Killcare Beach

You’d like to think that after writing a book that’s picked up by a literary agent, the writing of book number 2 would come easily, wouldn’t you? But second album syndrome is alive and well in my creative neck of the woods.

Having been told to start writing book two IMMEDIATELY, by my agent (pause for a moment while I let the words ‘my agent’ sink in), I did what any self-respecting writer would do; I had a creative meltdown.

It sounded a little like this.

Start a whole new book? How can I start a whole new book when I’m creatively exhausted from writing the first book?  Find all those new words? Again? How can I do that when I have (practically) no idea what the second book is actually about.? Haven’t I done enough? I don’t want to do this again, it’s way too confronting. What if it’s terrible?

Cue – the sequel.

That seemed like an easy straw to grasp, but even that proved to be very slippery to hang on to. But it was something. So, with no idea where it might take me, I wrote a Chapter One, hoping that some miraculous epiphany would occur. It didn’t. But at least I had a chapter.

In a state of mounting panic, which has yet to fully subside, I went away for 4 days at great cost to the family I left behind. My husband, who paid the bill, my 23 yo daughter who became the live-in nanny for my 6 yo daughter and of course the 6yo daughter who doesn’t think her mother should go anywhere without her.

I made the 1½ hour trip up to Killcare on NSW’s Central Coast and made myself at home in a 2 bedroom cottage with a wonderful deck overlooking the ocean. and for 4 days I thought about Book Number Two. Away from the everyday clutter and distractions of my life, I could let my thoughts roam. If I was  being filmed by a fly-on-a-wall documentary team, this is what those 4 days would like.

Me having a leisurely breakfast of yoghurt and fresh fruit on the deck with the view. Then, after a second cup of tea, a walk down to the beach for a trudge along the sand and a swim and a bit more trudging.Tthe trudging would lead me to the local cafe for a coffee and a catch up on all things internet, emails, Twitter, Facebook, the odd phone call. All necessary, no procrastinating here. Then back up to the cottage for a light lunch and some scrawling, or looking through magazines for visual prompts. It was pretty taxing, so I’d have a little nap before some more afternoon scrawling and scribbling. By which time, I was thirsty and needing a glass of wine. Then dinner at the local club and of course uninterrupted TV viewing and book reading.

It might not sound like work, but by the end of those 4 days, I had worked out a roadmap for the story and had the bones of the first 2 chapters on which to hang the flesh of a story. I can’t go away every week, or conduct my normal life like this, but removing yourself from the distractions, giving yourself permission to think, to let ideas form, to listen to your characters is invaluable. And that’s how my first book was written. In the moments when I shut my brain off and let the ideas percolate, brew and take shape. It was written in the writing myself into the story and not dictating from above, basically, by getting out of my way.

How many of the words or ideas will actually make it into the final draft of book 2, I have no idea, but it’s not important now. I have made a start and that is what matters.

Yesterday I took a step closer to becoming a published author. I signed an Author’s Agreement with Literary Agent, Sheila Drummond. It’s really all rather surreal. After years of scrawling notes in my Moleskine notebboks, cheap supermarket exercise books, scraps of paper, the back of theatre programmes and finally typing away at my laptop, I’m starting to reap the rewards.

It’s exciting, daunting, overwhelming and absolutely nerve-wracking. But there’s no time for sitting back and basking in the moment. I have to immediately start book two.

It’s no longer enough to have one good book in you, there has to be at least 2, preferably 3 and can you write a book a year? That was a wake-up call!

All this time of nurturing my dream, writing, rewriting, rewriting the rewriting all to create one book and now, today with book number one barely out of my system, I have to start creating a new world to inhabit for the next year. New characters to fall in love with, care about, dislike, wonder about their lives before I met them.

And how to begin? For me it’s with an empty page and a pencil, a thought and then start scrawling and see if ti leads me anywhere. Then I’ll take another blank page and start covering it in visual images, pictures from newspapers, magazines, real estate catalogues, images I’ve Googled and build a representation of the world and characters.

But at the end of the day, it will be all about the writing. Will it be easier this time? I don’t know. Now I’m out of my comfort zone. It’s no longer a closely guarded dream, it’s a reality. Now I have an agent to answer to, not just a monthly writing group. There will be publishers wondering if I’m worth their investment in time and money. At the end of the day, whether you publish with a traditional publishing house or self-publish, you have to confront the reality of the business that allows our work to be read, and that is what we want isn’t it?

And now the empty pages beckon, time to start work.

So long, in fact, I’ve gone beyond parched and am rapidly approaching shrivelled, dried and the merest touch could see me crumble away. But now I’m just being melodramatic.

I don’t really know why I stopped blogging regularly. Life happened. I followed other creative pursuits, like knitting my husband a sweater and there was, of course, the small matter of the manuscript. The rewriting, the editing, the coming to grips with the rewriting and the editing. The realisation that as hard and challenging as the first draft was, it was nowhere near as hard as the rewriting and editing.

The first draft was like the drawing of young child. Free, liberated, unconstrained – except by my own doubts – it could flow where it wanted to and I was happy to follow it. Now my wonderfully free-spirited child has to be disciplined to suit the genre, the publishable, the marketable qualities that are needed to move my manuscript from being a long held, quietly nurtured dream, into a fully formed reality.

It’s not easy.

My first edit which was meant to see about 20,000 words cut from the 105, 612 I’d written, resulted in about 3,000 words hitting the cutting room floor. And I realised just how brutal I was going to need to be. All those words I’d fought for, gazed out of windows searching for, got up in the middle night to jot down before I forgot them, they needed to go.  Anyone who’s ever been to a writing workshop will be familiar with the term ‘killing your darlings’, and that is what it feels like  and for me it is accompanied with a fear that these may be the only words I ever had. That new words won’t form, find me on the ferry, seek me out in the hushed quiet of the sleeping house or flow from my pen at the State Library. The fear is not so much that I only have one good book in me, but, that maybe, I only have one good draft.

But cutting 20,000 words isn’t enough. I need to lose more because there will be new words to add, characters to flesh out, new scenarios to create. Then there will be the  seamless weaving in of the new with the old. At least that’s the goal.

I’m currently on draft number four. How many more I’ll need to work through I have no idea. But I remember the words of author Pamela Freeman – ‘You will only ever be as good a writer as the number of drafts you are prepared to do.’ And I think I am only now beginning to fully appreciate just what she was trying to tell the wide-eyed group of writers, hanging on her words at one of those writing workshops.

The last of this morning's sunrise captured at 7am.

Last night I was just placing my bookmark into the crease of the page but my eyes flicked across a sentence that immediately kept me reading. I was very tired after a busy weekend, and sleep was beckoning, flirting, but couldn’t compete with the seductiveness of a sentence that had me reading for another half an hour.

‘Something of great importance to me happened two nights ago.’

Really? I asked myself, and of course I had to know. So today’s prompt is this sentence from Alex Miller. I think it’s a great opener, but if you want to incorporate into  your piece, that’s fine too.  Set your timer for 5 minutes or write about 500 words. If you’re looking for specific feedback, please let us know. Otherwise – enjoy the writing.

I chose to set my timer and see where my pen might lead me.

'Two Nights Ago'

‘Something of great importance to me happened to nights ago…

…It was, as these things often are, unexpected. The moon had  hung in the sky, a yellowish orb, casting light across the water. The boat wallowed, inelegantly instead of  skimming over the surface. He sat across from me, nervously pretending to busy himself with a sinker, threading the green prawn along his hook. He cast his line, cleared his throat and then said nothing. A disco boat, all UV lights and pink glow sailed by. The woo-hooing of the women shrill and penetrating. We both pretended not to notice.He glanced across at me as the disco boat rounded Peacock Point, leaving a pink fan in its wake.

‘Patience and quietness are what’s needed for fishing.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box of blue velveteen and placed it on the seat between us, ‘Good for a wife too.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

I’ve been a Write on Wednesday regular for sometime now, and I’m very happy to be helping Gill out this week. If, you’ve stumbled by here and have no idea what Write on Wednesday is, or why I’m writing about it on a Monday, WOW is an online writing group. A weekly creativity fix that allows writers to share their words and receive support, encouragement and feedback from other writers. Some writers have ongoing pieces and characters they’ve been working on, others use the weekly prompts to flex and exercise their creative muscle.

WOW is normally at Gill’s blog, inkpaperpen, but for a couple of weeks, it’s on a roadtrip while Gill takes some R & R.

Alex Miller's 10th novel, Autumn Laing

I’m reading Autumn Laing by Alex Miller, two-time winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin award. He writes beautifully, intelligently and with wit and like all good storytellers he understands how to keep the reader reading.

Last night I was just placing my bookmark into the crease of the page but my eyes flicked across a sentence that immediately kept me reading. I was very tired after a busy weekend, and sleep was beckoning, flirting, but couldn’t compete with the seductiveness of a sentence that had me reading for another half an hour.

‘Something of great importance to me happened two nights ago.’

Really? I asked myself, and of course I had to know. So today’s prompt is this sentence from Alex Miller. I think it’s a great opener, but if you want to incorporate into  your piece, that’s fine too.  Set your timer for 5 minutes or write about 500 words. If you’re looking for specific feedback, please let us know. Otherwise – enjoy the writing.

I’m so sorry – I’ve been ‘Adding’ a new collection when I should have been ‘Creating’! Hope this all works now. I’m so not into blog technology!!

I was really taken with the use of the tweezers, the surgical precision used to create something of such temporary beauty and pleasure.

I celebrated my wedding anniversary here a couple of years ago and enjoyed a gorgeous lunch on a sparkling Sydney Spring day, overlooking the Opera House and Circular Quay .I still remember the warm, friendly service and the small details that created dishes that were delightful to look at as they were tenderly placed in front of us onto the crisp linen table clothes and the melt in your mouth, exquisiteness of the delicate flavours. A perfect lunch.

It comes courtesy of nowness.com, one of my favourite websites for art, fashion and the fusion of beauty and ideas.

Enjoy.

A rain-dampened frangipani

There are some pleasures  so simple, so quiet that it’s easy to ignore them as a moment of beauty in one’s life. But over this very wet summer I have been deprived of one of these pleasures on a very regular basis.

Early in the morning, when the dew still glistens on the grass and the droplets hang on back-lit spider webs like decorations on Miss Haversham’s wedding table, I take my cup of tea into my garden and wander. It’s a small inner city garden so this is not a lengthy exercise, but it is a time of quiet solitude. My gaze wanders across the blush-tinged frangipani, herbs, the potted citrus trees, the blood-red roses,whilst  trying to ignore the hot pink trampoline that has recently taken up residence.

Some mornings, my cat stretches lazily and pads around next to me, as I de-aphid the roses, try to find the caterpillars munching happily and hungrily through my lemon tree’s leaves and pick some frangipani blooms to float in a bowl. But mostly it’s just me, my cup of tea and my roaming thoughts.

But this summer of record rainfalls, I have retreated to my study that overlooks the back garden. The grass is lush and way past its mowing use by date, the herbs  are also enjoying the rain, but the blush-pink frangipani are brown-bruised and the roses covered in black spot. And my roaming thoughts are contained, restrained and more often than not, accompanied by my not very quiet 5 year old.

I’ve tried a change of venue, taking my morning tea to my front balcony and gazing across the harbour, watching the morning rowers, unfazed by the rain, the ferries and the rippling of the water as the rain disturbs its surface. And it’s beautiful, no doubt about it, but it’s not the same as being in my small plot of nature, touching, nurturing and thinking.

I’m not one for bush walking, camping or other more earthy displays of communing with nature. But even my urban soul yearns for the calming influence of nature on balmy Sydney mornings that isn’t met by a morning walk or a harbour view. Nor is it a particularly beautiful or exotic garden, but it is quiet and peaceful in the early morning and allows me to think freely in a way I don’t do elsewhere.

So, I’m longing for La Nina to pass. For the weather to return to the drier and fresher air of a Sydney Autumn so I can resume my  simple morning pleasure.