Anyhow, we’re at a family gathering a month or two ago and she announces to me very efficiently, “I’ve been reading your blog.” She adds, “And some of my friends have, too.”

And even though the whole point of this blog is that people read it, somehow it freezes me up to the point where there has now been no Davenport news for weeks.

There’s a book I’m working on at the moment, aka “the Turkey book” aka Cappadocia, in which two of the characters talk about what it’s like to have an intimate conversation in front of a third person who doesn’t speak the same language and they conclude it’s like stripping in a limo, and I think that in some ways writing fiction is like stripping in a limo, too.

You’re naked, only no one can see it. In a limo, you’re on show, behind those reflective tinted windows, and even though people might be looking curiously at the glass – are you a bride, a celebrity? – and you can be looking right back at them, there’s a shield.

When you write fiction, you reveal yourself in ways you’re not even conscious of, while the reader learns things about you that they don’t know they’re learning. Behind the reflective glass of the story, you’re on show. Things you think and feel, that govern the way your characters behave. Things that have happened to you, that you transmute somehow, but if there were such people as forensic literary analysts*, they would nail you in a heartbeat like profilers nailing a serial killer.

And with a blog, there’s really only the illusion of glass. Often I can safely pretend to myself that no one is reading this – helped by the fact that sometimes nobody actually is – but in fact anybody could be reading it. Anybody in the world. And there I am. Naked. And maybe the glass isn’t nearly as reflective as I think.

And to discover that Alison and her friends actually were reading it… are reading it… silently, without disclosing their presence*… has been like accidentally hitting the window opening control right when I’m in the middle of changing out of my bridal gown into my dancing-the-night-away outfit.

I’ve frozen and covered myself up. Ineptly. Defeating the point of the blog by failing to post, except in safer ways, talking about books.

But maybe now I’ve scrambled back into my clothes, or rolled the window back up, or something.

Or maybe I’m ready to accept that I’m naked, here and in my books.

We’ll see…

*Well, I just googled it and it turns out there are. They are used for things like assessing whether a ransom note is genuine or a hoax. I actually think I would be good at that. Maybe if this fiction writing thing doesn’t pan out…

*Hi, girls, if you’re there.

On leaving school, Marianne is sent to the east as part of her compulsory service, and she’s there in January 1945 as the Russians advance and territory quickly falls. Here is how she describes the hours immediately before she flees westward in a crowded truck.

“I dressed quickly. My hands trembled as I buttoned up my dress and I searched frantically for my left stocking. Outside, a red sun was rising, and when I stepped out into the back garden, the frozen snow cracked under my feet like glass…

There is pandemonium in the main street. I needle my way past muffled-up figures pulling rickety handcarts, past carts drawn by horses which look as though they will never reach new stables. Vehicles are piled high with pots and pans, mattresses, bedding, suitcases and sacks filled to bursting point…”

I would love to know more about her life after the war, when she goes to England, marries a Scotsman and has three sons. She has written another book, The Alien Years, but it’s hard to get hold of at a reasonable price.

The Naked Years is no longer available new, but you can buy it secondhand on Amazon and it’s a very worthwhile read if you’re looking for something about this period that falls between fiction and dry history. Saving Gerda was much enriched because of it, so much so that I named one of the important characters in the book Marianne, after its author.

My eldest son and I have been fans of Art Spiegelman’s unique and ground-breaking and Pulitzer Prize winning Maus duo for years. We’ve both read it multiple times, and loaned it to others to read, with the result that it’s now looking quite well-worn and shabby. Even though I’d been reading about the Nazi era and the Holocaust on and off since studying it in detail at school, Maus still gripped me as if I’d never encountered this stuff before. Saving Gerda ends eight months before the start of World War Two, and yet the war and its consequences are there. We know what’s going to happen. The book doesn’t have to say it. The book isn’t about that. Saving Gerda is about what makes us brave, really.

Perhaps because Saving Gerda ends before the war, Maus and other really powerful books about that period – Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Survival in Auschwitz, and many others – are all the more important as an off-stage presence. I don’t think Saving Gerda would have worked if those books hadn’t been written, so I feel very… oh… humble when I think about them, and very much in their debt.

For my birthday this year, my son gave me MetaMaus, a look inside a modern classic, Maus and I’m about half-way through. The book gives a huge range of background detail, fascinating to anyone interested in the creative process in general, in Art Spiegelman’s creative process in particular, and in the period he’s writing and drawing about.

Inevitably, at times it’s a bit too navel-contemplatory (okay, yes, I know that’s not a word). All the writers I know love to pull apart our process when we’re talking at a restaurant in a big group with a glass of wine in our hand, or maybe going for a long walk one-on-one, but I imagine it must have been quite uncomfortable for Spiegelman to pull apart his process in such a public and self-conscious way, in response to questions by Hillary Chute, an English professor at the University of Chicago. I suspect asking the questions was quite hard, too. Sometimes, this question-and-answer structure creates an impression of over-reverence that I think is often a problem in the field of literary criticism, and that is one of the things that sends me thankfully back to the much less analysed landscape of commercial/genre fiction.

Brief pause to celebrate commercial and genre fiction. Both as a reader and as a writer, when you’re reading crime or romance or chick lit, you don’t have to think about it, you just do it. Yay!

And even though thinking is good, sometimes just doing is good, too.

So I’m making Saving Gerda sound like a very serious book, and I suppose it is. Maus is a very serious book, too, and yet there are moments when you laugh, moments when you groan in recognition over tiny day-to-day details. MetaMaus includes a whole slew of rejection letters that Maus garnered before it was accepted for publication, and they are quite telling – overly-long and containing too many excuses, uncomfortable in the way they’re written. They all sound the same. One of the repeated criticisms in the rejection letters is that the detail is too personal and too unique, and as a writer and a reader I so completely disagree with this! The whole reason that novels work – any novels, any good novel, whether it’s literary good or genre fiction good – is because unique, personal detail is the best way to bring out the universals in human experience. Maus succeeds because of its personal detail. I’m so glad the writers of those rejection letters did not prevail!

I’ve said yes to the biography, but have warned him I’ve never attempted something like this before, and it’ll take a while. He wants to record things on tapes, and that scares me, because I’ve listened to those kinds of tape and, with the best will in the world, people ramble and say things out of context and repeat themselves.

Meanwhile, he’s given me a book to read. “This is the kind of thing I want.” It’s called Jackson’s Track (Penguin Books) and I read it last week and it’s really good, first published thirteen years ago and told in the words of the man whose story it is, Daryl Tonkin, but facilitated and put into shape by a writer and teacher of literature called Carolyn Landon. They’ve both done a great job.

The story has stayed with me, which may not sound like much of a claim since I only read it a week ago, but believe me there are books I read that I can barely remember three days later.

Born in 1918, Daryl Tonkin spent most of his life in the mountain ash forests of the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, living the simplest of lives – bark hut, tea and damper for breakfast, logging trees with minimal machinery. He “took up” with an aboriginal woman named Euphemia Mullett – Euphie, to whom the book is dedicated – and in the context of this widely disapproved yet lengthy, fruitful, loving and respectful partnership between a white man and a black woman, he tells his own story of the Stolen Generation, government involvement in aboriginal affairs, success and failure in Victoria’s indigenous communities.

It’s so personal, and yet often I feel that’s the best way to understand the universal elements of experience. Two of the most ambitious books I’ve written, Saving Gerda which will be out in June, and Cappadocia which I’m doing a final draft on now, have required me to take a historical or universal experience and make it real in very detailed, unique and personal terms. The romances I’ve written for so many years do this too. The universal experience of falling in love – that incredibly important quest for the right life partnership – is different with every couple who undertakes it, yet every unique detail in a story resonates with what we experienced ourselves when we fell in love, or what happened to our parents, or our friends.

Jackson’s Track is a romance in many ways, too. Daryl quotes the words of one of Euphie’s rare letters to him, after she was taken away from the property at Jackson’s Track by Daryl’s brother, who wanted an end to the relationship. “I belong to you and nobody else and I am waiting for you to come get me.” And she did belong to him. They belonged to each other. They were together for fifty years, had a large family of children, lived the hard-working, simple life that made them happy.

If I can do anywhere near as good a job with our friend’s in many ways similar story of hard work and struggle, I’ll be extremely proud.

And if you’re at all interested in pioneer Australia, aboriginal issues, or just a simple love story, you’d probably like Jackson’s Track as much as I did.

There are quite a few of these lists, and I don’t think Laura has come up with the best one. A little research on my part yielded the fact that it was put together by the editorial board of Modern Library in the late 1990s, and it’s very heavily focused on male writers from the UK and the US. Some of the books were highly over-rated even when they first came out, and are rapidly disappearing into a state of limbo called Have Not Stood The Test Of Time. There are only eight women on the list, and not a single writer from Australia, South Africa or India. Laura is not really old enough for many of the books yet, but since we expect this reading project to take some years, what with having to re-read “The Hunger Games” trilogy and the Harry Potter books at regular intervals during the process, she will be grown up by the time we are done.

Lilian Darcy has a policy of not speaking ill of the work of fellow writers, but Liz Davenport is under no such constraints, and she feels that any writer who’s managed to appear on a Top 100 list, no matter how dodgy the process of compiling it, can take whatever flak she cares to dish out, so as Liz I’m just going to go ahead and say…

“The Magus” is on there???? Are you kidding me? I have to read that pretentious piece of dreck again? Some people actually take that book seriously? Woody Allen, when asked what he would do differently if he could live his life over again, apparently replied about the movie, that he would do “everything exactly the same, with the exception of watching The Magus.” I feel for him on this one.

And “To Kill a Mockingbird” is NOT on the list? And there’s nothing by the Brontes or Jane Austen?

On a more positive note, I’m really looking forward to reading or re-reading many of the books on the list, including “Of Human Bondage” by W Somerset Maugham, which I know I have read but remember so little of that I felt unable to apply the highlighter pen to it.

I’m not sure if this is going to be fun. I’m not sure if we’ll ever get through all the books on the list. But for now, in the anticipation phase, it’s going very well.

I’ve been taking a short break from Six Sentence Sunday, but now I’m back, and once again taking a dip into Saving Gerda, which now has the most beautiful cover, courtesy of designer Kim Van Meter. I’m launching this book in June, but here’s another early taste. There’s also an excerpt up on my website at www.liliandarcy.com

Twelve-year-old Gerda is in her class-room at school, a place where she has always been made to feel privileged and perfect. As yet, she’s been almost untouched by the darkening atmosphere of Berlin in 1938…

Gerda had been nine years old when she first learned that she was the descendent of swans. She was delighted about it. “Yes, children, the most beautiful swans, with snow-white feathers, long, graceful necks and sapphire-blue eyes.” Then, Gerda’s teacher had been pretty Miss Klempner, whom the class adored. Miss Klempner was engaged to be married, had sapphire-blue eyes of her own and read fairy tales aloud to the class every Wednesday afternoon. This wasn’t a fairy tale, though, this was racial science.

Here at Monday Eventing, on the other hand, we are unashamedly at the lower echelons of the sport, both at daughter’s level of competition and parents’ level of financial support. There’s a satisfaction in the doing-it-on-the-smell-of-an-oily-rag approach, and this segment of the Lilian Darcy/Liz Davenport blog is in many ways a celebration of that. Today, despite being so happy about the placings at Kihikihi, I’d also like to celebrate the benefits of not winning, especially at the beginning.

If you’ve always won or placed in any field of endeavour, then this is the only measurement of success you learn to value. I’d go further:- It’s the only measurement of success you even think to make. As a writer who had my first completed manuscript accepted and published (“Bright Crystals” mumble mumble please don’t read it seriously I mean that) I know at first hand that early success can lead to dangerous thinking and a shallow connection to your sense of vocation. Writers who struggle for years with rejections and rewrites and stringent critiques learn to value the essence of what they do – the actual writing, the creation of character and story, the satisfaction in typing “The End” and knowing you’ve created something that’s complete and whole. The first few books I wrote, I didn’t value my process the way I needed to, because I had other sources of gratification. Setbacks as my career continued taught me other ways to measure my success – measurements that could withstand the ups and downs I couldn’t control, that could ground me when I did taste success and risked losing my priorities.

I’m really glad that in her chosen vocation as an eventer my daughter is finding other ways to value and validate what she does, and that she’s finding them now, early on, rather than clocking up the piles of blue ribbons from the moment she first ventured into the competition ring.

Here are some of the eventing-related things we’ve celebrated lately:-

Going clear in the show-jumping phase at Albury, when only 12 of the 58 Prelim riders did so.

Watching the Three and Two Star riders gallop and wrestle their way around a demanding course.

Daughter taking a Pony Club instructing course and teaching her first group of pony club kids.

Jumping up to 1.10 cm at the gorgeous indoor show-jumping arena at Wallaby Hill, under the excellent instruction of Annabel Armstrong.

Sitting and reading in our camp chairs at Wallaby Hill, enjoying some down-time.

Eating leek and potato soup and toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, cooked on our little butane camp stove. It’s amazing what you can achieve with one burner and some advance planning.

Checking out the live results at KihiKihi, and admiring the creative and highly sculptural jump construction by the course designers and builders in photos on great sites such as An Eventful Life.

How about you? What non-winning, non-bestselling moments have you celebrated lately, in riding or in writing?

But the shorter book started me thinking about writing short, and how different writers tackle that. Some people would consider that almost all of my own books are short – 50,000 word romances mostly, with Saving Gerda, due out in June, my longest book at a little over 100,000 – but I’ve written even shorter for Harlequin’s on-line serial reads – just 10,000 words, and broken up into a defined number of chapters, which appeared daily or weekly on the Harlequin site.

There are basically two ways you can go with short, I think. You can paint a tiny canvas of a very simple scene in exquisitely detailed brush-strokes, or you can do a big splashy number that you basically paint with a six-inch house-painting brush. Rolf Harris used to do this. Literally. Painting pictures with a house-painting brush. You probably don’t remember. It was a long time ago, and I was about three. But finish reading this and then you can go and see what it looked like.

The Worst Crime Novel lady and I both chose the pace-over-depth approach. Her book rocketed along in present tense, with about ten different point of view characters and twenty different locations, and you kept reading and followed it all, and it ended quite quickly and you were happy.

My own reasoning was that in 10,000 words even a small story isn’t going to go very deep, so why not embrace shallow, turn it into an asset not a liability, and keep the reader busy? Readers aren’t stupid. Although they’re often in the mood for a leisurely unfolding of detail and character and tension, as in the currently-being-read P D James, which clocks in at over 550 pages of small font, they’re perfectly capable of picking up on one or two rapidly sketched details of personality or mood and filling in the rest for themselves. My 10,00 word on-line reads had three or four different story arcs, eight or nine major characters, more than one romance, family reconciliation, bitter break-up, sex on the beach… They galloped along and they were fun to write and readers seemed to like reading them, too. You can still get them, if you have an ereader. They are called “Whirlwind Wedding”and “Married in Thirty Days” and the titles match the pace of the stories.

Writing to a different word length than usual is an interesting challenge for a writer. Not everyone likes it. Some writers find they’re too accustomed to their usual length and instinctively craft stories that match it. When they’re asked to go outside it, they have to pad or squeeze and it doesn’t work.

For the Worst Crime Novel lady, length wasn’t the issue. It was clearly a matter of life stuff going on and her writing identity temporarily falling apart, and somehow her and her publisher both being locked into publication of a book that couldn’t be saved in editing and just should have been pulped. As writers, we should devoutly hope this never happens to us. WCN, I promise I will find out from the internet which is your best book and read that instead, and I hope you’re feeling better now.

Meanwhile, here is Rolf Harris painting on TV in about 1968

There are those crisp mornings, the slanting light early or late in the day. It’s softer and richer than the light of summer now that the sun is angling lower. Don’t get me started on wind, I HATE wind, in what some might say is a typically over the top, this-is-personal Liz-type way, especially in combination with open paddocks and horses, but when it’s not windy, it is just perfect.

What’s not perfect, according to Laura, is the fact that there are New Girls riding at the farm, and Mick has given Bella to one of them, and Laura is still far too possessive about Bella, given that the new horse – who used to be Bob and I don’t think I’ve mentioned that he’s now Clancy – is going so well.

We’ve had New Girls arriving for a while, now, to the point where one or two of them now count as Old Girls, and some days at Mick’s it’s like a gymkhana, with six or seven riders, and ponies and horses being saddled and unsaddled, trotted or galloped up hills, given carrots, schooled over jumps, brushed or washed or rugged, returned to the generous acreage of their paddocks. Laura is suspicious and intolerant of every new face. Does this girl have good horsemanship? Will she give the pony a hard mouth? Will she and her parents sufficiently appreciate Mick? Will she remember to shut the shed?

Bella has been given to a girl called Lauren, and I think this is part of the problem.

Laura, Lauren.

It’s odd that their names are so similar, and I think Laura fears being tainted by association – that people will accidentally say, “Laura has given that poor pony such a hard mouth,” instead of “Lauren.” Laura is absolutely convinced that Lauren is going to give Bella a hard mouth. She seems to expect it to happen in the space of two rides, and she watches poor new Lauren with such suspicion and reports to me every transgression. “She didn’t pick out her hooves.” “She didn’t get off her to open the gate into the woolshed paddock.”

I point out to her that she herself doesn’t always dismount to open gates, but she says – and clearly I am failing to recognise that this is a no-brainer – “Into the woolshed paddock I always do!” Apparently the woolshed paddock gate is tricky, and cannot be tackled on-horse, and Lauren should know that.

I say to Laura that perhaps she should just concentrate on Clancy, who is jumping beautifully, if only to a height of about 60 cms, but she still mourns the loss of funny fat orange Bella. She would love to have veto rights over who rides her, and the chosen girl would probably need to be way more perfect in her hands and seat and grooming skills than Laura is herself.

I think there is a part of her that wants Lauren to be terrible with Bella, not in a way that will hurt Bella (or indeed hurt Lauren… much) but in a way that will end in Mick banning Lauren from Bella – “She’s not a good enough rider for her,” he will say, in Laura’s head – and keeping the pony unridden for a while until a better candidate comes along.

It’s not a sensible way to feel, but Laura cares too much about riding to always be sensible.

Or even moral. I do actually strongly suspect that she’s envisaging a rather upsetting fall.

Next weekend, we’re entered in the Albury ODE. Daughter attended this event last year as a groom for Natalie Blundell and had a fantastic time – as did Nat, coming third in the Three Star.

Me: “So who beat you, Nat?”

Nat: “Chris Burton and Chris Burton.”

At the moment the forecast for Albury looks just about perfect – sunny, mid-twenties, light winds. Such promise with regard to the weather immediately suggests that we must look elsewhere for the possible source of disappointment and challenge.

Well, the horse will go lame, of course. There are a couple of likely scenarios, here. He has a cut on his off-fore knee at the moment. It’s healing nicely and isn’t deep, but he could easily do something to open it up. Then there’s the problematic near-hind hock joint which hasn’t had time to experience the full effect of the joint medication he’s now on. But he will probably fake us out by developing a totally new injury between now and travel day on Friday.

Or he’ll kick a shoe. He’ll be on that shoeing cusp next weekend, where it’s really too early to have the farrier before we go, and yet a little late by the time we get back. I am already mentally factoring in the cost of having the event farrier at about nine o’clock on Sunday morning.

If by a miracle none of these things happen, then one of us will get sick, or something will go wrong with the transport, or the event will get cancelled due to… I don’t know… floods. Australia has been putting on a few spectacular examples of those, lately, and weather forecasts can be wrong.

Our fingers are also tightly crossed here for the Trans-Tasman event at New Zealand’s Kihi Kihi Horse Trials in just under two weeks’ time. We’ll be cheering for all the Australian eventers, with particular hopes for a great performance from Nat and Algebra. If you’re interested in supporting these two in their Olympic bid, or you just wouldn’t mind winning some good stuff, there’s a raffle on! Go to www.algebra.com for more details.