Wish you were here

Dear [your name here],

As you can see from the front of this card, [placename] is a veritable Topsy Turvey world compared to home. Yesterday I sang with an elephant and strummed a lute; today I ate crickets with Conan Doyle and rowed a river of thickened cream to a walnut grove populated by dancing thornbills. You'd love it here. The air is clear and warm most days and there is a pool outside my room that burbles constantly, permeating my sleep and aquifying my dreams. Tomorrow I hope to climb a mountain to attend a festival of fabricated gods. I'll have to rise early, so I really must finish.

Hope you're well and happy. I'm thinking of you,
Alida

Wish you were here #2

WIP

You won't believe what I've been working on. I wrote this last week, and even now it makes me cringe. But I thought you'd be ... well, horrified, actually, and cry bitter tears of commiseration with me:

"In the new musical, RAIN, Australia’s most powerful women go on strike to protest climate change. ‘Not tonight,’ they advise. ‘We have a headache.’ But – wouldn’t you know it? – the high-profile partnerships of Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Therese Rein remain unfazed by the putting-out drought, and storms start brewing… This cheeky, irreverent political satire is bound to ruffle more feathers than the ETS. Get your giggles before the next leadership spill!"

Link text? Why, I'm glad you asked. It was: Bring your brolly. Take that, usability advocates and people actually using screen readers! Good freaking luck. In case you're wondering, the ruffled feathers were entirely mine. Putting-out drought? Where do I get this stuff?

I also wrote the sentence, "From king fish wings to octopus dumplings, Tomodachi will take your tastebuds on a tantalising journey through Japanese cuisine" which, clearly, exemplifies my broader copywriting philosophy: if in doubt, employ alliteration and rhythm until your readers' eyes water.

Slightly frustrating

Slightly frustrating things about my contract workplace include:

• Nescafe Blend 43
• all the fucking people on the streets at lunch time for Christ's sakes
  
• Windows
• absolutely no web mail; Twitter and Facebook, however, deemed not to pose a problem
  
• Windows
• the world's weirdest document management system
• being able to get shirty because someone asks you to do something that is not actually writing, such as sourcing content or chasing up inputs from colleagues
  
• Windows, people, Windows
• no thesaurus

That last one's a bit weird and may take some swift remedying.

Word re-engineering and the subconscious

When overstimulated or under pressure, my subconscious has an embarrassing habit of re-engineering words. I'm not talking about typos. I'm talking full-scale augmentations and automatic amendments that convey a similar (or opposite) meanings, using phonetically or conceptually complementary terms. The more pressure there is, the more re-engineering takes place.

Example: last week, when trying to type the word question in the midst of prose, I produced the previously (and thankfully) unheard of whatstion.

"Well," I thought. "That certainly came out of nowhere" (which, incidentally, I just typed as knowhere. Jesus H. Christ.). Here are some others that have recently surfaced:

• denomalies
• outercontinental
• delucidate
• neveryday
• dischordinary

If you ask me, the ordinary is most commonly dischordinary. If words are our means for making sense of the world, then the likes of neveryday and dischordinary speak volumes. And denomalies says something -- something extremely damning -- about fluctuating exchange rates and my invoices.

Incidentalities

Sometimes, while researching the number 20,000 or Beatles songs co-written by McCartney and Lennon, or contemporary art fairs, as one does for, you know, work, one comes across some rare gem that requires pencils to be put down, pauses to be taken, thoughts to be stilled.

Today it was this short quote from a doomed man, a wash-up, a broken, beaten, down-hearted traveller at the end of an epic journey whose finish had not been heralded by fanfare, nor accolades. He'd tried to write the tale of his adventure many times over, but failed, saying:

"I wrote it sweet enough but it came up sour."

Perhaps these words struck me purely because this week I came up against so many creative dead ends, points at which I knew my heart wasn't sweet or buoyant or optimistic enough to give the delightful edge required to the copy I was writing. It's not the first time. Like George Beck, I've tried over and over to write a story as beautiful as the things I've seen, and though I have the words and the images, it keeps coming up sour.

Some authors say they write in order to know what they think, but sometimes it seems more sensible to keep those secret thoughts hidden. Sometimes it's better to think what we wish to, rather than to know, for certain, what the insides of our minds are like.

The content machine

It feels a bit like I've become the content machine. At any point at which my hands are not otherwise busy -- driving, cooking, lighting the fire, plucking a cockerel -- they are typing.

The cause of this status is a new, short, contract. It starts tomorrow, and will take up my every working hour. The remaining waking hours will be spent producing content for the charming individuals for whom I usually produce content. Sometimes, I may sleep. But there will be no time for anything else.

I will be the content machine, slamming out the text, auto-spell-checking, ALT-TABbing to my dictionary, reaching for Fowler's like some kind of obsessive automaton. Like something Huxley or Burgess would have dreamed up. Like a person composed entirely of letters -- ells for limbs, a capital H for the torso, a big fat O for a head. Little ps for feet and full stops for my joints.

You can see where this is heading. I'm losing it already. In eight weeks' time I'll be little more than a puddle of parentheses and paper cuts. But, blood-bespeckled fingers crossed, it'll be worth it.

An inauspicious commencement

Have you read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall?

I've had it on the list for a while, but I got distracted with other things. Then, on the weekend, I thought I'd give it a try. It was a sunny morning. The birds were atwitter and I had coffee, so the book-starting signs were all good.

I don't know what happened, but two pages in I was crying. Sobbing, really. Maybe it was three pages. I had to close the thing before I got to the page number. But it was no more than three.

Everyone's talking Toy Story Three tear counts at the moment. No one who's read Wolf Hall has mentioned anything to me about the start, about page 2, about the crying. I avoid reviews, but I haven't heard anyone mention that, you know, The Age's review of it was muddied with bitter tears or anything. God alone knows how the Man Booker people got to the end of it with enough presence of mind to give it the award.

Anyway. When I get the guts to try it again, I'll let you know if I get beyond page 3. In the meantime, if you've read it, and can warn me of any further bawling-sessions-in-waiting, that would be appreciated.