New Australian Stories 2 (24 page)

Annals wore her flowing clothes and silver jewellery at breakfast. Looking closer when I fetched my coffee, I saw she was also wearing full make-up. Her hair was sleek. Like a waterfall. An advertisement for hair conditioner. She drank decaffeinated tea and ate only a tiny wholemeal roll and an apple. Her figure was perfect. Her voice calm, well-modulated. I knew her study back home would be organised with document trays and proper bookshelves. Her kitchen cupboards would be tidy, her bedsheets always fresh. I didn't need to see photos to know that her husband would have slightly greying hair and project an aura of stern kindness. Actually, I was certain he would resemble Hugo Weaving. And her children, one of each. Sebastian and Aurelia. They would have excellent teeth and school reports.

Even the university where she worked was a magical place, on a hill. Evergreen trees, misty mornings. I expected that on teaching days she also wrote a thousand words before breakfast. Hugo was probably something in design, or advertising. They would pay their bills on time and upgrade their cars every five years and have family holidays at coastal resorts. Curtis and the kids and I holidayed at the coast too. But somehow I couldn't see Annals in a tent, the whole shower-block, burned-sausages thing. Where would she write her morning thousand words for a start?

Between sessions, tall young men stalked the grounds, phones clamped to their ears. Impossible to decide if they were successful young authors or successful young publishers, agents or editors. Producers or consumers. It didn't seem to matter. Suits worn nonchalantly with T-shirts. Shaved heads. Ray-Bans. Once, you could pick authors by their straggling hair or unfashionable floral skirts. But here only the bearded mountains poet seemed to be playing the part. Everyone else had a corporate look. These young men with phones were doubtless negotiating deals with New York, Frankfurt, Hollywood. One of them had thick black hair that he pushed back from his forehead, but in petulance, not despair, for surely he was too successful for that. He pulled his phone away, stared at it, then reattached it to his ear while gazing into the distance. As if he were listening to the sound of the sea in a conch shell, the sound of a faraway sea, the Atlantic, or the Nordic. The immense swell, the crashing waves of success and prosperity, the white caps of book sales cresting in triumph before pouring into a bank account.

Another of these men emerged from a doorway as I walked past and we almost bumped. He was looking at the floor while talking on the phone, uttering single words punctuated by brief silences. Ambiguous (pause). Deficient (pause). Vulpine. So he was talking to his publisher or agent. Accommodate (pause). Windfall (shorter pause). Yo-yo. Or maybe providing answers to crossword-puzzle clues. His voice was soft, and the hair on the back of his neck curled endearingly just like Rosie's when it was damp, but I did not let that fool me. I was sure he was a deeply focused, humourless individual who wrote five pages each day and secured literary fellowships every other year.

Not fast enough at leaving one session, I became trapped in the first row before the next started.
Contemporary Mythical
Narrative
(4.00 p.m. – 5.30 p.m. Sem. Rm 1). My eyes started closing though I willed myself to remain awake. Luckily the lectern hid me from most of the panel. The author at the end was reading in a piping monotone from his new novel. The story was all about a woman walking across a windy mountain pass that seemed to go on for miles. He read for twenty minutes, and still all she did was brush some grit from her eye. She never got anywhere near the end of the rocky path. The roaring wind did not abate. I was alarmed when I noticed he was only halfway through a very thick volume, and it was while speculating on what might lie ahead in the novel (a speck in the other eye? another mountain after this one?) that I fell asleep.

Afterwards I decided I must make a greater effort. I returned to the book display and selected one of Annals' books from the piles of them under her photograph. Unfortunately I could not read past the second page of
The Annals of the
Soothsayer
, which contained the phrase
Alamandra swooned at
the feet of Alaric
, because a) I did not believe that anyone had swooned since 1801, and b) I was already confused by two characters' names commencing with ‘Al'.

I was allotted a half-hour, one-on-one session with a Strategic Marketing Consultant. His head was polished to match his shoes. At the start of our session he placed his BlackBerry beside his appointment book and pressed a button firmly. Possibly he was activating a timer.

‘And what genre do you write in?'

Genre.

‘Umm. Well, it's a sort of children's story.'

‘But what genre? Fantasy? Adventure? Crime?'

‘Not any, really. Elements of all, I guess. Maybe.'

‘Children's or young adult?'

‘Oh, definitely children's. I mean kids from any age. If they want.'

‘We need a specific target audience. What age exactly?'

‘Around twelve? Ish? Maybe younger. Eight, nine. But then teenagers might —'

‘Children or teens. You don't do both.'

It was the first I'd heard that kids aged eight and thirteen weren't allowed to read the same book.

‘Look around you,' he said. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘Well, my manuscript was selected …'

‘That's not what I mean.' He glanced behind him. ‘I mean, look at all the
successful
authors here.' He emphasised the word in a way that showed contempt for the handful of writers, like Thin Nervous, whose book might have been translated into French but whose sales remained under four figures. These writers were not even bothering anymore to turn up for their book-signing sessions, whereas Code Six and Annals sat there signing and smiling every day. Their publicists slid well-padded chairs underneath them and stood by with supplies of bottled water, as if book-signing were an Olympic event. ‘These authors understand exactly their place in the market.'

Author? He meant I really was an author?

‘
They
are focused.'

No, clearly he meant I was not.

‘Your target audience,' he repeated, closing his appointment book just as the BlackBerry buzzed. ‘You need to define your target audience.'

No one could confirm when and where I was to meet my mentor. Or if she was even there. I carried my manuscript around all week, expecting anytime to start the hours and hours of blissful intensive hands-on work that I had anticipated ever since I applied for the program. My manuscript began to have a dog-eared look to it. Then I noticed that few people had manuscripts with them. As if it were impolite, or show-offy, hawking a folder of paper around. Writing the new millennium seemed a very private affair.

At dinner one night I was seated next to an author from Los Angeles called PB, who wrote for twenty-somethings.

‘What do you have there?' She tapped my folder.

‘It's really just a first draft.' This was not true. I must have rewritten it fifty times.

She did not step in to ask what it was about or had I been published, but took a bite of her cheesecake.

‘No one here seems to be doing much writing,' I said. Apart from Annals, but I knew better than to mention her to someone called PB. Not with her hot pink wig and tartan miniskirt.

She laughed. A sudden barking sound like gunshot at daybreak.

‘We all do it but don't admit to it. Like picking your nose, or masturbating.' Seeing the shock on my face, she leaned closer. ‘Listen, kid, writing sucks. Getting your name out, that's what counts. Do you blog?'

Kid? I was at least ten years older!

She got out of her chair. ‘Are you going to the
WordSlam
?' But it was not an invitation.

Writing the new millennium was clearly for a different kind of writer. I wanted sessions on the problems that bothered me, such as choosing names for characters and keeping my desk tidy. Or advice on posture and diet. And I wanted to know how to inoculate myself against the contagiousness of style that I once read about. I didn't want to be told that writing sucks. I hoped my mentor was not like PB, with her interactive texts and Californian advice.

Not only was my mentor unable to answer these questions, she looked at me as if I were a species of vermin. Finally, on the last day, I'd found her seated at the back of a small room smoking a cigarette out of the window.

She told me to sit and pushed some forms at me. ‘Publishers. Conference committee. They're after details,' she said.

‘More details?'

She shrugged. I had already filled in forms and answered questionnaires, when I was selected. When my manuscript was selected. She shrugged again, saying she was just a freelancer, funded by the conference trust and the local council, just doing what they asked. I signed the forms and pushed them back. I wondered how much she was paid to sit here on the last afternoon and blow smoke in my face. The mentors were meant to be professional writers and editors. I asked if she had written books too, if she was an author.

‘Freelancer,' she said ambiguously.

Somehow I already knew that she would ignore my folder too.

When I got back home on the Sunday night I threw my suitcase into the corner of the bedroom and headed for the spare room with my notes.

‘I'll have to be set up properly in here,' I called out to Curtis in the kitchen. ‘Your friends won't be able to stay the night anymore. And the kids' toys will have to go back in their room.' I kicked a plastic dinosaur out the door and tossed three stuffed animals onto the bed. Then I took them and the other toys off the bed. I needed it to set out all my notes and drafts. I was dismantling the Thomas the Tank Engine train set that took up half the floor when Rosie walked in, sucking a finger.

‘Sorry, petal. All this has to go. Clean sweep. Mummy's gotta write.'

‘So you got the book deal?' Curtis appeared in the doorway.

‘Yeah. Well, I signed something.' I pulled Rosie's finger out of her mouth.

Over the next few weeks I learned that the greatest impediment to writing was not the children, not the television, not even the lure of the refrigerator, but the telephone. The phone calls anywhere between three and eight-thirty, from telemarketers, consumer researchers and someone offering me a free holiday if I attended their investment seminar. I couldn't unplug the phone and I couldn't ignore it. Sometimes I did ignore it. But after five or six rings I would give in then, after I'd growled into the phone and returned to my desk, forget what I was going to write. If Jay had been a few years older I'd have asked him to take messages. Curtis had not a clue what I was going through.

‘You try being creative at home,' I told him. ‘You try pulling an entire story together and keeping the household running. And that bloody phone. What do we need one for anyway?'

But I knew why. The third week back, still no contact.

‘Haven't you already written it? Isn't that manuscript what they contracted?'

The ignorance of some people. ‘Duh. As if I won't be pressured for the next one. Gotta have that ready when they want it. Besides' — I gestured at the dog-eared folder — ‘this needs a complete rewrite.'

One afternoon I was staring at the blank space on the screen where I had just deleted two paragraphs. They had to go but then I panicked at the sight of this big hole which needed filling in. My head felt as empty as the page before me. If I stared at it long enough maybe the words would bore through to the screen from my pupils.

When the phone rang, for once I was grateful. Though I quickly regretted agreeing to take part in the survey.

‘How much of your weekly income is spent on takeaway food?'

Instead of answering, I asked, ‘What are you reading right now?'

‘Pardon?'

‘What book are you reading? You are reading one, aren't you?'

She mentioned a title I had never heard of. The author's name sounded fake. Edwina Montgomery. Either that or she died in 1939.

‘Name her other titles,' I demanded.

‘
Return to Galaxy Red
.
Journey to the Edge of Time
.
The
Starship Propheticus
,' she said. ‘Science fiction.'