Ree-flections
Welcome to issue #16 of my Ree-Writes newsletter.
February in Brisbane is steaming along about. We are getting used to the new routines of work around school drop-offs and pick-ups. Words are mostly simmering in their soups somewhere and are refusing to be ladled easily, but that’s not a new happening.
I caught enough words to put together the ‘What I created’ story below. If you have any thoughts on whether/how well the image illustrates the story, I’d love to hear from you.
I hope my words find you well in your world, and I hope you enjoy this issue.
Writing & Creativity Cool Finds
Check out this literature clock! It gives you a literary excerpt (or ten) to match your exact time! It’s a very good way to watch time tick by.
This is a podcast (with transcript) on Chokepoint Capitalism (on how creative labour markets are rigged in favour of Big Tech, and how they can be unrigged). Somewhere between infuriating, intriguing, depressing and revelatory. Worth a read/listen.
So, back in Ree-Writes #3: Frequencies , I shared a link about someone who went off to write in the proverbial romantic/isolated cabin and didn’t like it at all. Here’s an article where famous writers’ preferred writing places get trialled to see if they’re really zones where words can flow. The different venues get ranked by wordcounts achieved. This was a fun read!
More on AI (artificial intelligence) word and image generation tools: here’s an interesting piece on how major publishers have banned AI word-generation chatbot, ChatGPT , from being listed as an academic author . The article also links to a separate piece about 5 experts’ thoughts about AI and the future of creative workers . I found this piece on the frustrating side – probably because the experts were mainly from the IT side of things and with nary a creative academic voice to be heard. Try this Creative Penn podcast for a very optimistic take on AI generators as tools which can benefit creativity.
Something I created
The River Being
The being who appeared before us in the river that night was radiant with stars. Around her, the air prickled with the sound of distant oceans, and she moved and circled restlessly in the way water won’t keep still.
But it was her eyes that made me catch my breath. They were a wild wind – buffeting, disorienting, giving us nowhere to look and nothing to hold on to.
Before I could even glance over to see my best friend’s reaction, the air all around us folded into water. The trees we’d been camped under, the bushes, the grass beneath our feet – all were underwater as though it was how the world had always been.
We were breathing water, it ran through our veins, our very beings exulted, and it was how we were born to be! The world of air retreated to memory – vanquished, heavy, discarded.
We floated, folded, rippled, stretched and kicked in the water. It was speckled with starlight. We could see everything in sparkling clarity. We laughed as joy and disbelief washed around us. We spun, arced, floated.
The being smiled a smile of another place.
Her eyes fathomless, she beckoned us to follow.
We paused. In the way you do when you suddenly doubt the treasure before you – ice cream, the high grade on a maths test, when your crush smiles at you.
The being tilted her head and her hair full of star specks swirled around her. The movement somehow suddenly reminded of my little brother – a thought which slipped unexpectedly towards me as though he had missed his footing on a canal. My heart lurched with him and I lunged towards the thought of him with both hands.
The being beckoned again.
I held the thought of my little brother tight. The feel of his hand clutching mine with all his strength.
I didn’t want to, but I had to. I shook my head. Just once.
Beside me, my best friend laughed. And nodded joyfully.
Suddenly the world was air and sound again. The trees dripping wet in the moonlight, birds chittering indignantly to each other, my clothes sodden on my skin, our camping gear all soaked, the grass soggy underfoot.
I gulped in a breath and got slowly to my feet, my movements heavy and clumsy. I inhaled again. And again, and again. Forgetting to exhale. Trying to make the world be upright again.
I wiped a cold, shaking wrist across my forehead to get my hair out of my eyes. I didn’t have to look around to know that I was alone.
My best friend was gone.
I never saw him again.
Until now.
Backstory: More of a start of story, but still a stand-alone (pun unintended ;-)) I wrote a Twitter version of this a couple of years ago, and the illustration is one of my painting collaborations with LittleOne that I pushed through my Photoshop Express app a few dozen times.
A Book or Piece of Art I Love
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix
I bought this book because of the quirky title! And I’m glad I did.
We meet the protagonist, 18-year-old art student Susan, when she arrives in London, trying to find out more information about the father she’s never met. The story is set in 1980s London, so we’re able to dispense with the modern technologies of mobile phones and street surveillance cameras which would have interfered with the plot. Susan encounters Merlin, who turns out to be part of a secret society of booksellers who patrol the edges of the Old World of “living myths and walking legends” and the modern New World, and who try to stop the two Worlds from bleeding into each other.
Merlin is a left-handed bookseller. The left-handed booksellers are on the frontlines of these Worlds, licensed, as the tagline says “to kill… and sell books”. The right-handed booksellers are the researchers, answer-finders and spell-casters.
The Old World has reasons to take an active interest in Susan, and between the various entities trying to get to her, Merlin’s investigations into his mother’s death 6 years ago which seem to overlap with Susan trying to find out about her father, and Susan’s and Merlin’s brewing romance, the story romps along.
For noting: the delightful incongruity of booksellers as the proverbial secret agents, wielding books and weapons with equal aplomb.
Also for noting: luscious descriptions of book-worlds and bookshops.
Randomly Interesting Inspirations for Stories
Did you know giant technicolour squirrels exist in real life? Well, they do and they’re WONDERFUL.
Take a quick trip to an old city that sings , and for all our modern technology, no-one knows exactly how it was built.
This story is, for me, one of ultimate, real-life, top-secret, high stakes heroism. Remember before the pandemic? When Australia was being ravaged by bushfires? This is a snapshot of how, in the middle of all the chaos and horror of all the bushfires, a secret pocket of trees – which have been around since the age of dinosaurs – were saved . Somewhere out there is a small group of people who know they saved those trees, but who can’t tell anyone about it.
Thank you
Du fond du coeur, thanks for reading x
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Ree-Imagined Worlds 
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