Think that Copyleft sounds like a shitty socialist pun? You’d be dead right. But it’s a socialism of ideas, and isn’t that shitty… kinda. In essence, Copyleft says two heads are better than one, and what’s in my head might do just as well to be in your head, and really we should just work this out together. It’s a movement born, unsurprisingly, from computer programming.

…

Copyleft is an idea that makes sense for programming because a computer program is a piece of logic designed to do a certain thing. There are clear objectives, and clear guides built on a pass/fail basis as to what could change to make it easier to use, faster, compatible with different operating systems. Different developers may add certain functionality as a personal flourish, but it is ultimately a utilitarian pursuit. People have made some pretty good open source software, if you’re into that kind of thing (and by that kind of thing, I mean building software, because you should have a decent knowledge of your OS before you delve into using most open source stuff). So, global community of knowledge, some excellent free software. Good times.

…

HOWEVER: a computer program is not a novel. There are massive differences that render what is right for one NOT right for all – most strikingly literature’s propensity to often be very personal in creation, use and interpretation. I can’t even imagine what possible application Copyleft would have with literature, other than justifying piracy in a pseudo-intellectual doublespeak. Oh wait…

…

ENTER: Doctorow.

…

Ryan’s right in that I don’t like Doctorow. I find his ill-conceived metaphors a bit like chewing fat – if there’s substance to the argument he misses it by disguising his meaning under layers of unappetising rhetoric. They’re not usually things that make me go ‘hmmm…’; they’re things that make me go: ‘How can someone get away with talking this much shit and not be pulled up on it?’

…

But even I’m not bigoted enough to let just one guy ruin a whole movement for me. Maybe Doctorow is like Mao – complex, misunderstood by those not as brilliant. Certainly his ‘we don’t need copyright’ chant is reminiscent of the ‘kill the sparrows‘ movement. Regardless of this one guy, I have major problems with the idea that Copyleft is applicable to everything covered by copyright, and literature in particular.

…

So here we go, an example of a Copyleft ‘contract’ in all its glory. The main crux of this sort of license is ‘to promote and protect these creations of the human mind according to the principles of copyleft: freedom to use, copy, distribute, transform, and prohibition of exclusive appropriation.’

…

The bit I’ve highlighted in bold is something I know is a major sticking point for some people largely because they equate the monopolisation of copyright ownership with decreased diversity in content. I’m not sure how this argument works, as a publisher who buys copyright from an author comes in after the content has been written. Maybe there’s a fear that someone may come in and snatch up rights to every book ever from unsuspecting authors and then… I don’t know, keep them all in a vault or something. But there’s another side to this. Wouldn’t Copyleft ideas make it a lot easier for people like Google to come away with a free (and dangerously large) slice of pie? I don’t see anything wrong with a giant digital library – there’s no debate as to whether this would be a valuable resource for readers. I do see a problem with Google appropriating in-copyright work at no cost to themselves, and yet making money from it through selling  advertising space. What this whole Copyleft support thing really boils down to (for most people) is an unwillingness to pay for something.

I own ALL THE COPYRIGHT!

…

Doing away with copyright of intellectual property is, essentially, saying either your ideas aren’t worth anything, or they might be worth something if they were appropriated by someone more brilliant than yourself. If you are to deny that an idea  has monetary value, then you’d better also be prepared to tell me why a mechanic should be paid for employing his skills, or why I have to pay rent, or why a loaf of bread costs a certain amount but not less. This is not some exercise in exploitation by publishers so they can line their nests with fat wads of cash or pimp their merc. It’s an established business norm for the simple reason that artists, writers, musicians deserve to be paid for the time and effort they put into their creations.

…

We have more to fear from obscurity than piracy? Don’t think so. They both lead to the same thing: an industry that can’t support its producers.

A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly.

A good editor is often the only person who will ever consider the text as closely as the author, and therefore is in a good position to play the above mentor role, advising on intimate details of the manuscript’s development while the author rebuilds their manuscript around their shattered ego – this requires considerable, tact, diplomacy and compassion, and often it seems an author becomes willing to let their guard down with their editor more than anyone else, for the sake of their beloved manuscript.

This can be beautiful (though it is sometimes embarrasing and painful), and is the sort of relationship I constantly aspire to in my work. The operative word being ‘aspire’: it is not always possible, especially when an author’s insecurities manifest as petulance, arrogance and resistance.

Someone recently asked me to write about my mullet for an independent Adelaide newspaper, and the below ‘column’ is the result. It was accompanied by the terrible Photo Booth job that I’ve pasted in: not sure what’s worse, the ‘haircut’ or the ‘photo’ of the ‘haircut’. Or the ‘column’. Actually I quite like the column – at the very least, I immensely enjoyed writing it. In the paper it was pitched to the reader as a review.

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Avert your Eyes!

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Behind every good mullet, there is a great woman.
– source unknown

This production was an accident, clearly – no urbanite in their right mind would grow a mullet in the twenty-first century. But hairdressers are too expensive, they always think they know better, and they never do. Take the decision to drop out of high school to go to beauty college, for example. Mullets, like the best dreads, result mostly from negligence.

The first notable development in the process of allowing a mullet to grow is feeling like your motor skills have been compromised when you try to hack at your own hair in the mirror: suddenly right is left, up is down, and before you know it you’re hugging the toilet, trembling and sucking your thumb. Best to let your friend have a go.

My friend, being my ex-girlfriend, has obviously been waiting for nearly six years to inflict me with a faux-hawk and then not tell me for weeks, laughing silently as people jibe at my pseudo-intellectual, recovering-bogan, partway-metrosexual hybridity as we walked down the street.

This is how the best mullets develop – they are marginally respectable haircuts allowed to grow wild. Like passionfruit vines. But it’s the hybridity that really carries this retro-nostalgic production into it’s own definition of subcultural respectability – to wear a mullet these days you need to be so comfortable in your confusion about your own self image that people mistake all of your fashion mistakes for irony.

Breaching the neckline while wearing an asymmetrical fringe helps.

Breaching the neckline is important – this is the moment where someone first points out to you that the hair on the back of your head is disproportionately longer than the rest of your hair. There is no going back once the subject is breached – you now have a mullet – just make sure you do not breach the neckline with anything approaching a buzz cut up front: this will almost certainly result in your ‘haircut’ being categorised as a rat’s tail, from which no socially minded individual can recover.

After the breach, the final development in this socially challenging but ultimately unrewarding experience is to note, if you’re lucky, that your (current) girlfriend still loves you: successfully wearing a mullet this many years after Beyond 2000 was on the telly is entirely dependent on the support of a loving girlfriend. Unless you’ve decided to be single for your gap year.

Stone Soup

There’s a magazine that publishes writers even younger than Voiceworks: Stone Soup, published out of Santa Cruz and described by someone as ‘The New Yorker of the 8 to 13 set’.

In the interests of SIB’s subtitle, I wonder if they have an adult readership. They reckon their circulation is at 20 000, with library subscriptions taking their estimated readership to near 80 000. Epic!

Here’s an optimistic redefinition of what it means to be an ‘unpublished writer’: ‘Are you unpublished? No, I’m PREpublished’ on Samantha Hughes’ blog.

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all.

Like me, Julia was raised in a working class family in Adelaide, where she became inspired to do something good in the world, and then, unlike me, she went and became Prime Minister. All because she shares the belief that each of us has a duty to each other to be our best, and to contribute some improvement to the world before we die.

At least, that’s the reverie I fell into as I swooned and gave her my card, nervously avoiding the bodyguard who had just inspected it with what I later became certain were ASIO-issue x-ray or maybe just photo-recording spectacles, and then I went back to work and came home and saw my mug on the telly and figured I better ride this wave of thought, and pulled out this little doozy that I’ve been nursing for a week or two. It is now a love letter to Julia.

Dear Julia,

.

Independence. Independent publishing house. Indie. Indie rock. Independent record label.

All of these except for the first are relatively easy to identify with, in a cultural sense. It is easier to identify something that has been labelled ‘independent’ than it is to define what independence really means, especially when you say or write independent too many times – like the word ‘spaghetti’, or ‘bowl’, if you look at it for too long you go cross-eyed, and you begin to wonder how these combinations of symbols came to mean something as specific as ‘a kind of pasta of Italian origin, made from wheat flour, in long, thin, solid strips or tubes, and cooked by boiling’ and ‘a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc’.

Bowls are great for cereal!

Being independent is so hot. Being into independent art, literature and music seems to imply that you know of an alternative source, like a really good drug dealer, who supplies you with gear that common people can’t score. It’s true that a bag of weed still costs twenty-five bucks after all these years, but ‘independent’ art carries the misguided connotation that it also somehow exists outside of market pressures that warp commercial art, literature and music into the generic pop that makes us vomit a bit in our mouths when we like anything that more than five of our friends like.

When I started at Wakefield all those moons ago, their curiously mixed-economy style of publishing was confusing. They get a few government grants, they do a bit of partner publishing, a bit of corporate publishing, they ran a distro for a while, and they trade international rights with publishers of all persuasions and structures. They also publish a variety of mass-market DIY gastronomy slash ‘gastro memoir’ that is remarkably successful in the trade. They do this to support their investment in novels, poetry collections and obscure South Australiana.

At the time I latched onto the idea that independent literature was defined primarily by the absence of financial backing from large conglomerates. Yet, a quick look around at what is generally considered to be ‘indie’ lit reveals that most of these operations are supported by something, other than the market: the good will of a benefactor, government funding, or a university. So as I think it out now I realise true independence is the reliance on consumers making the choice to buy your product.

My misconception has to do with ‘indie’ bastardising the meaning of ‘independence’. ‘Indie’ is a trend – something that people toss around willy nilly, slapping on anything that seems vaguely removed from the mainstream, without due consideration of how it’s actually financed. ‘Independence’ is a timeless value. Lit journals funded at ‘arms length’ by Australia Council are not independent – they are dependent on the government, a dependence we felt was threatened when, under Howard, severe funding cuts swept the sector, leaving Mark Davis to suggest it was a silent campaign to cripple dissenting opinion. Try to not let that happen again, if that’s cool.

A silver lining of that period might be that it seemed to spurn on a bunch of truly independent ventures – Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, Torpedo, aduki and Vignette Press are examples that come to mind – fiercely anti-welfare and determined to reach audiences through sheer leg work, they inspire me because they’ve chosen to think of innovative ways to get their product out there.

Marketing to general readers, or directly to small, self-sustaining niches, is integral to the business models of these operations, and advances in communication technology are providing the means to answer the question: ‘Where is the market, and how do we get the value of our product in its way?’

But our cultural definition of ‘independence’ continues to inhibit innovation in these important areas of the sector. SPUNC are trying to rejuvenate innovation, and Australia Council are behind them, but the sector needs more. We need to change our definition of ‘independence’. Imagine, say, a parallel universe where the small-press operators put the stipend of a part-time marketing person on their credit card along with their printer bill, which is not uncommon, such is the belief in the value of this work that people go in for personal debt to fund it.

There are other ways to affect this shift in the mindset of the industry, such as a massive injection of capital tied to marketing, publicity and sales campaigns for small presses, and serious audience-development research and training. This would show small-press operators that it’s worth investing in commercial innovation. Split Literature Board funding 50/50 instead of funding the production of more manuscripts than we really don’t know how to sell.

The shift could also be nudged along by facilitating pro bono partnerships between the corporate sector and the independent-publishing sector, such as Australian Business Arts Foundation are doing in the high operatic arts sector.

With enough money, companies like Coca-Cola Amatil can convince people that drinking lots of acidic, sugary water will make them float around in really fun bubbles. Think of the social benefits of merely doubling the scant budget of a small press, so that they might propel their product into a self-sustaining market orbit. Facilitating communication through literature offers people a private communion with ideas that is unsurpassed by any other medium: it affords us the time and space to consider ideas on our own terms, to learn in the comfort of our own headspace.

This is why I’m so passionate about facilitating the written expression of others. Your speech reminded me of that, when you mentioned that hard work and education are the key to a truly progressive and productive society. An ongoing engagement with literature from an early age constitutes the finest education a person could ever hope for or need. Being literate in literature gives us access to a lifelong education, as we seek out the experiences of others to develop love and compassion through understanding our myriad differences.

Facilitating this provides me with hope that shit won’t get worse, at least.

It was a genuine pleasure to meet you briefly. Seriously, hit me up if you need to know anything about semi colons or en rules or ellipses or whatever.

.
Love,
.
Ryan
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PS You might already be familiar with this clip. I was reminded of it today when my friend said she wants to have your babies. Thing is, you’re both woman, which is why I was reminded of this clip. It doesn’t transpose exactly, but I’m sure you’ll catch my gist.
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Tom Cho launched Voiceworks in Melbourne last night, and apparently he said ‘Whitney Houston once sang: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”’ It gives me hope to know that Voiceworks is facilitating the expression of the sort of people who understand and value this. Tom Cho’s doing pretty alright for himself as a novelist, another Australian author whose first publications were in Voiceworks.

Voiceworks is a place where young writers and artists educate themselves. You don’t need to poke around Virgule, the magazine’s blog, for long to glimpse the bounty they’re sharing.

The issue they launched is ‘Birthmarks’, number 81. I recommend you buy it here. If you’re not sure why you should, check out these reviews. It only costs eight bucks, but if you read it four times, that’s like two bucks a read.

It looks like this:

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a clear sense, from the comments on the Virgule post, exactly what the problem is.

I’ll get to why the call for transparency is questionable at the end, but first I’ll try to understand what some of the fuss is about, with qualifications that are worth considering before we go mouthing off about ABR’s commitment to youth literature.

One, it’s disappointing because it’s one less young writer published in an established journal. But this happens all the time and we don’t blog angrily about it. Perhaps that’s because, two, this collective rejection casts a shadow over the whole community of young writers. But the implication that zero out of 100 young writers are not good enough to be published in ABR is not so hard to swallow – that’s not a big slush pile, and I know a bunch of young writers, outside of that slush pile, who have written for ABR, myself included.

So, I dunno, it just seems like a lot of anti-ageism noise. Worse, ill-thought-out allegations that this decision means ABR don’t really support youth literature only shitcans their attempt to do so. Worst: Ben’s claims that ABR refused to award the prize because ‘its reputation or the respect of its readers might be damaged by the publication of a young person’s ideas’.

Phooey! Such a blatantly antagonistic, deliberate misinterpretation of their decision is simply uncool, and posting this as a comment on Virgule seems determined to pit the gilted applicants against ABR. Yep, that’s anti-ageist noise alright, especially when you consider the form letter doesn’t say this at all. It says:

In [discharging our right not to award a prize] we are mindful of our responsibilities to readers, to the magazine’s reputation for excellence, to our sponsor and – most importantly – to the entrants themselves.

Who’s to say the ABR editors aren’t on the phone/keyboard right now to the shortlist, commending them for their work and commissioning an In Brief, to get the shortlistees working on something more manageable than a full-length essay? So far we’ve only had a snapshot – from people who are upset they didn’t win, as much as they’re upset that no one won.

Even if the editors aren’t on the phone, it just doesn’t seem like something worth making a big deal about. Rejection slips are nothing new. Applicants are free to send their essays elsewhere. They’re running the prize again (another commendable initiative forgotten by most of the commenters), by which time the dedicated among the applicants might have developed enough to enter a winner.

Meanwhile, pulling the prize this year might actually be considered commendable: they are presumably (and understandably) worried about publishing poorly expressed ideas, which, let’s face it, are going to be among the majority in a slush pile of 100 from young writers – even at Voiceworks, where we would receive between 200 and 300 submissions per quarter, we were often scraping the barrel, because it’s true: young writers are usually not as accomplished as older, established writers – the ‘established’ is important: it’s not age that qualifies you as a good writer, but the amount of time, energy and dedication you’ve poured into developing your work, plus the extent of your natural affinity for ideas, and the ability to express them.

During Voiceworks Editorial Committee meetings we would often debate the merits of publishing a lesser-quality piece by a younger writer. There were usually two fronts: doing so might encourage the writer to continue developing their work – to keep writing at all, even – and we might get to publish their higher-quality work later; doing so might undermine the magazine’s reputation for exceptional quality, meaning that readers might not hang around until the time the younger writer had grown up.

Deciding to pull the prize this year does not, necessarily, undermine ABR’s commitment to youth literature. In fact, two alternatives to pulling the plug on the prize could be worse.

One, run something mediocre, which ABR’s older readership might read with disdain, which they then carry over to the broader community of young writers. And every applicant other than the winner remains equally gilted, as they read the winner that’s not as good as they think their essay is.

Two (as suggested in the comments), edit the fuck out of the piece, which undermines the integrity of an award anyway – it’s not an award for an essay-with-great-potential – and establishes a misrepresentation among older readers, as well as a sense of false hope among the winner – few other outlets (Voiceworks aside, of course) will give the author the same extent of editorial attention in the future, when they start shooting equally mediocre essays from the hip at every major paper that still runs them.

In anticipation of the retort that who are Peter Rose and Mark Gomes to determine the nature of mediocrity, I come back to the questionable call for transparency.

Reading the article that Sam Cooney linked to from the comments at Virgule, I was reminded prizes are not much more than simple publishing decisions with a fancy label.

The decision might look different – it is preceded by a public call for submissions, presided over by a public (albeit usually secretive) panel of judges, and succeeded by publication with a gold sticker.

Compare this to other publishing decisions, which are preceded by a private solicitation of submissions, presided over by a private (albeit disparate, but no less inaccessible) panel of arbiters – agents, editors and (if you play with the big kids) marketing departments – and succeeded by publication without a gold sticker.

The only real difference is the sticker, which might momentarily and marginally influence sales, but does little to influence the aesthetic judgement of readers, which is what really drives sales, and therefore the extent of an author’s readership.

The decision to award a prize to a piece of literature is no less subjective than to publish one in the general sense, so ABR deciding not to award a prize merely means that nothing they received was worthy of a prize. It takes balls to do that – especially with so many egotistical writers (read: writers) running around – and at this stage I remain convinced that they not only have a right to do this, but a duty, to prevent mediocre literature being published as award-winning literature, an idea that is inherently contradictory.

ABR is a journal of particularly high … uh, calibre, so the upset over its rejection of these young writers’ advances is understandable, on a superficial level. But the panel was just a couple of editors looking for outstanding submissions from young writers. Attacking an establishment outlet for failing to award a youth-literature prize doesn’t help the very cause this outlet is trying to promote.

This is an important new prize run by an important journal with a long-running history of publishing high-quality ideas about literature. If we shitcan this prize it in its inaugural year, I bet the loud mouths won’t blame themselves for it folding – it’ll be the fault of yet another esteemed, establishment journal looking down on youth literature.

It’s not cool of the youth literati to go shooting their mouths off like this, so if you have a legitimate and informed criticism of the decision, I would love to hear it, and will happily respond in comments below, while eating the form letter. That means I will try to eat my twenty-inch iMac, so I’m pretty serious about this – please comment: tear me to shreds!

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’.

I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever.

I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and edit his manuscript. I’ve been helping him to prepare it for submission to the Vogel, despite my reservations about awards, which I mentioned, and which I discussed here. It’s a deadline, at least – one that’s been extended!

The Manuscript

Nic’s manuscript is one of the most accomplished, challenging and thought-provoking manuscripts I have read in a very long time. It’s about: Tailings, a half-caste Chinese girl in colonial Victoria during the Gold Rush, who is looking for her mother’s bones while her Irish father digs and drinks himself into suppressing the loss of his wife; and Volker, a 1930s anatomist and eugenicist enamoured of The Third Reich’s racial purity program, who is implicated in the surgically executed live dissection of a young Chinese man. (There is lots of death in this manuscript – I would go as far as to call it a ‘literary thriller’.)

Chinese, colonial and German themes all wrap around each other in the most intricate way, entwined with a minimalism so accomplished that I remain gobsmacked that it is the first novel manuscript of a 30-year-old writer.

Books it reminds me of: Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, Original Face by Nicholas Jose and Many Years a Thief by David Hutchison.

NB: Nic Low is neither Peter Carey nor Nicholas Jose, nor David Hutchison; Nic Low is Nic Low, a 30-year-old writer / festival director / public installation artist. (He is also a self-taught web designer and developer – in fact, in exchange for my work on his manuscript, he’s gonna trick this blog out with bouncing hydraulic shockers.)

He’s at the beginning of his career as a novelist and he has produced a first manuscript that punches in the same division as those novels above.

I’m not bullshitting.

No Bullshit

If you are familiar with any of my published criticism, or have talked with me for longer than two minutes about books, you will understand that this sort of praise does not come easy to me. Working as a book editor and critic has rendered me more discerning than I would care to be: I don’t enjoy books as much as I used to, because most of the books I read could have been better than they are.

This could be considered a bad thing: you could wax lyrical about how the dissection and criticism of literature renders it lifeless and uninspiring.

Or it could be considered a good thing: instead of meandering through the sea of mediocrity that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia (vaguely enjoying most things but never really being inspired to write, think, learn, explore), every now and then I stumble across a manuscript like this that blows my fucking brain, bobbing up and down on that sea like a diamond wearing a life vest … or something less garish. A beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … perhaps.

‘Tailings’ is one to look out for, I reckon.