3 years of blogging

Back in 2011, I had been thinking about starting a blog for so long that I just went, screw it, grabbed the first idea that appealed to be, bought a domain name and got started. The blog was called Indie Press Review and its raison d’être was to review and plug independent works. I was just warming up to the idea that self- and indie-publishing was a good thing for the industry as a whole and wanted to contribute to the revolution.

I got a warm reception from the independent writing community on Facebook (a chance connection led to my first lead and Indie Writers Unite), and so armed with my first review copies ever, I dove right in.

It was a little underwhelming.

I had been secretly hoping, I think, to find works of the calibre that I had read in the fanfiction world,in which I had already dabbled in the past. I found instead writers who were overwhelmingly passionate about their work but who didn’t have the patience or the resources or the community to find an editor they could trust, which was devastating, and also the main reason I had been slow to warm to the idea of self-publishing. Editors, I feel, make the world go ’round. They help us as writers to say what we want to say, help us to find our voices, help us to distill the truth of what we’re trying to say from the crap of how we think we should say it. In the real world, I’ve worked as both a writer and an editor, and I have to say, you can’t really have one without the other, and I know better than to trust myself to do both. There’s a reason why Faulkner famously said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” Not words. Darlings. Self-editing is hard.

So Indie Press Review limped along, battered about by my struggles to find my voice, my focus, my reason for writing. I thought I had to have it all from day one, so I elected to wait until everything fell into place, posting barely once a month, until I realised that everything wasn’t going to fall into place, and maybe I should mould my blog to fit me rather than moulding myself to fit the idea I had of the perfect blog.

So I reserved this little corner of the internet, and began again. I went back to the start, in all ways, except this time I had a little more focus and a little more of my voice. I gave myself freedom to write about the things I wanted to write about, like fresh summer sangria and comic books and pretentious literary fiction. I’ve mostly stopped trying to live my life like a blog post, and instead filter bits of my life through my blog. Every time I post I feel like I have a little more focus; I hear my own voice with a little more clarity; I’m a little more convinced that what I have to say is worthwhile.

Three years ago I wanted so badly to have something to say that I reserved a corner of the internet and tried to mould my voice to the space that I thought was available. This year I realised that I’d found what I wanted to say, and where I wanted to say it. So thanks, dear Reader, for sticking with me. Even if you’ve only been around for a little while, every one of you has made this journey worthwhile.

Strive to remain

Words are how we become,
and strive to remain,
human.

I’m not sure where I first read this quote. On the internet, for sure, stumbling around reading articles about writing and living and, well, striving. I love it because to me it sums up everything about writing and living and politics and poetry in one little sentence.

Words are how we become, and strive to remain, human.

Whenever we’re feeling sad or angry or frustrated or excited, and start babbling and gesturing to get our point across, we get told, Use your words. One of the central things about growing up is learning how to use language to express yourself. It’s one of the central things about life as a human, really – in politics, in mediation, in relationships, in art* – the best way to have a meaningful exchange, especially in absentia, is to use words.

Writing is how I’ve always best expressed myself. I hate confrontation, and I’m only now beginning to admit that the reason for that is that the words dry up. I’m not very articulate when put under pressure, with long silences and short sentences and a total absence of eye contact. In language, we can attempt to express ourselves articulately, succinctly or at length, poetically or simply. Language, in my mind, is what allows us to be what we are, mostly civillised, polite, lawful. One of the biggest stereotypes about teenaged boys is their apparent lack of ability to communicate in words, and yet give them a few years to come into their confidence and we think, what lovely young men, when we hear them speak eloquently about their expereinces.

I’ve been thinking a lot about becoming recently. I read the Simone de Beauvoir quote that goes One is not born, but rather becomes, woman, and in light of all the exposure the transgender community has been having in the news it’s really been rattling around in my head, bouncing off things and provoking half-formed ideas about womanhood and femininity, and generally making a nuisance of itself. But I think the point is, as my parish priest told me when I was seventeen and freaking out about how to decide what I wanted to become when I left school, is that becoming is a series of small choices, one after the other, that can sometimes be traced but often can’t, that lead us to where we are on any given day.

It was a series of small choices that led to my becoming a writer, that led to my flowers-and-skirts-and-superheroes sense of style, that led to my life in Melbourne as it is today. It was a series of small choices that led to me sitting here, right now, with a coffee and my laptop and musing on the meaning of choices and words and becoming. I feel that with each new word I lay down, with each new blog post and snippet of terrible fiction and text message, I become more myself, more the me I strive to be, more human.

*Yes, the visual arts are an excellent way to communicate feeling and movement and to provoke thought. But I’m not really talking about that. I’m talking about making your meaning clear and your relationships flow smoothly.

On giving up adolescence and accepting adulthood

I’ll be 25 in September, a fact which tends to spring itself on me at inopportune times.

Twenty-five has always seemed to me like the age at which proper adulthood starts. You graduate high school, then uni; you spend a couple of years mooching around in a minimum-paying job until you finally figure out the thing that lights your soul up. You’re mid-20s by now, so you either do your soul-lighting thing as a hobby or you figure out a way to making a living from it.

Twenty-five is the age at which you start thinking seriously about long-term relationships, about marriage, about children. Twenty-five is the age at which we start to say, I need to get my shit together.

I guess what’s so startling about my reaching Serious Adulthood is the amount of shit that I do, actually, have together. I work in a job I enjoy that’s more than tangentially related to the field I want to end up in; I’m married and have been for a couple of years; I’m renting long-term and seriously considering either buying a shoebox apartment or moving overseas for a year. I budget, I eat leftovers for lunch, and I wear makeup to work every day. For all intents and purposes, I am an adult.

But seriously. Really?

I’m beginning to think that this Serious Adulthood thing is a bit of a scam. I mean, sure, I pay my rent on time and wear pencil skirts, but I’m also a massive Marvel fangirl and have been known to squee unselfconsciously when the topic comes up. I remember to schedule a checkup with my GP every year – I have a GP, for crying out loud – but I’m pretty sure the last time I ate M&Ms for dinner was only a few weeks ago.

Come to think of it, maybe I don’t have that much to worry about after all. If I’m just making it up as I go along, I’m sure everyone else is too, and I sure as hell don’t notice a difference.

Salinger and Gaiman

About a year ago I began telling people that Neil Gaiman was the person I wanted to be when I grew up.

He’s cool, he’s witty, and he wrote one of my favourite books ever, American Gods. His wife is amazing, his home life seems happy, and all the time he spends alone with his Parkers and his laptop seems to inevitably end in a new bit of genius being released into the world.

Trouble was, I had no idea how to become Neil Gaiman.

I couldn’t do the typical follow-his-footsteps thing, because that path into journalism doesn’t exist in the same way anymore, and anyway I don’t want to be a journalist. I want to make things up. (For the moment, anyway. Essays are becoming a bit of a thing in my life.)

So I spent a few months trying to figure out how to become Neil Gaiman, and then I realised. I didn’t want to necessarily be Neil Gaiman – I just wanted to be a writing rock star. I wanted to write crazy things and have millions of people love them.

Then I remembered that I’m much more of a realist in my writing. Writing about the small moments, everyday life, not gods and ghosts and magic. (Though I do love a smattering of that as well.) So maybe Neil Gaiman wasn’t quite the mentor I was after.

Now, though, I tend to think I want to be more like JD Salinger. Much quieter, more realistic, and still churning out amazing pieces of literature. Focussing much more on the craft than the audience interaction.

I think that suits me better anyway. I’m always too nervous about becoming involved in communities. (I’ve been skulking around the outskirts of Tumblr for months now.)

Neil Gaiman once said, in that famous commencement speech that has now been turned into a beautiful book, that you start becoming a good writer by imitating other writers until you find the voice that’s your own.

Part of that is the hero-worship, the wanting to be another author so much that you write like them, endlessly drafting pieces that you think sound good (like them) until finally, finally the layers fall away and all that’s left is your drive to write, and your stories begging to be told.

I think that it’s a lifelong process for most writers. You only have to follow any writer’s career to notice that their debut novel/essay/article/collection of poems is wildly different from, much more naive and unpolished than, their latest. Heck, take a look in your own writing archives and you’ll see what I mean.

That’s progress. That’s growing. That’s the difference between wanting to be Neil Gaiman or JD Salinger, and just wanting to write so much that it doesn’t really matter who you are, so long as your work is out there for people to read.

Magnetic and quivering light

Melbourne’s answer to Paris’ Pont des Arts

Last week I couldn’t decide which Gabriel Garcia Marquez book to (re)read, so I began Love in the Time of Cholera and re-began One Hundred Years of Solitude. I forgot how much I love the latter, and can’t believe how long it took me to read the former after first hearing about it on Oprah’s Book Club segment years ago when my sole occupation involved working early mornings at McDonald’s and then watching daytime television while my mother folded endless loads of washing.

I feel like, if I ever went to South America, the light would look the way One Hundred Years of Solitude makes me feel. Bright, and content, and curious. A little confused – because hey, it’s disconcerting when you realise that hundreds of years have slipped by without noticing. Lighter than air, and more in touch with myself, my desires, my true-true. It’s hard to fall out of touch with things when just looking up from your computer screen makes you happy.

This last weekend was the Labour Day long weekend in Melbourne, and my partner and I spent the three days reconnecting. We’ve had a stressful couple of months (years) and it was nice to be able to sit back, explore the city we love and remind ourselves of all the things that made us stand up in the cold and the wind eighteen months ago and promise each other forever.

Summer’s on its way out, oscillating between autumn chill and muggy hot days worthy of the middle of January. I can’t wait for the cold, woolly jumpers and big mugs of tea and digging my bright red coat out of the back of the wardrobe. But summer’s last hurrah is a time for celebrating, for relishing those last few days of daylight savings, going out for dinner and still being able to stroll home leisurely in the twilight.

I’m a hermit for most of summer, being a bookworm and pale-skinned to boot. But the end of summer, while it always takes too long to wind down for my taste, tends to feel like a treat. Or maybe that’s just the long weekend and beautiful translated novels.

Life in the cracks

Novelists open up the private moment.

*

There’s a letter by F Scott Fitzgerald that I keep in my notebook and draw out and read whenever I have a quiet moment. The gist of it is something quite different to the point of this post; that you have to sell your heart when writing fiction, or at least when you’re starting out. But he describes the quiet moments, girls around the dinner table exchanging gossip, that most writers attempt to turn into fiction at some point in their lives. I know the quiet moments are my favourite ones to write about – the time just after the dawn when the word is still and the protagonist can see, just for a moment, with perfect clarity.

I think that’s what’s so enticing about the private moment. Whether or not the characters realise it, it is in these moments that they reveal the most about themselves, and in turn, it’s when the readers get to discover the most about themselves

*

I once went to a talk where the speaker said, “We read to remember who we are. We read and say, ‘Yes, that’s me. I felt that.'”

Whether the circumstances match up or not, in reading about Lolita, Humber Humbert reminds us of our own obsessions, like that time we sat for a whole weekend and watched Doctor Who back-to-back. American Gods’ Shadow makes us think of the times we were drifting, and Jay Gatsby crooks his finger at us and says, ‘Remember that weekend when you were seventeen and everything was perfect? You should do that again.’

*

Real life is made up of private moments. It happens in the cracks in time that we don’t even notice. It’s in the book you read while you’re waiting for a tram, in the dreams you dream when you put on your lipstick. It’s in the slip of fingers over flesh as you dance around each other in the kitchen.

*

That life, the life that happens in the cracks, is why I write. It’s what I love to write about. Peeling open the moments that make life real, worth it, and studying them in a way we don’t often get to while we’re working and sleeping and otherwise living around them.