Emily Gale

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.

Drying For My Art

I think it’s pretty obvious what I was aiming for with this artistic shot…um, and that is the similarity between writing a book and hanging out your laundry. If you don’t grasp it, I can’t help you. It’s something you either get or you don’t.

As with most things I think about, talk about or blog about these days, my first port of call was to google it. “Washing line”, I typed in. I was hoping for a nice article that instantly justified my random pegging of books. There was Wikipedia, calling out to me with its seedy reputation for loose facts. I clicked on it expecting to find something pretty straightforward like: a piece of cord stretched from one point to the other upon which clothes are hung out to dry. See also: clothes line. The End. But actually there’s a rather in depth article about how controversial washing lines are these days: “A variety of interests are invloved [sic] in the controversy about clothes lines, including: global warming, individual rights, the economy, private property, class, aesthetics, health, energy, national security and nostalgia.”

Who knew what a bold political statement I was making with my simple shot? Not even me.

Come back soon to see more photographic gems, and to find out which shot replaces those berries.

Haughty-Culture

It’s art if I say it is. Or possibly if one of you say it is – I think it only needs to be one of you.

Today was my ‘create the perfect photo to replace the generic berries’ day. I had visions of books hanging from autumnal trees, against a perfect May-in-Melbourne sky. I’m not quite sure what I thought that would say about me, other than “I like trees, Autumn is my favourite season, I write books.” But it was a start.

Unfortunately the weather and my chronic photography skills conspired against me, as did my kitten who kept running underneath the house (so excited to be let outside – he’s not quite old enough for longer stints), forcing me to pull away from cracking shots to call “Harry! Harry!” in my crazy-cat-lady voice. It’s very high-pitched and a little bit creepy, that voice.

Also, the books kept falling out of the trees. That’s why they ended up in the strawberry plant. Here’s a sample shot – but will it make it onto the homepage for good? Nail-biting stuff. What I wanted the photo to say was: I am quite organic and arty and profound. The truth is: The bloody books wouldn’t stay in the trees so I stuck them in a strawberry plant…that my dad grew for me, and which has been half-eaten by possums, leading me to get possum poo on my ugg boots while I was performing this haughty-cultural act.