This Christmas I was sitting down talking with someone I hadn't met before and she asked me about my book. I should have appreciated it and been dying to tell her the details (isn't that what normal people do? Maybe not? Anyway...) but instead I felt like crawling behind the lounge and hiding. Not because I don't like my book or because I'm embarrassed by it, but rather I worry too much about what others think.
I put it on Kindle over a year ago and at the time I was happy for the world to know about it. I then thought more about it (I'm a serial overthinker!) and the more I thought about it the more I doubted.
Someone I'm very close to inspires me in this way regularly. I won't name names, but I love the confidence he has.
It's not in relation to writing, but it's still a confidence in what he's doing. I'm sure he has moments where he worries what others think, but he shouldn't. He's doing what he loves, he's good at it; it's great.
I look at him and realise that you will always have critics, you will always have people who are more interested in having an opinion than anything else, so I think you just have to learn to get on with it. Having said that, the feedback I have received for Out Of Her League together with the reviews online have been far better than I expected.
So, in the spirit of confidence and keeping within Amazon's guidelines of not posting too much, here's a small sample of the start of Out Of Her League.
I'm currently around 10,000 words into the second book and so far haven't lost enthusiasm unlike the several other drafts I've started since my computer was stolen so fingers crossed.
I know the start seems a bit depressing, but I can assure you she's not like that the whole way through!
Until next time, be confident, have fun and have an awesome new year's!
(I think perhaps in my last blog I said that thinking I wouldn't be writing another post before the new year but oh well, I guess I was wrong!)
One
Guns blazing,
tyres screeching, the Jeep careened around the corner and came to a grinding
halt outside the embassy. Dan McDonald
ducked as bullets sprayed the wall behind him and shattered the windscreen of
the car. Standing, he brushed himself
off, looked at his attackers and smiling, said…
“Nothing because the bad guys shot him
and the writer knew it was the end of a beautiful make believe friendship.” I groaned and plonked my head onto my
desk. I might as well have been killing
off my character; the last book I wrote had killed off my career anyway.
I stayed with my forehead pressed hard
against the solid desk for a long time; perhaps if I didn’t move for a
couple of days my agent would stop harassing me for my next ‘masterpiece’.
I am Caterina Boston, writer
extraordinaire. At least that’s what the
reviews used to say. One failed book,
one misjudgement on my part and the critics were all over me. Lucky thirteen. Isn’t that what they say? Well okay, maybe not.
The critics described the book as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘out of my depth’. They asked how a writer who had never left
South Australia could possibly know what it’s like to travel to Africa and discover long
forgotten artefacts whilst trying to fight off a head cold and be home in time
for their mother’s
60th.
This they were critical of? I had previously written books about Dan
McDonald scaling the pyramids and discovering the forgotten underground city of
the pygmies (for which he had to spend a lot of time with a hard hat and a sore
back).
The loud purring of my large tabby cat
Maui brought my mind back to the present as he jumped onto the desk. Like me, he isn’t the most co-ordinated and before I
could stop him, he swished his tail and sent my laptop crashing to the tiled
floor. Startled, he jumped down and
disappeared into the bedroom, leaving me with the mess and hopes of having
everything backed up.
I sat staring at the pieces of laptop
for a long time; I didn’t
miss the irony of the situation.
Shattered. That’s what I was.
I leant back in the chair and stared at
the ceiling, determined not to cry; I had been working on a story I knew would
probably never see the light of day. I
had had a moment of inspiration but that had disappeared hours ago and was yet
to return.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Hoping it would distract me from my latest
catastrophe, I pulled it from the pocket of my jeans and shuddered when I saw
it was a message from my agent:
Don’t forget the
writer awards tonight. Pick you up at 6.
Sighing I thunked my head against the
desk again, determined to stay there all night instead of face my peers.
~
“So the moral of the story? Have a moral to your story. And a plot line. And enjoy the ride while it lasts because one
little mistake; one moment of miscalculation regarding a plot line and you’re out of the
club. Thanks for having me and enjoy
your night.”
The room was silent, the air tense as I
spoke these words. Finally, as more of a
matter of courtesy than genuine encouragement, the room erupted in scattered
applause. The most enthusiastic was the
waiter who had served me before I made my way to the stage. He hadn’t read any of my books, but appreciated that I had
agreed to pass his novel on to my agent.
Little did he know that there wasn’t a great market for zombie killing super models;
but then again what did I really know about writing anymore?
As I made my way off stage and back
towards my chair I heard whispered comments like ‘well that was encouraging’ and ‘it’s not the
audience’s fault she
hasn’t got it
anymore.’
I rolled my eyes at my agent as she
made her way down the aisle of brightly coloured tables to greet me and take me
back to my seat. Since I didn’t have a date
she had decided this would be a good move, in her words to ‘show that I
still had friends’.
I would like to say I work as a writer
by day and a supermodel by night, but the truth is, I don’t know if I’d pass for a
standard model, let alone a super one. I
guess you could say I ‘scrub up okay’, I wear makeup and do my hair at every opportunity, but I’m not confident
enough to call myself anything but average; although I suppose I’ve been called
worse.
Perhaps you could say I’m a little
dramatic, a little over the top, and maybe even a tiny bit paranoid, but it’s endearing… right?
I prefer to think of myself as
passionate and conscious of my world and all that is within it.
I once worked at a doctor’s surgery but
didn’t love it
there; that and they decided to let me go after they discovered my vaporising
hand sanitiser. In hindsight I suppose
spraying nearly every patient as they turned around to sit in the waiting area
and talking with my hand over my mouth and nose and making the evil sign when
they coughed wasn’t really great for business.
I’m not good with germs. I don’t mind going out and having some drinks with
friends and generally enjoying myself, but I’ll admit I’m a bit of a clean freak. I spent some time weeding the community garden
in my unit block last spring with Maui.
It was all going well until I pulled up a weed and saw the huge
caterpillar hanging off it, grinning evilly at me.
The neighbours called it shrieking, I
called it vocalising my fears. However
you want to look at it, before Maui could blink I was upstairs with the door
shut washing my hands with soap; lots of soap. After that I decided I would
rather pay for the other tenants in the unit block to do my share of the
gardening.
Something not well known to the public
is that I have a degree in archaeology, so I do know what I’m writing
about. The problem is I’ve never seen
anything much in real life, although the Egyptian exhibit did come to the
museum a few years back and I did pay to visit it more than once.
As my agent Mary approached I
recognised that familiar forced smile as she tried as hard as she could not to
hurt my feelings and send me on a downward spiral. It’s not easy to get me down but once I’m
there it’s even harder to get me back up.
“Can we talk?” Her perfect body fit snugly into her perfect
suit, to match her perfect hair and nails.
I had made the effort, I looked presentable, but not nearly as perfect
as Mary. My dark hair never behaves and
the curls regularly get in the way.
I knew by her tone it was bad, because
she made it sound extra good.
“But we’re right in the middle of the writer
awards.” I managed to stutter, taken aback by the fact
that she had walked to meet me to tell me bad news. I pointed helplessly towards the stage as she
smiled and guided me towards the back exit.
“I can’t leave now,
what if I win an award?”
She smiled, “Oh I don’t think we need
to worry about that dear.”
I scowled at this comment but made my
best effort to look happy as she pushed me through a throng of people and out
the back door.
“Where are we going?” I demanded, hands on hips, I turned to look
at her.
She sighed and let her shoulders drop, “Cat, it’s been good but
let’s face it, it’s over.”
“What?”
I couldn’t believe it; this was like high school all over again. “What do you mean it’s over?”
“This.”
She gestured between the two of us.
“This business
relationship we have going. It’s done for.”
Six months earlier when my book ‘The Heights of
India’ had reached
the tops of the best seller lists in New York Mary had called our business
relationship a ‘friendship’; she had said she would always be there as my agent and my friend. I had known it was a lie then, but I had been
so caught up in the hype of being on the best seller list again I had let it
pass.
Now I stood in an alleyway behind the
awards ceremony knowing that my dreams were gone, banished by one bad
review. Well okay it was more like 101
bad reviews, but that wasn’t the point.
All of a sudden the people I thought were my friends were just people on
the street who would look at me with that vague recollection of ‘don’t I know her
from somewhere?’
Okay so I’m being a little melodramatic, but at
the time it felt as though my whole world was falling apart. As a little girl I dreamed of being an
astronaut; that dream had failed me too.
