Making Sense Of It

When you are trying to get a book published, people will give you lots of advice. Just like the advice folk well-meaningly giftwrap in powder blue or pink when you have a baby, the trick is to learn which bits suit you and to toss the rest. But even when you think you know what’s what, some old rule you used to live by can come back to bite you. The one that recently bit me was one I’ve always sworn by, possibly as a hangover from being an editor, when all I longed for was a hard-working author who didn’t make ridiculous demands: be nice.

Oh, I have been nice. I’ve been so damn nice I could throw up a little. I have stopped myself from making a fuss, repeating the mantra: all your life you wanted to be published, just act grateful! It’s difficult to find that balance between nice and doormat when you’re an author who has clawed her way in. Recently I discovered that I did not get it right. I should have kept on, not given up. Because of my dreaded alter-ego, Ms Nicey McNicerson, I’ve only just seen the light on a particular project, with the result that a book I was proud of is now a book I want my name removed from.

So my revised rule is this: be nice, but don’t be a mug. It’s not as profound as some might put it.

A writing career doesn’t always make sense. Authors feel a pressure to seem overcome with joy once their first book is published, even if privately things aren’t going so well. It’s PR, darling. But the fact is that sometimes you can work your bedsocks off (it’s very brr in Melbourne at the moment) on a novel and get a brisk and unexpected ‘no’, and other times you can scribble something hurriedly and get a fantastic reward. You can’t make sense of that any more than you can capture and bottle that luck element that goes into your first book deal. The reward has to be in the journey.

A few months ago I entered a haiku competition on Melbourne Gastronome. My haiku, hastily scribbled during an advert break, won me a night’s accommodation at The Outpost Retreat in Noojee. Because I wrote it so quickly, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I didn’t deserve it. You’re supposed to sweat, aren’t you? As it turned out, I really needed that break – in the end it didn’t matter whether the haiku made me deserving or whether something else did. So we piled into the car, my partner, my kids and our manny, and headed east with a large quantity of Mentos for my car-sick-prone daughter. We had a fabulous wintery meal (rolled beef stuffed with veal mince on a bed of sweet potato mash topped with a portobello mushroom and a Yorkshire Pudding, followed by pistachio and almond torte with pistachio ice cream, hubba hubba). But the highlight was watching my 3 year old’s face (and wild driving technique) as he had his first go at the steering wheel on a dirt track, sitting on his father’s lap. Such joy cannot be planned. The freezing-cold early-morning stroll the children insisted on was pretty good, too (we made sure it didn’t last too long by giving them light jackets and no gloves).

And after that little pick-me-up, it’s back to the drawing board…fortunately, that’s my favourite place to be.