Diary of Bodies 2: housework, dinners, and other editorial distractions

The day was off to a lovely start: I put on my trackydax, uggboots, and my favourite woolen jumper (the one with the holes in it), made a coffee, and then the doorbell rang. There was the postie…with a package that I would soon discover contained the typeset pages for Bodies of Men, courtesy of Hachette Australia.

Holy crap.

After a few days during which I did little more than stare at the pages, on Monday of this week I finally sat down at the desk, picked up a red pen, and got to work.

When I say ‘work’, it seems that I did as much housework as editing. And I’m lousy at housework. But not this week apparently.

The pattern seemed to be: edit paragraph, then dust the sitting room; edit paragraph, then put away the CDs that have been forming into piles; edit paragraph, then dust the stereo; edit paragraph, go buy some firewood and stack it very, very neatly in the shed; edit paragraph, consider vacuuming the rugs (with this chore, ‘consider’ was as far as I got, I’m afraid).

So, it’s been a slow process editing the typeset pages. One reason is the text looks so beautiful that I don’t want to spoil it with my scrawl; another reason is I’m finding it’s taking a lot of mental energy to dive deep into the story (again) and fix the annoying mistakes I’ve made or the sentences that really do need to be better.

Which gets me back to the pattern: fix sentence, then go and clean the fridge.

On Thursday evening I took a break and had dinner with a writer who’s currently working on a novel. One of the things we discussed over the meal was how much we should talk about our fiction before it’s published. I shared some advice I received a few years ago from an eminent Australian novelist who told me (with gusto, I should add), ‘Never talk about your fiction while you’re writing it. This has nothing to do with superstition. If you talk about it while you’re writing it, the energy will go from the telling because you will have already shared the story publicly.’ So my writer friend and I decided that it indeed it was wise not to talk too much about our projects before they were published. Instead we talked about our families.

This enforced creative reticence is at odds with social media: by their nature, digital platforms (a terrible term, methinks) encourage the sharing – and over-sharing – of everything. Of course, it’s rather pleasant, probably healthy, to tell the world a little about how things are going, especially when writing is primarily a solitary task; but, yes, there is wisdom in holding back, especially in terms of the content of this thing I’m writing – and living and breathing – since 2013, although I did give a couple of hints in an earlier post.

What am I trying to say?

That I’m still working on Bodies of Men but the end is in sight – I have to get the edits back to Hachette in a fortnight’s time, even though publication is not until April 2019. Until then, I hope you don’t mind if I remain a little shy (at first my fingers typed ‘shit’) about the actual story of the novel. Perhaps I’m just scared, or feeling vulnerable? That wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe.

As ever, thanks so very much for all your interest and support. Many of the readers of this blog/website thing-o have been incredibly encouraging over the years, offering warm thoughts and reflections, silent little whisperings saying, Just keep going.

So that’s what I’m doing: keeping going.

Best I get back to the edits, then I’ve got a bathroom to clean.

What I’m Reading

It is, in a way, an act of withdrawal, and I worry about it sometimes.

I am spending more and more time reading and alone. How healthy can that be? But let’s be honest: for a natural hermit, it is very healthy, especially when I am fortunate to have a room dedicated to books—a private library.

Eight years ago, partly due to good luck and partly due to a desire to put literature at the centre of my being, I left Canberra for a town an hour away, in regional New South Wales. Although I would need to continue earning an income, I could, if luck kept smiling on me, live on the smell of an oily rag. My plan was to spend the majority of each week writing, but I have found, thankfully, that I am spending as much time reading—day after day of it, all in the smallest room in my crumbling old cottage.

In the library is a pair of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were there when I moved in, as well as an old green Hordern & Sons wood-heater (it is rarely used, because it tends to smoke out the house) and a tartan couch that I bought for $30 from the local Vinnies but is a bit too short for my body. In winter, when the mornings sometimes start with a horrifying minus 10 degrees, I read under two blankets: one, a mix of oranges and reds, was my grandmother’s; the other, which is as green as the wood-heater and the couch, was my mother’s and given to her by a school friend—my mother is now in a nursing home and battling dementia, so the gift came to me earlier this year.

In summer I am sprawled only in black T-shirt and grey shorts, the soles of my feet gritty with dirt because I like to get up every hour or so and hand-water the garden…

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Keep reading over at Meanjin, which commissioned this piece and first published it on 26 September 2018.