When All Avenues Are Exhausted

This week has been a roller coaster. To put it mildly.

I’ve hinted about a project I’ve been slowly gestating. One that combines all my passions: postcards, poetry, art, community building. I’ve also hinted that all hasn’t been going as smoothly as I had hoped it would be.

GET IN TROUBLE

In February, I created a series of postcard-sized art poems during Post-It Note Poetry month. After a few days I realised how hard it was to adequately capture each card as an image.I asked a friend who is a professional photographer about them and he assured me they would scan fine. And so I kept on producing them. 

Half way through the month, I took the first 14 in to be scanned. The results were less than brilliant. I put it down to a dirty screen on the copier and kept producing.

NOT QUITE SO WONDERFUL

The thing was, when I reviewed the scanned images in March with my co-conspirator, when all the drawing, cutting, pasting and building was done, we both came to the conclusion that the scans were underwhelming  – the acuity of the colour had been bled out of  the art, flattening and dulling it. So I sought my friend, the professional photographer, to see if he was able to do a better job with them.

When he sent through the images and I had a good look, I was devastated. He made the images sparkle, there was colour, it wasn’t consistent though and the acuity in the words was sacrificed for the colour. 

There was no easy fix. 

I felt like giving up. 

But at the same time, my brain had kicked into creative problem solving mode. I was already mentally creating my dot point list of alternatives.

LIGHTNING STRIKES

The night before the photos arrived, I’d also been gifted an idea of the next possible art poem mash up. Woke up with it at 3am. So yes, devastated by receiving the images that hadn’t lived up to my expectations,  but hopeful of having a back up.The new idea didn’t work and my first foray into water colour was pretty abysmal. I showed up the next day to try again, back using my original poetry technique and a new text. The results were a little more heartening. It gave me enough hope that if everything did fall through with the February cards I had a medium in which to continue with a new series.

FACING UP TO THE FINAL SIREN

I put off going into The Valley, to see the printer, for a week. And with each passing day, my anxiety  grew. Like all anxiety, it was completely irrational. I had a way forward of this path became a dead end. Still, it was a tsunami of anxiety that engulfed me Wednesday morning…it would have been so much easier to just not go. 

But I did. 

I went. 

I was prepared for the worst. Hopeful for the best.

The answer was definitive: I had created something unreproducible. With that knowledge I was able to let go and focus on a way forward.

UNEXPECTED GOOD NEWS

The new idea was reproducible, and to sweetened the deal, I was quoted a cost half of the cheapest quote I had. I felt all along that this probably had to do with the printer and making local connections. The original artwork from February will be listed for sale in the coming weeks and will be the seed funds for the project that I hadn’t quite sorted out. Everything finds its place if you let it. 

SHAKE IT OFF

But I’ve taken a battering – my confidence isn’t at an all time high, like when I started! I feel kicked about. However I’m so much wiser now. Mistakes I’ve made will never be made again. I remind myself of my first publisher’s mistake: not all black is black. Ironic to find myself defeated by black again! Timelines are rejiggable. And best of all, this has been kind of running under the radar so I didn’t have to front up to say: hey, about that, I failed.

All through, I’ve kept to my mantra of smooth and easy. Where it hasn’t been, I’ve embraced the fact I’ve learned something new or been connected with an unexpected opportunity. 

There’ll be more about what I have been brewing (because the actual project does not change, only the content does!) and a chance for you to step with me through the creation of that content in the coming month. 

Embracing Venus’s shadow has never been so heart breaking and simultaneously ecstatic.

While You Were Away; A Letter

Tasmanian indie publisher Transportation Press’s new project  is a joint undertaking with Iranian-American writer-editor Shirindokht Nourmanesh and Twitch Tasmania. “The Letter Project” seeks to create a dialogue between one part of the world and another. I was chuffed to arrive home from holidays this afternoon to find my letter had been published earlier in the week while I was far from Brisbane, internet or mobile phone service.

To Wish A Letter Into Being

Have you ever been asked to write a letter to you in the past?

It’s one of the sappy kinds of self help exercises I’ve always detested. But somehow, in the last few years I’ve found myself wishing I could actually write a letter to teenage me, a way of saying “hey, there’s all this juicy, awesome stuff in the future. Hang in there” rather than needing or wanting to impart my hard won knowledge *cough* and wisdom *cough* (which I assume is the reason behind the letter as an exercise).

I’ve really just wanted to say, “Hey, here in the future, you get the things you want. They’re just not in the shape you want or expect them or in the time frame you wish it would happen. But it’s all here.”

Post Marked: The Past

Other than the actual practical ability to do so, the idea of sending a letter such as this into the past is based on a couple of assumptions :

1. The way you remember the past is they way it actually was.
2. The way you feel in the present about the past, is the way you actually felt in the past, and
3. Past You wants to hear from Future/Present Day you.

Ah, but what if they are all erroneous assumptions and the tech was two-way?

Dear You

“Dear You” is a semi-fictious, semi tongue-in-cheek, semi-autobiographical piece that opens:

29^th October 1989

Dear You,

(I’m not addressing this to “Future Me” because I’m not any version of you.)

You go to all the trouble of writing to me from the future about “that boy” but you don’t tell me who he is. Is he someone I already know? Someone I already like? Someone I have already lost? Someone I’m yet to meet?

And what the hell do you mean by “be patient…

Read on

I have Kris’s gentle nudges to thank for making me sit and write while on holiday and with only a very basic smidgen of an idea to fly a letter by the pants of.

You can read Kris’s letter here, and there’s also a letter by S.G. Larner, plus half a dozen other great pieces of epistolary writing.

Awaken the Social Media Army

And… because I am only a small way through my social media sabbatical I need your help. It transpires, getting the word out about your work without social media is the proverbial silent scream.

So… If you have a minute, please share “Dear You” on Facebook or Twitter. Transportation Press makes it simple with a bunch of social media icons on the bottom of the letter page.

And before you leave… would you or wouldn’t you write a letter to past you if the technology was available?

Image: Letter Box (c) Jodi Cleghorn 2012

In Apology #fridayflash

Dear Jack,
I’m sorry you didn’t get laid for Valentines.

I’m sorry ‘Sexual Healing’ got stuck on your iPod, for two hours, without you knowing how to fix it. I’m sorry the champagne cork broke in the bottle. I’m sorry your elbow kissed my mouth when you tried to slip your arm around my shoulder and it interrupted your mojo.

I’m sorry you couldn’t get it up even though I tried every trick I knew to get you hard.

Most of all I am sorry your credit card was declined and my minder broke your leg. I did try to get him to go easy on you, after all it was Valentines Day and you hadn’t exactly got what you were paying for.

I hope Valentines Day is less painful next year.

Yours,
Susie

PS: I’m sorry for lying. Yes, Susie is a stage name. I’m sorry it’s also your mum’s.

Good-Bye Jude and Ella-Louise

I’m feeling emotionally fragile this morning after last night’s final editing session with Adam on Post Marked: Piper’s Reach. Actually that’s a bit of an understatement. I’m emotionally gutted, made worse by the fact I wasn’t expecting this. Even though we finished writing the letters back in April and have read through it multiple times, been over the end multiple times, and apparently grieved it all… reading aloud the letters last night truly rendered me bereft. And grieving all over again.

#iamnotcrying

That was the hashtag we tweeted under last night. When Adam suggested it, I thought, ‘Yeah okay’. Three months had passed since we’d last been together to edit and I forgot that editing meant reading aloud. And reading aloud last night meant… reading those letters aloud: the final words of Ella-Louise and Jude to each other.

The ones wrought from the depths of their heart as the realisations surfaced about who they were, what they had done and what was left to do next. Of the two of them brokering something of a resolution and believing in future, even if it wasn’t the future they originally wanted.

When my voice began to wobble, somewhere around the final 20 page mark, I knew I was in for a long haul of tears. And I so didn’t want to be the first to cry, but I have a reputation as being a bit of a sook. It would have been all wrong, had I not cried first.

Amplification

When you write in such close creative quarters with someone, you get to know them pretty well. You get to know a little about what makes them tick, what makes them laugh, what you think will make them cry. You create characters you both love (and sometimes hate, or want to slap some sense into). You share a very intimate space.

My challenge throughout the 14 months of writing was to ‘make Adam cry’. A rather noble gesture and one I took quiet seriously. And I thought I knew how to do it. Turns out I brought him to the brink several times without pushing him over.

I was certain the end would do it.

That final letter.

And when I didn’t make Adam cry the night we exchanged those final letters back in April I was shocked. In fact, I was a little incensed. How could he NOT cry? Did he have a bloody heart of stone?

What I didn’t realise was Adam was incapable of expressing any kind of emotion such was the physical and emotional impact of that final letter. He walked around in shock for a week, trying to process the ending. And later we got to talk about just how it felt, began to pick it apart (if you’re writing partner can’t see the ending that’s coming, that’s a good thing right?) but I felt a little cheated. I had wanted to make him cry, like he had been making me cry across the three seasons.

Turns out, it’s not such a great thing to want.

It’s one thing to cry alone, another thing to cry in company.

Adam said last night, that the process of reading aloud amplified the emotion. It absolutely did. It also stripped bare our reactions to the words. I started crying for the words, but then I was crying because Adam was crying and thankfully we were separated by a State, with video cams off, which at least gave us a modicum privacy with our tears. Perhaps stopped us from dissolving completely into sobbing, hiccupping messes. Well temporarily!

We Could Be Heroes

It wasn’t like we hadn’t read it ad nauseum. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what was coming. It wasn’t like it was going to be a surprise… and yet it was. I was bowled over by just how visceral the emotions were. Of how deeply they tore through me.

I knew the exact moment we (collectively) would crack. I felt a little sick knowing those words were coming.

I tweeted: @revhappiness is going to say that heroes line and I will bawl.

Adam’s speed slowed, his voice quietened, the pauses between paragraphs and sentences lengthened, I could hear him struggling to get the words out and then came the line and there was a very long pause as we both were consumed by emotion. Neither of us were ashamed to admit we were crying.

But there was still one letter to go.

I don’t know how I read it. I was so choked up. It was like I was whispering Ella-Louise’s final words for a long way away. And then it was over.

For the last time.

There was nothing but silence. And snuffles. And more silence. Because what do you say when it is: The End?

How To Say Good-Bye

A friend told me this week that crying is being close to your soul. And last night it felt as though I lay within the souls of Ella-Louise and Jude. This morning I feel as though I’ve lost two close friends. I feel, even now, as though I could begin sobbing at any moment. While they left with each other a small part of themselves, I know they left a small part of themselves with Adam and I.

It is as though I’m up on The Point being buffered by a summer storm that blew in from nowhere, but a storm I knew in my heart was coming.

We created this montage as a tribute to the series and farewell for our readers back in June, but now the clip feels more like a eulogy; to friends well met and fairly parted.

First Impressions For Post Marked: Piper’s Reach

Last week I wrote about the process of honing the first page and the angst of marrying a non-traditional narrative with a traditional narrative framework to hook the reader. I had been reviewing the opening page in preparation for submitting to Marcy Hatch and Dianne Salerni’s “First Impressions” and agonising over the fit. Wondering if Piper’s Reach was appealing to those outside of our existing fan base. Dreading feedback that said we’d got it all wrong. After reading the comments on both Marcy and Dianne’s blog I know now why I was so worried.

Kittie Howard commented: There’s no middle ground with epistolary writing. It either hits or misses.

So, are we a hit or a miss?

THE HITS

“What’s great about this first page is that it sets up lots of questions about the past between these two people but also suggests a question about the future. Why is the narrator writing to Jude now, twenty years later?” Marcy.

I never really thought about why the twenty year gap (I was thinking of all the other whys) or the inherent question regarding the future (even though we set up the original tagline as: When the past reaches into the present would you risk a second chance.)

There’s just the right amount of past and present mixed together, and enough places mentioned to provide a clear image of setting without being confusing. Dianne

Again, I hadn’t thought too much about the setting on the first page (too worried about character and voice and conflict), even though Adam and I had spoken during the editing process about properly locating both the towns early on, something missing from the original letters.

To follow finish off Kittie’s comment: There’s no middle ground with epistolary writing. It either hits or misses. This one hits!

Alex J Cavanaugh commented: That simple letter says a lot. The authors nailed so much in just a few paragraphs.

You can read the full critiques and all the comments on Marcy’s and Dianne’s blogs, or add your own there.

THE MISSES

Some of the readers were slightly confounded by Australian colloquialisms such as ‘sea change’ (though apparently it was Shakespeare who first coined the phrase in The Tempest!) and ‘pashed’. Adam in true Adam style explained pash in the comments and added ‘pash rash’ – oh, I’d totally forgotten that! Chatting over dinner last night Dave and I agreed ‘pash’ really does belong (rather than snog) because it is one of those iconic 70’s and 80’s teenage Australian words – those all or nothing kinds of kisses at blue light discos and school socials that traded etiquette for raw momentum. If we want to keep true to the Australian voice of the characters we will need to be mindful to accommodate an international audience in the context of those words.

There were some punctuations glitches to fix and a small tweaking of one sentence regarding ‘stuff’, which is quite shameful given years ago I walked into my soul sister’s Year 8 English class where she had written ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ on the board and was running through ways of better articulating these generic terms!

So the worry was for nothing. Easy to say in retrospect! The project overall is unique enough to pique the interest of readers and there is enough in that first letter to hook the reader in. Now to worry over the next 321 pages!

Many thanks to Marcy, Dianne and their readers. Their comments and insights have fuelled the second stage editing rocket ready for launch next week.

If you have a manuscript and are interested in being part of Marcy and Dianne’s ‘First Impressions’ drop by either of their blogs for more information.