Josephine Moon's Blog, page 27

FREE copy of The Tea Chest, released into the wild

A book in the wild

This morning I released a FREE copy of my novel The Tea Chest into the wild!

If it hasn’t been claimed yet, you will find it at Cafe Doonan (Eumundi-Noosa Rd, Doonan), where it is waiting for you to

TAKE
READ
RELEASE

If you come across one of my book’s in the wild, it would be wonderful if you could drop me a line/photo from wherever you found it, and keep a record on the back page of its journey through the country (or world). But if you’d just like to read it and pay it forward, that’s great too.

It’s my gift to you for an unexpected moment of joy in your day.

xx

Reclaiming Your Inner Artist

Me, in the middle in blue, participating in a public drumming performance, roughly ten years ago.

Ever had that moment when you suddenly think, ‘Far out! What happened to me?’

You’re wondering where your ‘life’ went. You’re wondering where the real YOU went?

I’ve had those moments, many times, such as when I realised I couldn’t lead the life in the corporate world any more. And most recently, when I declared to my husband across the kitchen sink, ‘I’m an artist without any art!’ like it was a national crisis.

A tad melodramatic, sure. But this is what our inner artists do. We ALL have an inner artist and if we don’t pay attention to them, they will start shouting at us louder and louder until we listen to them and do what they want… which is to feed, nurture and love them. (Think of your inner artist as a toddler or a dog and you’re pretty much on the money.) To the inner artist, having no art in my life WAS a crisis, akin to a lack of oxygen. My husband (quite used to me by now) merely said, ‘Well you need to go out and find some.’

So I did. I reclaimed a part of myself that’s been sad for more than 9 years, which was when I stopped going to African drumming classes. The reasons I stopped going were all very logical–we moved inland to ‘the bush’ and I simply had no access to a drumming circle. Then we moved to the Sunshine Coast last year (for the very reason of accessing artistic and lifestyle goodness) but now having a toddler and big, conflicting work schedules for both my husband and me, it just didn’t happen.

But finally, it has. And it felt GOOOOOD. Oh man, my soul (my inner artist) was so, so happy and has been all day today and especially so while I was working on my latest manuscript.

I’m in there!

It is the central tenant of being an artist that we must

FILL THE WELL BEFORE WE DRAW FROM IT.

In other words, we cannot make art (in my case, novels) if we aren’t first nourishing ourselves with the sights, sounds and experiences we need to then be able to draw from.

Our inner artists are constantly telling us what they want; it’s just that we don’t always listen.

What’s yours saying?

 

Thoughts on Writing: Editing a Novel is Like Renovating a House

We’ve been renovating a 100+ year old house now for more than 18 months, and I’ve edited quite a few manuscripts in my time (having been an editor before becoming a career writer) and if there’s one thing I can say definitively, it’s that editing a novel and renovating a house are the same beasts. There are different stages to editing and they have to go in this order, or you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt and re-work down the track. Want to know how to edit a novel? Think like a renovator.

Demolition

Oh, how I enjoyed this part of renovating our house. Bulldozing. Jackhammering. Tearing down. Knocking down. Ripping up. Throwing out. Fun, fun, fun. We had to remove the toxic waste (asbestos). We had to tear down a significant extension on the house that was teeming with live termites. We had to cut down enormous trees that were touching the house, smothering it and threatening its very survival. Hey, I am a tree hugger; I have difficulty removing weeds. But if they’re in the wrong place and are threatening the entire building they have to go. So too does the useless, poisonous, distracting stuff in your novel. The plots that go no where. The characters that don’t belong there. The pages of useless stuff that slows your plot down to a girding halt. Get rid of it. “Cut your darlings.”

 

Structural improvement

This stuff is huge. This is where you ask the really tough questions: what am I trying to achieve here? Where do I want this to go? What style of project is this? Who is my reader (buyer)? This is the stuff that will make you cry with sheer frustration and jump in the air with elation when you get it right. And far, FAR too many writers skip this and jump to the next stage. But this is where the money is!!!

After the demolition came the urgent structural improvements. The big one for us was to re-stump, a task I once thought was a simple matter, but in fact turned out to be a really trying exercise. The stumps that were there were termite ridden and rotten and the whole house was slumping. We had to get council approval and that meant we had to… wait for it… draw up plans!!! (Do you see where this is going?) What was currently on the house and what did we intend to replace? What material were we going to use (wood, cement, steel)? And the answers to these questions meant we needed an engineer (an expert) to give guidance on how to proceed.

Now, hopefully, your novel isn’t in as much danger as our house was but, even so, it’s fantastic to get an expert, an outside eye, to step into your project and offer some wisdom to make sure you’re going in the right direction and not making things worse for yourself down the track. This is where you need your beta readers–your trusted advisors. (But do tell them to ignore the obvious spelling etc. and spend their valuable time on the big stuff. That’s what you need.)

Having taken care of the must-do structural renovation (and we couldn’t do ANYTHING else to the house until that was done because EVERYTHING else depended on having a level, stable base to work from), we moved on to the fun structural improvements. We’d previously demolished the front stairs (also termite ridden) and built new ones. We pulled out an entire load-bearing wall and put in a load-bearing beam. And then we did another one. We put in new doors. We built in wall where previously there wasn’t wall. We chased the leaks in the roof and plugged them.

All of these types of things can be done in your structural edit and there isn’t a lot of point proceeded to the next stage. There’s no point painting walls if you’re only going to tear them down.

 

Cosmetic renovation

This level of renovation is equivalent to the copy edit stage of your manuscript.

Most of the really hard yakka is done at this point and you won’t need quite as many chocolate runs, coffee or cold beers at the end of the day. This is where we put in a brand new kitchen. Ta da!! Gorgeous. A chandelier. Ka-ching! Polished floorboards. Painted walls. Re-wired the house. Put in an air conditioner.

All these things make it easier to live in the house, which is precisely what you’re doing in the copy edit. You’re finding sentences that could be prettier and making them so. You’re sanding back the excess words and letting the real beauty shine. Everything flows from one area to the next. You’re grammar is straight, tidy and enticing.

 

Sprucing

This is like proofreading. (We aren’t here yet in our house renovation; we’re still working through the cosmetic renovations.) This is like when you’ve got people coming over for dinner, or you want to sell the house. You’re mowing, cleaning, tidying, fluffing and styling. The proofread is your final sweep, your last chance before your visitors arrive to make sure your place is looking its best and nothing’s going to embarrass you (no hidden mould or hair caught in the sink trap).

 

To summarise, there is no point putting flowers on your kitchen bench if you don’t even have one! Make sure you’re editing your novel in the right order. Do the hard work first, the one that will cause you the most sweat, agony and tears and have you saying that you will never, ever do this again for as long as you live. And work your way through to the fun, pretty stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tea Chest #1 Bestseller & Goodbye Dear Jasmine

Life’s a funny thing. This week started out difficult for several reasons and then got really tough, with me having to make the heartbreaking decision to euthanase my cat Jasmine, who was 18 years old, and had been with me since a week before I turned 20. That’s almost half my life. Her loss is very much the end of an era.

She’d been with me from university through relationships, house moves, marriage, miscarriage, a baby, and finally my dream of becoming a career author. And now she’s gone.

And then today, a fellow author alerted me to the Allen & Unwin website. My debut novel, which Jasmine helped me write by sitting in my lap and drooling on my pants till I had to lay tissues down while she purred, has just ranked no. 1 in their Top 10 Bestsellers.

Proud? Yep. In awe? Yep. Grateful? Hell yeah. Sad? Yes, sad too.

It amazes me that really sad and really happy things can happen at the same time. It amazes me that, on my last day with Jasmine, I could lie in bed with her, grieving, and be hungry for goodness sake. Hungry! Like, how could my body just keep going on doing its thing when this really important and special part of my life was ending?

I have no words of wisdom here to share, just an observation that really awesome things and really sad things don’t always happen at neatly scheduled times. Life just keeps dishing stuff up and sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it sucks. But I guess there’s always hope that more good stuff is on its way.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has been buying and reading The Tea Chest. Thank you.

And to you, my dear Jasmine, thanks for the company on this crazy journey of life.

Jasmine, Christmas 2013

Jasmine in healthier days, off to greet my horse Lincoln

Random Acts of Fairy God-people

 

MGB

Michael Gerard Bauer, I’m looking at you.

On my (rather excessively long) journey to publication, I’ve had some fairy god-people types appear every now and then. The most obvious of which was Monica McInerney. But there have been others, and one of them was Young Adult fiction writer, Michael Gerard Bauer, an author of fantastically entertaining, witty, funny and sensitive stories for young people. And one year, I met Michael. It was at the CYA Conference in Brisbane. It was afternoon tea time and (with no disrespect intended) I had been wondering all day long why I was there. I’d been to CYA before, and thought it was great. But I think, this particular year I simply had a deep knowing that I was on the wrong path. (And as it turns out, I was. I wasn’t a YA author after all but a women’s fiction author.)

At any rate, I found myself standing with a cup of tea next to MGB and decided to say hi and tell him how much I loved his books. Our conversation lasted a handful of minutes but Michael was so very lovely and asked me a lot of questions about myself and my writing. Along the way, I confessed that I was feeling very disheartened and frustrated, like I was always getting oh-so-heartbreakingly-close to publication but falling at the last minute. The conversation moved on, with Michael telling me how amazing it is to have a publisher say they want to publish your book, and how much he still felt that thrill, even after many books on the shelf.

My poster that was taped to the bathroom window

And then he looked at me, straight in the eye, and from no where said, “And you are going to feel that too, very soon.”

Chills went down my spine. THIS was why I was at that conference. So MGB could touch me with his fairy wand.

(I’ll give you a moment to process that image.)

I don’t know why Michael said it; we’ve not spoken since so I don’t know if he knows (or even remembers that conversation). But I drove home not long after that, feeling elated–like I’d been blessed by a very hairy fairy-god-man. It felt (and there’s no other way to say this) transformative. Like, because he’d said it then it must be true.

And a little less than two years later, I’d been signed by my agent and The Tea Chest sold shortly after.

And because I’m one of those odd people that put things on posters and tape them to the walls, I had printed out those words as soon as I got home from the conference. I didn’t ever want to forget them.

(And I’m sure that Michael is right now checking his doors are locked as there is a crazy stalker person out there who keeps photos of him on their board in their office. It’s okay, Michael, truly. No photos, I promise.)

They sat taped to the bathroom window for a long time, then came off one day when I was cleaning the glass and I stashed the paper under the sink. I forgot about it until we moved house in September 2013, found it, packed it, then found it again in our new place, just last week. (Let’s just overlook what this says about my housekeeping skills.)

I have now let that tatty, slightly mildewed piece of paper go, but I first wanted to photograph it and post it here to let all aspiring writers know to look for signs (okay, tea drinking, bearded men with glasses) that randomly come your way to let you know you’re on the right path. They’re out there. Oh yes they are.

(So too are the crazy people who will write down your words and tape them to the door….)

Getting published: There’s no reason it can’t be you

In February 2009, QWC published an article I wrote called ‘The Power of the Positive’ in their WQ magazine, and I’m betting more than a few people thought I was a little nutty and ‘woo woo’. 

I started off by saying, “It seems to me that there can be a tendency in writing circles to dramatise the negatives… the main message is all about how difficult writing is, how it’s nearly impossible for a first-time writer to get published, how the annual salary for full-time writers in Australia is ridiculously low, how you ‘shouldn’t give up the day job’, how you ‘shouldn’t get your hopes up’, how everything is so competitive and how the slush pile is so high and the editor’s time is so short.”
 
Sound familiar?
 

An excerpt from my article, ‘The Power of the Positive’

The rest of the article goes on to talk about the importance of believing the positive, visualising success, and channeling all that creative energy you have into something useful, rather than something that’s going to tear you down and bring others down with you–incorporating some sports psychology and some new age theory too.

But most importantly, it poses the question, ‘Why can’t it be you?’
 
Now, my first novel, The Tea Chest, has finally made it out into the world. And I am living proof that you can rise above all that negativity out there that will shoot down your dreams before they’ve even started. I’m not saying it’s easy to face more than a decade of writing books (10 manuscripts in 12 years for me before I got a publishing deal) and literally hundreds of rejections. It’s emotionally hard going when you’ve put your soul into a piece of art that other people criticise. And then it just sits silently and invisibly on your laptop with no where to go (which is why I’ve turned some of my manuscripts into books via http://www.lulu.com, just so I could see the completion of the project). 
 
And just for the record, The Tea Chest was submitted to every mentorship program and manuscript development program out there and not picked up.
 
You’ve got to do the work. Of course you do. I guarantee your book won’t get published if you don’t write it. But there is no predetermined expiration date or outcome on this. The sky truly is the limit (or maybe not even then).
 
Having said that, I do actually want to ‘ground’ this notion in a larger philosophy: that of art for art’s sake. Because I’m not saying you WILL achieve all those things you dream of. Sometimes, good work just won’t get published. This is not about bulldozing your way into perceived success via milestones and paycheques. The most important thing of all is to write. Just WRITE. 
 
If you are going to become attached to anything, become attached to being a writer, not to your manuscript. Then you will be able to move on from the wonderful manuscript you’ve worked so hard on for so many years and write a new one, or indeed something else entirely.
 
And just for once, I won’t quote Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way (I do not work for Julia Cameron or get commission  though the amount I plug her I probably should…), but instead I will quote Australian author, Torre de Roche: 

“Forget the stats, the numbers, the wealth, the prestige, the popularity, the things you imagine to be waiting for you on the other side of ‘success.’ They’re not there, and if they are, they won’t stay long. Instead, work tirelessly to make your soul happy. Keep going until you’re standing before a big, glorious creation made by you, for you. Your baby—made of cells, or paper, or clay, or words. That’s yours.

Be proud. You did it for the simple joy of creating. There is nothing more to life than that.

So don’t quit.” 

What I’m saying here is that we write because we must. We write because it makes us happy. That is why we do it. So do it.

But there is no harm in expecting the best along the way. There is no harm in valuing a financial reward for your art. Imagine your biggest, scariest possibility of whatever you deem to be ‘success’. Got it? Good. File it away somewhere in your heart and mind to revisit at a later date, shrug of the criticisms and the crazy looks you get when you say you’re working on a book (to which someone will instantly say, ‘oh, do you have a publisher?’ and you’ll squirm inside and say, ‘no, not yet’), and go write. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say about your ‘chances’ of being published. That’s their reality, not yours. Feel free to invent your own.

Getting published: Choose to be positive

In February 2009, QWC published an article I wrote called ‘The Power of the Positive’ in their WQ magazine, and I’m betting more than a few people thought I was a little nutty and ‘woo woo’. 

I started off by saying, “It seems to me that there can be a tendency in writing circles to dramatise the negatives… the main message is all about how difficult writing is, how it’s nearly impossible for a first-time writer to get published, how the annual salary for full-time writers in Australia is ridiculously low, how you ‘shouldn’t give up the day job’, how you ‘shouldn’t get your hopes up’, how everything is so competitive and how the slush pile is so high and the editor’s time is so short.”
 
Sound familiar?
 

An excerpt from my article, ‘The Power of the Positive’

The rest of the article goes on to talk about the importance of believing the positive, visualising success, and channeling all that creative energy you have into something useful, rather than something that’s going to tear you down and bring others down with you–incorporating some sports psychology and some new age theory too.

But most importantly, it poses the question, ‘Why can’t it be you?’
 
Now, my first novel, The Tea Chest, has finally made it out into the world. And I am living proof that you can rise above all that negativity out there that will shoot down your dreams before they’ve even started. I’m not saying it’s easy to face more than a decade of writing books (10 manuscripts in 12 years for me before I got a publishing deal) and literally hundreds of rejections. It’s emotionally hard going when you’ve put your soul into a piece of art that other people criticise. And then it just sits silently and invisibly on your laptop with no where to go (which is why I’ve turned some of my manuscripts into books via http://www.lulu.com, just so I could see the completion of the project). 
 
And just for the record, The Tea Chest was submitted to every mentorship program and manuscript development program out there and not picked up.
 
You’ve got to do the work. Of course you do. I guarantee your book won’t get published if you don’t write it. But there is no predetermined expiration date or outcome on this. The sky truly is the limit (or maybe not even then).
 
Having said that, I do actually want to ‘ground’ this notion in a larger philosophy: that of art for art’s sake. Because I’m not saying you WILL achieve all those things you dream of. Sometimes, good work just won’t get published. This is not about bulldozing your way into perceived success via milestones and paycheques. The most important thing of all is to write. Just WRITE. 
 
If you are going to become attached to anything, become attached to being a writer, not to your manuscript. Then you will be able to move on from the wonderful manuscript you’ve worked so hard on for so many years and write a new one, or indeed something else entirely.
 
And just for once, I won’t quote Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way (I do not work for Julia Cameron or get commission  though the amount I plug her I probably should…), but instead I will quote Australian author, Torre de Roche: 

“Forget the stats, the numbers, the wealth, the prestige, the popularity, the things you imagine to be waiting for you on the other side of ‘success.’ They’re not there, and if they are, they won’t stay long. Instead, work tirelessly to make your soul happy. Keep going until you’re standing before a big, glorious creation made by you, for you. Your baby—made of cells, or paper, or clay, or words. That’s yours.

Be proud. You did it for the simple joy of creating. There is nothing more to life than that.

So don’t quit.” 

What I’m saying here is that we write because we must. We write because it makes us happy. That is why we do it. So do it.

But there is no harm in expecting the best along the way. There is no harm in valuing a financial reward for your art. Imagine your biggest, scariest possibility of whatever you deem to be ‘success’. Got it? Good. File it away somewhere in your heart and mind to revisit at a later date, shrug of the criticisms and the crazy looks you get when you say you’re working on a book (to which someone will instantly say, ‘oh, do you have a publisher?’ and you’ll squirm inside and say, ‘no, not yet’), and go write. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say about your ‘chances’ of being published. That’s their reality, not yours. Feel free to invent your own.

Radio Interview with Evana Ho from Artsound

Interviewer, Evana Ho

My first radio interview for The Tea Chest, talking with the lovely Evana Ho from ArtSound FM 92.7. You can listen online now to find out more about The Tea Chest and the writing of the book. Thanks, Evana! 

“Take one brilliant tea designer. Add a gutsy woman newly separated from her husband. Sprinkle in another woman recently fired. Brew for 359 pages and you have a delightful first novel from author Josephine Moon.

The Tea Chest interweaves the stories of Kate, Leila and Elizabeth, who come together to realise Kate’s dream of opening a boutique tea shop in London. It’s a book about love, friendship, discovering strengths you didn’t realise you had, and of course – tea.

I spoke to Josephine Moon ahead of the release of her book on 26 March.” (Evana Ho)

Listen HERE.

Snoopy Dancing: Why I Write

The Tea Chest is just days away from hitting the bookshelves. So today, I’d like to stop and look at what’s brought me to this moment. I’d like to talk about joy.

You see, joy is the reason I write. At a fundamental level, I am happiest when I write and I am a cranky banshee bear when I don’t. (Just ask my husband–I’m tremendous fun to be around when I’ve got writers block.) Writing makes me happy. But here’s the thing. My writing can make the person who reads it happy too. Isn’t that neat? What a great job!

I feel incredibly blessed to have had my book published after spending twelve years writing ten books (five fiction and five non-fiction), with The Tea Chest being the lucky latest. There were some pretty rough patches in that time, with so many heartbreaking near misses. There was at least one time that I came a bunny’s whisker to giving up writing. Like, for good. But as soon as I read a new great story, I felt joy, I felt inspired, I felt renewed, and back to the keyboard I went.

The world’s a tough place out there. Have you noticed? I feel like every day, with more and more technology brining the outside world into our inner world at a rapid-fire rate (often, and unfortunately, without our deliberate intention), we have to work harder and harder to say, hang on a minute, there’s joy out there too. On a bigger level, I want to shout out to the world that I choose something different. I choose kindness, I choose joy, I choose nurturing.

Stories bring us hope, new beginnings and new endings, alternative ways of working through problems, creative answers and a chance to imagine a new life. They let us take risks in our heart and mind, to test them out, before we have to take them in real life. This is why I write. And what an honour it is to be given at the vehicle of a publishing contract, to be able to do that.

So as I work my way through the publication and publicity of my first book, each new step a huge learning adventure, I will ground that intention into everything I do and every book I write from here on. And, yeah, when I see The Tea Chest on the shelves for the first time, I’ll definitely be breaking out a little Snoopy dance.

My Justification for a Personal Assistant

Recently, I was lying in bed, awake, when I was hit with the 2 am terrors. I had stuffed up. Big time. You’ve had that happen, haven’t you? You did something a while back and your subconscious takes ten days to process what you did and then decides to remind you in the middle of the night?

You see, I’d had one of those de-cluttering fits that sweeps through the house every now and then, the type that end in three piles: keep, sell, give away. And while I am loathe to muck around with books, I simply do have to accept that I am not a national library and therefore must manage my book collection in some way so I don’t die, trapped in my own house because I can’t climb over the towers of tomes to get to the door (or end up as the lead story on World’s Worst Hoarders). My three piles, in the case of the books, was restricted to just two: trade-in, and lend-to-a-friend-for-guaranteed-return. And in that second pile was my copy of Monica McInerney’s The House of Memories, which she had written in for me when I met her in 2012.

Now, you may know that I adore Monica and her work and it was in fact because of her that I cracked my first publishing deal, so I am sure you realise how special that book was to me. And if you have any sense of storytelling, you probably realise that, at 2 am, I did in fact jolt straight up in bed, heart pounding, with seeping, cold dread filling my belly with the absolute certainty that you can only have at that time of the morning because…

I had accidentally put The House of Memories in the wrong pile.

Yes, friends, I had traded my personalised copy of the book by the very woman who voluntarily and generously jumpstarted my career, and I had done it for just $5.

How? How could this have happened?!

Simple, really. I have too many balls in the air and working extra long hours due to a perfect storm of deadlines, events and an energetic toddler combined with a temporary absence of childcare or home help and a husband also working extra long hours. 

AND… I’ve given up sugar and coffee. How crazy is that?

So, on the day of book trade-in, I had dumped the bag of novels unceremoniously on the counter of the bookstore before sprinting after the little running bookstore bandit who was making a beeline straight for a pyramid display of perfectly-sized pocketbooks to hurl into orbit, ripping open a packet of pink pig stickers at the same time, and I didn’t stay to watch the trade-in from the pile that contained my precious copy of Monica’s book. The toddler continued to rampage around the bookstore and eats pages so I hoisted him under my arm, shouted to the store person for the total sum of my trade-in, grabbed a few books in return (as well as the pink pig stickers that I now had to purchase) and left before toddler could cause some sort of building collapse.

And now, it was 2 a.m., ten days later, and my subconscious had done its work and finally alerted me to the problem.

There was much hand-wringing and fretting about my book, where it had gone, what the new owner was thinking about the message inside, and wondering how on earth I was going to tell Monica (or even if I should — but I was certain if I didn’t, the new owner would email her and tell her she had her book and wondered what it was all about, and then Monica would know and think I was an ungrateful wretch and… well, you get the picture…)

I went back to the store the next day and, blessed be, there, high up on the shelf out of easy eye access, was my book! Bless their haphazard shelving! I bought it back again and took it home, the little lost sheep who’d wandered off on its own back on the shelf with the rest of the treasured flock.

This all happened in the same span of time in which (a) I realised I’d been washing the dishes in floor cleaner for more than a week, and (b) despite the fact that I was doing washing every day, for some inexplicable reason, I had NO clean underwear and had to resort to wearing my husband’s Jockeys. (TMI? Forgive me.)

Look, all of this ‘stuff’ going on in my life is great. (Well, not so much the washing, I could without that.) But if I’m going to have so much stuff going on then I need some management tools, yes? Yes. So, I’ve learnt three things from this episode:

1. If there is only half of my brain on duty at a time, I need to check everything twice to make sure a whole brain is on board. (That makes mathematical sense to me.)

2. When it comes time for me to sign books, I now know not to ever write anything particularly personal or anything I don’t want other people to read because that book could end up anywhere.

3. I need a personal assistant. Case closed. Keep an eye out for my job ad, which you’ll see soon, providing I don’t throw it into the washing machine on a hot super sudsy cycle with the hose conveniently positioned to drain into the electrical circuits of the dryer, thereby starting a house fire.