this writing life – Page 12

Miscellaneous Memoranda

Or, A Collection of Book-Related Links That Caught My Attention But That I Never Got Around To Writing Blog Posts About.

– And yes, I know I ended that sentence with a preposition and started this sentence with a conjunction. At least I have a better understanding of punctuation than these cake decorators. Not all Cakes are Wrecks, though – look at these amazing book-related cakes.

– Here’s a fascinating (if you’re a traditionally-published author) post by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown about why they decided to self-publish the second book in their Change series, after Viking published the first book. It says so much about how the publishing industry works these days. (Incidentally, the manuscript of the first book in the series started off that GayYA thing.)

– And here’s an article by Sally Nicholls about why it isn’t always necessary to kill off the characters’ parents in children’s books. (It does make plotting exciting adventures much easier, though.)

– I have no interest in reading Go Set a Watchman, partly because I don’t feel the need to read the unedited first draft of a novel that I’ve already read and enjoyed, but also because I have doubts about whether Harper Lee has given her consent for it to be published. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?

– Speaking of which, what is going on with the book bestseller lists at the moment? Last week, the Sydney Morning Herald’s top ten bestseller list consisted of the previously-mentioned unedited first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, four of the Treehouse books by Andy Griffiths and FIVE colouring-in books! Now, I have nothing against Andy Griffiths – his books may not be my cup of tea, but he’s brought a lot of laughter and excitement to a lot of child readers. But colouring books? Why are they being counted?

– However, I do approve of this – a lot of people tweeting about what Young Adult books would look like if the books were Very Realistic.

– I also liked (possibly not the right word) this article by Annabel Crabb about a man who wrote her a detailed letter criticising her latest book, even though he hadn’t actually bothered to read the book. It reminded me of the time I was doing a book signing at an English teachers’ conference and two separate men came up to berate me for having the nerve to publish my book as a ‘Vintage Classic’, when my book was clearly not Classic Literature. Not that they’d read the book. (Not that I’d had any say in that book being republished under the Vintage Classics imprint, anyway.)

– Although if they had read my books, they probably would have objected to them anyway, because the books are full of princesses. Princesses doing girly, princessy things like buying ball gowns and learning how to curtsey and looking for a suitable husband, and also fighting Nazis, giving speeches at the League of Nations and writing newspaper articles about the plight of child refugees. There’s a good post about Princess Shaming over at Tea Cozy (the comments are interesting, too).

– And those men probably would have scoffed at the notion of a tiny island kingdom, as well. I guess they’re not aware of the “republican monarchy” of Atlantium here in Australia (“At 0.76 square kilometres we are counted among the world’s smallest states, which brings into play certain practical realities; we choose to deal with these in a pragmatic manner.”)

– I mean, those men probably don’t even believe in sea monsters!

'Colossal Octopus' by Pierre Denys de Montford, 1810 — ‘Colossal Octopus’ by Pierre Denys de Montford, 1810

‘On Writing’ by Stephen King

'On Writing' by Stephen King

I loved On Writing, a very entertaining and informative book about being a writer. It’s part memoir, part conventional fiction-writing guide, written in an amusing, self-deprecating style. For example, here’s Stephen King describing his first ‘best-seller’, a novelisation of one of his favourite horror films, self-published when he was at high school:

“Working with the care and deliberation for which I would later be critically acclaimed, I turned out my novel version of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ in two days … blissfully unaware that I was in violation of every plagiarism and copyright statute in the history of the world.”

He sold out his entire print run to his fellow students, making an enormous profit, although his principal later made him refund the money and told him to stop wasting his time writing “junk”. King received advice that was far more useful from the editor of his town’s newspaper, where King had a part-time job writing sports reports:

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story … When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

King goes on to describe his development as a writer – studying literature and creative writing at college, writing stories for magazines, then working on his early novels while supporting his young family by teaching high school. His wife fished the opening chapters of Carrie out of his wastebasket and convinced him to keep going with it. Carrie ended up being his first published book, made him a fortune, and set him off on his career as a best-selling author of horror and speculative fiction. It wasn’t all smooth sailing after that, though, and he writes eloquently about his struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, and then about his physical rehabilitation after he was nearly killed in a horrific traffic accident.

The second half of the book provides a lot of practical, well-organised advice about writing fiction, although King cautions:

“…no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

He divides writers into a pyramid, with a lot of bad writers on the base, some competent writers above them, a few “really good” writers above them, and at the apex, the geniuses – “the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys.” He believes it’s impossible to make a bad writer into a competent one, or a good writer into a great one, but that “it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one”. He also believes that stories are like fossils, “part of an undiscovered pre-existing world”, excavated from the ground using a writer’s box of tools.

His advice includes:

– Read a lot and write a lot. He provides a list of his favourite books (his favourite writers include Pat Barker, Bill Bryson, Annie Proulx, J.K. Rowling, Donna Tartt, Anne Tyler and Evelyn Waugh) and he says that watching television is a waste of time.

– Write quickly, work every day to a schedule, and don’t stop until you’ve finished a draft. He thinks a first draft should take no longer than three months and claims he wrote the first draft of The Running Man in a week. However, he does acknowledge that The Stand took sixteen months and (probably not coincidentally) is his fans’ favourite book.

– Don’t ever plot, because “plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible”.

– “Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”

– Similarly, symbolism will only become evident once you’ve excavated your story: “If it is there, and if you notice it, I think you should bring it out as well as you can, polishing it till it shines.”

– “Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others”, which is why H.P. Lovecraft, a painfully shy snob, wrote such terrible, stilted dialogue.

– When revising, remember this important formula: “2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%”

And if you get stuck, remember, “Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”

I can’t say I agreed with all of it (personally, I find plotting essential, and while I’d love to be able to finish a first draft of a novel in three months, I can’t imagine that will ever happen) and some of his advice about finding a publisher is a little dated, because the book was written fifteen years ago. But I found all of it fascinating and I’d recommend this to anyone interested in writing as a craft or as a career.

Adventures in Research: Schoolgirls in the 1950s and 1960s

Generally my Adventures in Research are not all that adventurous, given that they tend to involve nothing more arduous than a fifteen-minute stroll to my local library or second-hand book store and then some concentrated reading. This time, though, there is an actual story to go with the research. Well, not really a story, because it doesn’t have a conclusion. More of a series of events.

So – Sydney City Council has about a dozen branch libraries scattered around the centre of the city, each with a special collection relevant to the particular neighbourhood it services. For example, the Haymarket Library, in the middle of Chinatown, has lots of Mandarin books and DVDs; Customs House, near the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and other places frequented by tourists, has a large collection of international newspapers and magazines; my own branch has lots of LGBT fiction and non-fiction, handily marked with little rainbow stickers on the spines. Generally, these items can be transported between branches, arriving at your local branch within a day or two of your request – it’s really convenient and easy for library members. Anyway, a while back, I was browsing the library computer catalogue and came upon some potentially useful books about women’s lives in post-war Britain. There were histories, biographies and memoirs, including an intriguing book called Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the Fifties. All of the books were marked as “Non-Circulating Reference Books”, located at Ultimo Library, which did seem slightly odd – why would Ultimo, of all places, have a collection of non-fiction about women, and why would such books, mostly paperbacks, be regarded as so precious that they couldn’t leave the library? Never mind, I would visit Ultimo myself!

So one fine autumn morning, I gathered up my notebook, pen, Gregory’s Street Directory, bus timetable, multicoloured Post-It notes, packed lunch, ~~compass~~, water bottle, ~~pith helmet~~ and spare pen, and set off on my quest. Due to my excellent map-reading skills, I got off at the wrong bus stop and had to ascend Ultimo’s steepest hill (who even knew they had hills in Ultimo?) before arriving, puffing slightly, at Ultimo Library – the reference section of which turned out to contain a small shelf of books about local council history, but not much else. I searched the general collection, then asked the librarian at the front desk, who frowned.

“Are you sure these books are here?” she asked.

“Yes, they’re in the Sydney City Libraries catalogue,” I said. “Listed as being held in Ultimo Library in the Non-Circulating Reference section.”

She summoned her colleague and I showed them the list of call numbers.

“Ah!” said the colleague. “Those books! No, they aren’t here. They’re in the National Women’s Library. I wish they’d take those books out of our catalogue, because we often have people coming in here looking for them.”

“Then…why are they listed in Sydney City Libraries catalogue?” I asked, quite reasonably. ‘And why does it say they’re here?”

Who knows? Although it turned out the National Women’s Library wasn’t far away – in the very same block, actually. The helpful librarians gave me a set of directions that sounded almost exactly like Arthur Dent in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy looking for the plans to demolish his house, which are on display at the council planning department:

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a torch.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

Except my situation didn’t involve a leopard. (Pity, it would have made this story far more exciting.) So I went down the stairs, turned right, went past the table-tennis tables and the courtyard and the kitchen and down more stairs and found the locked doors of the National Women’s Library. This was during its listed ‘opening hours’, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around. I spied another door at the back, so I went back outside and around the building and tried that door and it was locked too¹. So I gave up.

As it was such a beautiful day, I decided to walk all the way home, which would give me a chance to do some sightseeing. Ultimo used to be mostly old warehouses and factories, but now there’s the Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation headquarters and the rapidly expanding University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). It was the latest UTS building that I was most interested in, because it was designed by Frank Gehry and the photos made it look so spectacular – a bit too spectacular, really, a bit show-offy and grandstanding, all wrong for a battered, industrial area like Ultimo, I’d thought. But that building was lovely. It nestled into its space, not overwhelming any of the surrounding buildings, and the famous ‘bulges’ in the brickwork made it look as though it was breathing. The bricks were golden-brown and glowed in the sunlight, and there were a lot of square, nicely-proportioned windows that reflected the blue sky, so the whole thing looked like a squat, friendly creature with a lot of big blue eyes. I didn’t go inside, so I don’t know how functional it is, but apparently it uses a lot of natural light and has loads of environmentally-friendly features. Officially, it’s named the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, because he gave the university twenty million dollars to build it, although I’m pretty sure all the students just call it the ‘crumpled paper-bag building’. Anyway, it’s a vast improvement on the main UTS building on Broadway, which looks like a Weetbix box covered in brown pebble-dash. Then I wandered up towards Broadway, noticing that a lot of the old warehouses along the way had been turned into trendy coffee shops and advertising agencies and such, and I had a look at One Central Park, which was recently named Best Tall Building in the World by someone or other. All of the outside walls are covered in vertical gardens, which I didn’t think would work out very well, given the vehicle fumes and the often harsh weather, but the huge variety of plants seemed to be thriving. It probably helps that it’s done nothing but rain in Sydney for the past six months.

When I arrived home an hour later, I went online and discovered that there were multiple copies of Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the Fifties on sale for less than ten dollars from various British second-hand bookshops. This seemed a lot easier than trying to gain access to the National Women’s Library, so I placed an order. And waited. And waited some more. Then I gave the bookseller an extra couple of days, due to Easter. Then I emailed them, more than a month after I’d ordered the book. The bookseller was very polite and apologetic. The book must have been lost by the postal service. They would send me another copy. So I waited. And waited. Then I emailed them again. They were very, very sorry. The replacement book must have been lost in the post, too. They didn’t have any more copies of the book, so they would give me a refund.

I can understand that one book might get lost in the post, but TWO? I had a vision of their new office boy, keen but not very bright, being sent off with an armful of parcels and diligently posting each one in a rubbish bin instead of a post box. I waited another week for the refund to arrive, then used the money to order a copy of the book from a different bookseller. I’m still waiting. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? This one will get lost, too. Or all three copies will arrive simultaneously in my mail box.

'My Secret Diary' by Jacqueline Wilson Anyway, in the meantime, I bought a copy of Jacqueline Wilson‘s My Secret Diary: Dating, Dancing, Dreams and Dilemmas. This is an account, aimed at teenage readers, of the author’s life in 1960, when she was a boy-crazy fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in suburban Surrey. It included lots of great black-and-white snapshots, as well as some excerpts from her real diary, which are as hilariously earnest and angst-ridden as you’d expect. I took notes on the clothes and records and films she liked, and the food, and the ridiculous school regulations and horrible uniforms, although I’m not sure how similar her life would have been to an upper-class London schoolgirl. In fact, I couldn’t quite figure out just where her family fitted into England’s rigid class system. Jacqueline’s family lived in a small council flat, but in a ‘genteel’ new block, rather than the rough council estate up the hill. They had a car, a TV, a telephone and a brand-new record player, but no washing machine or fridge. Jacqueline walked several miles to and from school (she was in the grammar stream at the local girls’ comprehensive) to save on bus fares, but there always seemed to be enough money for new clothes, cinema tickets, hairdressing appointments, pocket money and Christmas presents, and the family went on holidays (although not abroad) once a year. I couldn’t figure out what her father did for a living – he worked “at the Treasury” in Westminster, but doing what? Her mother worked locally, as a book-keeper. So, maybe lower-middle class – but could you live in a council flat in the 1960s and be regarded as middle-class? Maybe aspiring, ambitious working class, about to move into the middle class?

I was also interested to read about her favourite books – The Diary of Anne Frank, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and Rumer Godden’s The River and The Greengage Summer. She secretly borrowed Peyton Place from a friend and thought it was “sheer trash”, but was impressed with Lolita (“I wasn’t particularly shocked, just enormously interested”), although the author adds that “nowadays I find the whole story so troubling, so distressingly offensive, that I can’t bear to read it. I strongly recommend that you don’t read it either.” She was also determined to be a writer, so she bought a book called How To Be A Writer by Kathleen Betterton. This advised that “the writer for children must not attempt subtlety of character in which good and bad are blended”, so Jacqueline vowed, “If I ever write, I won’t write for children.” Fortunately for her many fans, she changed her mind, ignored that advice and went on to sell twenty-five million copies of her children’s books. (Teenage Jacqueline was also unimpressed with the writing advice doled out by Enid Blyton in her autobiography – “surely her books are not all that great”). I found this to be an entertaining, informative read – and if my other book about schoolgirls ever arrives, I’ll be able to figure out how typical Jacqueline’s experiences were.

You might also be interested in reading:

Adventures in Research: Schoolgirls in the 1950s and 1960s, Part Two

_____

Later I discovered the National Women’s Library is run by volunteers, so it’s understandable that the opening hours would be limited and unpredictable. And I guess the books aren’t allowed out because they’re all donated and many are out of print and not easily replaced. ↩

Adventures in Research: Some Books about the 1950s and 1960s

I’ve been plodding on through the 1950s and 1960s, which has included reading books written about the period in more recent times. (This, by the way, did not involve much adventure. I just borrowed all these books from my local library.) First was Family Britain: 1951-1957 by David Kynaston, which was a thoroughly researched sociological history, examining issues such as housing, entertainment and food, as well as taking a close look at a few significant political events, including the Suez crisis. There’s lots of detail about the experiences of working class and lower middle class people, told in their own words (often thanks to the interviewers from Mass Observation) so the book was often very interesting – but it was slightly disorganised and repetitious, so this is possibly not a book for the general reader.

'Never Had It So Good' by Dominic Sandbrook Those looking for a more entertaining read about the period may prefer Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, 1956-63, by Dominic Sandbrook. This is also very detailed and carefully researched, and it was particularly good at summarising important political events (for example, the resignations of Prime Ministers Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan and subsequent political manoeuvrings). There are also interesting discussions of popular culture (film, television, music and books), although the author’s personal biases become apparent here. For example, he devotes more than an entire chapter to Kingsley Amis, who Sandbrook believes is “brilliantly funny”, with Lucky Jim considered to be “a work of tremendous influence”, “emblematic of a post-war literary trend”, with an immense number of imitators (Really? Did Amis have more imitators than, say, J. R. R. Tolkien?). Meanwhile, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien are collectively dealt with in three sentences. Similarly, women are nearly absent from this book. There are a couple of pages about Christine Keeler (the young woman at the centre of the Profumo scandal), a few references to a young Tory politician named Margaret Thatcher, some anonymous housewives buying washing machines and a horde of anonymous teenage girls screaming at the Beatles, but that’s it (and don’t expect much about topics such as fashion, either). Otherwise, this is an entertaining, informative read about the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Eager to find out more about women’s experiences, I turned to Sheila Rowbotham‘s Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. Goodness, it was dull. There are a few interesting anecdotes about her personal experiences as a young academic and political activist, but mostly it was pages and pages of tedious squabbling between various Left factions – trade unionists versus Marxist academics, Leninists versus Trotskyists versus Maoists, and so on – with every single participant named and none of them actually seeming to achieve anything useful. Most of the men are appallingly sexist and the book becomes more interesting when the women start to object to this behaviour and begin ‘consciousness-raising’ groups to share their experiences. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen until the final chapter, and the book ends with the author and others planning the first Women’s Liberation conference in Britain, which was held in 1970. The author does make an interesting point, linking the 1960s hippies to Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies:

“The ‘do your own thing’ sense of individual liberation was turned into a justification of living completely for yourself. Elements of this self-absorption were also to persist, transmuting into the ruthless selfishness which would come into ascendancy in the late eighties.”

Jenny Diski, author of The Sixties, agrees and takes this idea further:

“There are two accusations: that we caused the greed and self-interest of the Eighties by invoking the self, the individual, as the unit of society and setting up individualism for the Right to pick up and run with; or that we caused it by being so permissive, so soppy about matters that needed hard, firm handling, that a reaction was inevitable if the West wasn’t to sink into a morass of self-indulgent chaos.”

'The Sixties' by Jenny Diski Otherwise, this is a very different sort of book, a collection of entertaining personal essays on the topics of consumerism, drug-taking, sex, revolutionary politics, education and mental health in ‘the Sixties’ (which is defined as circa 1965-1974). It wasn’t particularly useful for my research purposes, as Jenny Diski’s experiences were so outside the ‘norm’ (for example, she was expelled from school at fifteen for sniffing ether, was incarcerated in various mental institutions, then lived in a commune with drug addicts and then, while still a young trainee teacher, set up her own school for disadvantaged children, run on ‘alternative education’ principles). However, I found it fascinating and often very funny. (Jenny Diski is a novelist, and Sheila Rowbotham an academic and historian, and it shows.) (Oh, I just found Jenny Diski’s review of Sheila Rowbotham’s Promise of a Dream in London Review of Books. Ha!)

To give myself a break from politics and drugs and mental asylums and so on, I then read 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, a charming and very funny collection of correspondence between Miss Hanff, an irreverent New York writer, and Mr Doel, a stuffy London bookseller. The letters began in 1949 when she wrote to order a book from the antiquarian shop where he worked, but soon the correspondents included the bookseller’s colleagues, wife and neighbour, as well as the writer’s friends, with books, recipes and gifts being exchanged across the Atlantic for the next twenty years. If you love books, you will adore this.

Goatbusters, Or How The Writerly Mind Works

When people find out I’m a writer (and if those people are not writers themselves), then, nine times out of ten, their next question will be about where I get my ideas. At one stage, this became a running joke with a writer friend of mine, as neither of us ever seemed to be able to come up with a good answer to this question. It may have been truthful to say “From everywhere!”, but this never seemed to satisfy our questioners, so we invented a lot of really silly responses that we were never brave (or rude) enough to use in real life. The problem was that I was assuming that everyone had a mind that worked in a similar way to mine – that is, that given an old photograph, a piece of historical trivia, an anagram, an unusual occupation or even an oddly shaped cloud, anyone’s mind would instantly use that to spin off into half a dozen questions, some jokes and, given enough time, a novel-length story. Working on that assumption, asking where writers get their ideas was, to me, like asking most people how they managed to breathe. Why would you require an explanation of something so obvious and instinctive?

Of course, people’s minds don’t all work in the same way, which is a good thing, because we need a variety of human skills and talents to make society interesting and productive. I remember having a conversation with a very intelligent, articulate and polite teenager who asked me ‘Where do you get ideas for writing?’ with genuine bemusement and some anxiety, because her curriculum required her to do lots of ‘creative writing’ and she was finding it a struggle. I think part of the struggle was due to the poor girl being forced to produce pieces of writing following strict guidelines, in a limited amount of time, in the hope of pleasing her teacher, in order to attain a good assessment mark, which would count towards her final Higher School Certificate score, which would define her ENTIRE FUTURE¹. However, I suspect it was also because she had the sort of mind that did not instinctively and incessantly ask questions such as, “Are there really only two options here? Can I do both? Or neither? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do this? What would happen if . . .?” That is, she did not have a mind that was constantly flying off at (possibly unproductive) tangents. Or perhaps she had once possessed that sort of mind, but ten years of formal education had trained it out of her.

I don’t mean to suggest that only writers have minds that constantly ask “What if . . .?” Research scientists, for example, are brilliant at asking those sort of questions. Anyone who has a job that involves identifying and solving problems needs to be able to think this way. And I don’t mean to suggest that having an enquiring, imaginative mind is the only quality needed to produce, say, a hundred-thousand-word novel. You also need organisational skills, persistence, self-confidence, an ability to ignore distractions when necessary, time, money and a lot of other things that may not be easy to acquire. But I do think that most writers, of fiction or non-fiction, are especially attuned to those tiny details in everyday life – things that are slightly odd or amusing or mysterious – that have the potential to be transformed into a poem, a story or a book (or a blog post).

For example, on Saturday, I was browsing the pages of the weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald when I came across an article intriguingly entitled Cemetery Calls in the Goatbusters, with an even more intriguing photo of some blurry white goats posing on some tombstones. It appears that four “white Boer goats” have been spotted in the Jewish section of Rookwood Necropolis², Sydney’s largest cemetery, and they are now stubbornly avoiding capture. Fiona Heslop, the cemetery’s chief executive officer, was quoted as saying,

“I have looked out of my office on numerous occasions to see the goats leaning against headstones, only to look back a moment later to find they are no longer there.”

Ms Heslop added (possibly in ominous tones),

“They are not doing any harm at this stage, but they do show up in the strangest places at the strangest times.”

Surely even the most unimaginative reader would be wondering by now about how the authorities managed to identify the exact number and breed of the goats, if the goats are so amazingly elusive. CLEARLY THE AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING SOMETHING FROM US. (The idea of animals living at Rookwood, on the other hand, is not all that mysterious, given that Rookwood Necropolis consists of three hundred hectares of mostly untamed bush, including a entire ironbark forest. It would not surprise me to learn that somewhere in the depths of Rookwood, there’s an elephant that escaped from a circus in the 1970s, or a couple of Tasmanian tigers, or a flock of pterodactyls.) But what are the goats doing there? As I read the article, several possibilities immediately sprang to mind:

1. They are highly trained lawn-mowers, being used by the authorities to keep the grass under control after budget cuts forced the redundancies of most of the human gardeners. (Then why would the authorities claim to be trying to catch the goats? Well, obviously, some cemetery visitor saw them and made an official complaint, so the authorities now have to pretend to round up the goats. Then, whenever the RSPCA inspectors arrive, the gatekeeper blows a warning whistle and the goats sprint off to the café, where they don aprons and caps and pretend to be waitresses until the coast is clear.)
2. They are patrolling the cemetery with webcams strapped to their horns, because the authorities are worried that modern-day bodysnatchers might be using the cemetery to supply the anatomy labs at Cumberland College of Health Sciences, which is right across the road from Rookwood.
3. They are the descendants of the original scapegoat, which was unfairly burdened with the sins of humans and banished to the wilderness by a long-ago Jewish high priest, and now these modern-day goats are hanging round the Jewish section of Rookwood in order to have their revenge, by pushing over a rabbi in the dust or some such nefarious action.

Feel free to leave your own theories in the comments. It is obvious the goats are up to something, anyway. Goats are always up to something. You only have to look into their eyes to see that they’re very suspicious characters. Or maybe it’s only people with ~~overly vivid imaginations~~ writerly minds who think that way.

Portrait of a goat. Creative Commons Licensed image by 4028mdk09