Granted

Mission accomplished. Wishes granted. Two weeks after I created this wish post, I walked past and discovered the people of Fitzroy had taken up every single item on offer. It really warmed my heart. I hope it gave them what they needed.

In case you're curious, the wishes were:

TRUE LOVE UNDERSTANDING A BRAVE HEART TO BELONG FREEDOM A BELLY LAUGH A SMILE FROM A BABY HOPE A FRESH START FAITH

I sure hope they find them. What do YOU wish for? What wishes would you grant, if you could?

(ps. When I put this little poster up, I was a bit afraid to be spotted so I picked a tiny, out-of-the way residential street in the middle of nowhere. I was saying to Em that I probably should have been brave and picked a busier street, like Brunswick Street, to ensure the poster was actually seen. But Em said maybe it was better this way. "Because maybe the people who walked down that street were the ones who really needed a wish the most." I rather like that.)

How to grant a wish

Wish-granting was my little project for today, inspired by this. What wishes would you grant, if you could? (UPDATE: All the wishes have been redeemed. Take a look here)

Holiday reading

I received this email recently from a woman who came across my novella Airmail in an East Berlin youth hostel. It just made my heart sing. "I am staying at a youth hostel in East Berlin and stumbled across a copy of your book. I am a forty year-old woman traveling with my son, and readily identified with Mr Solomon's bemusement when he first enters the hostel (it was my first time staying at a hostel!)...

"Being forty this year was hard for me and I too am traveling and gathering more marbles. It's not so much that I haven't lived an adventuresome life, it's just that suddenly your life seems so much shorter while the list of things you want to do grows bigger, and you realize that you have spent the last 10 years of your life raising kids and working. (could this be what a mid-life crisis is all about......duh)

"It's amazing how at certain critical points in your life the right book or the right experience occurs. Your book is part of that for me. Today I walked past some graffiti on the side of a cafe - 'Life is not over yet' it read."

Wasn't that nice of this woman to write and tell me? I don't think there's anything that could make me happier as an author than to learn that my book was "the right book" in someone's life. Oh so happy.

Sunday night sweetness

What to do on a cold Sunday night in with two teenaged girls to entertain and nothing good on TV? Host a cupcake decorating competition, of course. I mixed up a batch of my favourite vanilla cupcakes and plain buttercream icing, using an adaptation from the Magnolia Bakery (NYC) recipe that I love so much. Mr B went all out at the supermarket, buying up natural food colouring, sprinkles, edible sparkles and tubes of coloured piping.

The girls were incredibly creative with their designs. There was a blue-sky rainbow scene, a glowing eye, yin and yang, and even a scooped out bowl of pasta with candy spaghetti bolognese (a tribute to the delicious spag bol we'd eaten earlier for dinner, courtesy of Deb from Bright and Precious). We were very impressed, and Mr B sure had a tough time judging the winner.

It was just lovely to sit in the other room and listen them quietly chatting with one another as they mixed up colours and textures and patterns. It's so nice that, despite being in Years 8 and 9 respectively, they still take so much pleasure in these types of activities. (And I confess we all took pleasure in eating them, later, too.)

Why I write

"Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk waiting for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different to each other. "However, I write about these alternative worlds because it helps to preserve them. I'm their historian, their geographer, their sociologist, their storyteller. I write them into being. I have to say I don't care whether this is a good thing to do or not; this is just the way I am and the way I live my life."

These are the words of Australian author John Marsden, and today on the English Muse, I'm exploring the mental and emotional gymnastics that Marsden put me through when I read my way through his Tomorrow, When the War Began series these past weeks. My post is here if you're interested.

When I first read this quote, I thought "Oh yeah, me too." But that's not strictly true. Those alternative worlds? Escaping into them is why I read, not necessarily why I write. And that got me thinking: why do I write?

It surprised me that I had to think so hard to find my answer. After all, I've been writing since I was six or seven years old. Why did I write then? Why do I still write now?

Being a writer is like being an explorer. Charting new territories. Forging new frontiers. Rewriting the maps. Here be dragons! I undertake this adventure in the company of people I love, the characters who populate my stories. They are my co-explorers, often drawing me into places I'd never have thought to go. It is exciting, invigorating, and utterly addictive.

So tell me: why do you write?

Dear friend, thank you

A year and a week ago, this little novella about writing letters and owning your stories and recognising a touch of magic came out.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGJunx71LY] I wasn't prepared, there was no great fanfare. I was too busy getting married and changing jobs and moving interstate. But I am still proud of my strange little story. It is quirky and multi-layered, and I still feel a deep affection for the curmudgeonly old man, the neurotic young woman, the pink tracksuit villain and the ugly philosopher who populate its pages.

One of the nicest and least expected outcomes of this book being published has been the international community of letter-writing friends that has opened up for me. Early on in the process, I promised to write a personal letter of thanks to anyone who bought a copy of Airmail (I still do).

People would email me their addresses and I'd send them off little thank-you notes and letters. Some of them would write back, offering me snippets into their worlds from far away. Over time, the word spread and people began to know me as someone who sends old-fashioned mail. People asked me to be their pen pals. I can't tell you how precious this is.

So, to everyone who has bought a copy of Airmail, written me a letter, read this blog, or supported my writing in so many other ways, thank you. Truly!

I always thought that having your fiction published would be the ultimate, but it wasn't. It's the way we reach each other, through a mutual love of storytelling and the written word, that means the most. It's about you.

McArdle's Mind (fragment)

May 17, 1926. As McArdle rode his mare out through the morning fog, he turned his eyes away from his well defined and self-sufficient farm and looked inward, instead, to the places were there were still mysteries.McArdle’s lids were closed as he allowed the mare to amble slowly that particular late-autumn morning, but his eyes were very much awake.

They were searching inside his mind, darting left and right, spinning in their sockets, seeking out the hotspots of emotion, the green and verdant ideas, even the dark places furthest hidden where waited the angry jealousies of which he was most ashamed.

He rode on the border, the very cliff’s edge between What Seems and What Is: To McArdle's right, sun rose through fog-pockets over well-managed fields.

To his left, darkness oozed and crept and whispered through the time-forgotten bush, a thousand rustling Somethings still clinging to night while the day yawned and stretched.

Straight ahead, yellow light glowing in the windows of the manager's house, warm with Mrs Anderson’s breakfast sizzling on the stove.

But inside and behind, mysteries. A vast and shadow-filled landscape-of-the-mind that, if ever it were unfolded, would spread and smother the breadth of this continent in its arteries and thoughts, as well as half of Antarctica and a goodly portion of Asia, then stretch and extend its eastern edges, slowly, island by island, towards the shores of Argentina. Eventually, if left to its own devices, McArdle’s mind turned inside out would wrap itself over the entire globe. All its edges would meet and merge and smother the land until nothing of Earth would appear as it once was.

Space travellers would find in their journeys through our galaxy not a blue planet but a red-and-purple one, filled with blood and a visible pulse, electric thoughts sparking emotions and ideas across the surface with such startling frequency and force that our world would appear beset by deadly and impregnable storms. Text: McArdle's Mind, a fragment from a story I've been writing about a man who gets so lost in the world of his own thoughts that he becomes trapped, unable to return to the 'physical' world of action and community and time.

Images: gorgeous, ghostly bush photos by Irene Suchocki of Eye Poetry, who kindly gave me permission to use them here. Irene's blog is linked above, and you can buy the stunning photographs at her print shop.

Summer holidays craft

Remember when I told you I was in love with this crayon art? Last night, Em and her cousin Maggie had a go at creating their own melty masterpieces.However, not content with simply making a colourful mess, the girls built stories into their creations. Maggie drew a sweet couple sheltering under an umbrella behind a multi-coloured waterfall of rain. Em sketched a young woman casting a curved patronus charm that kept the rainbow mess at bay.

I think they did a wonderful job, don't you? Em and Maggie are both 13 and the best of friends. They are such a delightful team, it is always a joy to have them together in our home. (And yes, that is a stack of packing boxes alongside general mess and chaos that you see in the background. We are moving AGAIN this month, this time to Melbourne. That makes four interstate moves in less than a year and, I can assure you, we intend this to be the last one for a VERY long time).

Ocean mystery (fragment fiction)

A mystery was not what Lucy expected to find at the bottom of the ocean. It started on holidays: a dizzying dance of cocktails by the swimming pool overpriced resort food drunken nights at local bars salty sex in anonymous hotel rooms avenues of palm trees camel rides on acres of white sand rainforest walks and the world famous Great Barrier Reef.

This particular day started with clouds and two fat travel-sickness tablets, and whorled around her head as time stopped then spun and rain stung her cheeks while she leaned over the crashing boat and vomited the two useless tablets to the fish until suddenly, time became normal and they had reached the reef and the sun was out.

Busy throwing up, Lucy had missed the dive briefing and had to make do with some basic tips: breathe, kick your legs and look at fish. Clear your middle ear every few feet down. And never, not for a second, hold your breath. Lucy staggered, still sick-weak, the crushing weight of the cylinders on her shoulders threatening to pull her backwards, fumbling with the unfamiliar mask, cumbersome regulator and ridiculous fins, and changed her mind. This was not such a good idea, she would go back inside. Then the assistant let go of Lucy’s hand, gave her a push, and the ocean closed in.

Quiet.

Soft.

Still.

Slow.

Nothing but Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

She could hear the regular thump of the ocean’s heart and felt it in her skin as though she was floating through the very ventricles of the sea. It was extraordinary that here, immersed in one of the natural wonders of the world, Lucy closed her eyes and felt she loved it without needing to see it and later when she surfaced, grieved the loss of that heartbeat like the tearing trauma of a second birth.

Lucy moon-walked through the thick water while the others swam, appearing on the tourist video later as a slim, sloping, laughable figure in black, always last in the group, ludicrous pink fins flailing, arms groping forward like a blind man but eyes wide open now, like dinner plates behind the mask, and red hair pouring upwards, the only part of Lucy at home in the sea.

Nobody knew that here inside the ocean, mixed in with her terror, her constant struggle to remember not to hold her breath and a consistent dread that her lungs would burst or collapse or both, Lucy felt truly happy.

She felt it because all she could hear was her own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean. It was the most perfect music Lucy had ever known.

The catamaran carried them to a second part of the outer reef, and suddenly it was sea-sickness again. Half an hour of the nauseating rise and crash of the waves, petrol fumes, the stifling, constricting stomach and the familiar lean over the sides. Then the heavy cylinders, the clumsy fin-walk, the fear perspiring into her wetsuit, panic and regret, splash.

And the beautiful silence. Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

On the second dive, Lucy made a conscious effort to look around. She wanted to see and remember the rainbow schools of fish, the ancient turtle, the bashful shark. Lucy put her hand inside a giant clam and stroked its rich velvet before it slowly closed. She floated softly still while a groper twice her width nudged around her hands for treats. The group of divers entered a sandy-floored coral room by a window, one by one, and a hundred thousand tiny blue fish covered them like brilliant pieces of sky. When Lucy moved her hand through the swarm, it parted then merged again in effortless mathematical precision.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

One moment Lucy was playing patterns with the sky-fish and in the next, the ocean held its breath. Lucy was so distressed she almost held hers, but remembered the warnings just in time. She waited, frantic. The others had swum on out of the coral room and around a corner, and Lucy was alone in the unbeating ocean. She spun in the water, searching behind herself and in front for the source of the silent ocean, but it was not until she looked up and saw the legs and goggles of the snorkellers close above her that she realised with relief that the heartbeat had not stopped, she had simply floated too close to the surface and lost its rhythm.

Urgently, Lucy swam deeper, easing air from her tanks to help her sink and forgetting to unblock her ears until she felt the pain. She stopped then, and clumsily swallowed through her regulator. She was still alone, but the heartbeat was back in her skin, her own breathing was a soothing sound, and Lucy was happy again. She followed after the rest of the group.

Lucy swam on quickly now, past another giant clam, a turtle resting under a rock, sweet, apricot anemones, nervous clown fish, a small child, forests of coral…

The child was maybe three or four years old, and it was building a sandcastle. It sat naked on the ocean floor, piling sticky wet sand on sticky wet sand and pressing rocks and shells and pieces of coral into the sides, while remnants of the blue-sky swarm shot in and out of the clumsy sand walls and stroked the child’s tight brown curls. When Lucy swam past, the child waved, and she waved back. She tried to smile but her cheekbones pushed her mask up and it flooded with water so she had to stop smiling or not see.

Then the group leader returned from around the next corner and beckoned to her and she nodded then pointed to the child but there was nobody there, just the remnants of the sloppy sandcastle, so she swam on.

Quite a mystery.

A lovely conversation

Probably you know, although possibly you don't, that a little while ago I wrote a book. It's a short little magical realism novella called Airmail that you can read in one afternoon. A tad more recently (April this year, in fact), Airmail was published. And even more recently (yesterday, to be precise), Cam Robbins of Novelspot interviewed me about this whole process. This was definitely the most fun interview I'd done, because the questions were so thoughtful. Cam wanted to know why I wrote letters of thanks to people who bought Airmail, why I started the 'travelling Airmail' project, what was behind the dual settings of New York and Sydney, and what novel came next.

If you want to know the answers to these questions (and more), you can read the full interview here. I'd love your thoughts. Did I explain everything ok?

Oh and ps, the cover of my little book looks like this. I had very limited say on what it would be, which only made my relief all the greater when I saw this cover because I absolutely love it. Hurrah!