Ken had been frank about his deceptions, in a way. He had rung her to say that his partner was returning the following week and that it would be best if they didn’t see each other again. And could he have his salad bowl back, the one he’d brought with tabouli that night, as Patty would wonder about it. Gretel remembered the bathroom-cabinet evidence, but never Ken making furtive phone calls. In fact, she recalled Ken picking up letters from the floor at the front door, barely glancing at the name on the envelopes before tossing them onto the hallstand, making no attempt to conceal them. As if Patty was a former tenant who’d skipped town owing rent. She had to admit, now she thought about it, Ken had never brought Patty into bed with them, never implied a comparison with Gretel. The oysters, the flowers were Ken’s generic girlfriend slash partner accoutrements. It was part of the package, when you took a chance on Ken.
She woke as the sun was rising, with her book on her lap. There was the smell, she could swear, of oriental lilies. Or was it that other sickly smell, the faint odour of decay that Lance carried with him?
He was at the fridge, throwing little bits of cheese, a wedge of lemon, a half-eaten tub of pesto dip, into the bin. The esky sat upturned on the verandah, draining the last of his vigorous sluicing. Gretel stood outside, thinking. He had already backed the car close up to the villa and placed the bike at the ready, the helmet dangling from its handlebars. He had planned a final ride, she imagined, as what other pretext would take him away from her at the appointed hour? Otherwise, she assumed he would announce his intention to walk down to the manager’s office with the keys. Or perhaps he would require a final nap, and disappear to the bedroom with his phone. She looked at her watch. 3.25. Behind her she heard the clatter of cups, some knives in the sink. The rush of water. The clang of the lid on the kitchen bin. They would have to leave soon.
By the time Lance appeared at the top step she was already mounted on the bike.
‘Where are you going?’
But kicking off the stand, she waved a hand behind her as she headed for the lake, riding straight towards the shore, and then in the water, the low smooth water that looked only ankle deep all the way to the little island, and beyond. She was wearing the helmet.
Writing [in] the New Millennium
Professionalising the Creative (11.00 am–12.15 pm Sem. Rm. 3). When someone in the audience asked how long it should take to write a book, all the authors exchanged glances. I expected the answer to be depressingly precise, but not this depressing. Nor this precise. Ten years, said one author, not missing a beat. Six weeks, said the author next on the panel. The first elaborated: ten years from early notes to final draft but another two before publication, so strictly twelve. Her book was a nervous-looking volume of fiction that sounded more like poetry. In the book display it sat disdainfully to one side of the embossed historical novels and the fiction with perky covers and one-syllable titles. The Lonely Flight of the Soul. It looked a lot like its author, a lonely soul clad in muted tertiary shades, sitting apart from the rest of the panel. The author who said six weeks went on to explain that he only wrote in the evenings, as his real job was in finance. He held up his book, a fat action thriller well over 120,000 words called Code Six.
My evenings were spent in front of the TV. Sometimes after Rosie and Jay settled down for the night and Curtis and I were done throwing clothes in the washing machine or cleaning up the kitchen, there was no point even switching it on. If I ever got to bed with a book, I couldn’t seem to stay awake. It took me three years to write my manuscript and it was still less than 30,000 words. I wondered how late the finance guy worked? Six weeks of 120,000 words came to 20,000 words a week, or 2,857.14 words per day. Not so bad if you said it quickly.
But I wondered how many words per hour he wrote. And were all those words good ones?
Hothousing New Talent. Mentoring and Marketing. Furthering Your Manuscript. I chose all the sessions that sounded like they meant business. I wanted action, results. When the assessor confirmed our details for the program, eight of us, all expenses paid, she added a final comment in her email. More like a warning. Our manuscripts had been chosen for their potential, but the rest was up to us. Even if we were to secure a book deal at the end of the conference, we had to understand that afterwards we would be on our own. With a deadline. She recommended we approach agents on the first day. Potential alone would not be enough.
The agents were all very tall. Twice, I lined up to speak to them after sessions (Managing a Literary Career; Breaking through the Paper Ceiling) but even seated they towered over me. One of them had severe cheekbones and shorn white hair, under which her skull protruded. I could almost see her thinking how she would rather be back in her office overlooking the water while on the phone to New York finalising a deal for a client, a real author. Instead she was in this small town, which had doubled in size for the week of the conference, talking to people who thought that because they had been told they had potential they were something special. Waiting in line, I overheard her saying something dismissive about potential writers. Potential started to sound less like a quality with inherent power, and more of a handicap. Each time I walked away before reaching the end of the queue.
At the first session after breakfast, someone said, ‘You know the Annals woman is still in her room? She’s written a thousand words this morning!’
Oh, the Annals woman. So famous she did not require a name. Like a duke from Shakespearean drama, Norfolk or Gloucester, so powerful that she went by an abbreviation of her estate instead. The Annals of the Golden Children. Five or six books, all with two definite articles in their titles, just to make sure. A body of work almost legendary among fans even though she was still so young. Annals dressed like an extra in a fantasy film. She could have been Galadriel’s understudy. Everything about her was bountiful: flowing hair, long velvet skirts, the thousands of words. Before breakfast.
Another writer, a bearded vegan from the mountains, said to no one in particular, ‘Apparently Trollope wrote three thousand words every morning. Before going to work. And he didn’t even have a laptop!’ He slipped a banana from the breakfast buffet into the pocket of his coat, which had telltale leather patches at the elbows. He looked like a nib-pen kind of writer.
Annals had a silver laptop. It really did seem made of precious metal. On opening night, when the rest of us were laughing and drinking too much wine, she clutched her laptop close to her chest, talking with head bent to her editor. She departed early in a way that announced, I am going upstairs to write now; that is what writers do, while the rest of us quite obviously were not writing. Unless you counted the flirtatious text messages crisscrossing the room. Arts bureaucrats, literary professionals, let loose for a week together. Even I caught on to that.
And writers. A writers’ conference is full of them. Why such an obvious thing took so long to strike me, I didn’t know. There were books and people to sell them, but no readers. We were all writers. Dozens of people attending each session. Here to learn writerly things. I was so eager. A great sheet of blotting paper ready to soak up everything about the writing life. And yet all the writers, the ones with books on display, seemed a different species. Everything they told us was contradictory. Write no more than three drafts, otherwise you overdo it. At least ten drafts. Twenty. Write with your eyes shut and let the words flow. Don’t censor yourself. Learn how to self-edit. Don’t even try and edit yourself. Be ruthless. Cut, cut, cut. I began to suspect they were all telling lies. The thin nervous author and the mountains poet whispered over skinny soy lattes during the morning coffee break, though on stage they seemed to despise each other. Maybe they were conspiring to keep us potential authors out of the scene.
And for a writers’ conference there was some very sloppy language around. I studied the program posted up at the information desk. I couldn’t knock out thousands of words in a day but I did know my grammar. Why was everything a gerund?
‘A what?’ Another Potential Writer, next t
o me.
‘Writing the New Millennium. Professionalising everything. All these verbs without subjects. And nouns posing as verbs.’ She looked sideways at me and moved away.
Streamlining and Storytelling. Approaching Publication. Writing the New Millennium. That was the keynote session: only top-shelf authors participating, we privileged mentees up in the front row, part of our fabulous opportunity. The authors had hardcover editions and overseas agents and Commonwealth Prize shortlistings. The audience questions were vetted beforehand. I dared not offer mine. Writing about, writing in, even writing for the new millennium. But what was writing the new millennium? The missing preposition bothered me.
The top-shelf authors were all unsmiling males over sixty. They read from their books in wearied drawls, making comments about dead European writers I’d never read. They wrote historical novels, and somehow we all knew that did not mean Regency dramas or anything with a bodice on the cover. Everything they said was addressed to the corner of the room somewhere past our heads, as if there hovered a better quality audience, a more appreciative and deserving one. The writing life of the new millennium sounded like afternoon tea in the staffroom of a boys’ school. I left the session early. The millennium wasn’t even new any more.
Back in the bar I knocked back two cold beers before moving on to red wine. Behind me on the wall was one of the conference posters. After my second drink I took out a felt pen and added the word in between Writing and the.
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 only ate 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 pm–5.30 pm 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’s 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 any more to turn up for their book-signing sessions, whereas Code Six and Annals sat there signing and smiling every day. Their publicists slid 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’d 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 fo
lder of paper around. Writing the new millennium seemed a very private affair.
At dinner one night I was seated next to PB, an author from Los Angeles 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.
Letter to George Clooney Page 11