Candice Fox's Blog, page 6

Have a very HADES Christmas

Hello blog followers,
I know I haven’t posted in yonks, but I’m committed to getting back to you with all your favourite Candiceness very soon. In the meantime, it’s time to ramp up for the Australian release of the novel. HADES goes to final print tomorrow in anticipation of our late-December Aussie release date. Have you thought about where you’re going to get your copy, or the dozens of copies you’ll be buying as Christmas prezzies? It’s perfect not only for Australian gritty crime readers, but for all you Dexter lovers out there. You can pre-order a physical copy now on Booktopia, Dymocks or Amazon, or you can pre-order direct to your Kindle. Or, if you know you’re coming to the launch, why not grab one from me there? As always, love hearing when people have ordered, so post me an update!

HADES on Kindle

Hey everybody! Are you planning on grabbing HADES on your Kindle? The pre-order option is available now. Can’t wait to hear all of your reviews. Comment back if you’ve taken the plunge!

http://www.amazon.com/Hades-ebook/dp/B00F3RABIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381049526&sr=8-1&keywords=candice+fox+hades

 

SOLD

Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’ll never make any money out of your art. This is the cheeky smirk of someone who heard that too often.

Random News

So, I’ve graced the cover of Random News, the Random House trade publication/catalog heading out to hungry book buyers looking to order for stores. Opening the envelope, extracting the little hand written note from my publisher that read ‘Lookin’ good!’ and then opening this magazine has been one of the milestones of my publishing journey. I immediately took the book to my nextdoor neighbour, whose face lit up as though a switch had been flipped. Then she scrunched her nose up, as she does, and said ‘This is so weird. Knowing someone famous.’

If you haven’t already, like the Candice Fox Facebook page for random bits of news. See what I did there? http://www.facebook.com/candicefoxauthor

Momentum

It might be a bit odd for me to be telling you as a writer that you need to stop thinking. One of the few privileges you get as a person setting off on such a journey is the ability to look thoughtful; elbow on table and face in hand, staring at the light dancing in the trees. Stroking your beard now and then, if you have one (and in my opinion if you can have one, you should have one. I have crushing beard envy. Yes, I know that’s weird.) If you’re a writer, people expect you to think. It is the perfect excuse for being that person in the office who has five hundred and ninety origami kranes folded and scattered about their desk, the one who’s always staring at the elevator buttons as though reading them for some hidden code, the one who’s always in the dark on the balcony at the office Christmas party, champagned, quiet. Being a big thinker is ok, but sometimes thinking big can ruin everything. Let me demonstrate.

I’ve only been a runner for a few months. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, though: I like the idea of it, the animalistic nature of an early-morning jog into the mist, a slice of ocean now and then glittering between the apartment blocks, alluring. I got the idea that I might like to be a runner when my marriage died, the curtains of that heady illusion suddenly fallen all around in artistic splashes of red velvet and me, unloved me, in all my ok-shaped-but-honestly-kinda-flabby-and-definetely-badly-dressed glory, revealed. I thought running would not only give me confidence and my body back but it’s a very measurable goal and I could judge myself by it, reward myself by it, compare myself to others by it (Beginning to see the problems?). I started going to the gym and running on the treadmill and fiddling with the speed and the incline and the fan and trying not to throw up and after a while I thought I was good enough to take it to the streets.

I got into my tights one morning, pulled on my shoes, hooked up my music, opened my front door and looked down the street.

Jesus, I thought. That’s a long goddamn street.

I figured 5km was a good goal to head toward, so I started bouncing along. My GPS told me that the end of the street was two hundred metres from my house. I was already struggling. Sweat was tickling in my hair, and my calves started itching, so now and then ducking to swipe at my calves, now and then plastering my hair back from my face, and all the time panting like a shot ox, I got about eight hundred metres into the run and slowed to a walk. On the morning of the next planned run, two days later, I lay in bed for a good twenty minutes just hating the assignment I’d set myself. I thought about places I knew that were approximately 5km away. They seemed like foreign lands. It would take me years, I decided, to be able to get to 5km and I probably wasn’t going to enjoy the journey in any case. Runners lead joyless lives. All they eat is buckwheat, whatever the hell that is, and polenta, and their knees and hips go by thirty if they don’t get hit by a truck, and their friends hate them secretly, the way I’ve secretly hated plenty of runner friends for their success at it. People are born runners. Long-legged types wearing bum bags and massaging their hamstrings outside cafes filled with colourful cyclists, talking about gel insteps and Deep Heat and the Sydney half-kay and beep tests you can download to your phone.

Stupid runners. I rolled over in bed. They’re wasting their time.

It’s possible, and surprisingly easy, to think your way completely out of anything you might want to do that is even slightly uncomfortable. And sitting down over the space of a year or more and writing a novel is the perfect example of something you can over-think and talk yourself out of in no more than a couple of sentences. Ninety thousand words? All of them completely original, appealing, interesting, grammatically correct, plausible, believable, entertaining, publishable? Ten thousand hours to master the craft? All of them alone, completely alone, nothing but novelty coffee mug and Microsoft Word and blinking cursor and oblivion-spelling empty page… Nothing but experience, imagination, desire, instinct, to guide you? Are you nuts? Do you have any idea how long it takes just to get an initial sparkle of inspiration into a narrative structure? To formulate characters, give them environments, upbringings, baggage, idiosyncrasies, hairstyles, cars, pets, jobs, habits, attitudes, accents, sexual fetishes, to get this cast together, to make them do something that strangers would be compelled to read about? Do you have any idea how many edits a manuscript needs before it’s even of submittable standard? Do you know how many full-length novels the average writer writes before they hit on a winner?

Let’s just stay in bed. It’s warm here.

Writing a novel is like the longest run you’ve ever been on in your life. You can sit there before you even begin with your elbow on the table and face in hand, possible beard action, and imagine how bad it’s going to be. Those first sweaty, stumbling, uncertain pages, the discomfort of finding a rhythm, the shock of wind that hits you now and then as you rise over a crest and realise how far you are from home, what’s before you. Like running, writing is lonely; no one will know you did or didn’t do it today, whether you did well at it at all, whether you failed and stayed in bed, whether you wrote something that you’ll have to scrap tomorrow, time wasted. Before you even open a document, you can open your browser and read about publishing houses tumbling to the earth and writers losing their contracts and editors sifting through thousands of manuscripts a year, giving them a page to impress, a single page, tossing them over their shoulder into the burn heap.

If you didn’t think about all that, though, what might happen? What if you thought of nothing beyond this word. This one. This line of text. What if one idea just crept into the next, and there was no need for an idea beyond what you have in your hands, a man in a room, a man with a gun, a man with a plan. Whatever it is. Plenty of writers talk about the need for structure, planning, big picture schemes, PostIt notes on cork boards, roads mapped out, GPS hooked up, progress measured and chapters outlined. But what if all you needed, in fact, was momentum. Slow at first. Gathering speed. Not a thought spared for the distance left until finish. Just the pure dedication to this moment, and the action of writing, or running, and the will in this moment not to stop.

I implore you to forget about the journey for a minute, because it will be long, and hard, and windy, and painful, and you’ll want to stop at the half way mark. You’ll want to stop ten minutes from now. You’ll doubt yourself. You’ll tell yourself you weren’t born for this. You’ll hate the people sailing past you, watch them disappear over the rise ahead. All of that’s to come, oh yes, I can’t tell you that it isn’t. But what if you just didn’t think about it. What if you just stopped thinking all together.

I ran 8km this morning. Easy.

Happy writing, everybody.

Since I left you

I’ve been a bad blogger. I’m sorry! It’s been a while since I was here to tell you what’s been going on, and yet even though I’ve returned I don’t intend to make this an exhausting recount of all the publishing success I’ve had since last we met. Indeed, things have been going a little nuts in Candice Town, but I’d rather have a look at what I’ve learned from the last few months than give you a yawntastic, self-praising timeline. When I was a kid dreaming of giving my first interview on Good Morning Australia as a hot-shot new novelist, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what would happen after that surreal moment when the phone rang one morning just before Christmas and my agent, a smile saturating her voice, said ‘I’ve got an offer for you.’ Turns out, I had no idea. So here’s a look at what has shocked, moved, puzzled and made me laugh about the process of finally dropping the feeling that I’m being a wanker when I call myself an ‘author’.

The strangest thing about being a new author, (and I should make it clear, one who hasn’t actually sold a single book yet, as release is still five months off), has been how incredibly irregular the excitement is. You’ll know from previous posts that I was shocked at how very ordinary the moment I got my first offer was compared to the street-parade-trumpet-blaring-heavens-opening-up-strippers-gyrating-on-my-porch vision I’d carried for many years. I literally received an encouraging punch in the arm from my stepdad, a flood of sudden tears from my mother, about eighteen dozen text messages of congratulations, and that was it. Christmas decorations needed to be bought, and Mum was going up the street, so I went with her, and that was that. The lack of reporters following me down the street and stalker fans affixing bloody love letters to my bonnet and moustached, round-bellied mayors giving my keys to the city wasn’t an anti-climax, however. What I got was a different kind of excitement to what I’d expected. The big explosive excitement was diffused into tiny moments throughout the next few months, most of them completely private. Being unable to sleep for the strange, knotted feeling in my stomach. Passing bookstores and looking at the displays. Getting text messages from my agent and feeling the muscles tense in my fingers as I open them. People introducing me into circles of strangers as ‘the famous author’.  I think in a way, the excitement has been a slow burn for the people in my life, too. Bringing in my first print draft copy of the book and handing it to my stepdad was clearly, for him, a game changer. Watching him try to open it with his big fingers to see the words somehow without actually touching the pages, lest he should leave a print or mark or smudge, was very sweet.

It was an artefact to him. A precious thing.

Losing the guilt, that strange inexplicable guilt, at calling myself a writer when people asked me what I did for as living was a slow process. I denied the fact completely until I realised that I made more money in those months writing than I did doing anything else. So economically, if not emotionally, I was, actually, a writer. But there was this fear I suppose that unless I waved my contract around I’d be a called a fraud on one of these encounters, that someone would point at my face and accuse me of ‘wasting’ my life or failing to find myself a ‘real’ job. When do you become an author? After your first book? Your second? How much should you make as an author before anyone respects you? Should you have to make a single cent? Are you a writer when you make nothing from it? Are people born writers, or are they assigned the title? I didn’t know. For a while there after the first deal I’d meet new people and cower from that inevitable, self-defining question.

What do you do, Candice?

I’m a university lecturer. Freelancer. Cat lover. Gym junky. Writer.

I’m a university lecturer and a writer.

I write, and I teach writing.

I’m an author.

A goddamn author, Boo! Can I get a hellz ye-oh?

(I reached gangsta fist-pump level about a week ago and then retracted slightly for the sake of good taste).

In the long stretches of ordinary life, moments of the writerly life push upward and break through the hard earth like volcanoes, dangerous to the desire to keep a level head.

I got a deal for book two from Random House Australia a couple of months back that totally derailed attempts I had made to talk myself down about this becoming a career. I lunched with smiling, laughing publishing staff at a torch-lit place in North Sydney, guest of honour, client, partner, interviewee, quietly obsessed with keeping my hair straight throughout the meeting without anyone knowing how worried I was about my hair not being straight. I read my contract, calculated the days I needed to get book two written by the deadline, and began writing, writing something that I actually knew other people were going to read, the first time I’d ever written like that. On the clock. Measured for success.

Strangers began to appear on my Facebook author page. Someone at a family reunion in London approached my mum and told her how proud he was of me, and she had to ask his name and who he was (Incidentally, I have no idea who he is either, but thanks for the well wishes distant relative stranger man). My Australian agent took the book overseas and started shopping it around. I got a New York agent. I got an American deal, and then another. People started talking translation rights. Drunk on cheap pink champagne at my neighbour’s house, I squinted at my phone while kids tumbled and wrestled at my feet and tried to answer the question of how much I’d accept for them to print the books in Hebrew.

‘Seriously?’ I asked my agent.

‘Seriously,’ she said.

I’ve been surprised at how sickening it can be lately to sit down at the computer and ready my hands over the keys. I always imagined something like this, watching the words crawl across the page and knowing that eager eyes would be reading them one day, would be a joyous thing – and sometimes it is, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes, oh sometimes, I am afraid. I think I’m most afraid because I don’t know how I made HADES the book that it is, aside from loving its characters like they are real people in my life (and learning much from the cataclysmic failure of four other full-length novels… ahem!). I still love those people, and am so grateful to be able to keep them alive, so half the time I spend writing is enjoying the company of my imaginary posse, and that makes the work easier.

When I ask myself how I’m going to write another HADES, or something even better than HADES, ideally, I look for what I was trying to explore. I wrote HADES the way I wrote it because I was genuinely interested in that foggy barrier between good and evil, when evil thoughts become evil desires, when evil desires become evil deeds. Anyone who says they haven’t wanted to kill someone else at a certain point in their life is lying. Anyone who says they haven’t wondered what they would trade to cheat death at least once is kidding themselves. But when do you enact evil? What makes it creep out of your brain, down through your arms and out your hands? I was fascinated by survival instinct and how this much-denied, ancient human magic would interact with a little old-fashioned psychopathy. Right now I’m interested in those societal fringe-dwellers living bare, the kind of people who scrape at existence, who are born into brutal worlds by brutal people and how inexplicably they are drawn together, encouraged, it seems, by each other’s inherent darkness. Mob mentality. The deadly potential of idle hands. Some people are born bad, and they come up against a world so righteously and self-consciously trying to do good all the time (or at least, appearing to). What would happen if I let one of my most beloved characters wander into this unforgiving landscape? What goes on in the everyday lives of those who never belonged?

So right now, it’s a writer’s life for me. I go to writer’s club. I make plans about my work on paper. I show drafts to agents and publishers. I approve or make suggestions to covers. I sit at my local cafe with my dog on my lap and my coffee in my hand and think about things, think about my people, what’s in store for them, how they will take it. I try to fight back the excitement, that paralysing excitement, which can so easily turn into terror and grind the work to a halt, which sparkles every now and then when my phone chimes with an email or a bus with a book ad goes by or a shopkeeper smiles and points and says ‘Hey, you! Shouldn’t you be writing? Go home! Gettouttahere!’

They don’t want my business. *sigh*

Candice Fox Author Facebook Page

www.facebook.com/candicefoxauthor

I’ve just begun a Facebook author page that I’d love you all to come along to. There, you’ll find bookish competitions closer to the release of my first novel, writerly quips as I power through book two of my series, and my ferocious attempt at a 1000 word a day challenge with a writer friend of mine, Adam. All the humour, heartache and harrowing fiction of Candice Fox right there in your Facebook feed. How can you go wrong? Plus I also have huge news about the book to reveal next week, so you’ll be the first to get it. Looking forward to chatting with you properly there.

Thank you!

First time

Advanced reader copy just arrived in the mail. First time I’ve ever held the book in my hands. Absolutely surreal to open it and look at my words on the page. Everyone going nuts with pride.

Egos and coffee

I’ve been thinking this week about writer‘s groups and just how bad that little pursuit can go for you when you find the wrong one, as I have a couple of times. Usually as a writer you’re the most dreamy, inventive, eccentric, determined person in your little life circle, so when you get together in a group of writers and all your determination and eccentricities clash, the chemical reaction can be explosively awkward. Let me tell you a couple of my writer’s group tales of woe.

The first time I was ever invited into a writer’s group, or had ever considered being in one, I was an undergrad at uni. The guy attempting to set up the group had heard me reading my work out in a workshop class in the red-faced, hurried, stumbling way I always read my own stuff, and had decided I was ‘serious enough about the art’ to warrant invitation to his group. This should have been the first indicator of this man’s deeply rendered shitheadedness, but somehow this escaped me, and I was very keen.

At that time, he was the only other person he considered serious enough about the art to warrant inclusion in the group, so at the inaugural meeting it was just the plump and moustachey founder and I commenting on each other’s work. Baron Von Moustache’s only constructive feedback was that my work ‘was very much like a fine French patisserie: I walk by and I smell the bread baking and I’m allured, but something further needs to happen as the catalyst to my entry, some other inherent welcoming quality’ that he didn’t find in the writing. I asked what he thought I should do to make the work ‘welcoming enough to inspire entry’, swallowing the crude jokes dancing on the back of my tongue. He paused dramatically, fingered his moustache, squinted and said he didn’t know. Great. I told him that I thought the dream sequence at the start of his sci fi short story was intriguing, but that I found it odd that any type of emotion caused his main character to want to throw up. When she’s afraid, ‘bile rises in her throat’. Same when she’s angry. Or nervous. Or lost. Or excited. The sensation occurs again on page five when she sees the leading man for the first time. I wondered aloud with an easy laugh whether the character might benefit from consulting her doctor about acid reflux treatment.

Moustache ended the meeting politely and never contacted me again.

I went looking for my second writing group about a year later, and found them advertised in the back of one of those flimsy local rags wedged between ads for gardening and handyman services. A weekly meeting where authors heard each other’s work and met writing ‘challenges’. It sounded awesome.

I called and enquired and was met with much enthusiasm from the director of the group. He told me they had about ten regular members and that everyone was to bring a plate. I gathered up my best work at the time, printed and rolled it and carried it along with me to a local library, open after hours. When I arrived, I blundered into a room where eight or nine elderly people were sitting sipping hot tea. Before I could back out and find my group, the director, an ancient, liver-spotted skeleton in a massive electric wheelchair told me that I had indeed found it. I placed my Lamingtons on the side bench sat uncomfortably at the end of the table while the first member continued reading their work. Rhyming bush poetry. A jumbuck and a jackeroo and a sunburnt, dusty plain. I listened with my back teeth locked. There was applause and praise. The second lady, pushing seventy and trembling as she held her paper, read hers. More rhyming bush poetry. Magpies and sunlit kitchens, possums playing joyously in the eucalypts. Wattle. Bubbling creeks. I looked at my knees and tried to settle my stomach. The applause again. I clapped along, tried to guess how old the youngest member was. Sixty, from the eyeshadow and the perm. When it was my turn their watery, yellowed eyes fell on me and I tried to laugh off the fact that I hadn’t realised it was a poetry group. It wasn’t, they assured. They accepted all works on all themes in all genres, and they’d noticed I had brought something and wanted to hear it. I laughed again, wheezed, and said I didn’t want to. More cries of protest. I submitted and read a short story I’d written about a fidgety psychopath sitting in a cafe two tables down from the grisly, alcoholic detective investigating his very own case: a series of brutal rapes and murders, the bodies dumped in bushland. ‘So I got the bush theme,’ I chuckled when I’d finished. There was an asphyxiating silence in the room. The man in the wheelchair was clutching his chest and sweating.

It’s not often that I’ve felt myself ‘belonging’ around other writers, but when I do, it’s because I haven’t read their work and they haven’t read mine. I know a few writers, and what we really connect on is that seemingly biological craving to tell stories, to invent things, to turn life into narrative and narrative into life. I find the competition addictive also – I was raised in a huge, chaotic family, so the need to be ‘better’ than everyone else all the time is something that pulses in my every waking minute, like a neurosis. I have a pathetic need to be ‘the winner’ all the time. But around my writer friends it pushes me to write. I talk to other writers and play on their own one-upmanship, about a novel completed or an idea fully formed or a nibble on the line from a publisher.

Rarely have I found another writer who actually informs my work or even genuinely wants to.

I enjoy them merely for the fact that they share my love of the page – but more than a group of critiquers, we’re like a posse of reeking booze-hounds in the TAB comparing betting cards, cheering, glancing over shoulders, sneaking side-long glances, egging each other on with dripping sarcasm and congratulating each other with rolled eyes through clouds of cigarette smoke. A writer’s group might work for you, but I warn you against the desire of others to gather an audience for their own work rather than encourage you in yours, and the danger of bursting into a group (much like into a date) without sitting on the sidelines for a moment or two quietly gathering reconnaissance. I challenge you to limit your groups or partnerships to those who you itch to share your work with, whether their criticism will be cutting or thrilling, because your good writer friends will cut you now and then, as much as they love you, and they will understand you as much as they differ in their own style. If you’re not a sharer, like me, I implore you to hang out only with those writers who make you laugh, make your stomach clench with a desire to be better, make you rush home and wrench open your laptop and slam the keys. Because if you don’t feel this way, then it’s all just egos and coffee underneath all the laughter and the back-patting. And who the hell’s got time for that?

Kat James: Men are so awkward

As a social experiment, speed-dating could serve to teach generations of young researchers about optimism, desperation, fear, bitterness and that strange, instant camaraderie that happens between women of all ages in public bathrooms. I think I knew within the first ten minutes of arriving that I wasn’t going to meet that committed, funny, cuddly fellow academic or writer I’ve been searching for on the top floor of The Office Hotel in Wynyard.

As a down-trodden brigade of Sydney’s most pot-bellied, sallow-faced, badly-dressed and just-plain-weird trudged up the stairs into the waiting area, I flung my expectations out the grime-spotted windows and went looking for girls to chat up. While the dates themselves turned out to be a hilarious festival of awkwardness, I came away from the night truly surprised by the attitudes of the women I interviewed.

These were some hearty, serious and self-assured women, and I was glad to get to know them, however short our time together. I began my investigation into the attitudes of the women in attendance of Blinkdate’s Post-Valentine’s Day Celebration with a couple of young fillies sipping white wine by the windows while they surveyed what was on offer over on the men’s side of the room. Megan, 29 and working in sales, had dragged Amy, 30, a cleaner, along to ‘get some experience talking to the opposite sex’. What struck me first about these two ladies was their complete lack of nervousness or desperation. Megan had been single for three years, and blamed this on her rigid determination not to ‘settle’ for anything less than ‘a mature, serious relationship’.

Blinkdate’s extremely flirtatious organisers, the thickly-built and cologne-soaked Sash and Michael, had divided those in attendance into two groups. Those love-hunters in the 25-35 age bracket were inside, and the over 35s were on the balcony. Ladies remained seated, while fifteen men circulated the tables at seven minute intervals.

My first date was my fellow 5Why writer and friend, Julius, so we giggled nervously and discreetly evaluated our competition. Then he moved on, and my second date passed in a blur of young, well-dressed Filipino enthusiasm I can barely remember. Up next was a brooding Lebanese criminal lawyer who immediately cut the theory with me in discussions about power, masculinity, law and terrorism. Thrilling.

On a card distributed by the organisers, I began ticking or crossing off my dates based on whether or not I wanted to continue the discussion.

We hit break time, which I was incredibly grateful for, as half the crowd darted to the downstairs bar to acquire more Dutch courage, and the other half dashed to the bathrooms.

In the space before the mirrors, my new friends Megan and Amy erupted into laughter as soon as they spotted me. They were all a flutter with hilarity at their dates. Apparently, there were some real shockers coming my way, and they couldn’t wait to see what I would do when I got them. While my younger friends had been all bluster and sass, Kelly, 49 and her friend Sam, 46, were in a group of four old high school friends who were all divorced and raising teenagers, and they were all business.

When I asked Kelly what she was looking for, she rolled her eyes and started applying her lip-gloss. ‘Someone normal,’ she replied. ‘Someone with a bit of backbone. Someone who’s not interested in playing games. They’re all into their games when you get to this age. They don’t tell you they have children. They don’t tell you they’re divorced. They don’t tell you if they want a relationship. They don’t tell you anything! You’ve got to claw it out. It’s pathetic.’

Back at the tables, my shockers began to arrive.

A young Kevin Rudd lookalike strode in carrying a black leather attaché (for God knows what reason… It was a Saturday night – what the hell are you carrying in that thing?) and wearing a pinstripe suit. He was sporting very intentional short blonde ringlets that framed a face so infantile I wanted to offer him a candy and pinch his cheeks.

The solicitor and part-time opera singer oozed self-righteousness, and though the criminal lawyer had surprised and delighted me with his intellectual back-chat, baby K-Rudd just seemed to want to get it into my head that I should read some French philosopher for my PhD, totally unrelenting to any argument to the contrary. Later, when the night was over, he let me know that mine had been the only conversation that ‘intellectually stimulated’ him, and that ‘the nail artists and beauty-school retards’ upstairs had ‘turned his brain to mush’ with their ‘mindless talk of travel’. ‘Travel,’ he objected, waggling his finger in my face, ‘is not an interest. It’s a necessity.’

Arrogance with a side of sickening superiority, table one! After baby K-Rudd came a man so drunk out of his mind that he could barely keep his head straight on his neck. Now that was funny. I’d heard from the other ladies present that he liked to talk about his motorbike, so immediately asked him what kind it was and spent the full seven minutes watching in barely contained amusement as he tried to string words together about the machine and stay on his chair at the same time.

The most entertaining match of the night, however, was a man the other girls had been calling ‘The Murderer’. Comically styled head to toe in black and swishing shoulder-length raven hair, this pale ninja of social dysfunction had been hiding in the shadows all night, darting away whenever someone came within his personal bubble into another dark nook like a shiny cockroach hiding from a kitchen bulb. With a high-pitched, old crone’s voice, he sat down and ignored my friendly greeting and questions about how his night was going so far.

He proceeded to read a question from a list written on his palm, to which I responded with my usual cheerful prattling. The first was ‘What is your favourite film?’ I blurted out some justifications for my love of horror and realist sci-fi adventures. I asked him what his was, and he paused, looked deeply uncomfortable, and then ignored the question, proceeding to the next. ‘What is your favourite song?’ This went on for seven minutes. He only spoke to ask the questions. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone, his tick card lying blank and still like a dead white bird on the bar floor.

I think my experience with the desperate and dateless that night at The Office served only to confuse me further about men, which doesn’t really dishearten me, because I was fairly confused when I arrived. What I did enjoy, however, was the gathering of similarly bewildered, aggressive, optimistic and determined women who came along and how willing they were to share their hopes and dreams with me. While I’ve been hunting men this past year since arriving in Sydney, I think I forgot how special the hopeful bond between single ladies can be and how similar we all are, despite the arduous nature of our search. So cheers, single ladies. You made my night.