There starts here. Here starts here. There starts there. All the same. The part where you move is the thing.
There starts (t)here is a cute little slogan written on the wall of tourist car hire business I drive past twice a day on the way to and from work. It is not emblazoned, very subtle, blink you’ll miss it. The letter ‘t’ in ‘there’ is deliberately greyed out compared to the other lettering, blink and you’ll miss that as well. Clearly it is a philosophical statement, embracing the journey and the destination as part and parcel of same spiritual/mental/physical endevour of travelling from somewhere to somewhere else.
About 18 months ago, someone suggested I go on a writing retreat for novelists. The retreat was in Bali, one of my favourite places to hang out, and without a single reservation, I applied for funding, got the grant (thank you Regional Arts Fund). Like many other things in my writing life, I have only vague memories of how I came to the story that I began during that writing retreat. A conversation with someone there, another scrap of information coming from there. Soon the lump of proverbial clay starts to take shape….
A year and a half later, two long online courses in novel writing later with Australian Writers Centre, and I’m bouncing back into Bali on a holiday with the family, with a full draft of my 100,000 word novel lounging about in my laptop awaiting a full structural edit.
Still a lump of clay. Still forming. But the general shape is discernible. I don’t hate it, despite having lived with it at a gruelling pace in all my free time since May last year. I’ve written a whole play based on the storyline, a full length text now known as ‘Cooked’ (again written mostly while on a holiday in Bali in April last) which is now in rehearsal for a production season at the end of this month, produced by JUTE Theatre Company. It’s been a trip.
So I remain on the road and trudging with this one. The structural self-edit concept is coming in hard. I have miles of feedback from my fellow AWC colleagues and I even had a trauma/pleasure of giving a live online pitch to a literary agent last Monday. That was wild. Three hot minutes. The agent seemed to like my pitch, but then again he said he liked all 20-odd pitches he heard in that session—so yeah, hard to tell.
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