A Teensy Preview

As I think I've said previously, I don't make new year's resolutions because I know I won't stick with them... however these last couple of days I've been thinking again about confidence and the difference it can make.  Whether a person is right or wrong, if they're confident in what they're doing, saying and so on, they're far more likely to succeed.

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.