So it's January 2021. Last time I posted here was September 2018! I like to think that's because I was working on the manuscript, so the blog became redundant. After all, I only set up this blog to help me write.
The nice thing about writing on a blog is that it gives you (me anyway) a sense of audience. You don't often feel that when working on your manuscript with messy notes and pages all over the place. So it's nice to be back and know you are out there. There's not so many of you so that makes it even more special!
The update is: I did work on it and I did present a draft to my trusted readers, Kerry Dwyer, Jennifer Moore and Jennifer Smart (long standing members of our Draft Busters group). Their feedback on my hardcopy MS was invaluable (lots of notes in the margins, edits, corrections — brilliant)! I went through all their suggestions, adding, subtracting, weaving in new bits.
Then I handed the next version to my good friend, editor Helen Williams. She had last seen it a few years back at about 12,000 words. It was now around 65,000 so a lot had changed. Some months later (late Feb 2019) when we could finally find a time to talk, we had a long phone session where I avidly took notes while sitting among junkies, trannies and grieving relatives of the nearby hospice in Green Park, Darlinghurst. (I was rehearsing with pianist Elizabeth Drake in Darlo for our comeback performance of our eighties cabaret hit, Failing in Love Again ).This was just days before I was to leave with a group of writers and artists for Morocco.
Morocco was incredible as usual. Before we set off, Covid was a distant problem, mainly confined to China and travel was still a safe option. But over the two weeks of our tour the global spread was rapid and by the end of our desert sojourn, Moroccan borders began closing. It was touch and go for a couple of tension filled days, but we all managed to get home safely.
Back in Sydney I went straight into 14 days home quarantine. It could have been the perfect time to get stuck into my rewrites, but I had other things to worry about. Like how to pivot (new word suddenly on the scene) and come up with new directions for my usual travel based activities. Caught up in new ideas and partnerships, Jess Stephens (Morocco) and I created and launched a virtual travel experience for artists and writers, Six Senses of Sefrou. It was a great sucess. Other plans were afoot with Jen Richardson of The Create Escape (Italy), Ilka Schroeder and Miklo Jarrett (North Coast Gumbanggirr Experience) and my Iranian friend, Golnar. (Afternoon Tea in Tehran).
Meanwhile from April onwards I was teaching Draftbusters Online. Our group of writers was going gangbusters but we planned a break in Sept/Oct which I used as my deadline to get back to MY Draft.
September was brilliant. I put everything else on hold so all I had to think about was MY writing.
I started on my start date. Well, I did clean a few cupboards and sort my desk first, all good ruminating activity and then I got rolling. Making all the suggested corrections and edits and reworking bits that needed more, cutting the extraneous. It didn't take long and I enjoyed the systematic process of going through the draft from start to finish.
This is why real writers write everyday, I reminded myself —no distractions, no demands, just the joy of total immersion in your work.
I finished all the edits and had settled down to a rewrite of section four of my memoir. The Phnon Penh section had always been problematic. Somehow I lose the thread of the search for Duras as I recount the stay with my dear friends, parents of my godson. It all becomes a bit too travelogue-ee, which Helen had astutely pinpointed it. I agreed.
I tackled the whole section, moving bits around, adding more scenes in, tightening the knot (I hoped). I finished and let it sit to ferment. I had another couple of weeks before I was to start teaching again and was hoping to come back to it but the universe had other plans for me. At the beginning of October I suffered five days of pounding headaches until a rash developing around my swollen left eye alerted the docs to a nasty case of shingles. I'd heard stories of this horrid illness but didn't understand its full implications until it had me in its grip. I liken it to a horror movie happening on the inside of your body. The insidious virus travels through the nervous system of its targeted area, sending out volcanic eruptions of pain and draining all your energy. It's taken three months to feel I am back in the land of the living and I would be celebrating with a dance around my desk, except for the lingering after effects, which they say can go on for some time.
Couldn't I have spent all that time writing? What can you do when you want to write but are physically incapable. Read more here.
But now it is 2021, I am back at the desk, back teaching online and back on the book!
I did re-read the Phnom Penh section and I can see it still needs more work.
And I did have an 'aha' moment recently after asking myself that Q writers hate:
What is the central question of your story?
Or as writer/coach Mary Adkins says:
Nail down tour book's big thorny question. Make sure it's a Q not a statement.
In her free masterclass Mary Adkins gives some examples:
"How do you find meaning in an unlived life?"
"Why do we believe what we believe?"
These are big life questions, and may seem quite general, less specific than the dilemmas and desires driving your protagonist.
Here are some possibles I came up with for my book. It's clearly about my attraction to and my fascination with melancholia, so what about:
Where does my melancholy habit come from?
What is the connection between mothers and melancholy?
Why do we sometimes feel sad for no apparent reason?
In my memoir while I make the connection between the pain in MD's writing and the despair and anguish that her mother and my mother shared, I realise that I haven't spoken much about my own experience of melancholy. Perhaps I needed to give some accounts about my occasional visits to therapists over the years and explore how I could not let my melancholy develop into the fully fledged mental illness of my mother.
Happily I'm led back to this blog to write those accounts. I don't want to write them in the MS right now. I need another place where I can explore this new thread, before I try to figure out how to weave it in to the bigger story.
To be continued!
(c) Jan Cornall 2021
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