Monthly Archives: August 2013

you never know who’s listening: shameless plug edition

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Just under a year ago I had the pleasure of reading my work out to a crowd of strangers.

If this doesn’t sound like a pleasure to you, then you clearly have no understanding of the warped psyche of a writer. This downright terrifying exhilarating experience was (thankfully?) immortalised on tape. (It’s probably not tape, it’s probably something much more hi-tech than that.) Anyway, it was immortalised. In the chaotic, nerve-wracking lead-up to the first public speaking engagement I’ve ever volunteered for, I somehow managed to miss out on the information that I was being recorded. Finding out later freaked me out momentarily – it’s like finding out someone can see straight into your bedroom, thanks to a combination of high-powered binoculars and your lack of blinds. (That happens to everyone, right?) In the end I was grateful that I went into the performance in a state of blissful ignorance.

My story, Under-Wired, was performed as part of Scissor Paper Pen’s inaugural Something Else event. They hold these story telling events semi-regularly, and they are always a delightfully bizarre mix. They give the writers a theme – ours was Wires Crossed – which is basically a rather vague nudge in the direction of your writing desk, and then they just sit back and watch the madness unfold. On the same night as me, my friend Zoe Anderson enlightened us on the weird and wonderful world of beekeeping with The Bee Story, and local poetry slam champ CJ Bowerbird unsettled and impressed everyone with his piece You Never Quite Reach the Drums in the Distance. 

Me, well, I brought down the tone a little. Under-Wired is about high school politics, “self-acceptance”*, and the sheer awkwardness that is a young girl’s relationship with her breasts. When in doubt, mine your angst-ridden adolescence for material.

In much the same way as I feel about my boobs now, I hope you guys like my little story.

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* So my much-more-articulate editors at SPP have dubbed it, anyway.

november is the cruellest month

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November last year. November. Last. Year.

Most projects, when launched, are so launched with what one might tentatively refer to as honourable intentions. There are a few notable exceptions: invading another country, planning an elaborate murder, deciding to facebook-stalk your ex. But this blog, man, it was one of those new leaf moments. I am kind of grateful that I didn’t really talk to anyone about it because gawd, if I had, right now I would be cringing so hard at how New Age I’d sounded. I found a notebook the other day, started around the same time as the blog, where I used the phrase artistic epiphany. Kill me now.

It’s hard to start anything without a little bit of that cringeworthy naïveté and it’s harder still to look back at the projects you started, the projects you were SO EXCITED about and were going to CHANGE YOUR LIFE and other cliched phrases like TURNING POINT – it’s hard to look back and see how fallow you’ve let those fields lie. Typewritten Tales leads with an incredibly emotional, exhilarated and thoroughly pretentious narrator (*cough* me *cough*) babbling about the first time she managed to get paid for writing and performing a story. And then there’s a potentially interesting series of posts on one’s work-in-progress* that trail off after only two or three. And then there’s a long silence.

It is my first instinct to delete my previous posts and start again. I am secretive by nature, not because I have anything worth hiding but because I am naturally embarrassed at the thought of anyone looking at me, or anything I’ve done, and not finding it up to scratch. This is a difficult way to be when you have specific goals that kinda, you know, rest entirely on someone else actually reading and connecting with something you’ve written. I want to delete those old posts, those pieces of evidence proving, without a doubt, my guilt: I have no follow through. I, as I have blogged about previously, have such a severe case of procrastination I should be in medical textbooks. I should be studying right now. I tend to judge myself especially harshly; I have a certain proclivity for freaking the fuck out and running away and hiding.

BUT. I read back over those posts today, for the first time in nine months**, those gloriously optimistic posts, those thoroughly edited posts, those posts that link to my personal twitter account and will be viewed by everyone I know, by everyone who googles my real name (what a tiny little clubhouse that must be) and you know what? I’m proud of that girl.

I am proud of past me, who tried and failed, and I’m proud of current me, who is writing again, seriously, for the first time in over a year. I am proud that in the fifteen years since I decided writer was my ultimate aim in life and the source of any potential happiness, that I am still able to try again. Oh, she’s got her faults, that little old me, but mostly I think she’s all right.

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*You know, I honestly can’t remember what story it was that I decided to develop for last year’s NaNoWriMo. Yet another abandoned project for the archives!

** That’s a WHOLE BABY’S WORTH OF TIME right there. I could have CREATED LIFE in that time. I didn’t do anything even half that constructive. I just made awful puns that would make TS Eliot roll over in his grave, then rise back up and come and eat my brain for having desecrated his work in that way.