Amra Pajalic

A few developments over the past week. Since the 15 February I’ve been pushing myself to finish my draft by May to enter The Vogel novel competition (http://www.allenandunwin.com)which closes on the 30 May 2006. I’ve been faltering in the past two weeks for a few reasons:

1. Writing at such a breakneck pace (from the 15 February I’ve written 55,500 words-from 13,500 words to 69,000 words) is really, really tiring. I feel like I’ve been completely consumed by my novel and the real world almost ceased to exist.
2. My projected draft total was 80,000 words but when I reached the 69,000 word mark I realised it was going to be closer to 100,000 words, which meant I had a lot more work to do.
3. The quality of the draft would be embarrassing to enter into the competition.
4. We’re moving interstate in July and I need to incorporate the move plans into my life.

Ergo, I’ve made the decision to not enter this year. I still want to complete my draft before the move to Melbourne as I expect my life will be in upheaval for a few months and I won’t be writing so this would be time to reflect on my draft and gain some perspective to revise.

As a result of making this decision the urgency has faded and my motivation has faltered. Yesterday I was moaning about how I felt stale and was trying to come up with solutions to this. Since then I’ve realised that I just have to keep going with the novel. The mark of a true writer is to write even when you don’t feel like it until you feel like it again. So on Friday I’ll be getting back on that horsey.

I’ve also updated my blog formatting. I have been inspired by Stacy Holmes (http://stacyholmes.blogspot.com) who listed her publishing credits on her blog so I have ripped off-I mean incorporated her ideas. Thanks Stacy.

This has also fixed up this annoying formatting problem I had where the sidebar kept disappearing to the bottom of the page. I haven’t done this up until now because I kept thinking that I would list these on my website. But for now I’ll use this to promote myself in my own lame-arse fashion and hopefully by the end of the year I’ll knock up a website.

I started this blog with the primary aim of self-promotion and yet have had great difficulty putting myself and my achievements out there. It took me a year to put up my photo (I deleted six months worth of entries by accident a few months ago), then it took a while to write up a proper profile that lists my achievements, and now finally I’ve breached the last bastion and listed all my publication credits.

When I wrote an email to JA Konrath (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com) commenting on his blog and website I said that I think girls have greater difficulty promoting themselves. We’re so conditioned by society to be nice girls and wait for praise, that it’s difficult to put ourselves forward and this is my thing.

While I’m not a shy or retiring person somehow when it comes to promoting myself as a writer it’s almost like I feel that I have no right to that claim. I kept thinking that the more publishing credits I collected the easier it would become, but at the end of the day nothing was good enough. Sometimes you just have to make the decision and push yourself out of the comfort zone.

I keep writing emails to my friend and critiquing partner Jodi about the changes in my blog with the heading “Promoter or Wanker.” I guess that’s what I find the most off-putting. The whole thing of what’s bragging and what’s being matter of fact about your achievements. Hopefully I’m toeing the line and hitting the matter of fact tone. Anyone else had this problem?

A few weeks ago I was talking to my Mum and she said that a former friend from high school wanted my address and phone number. I didn’t believe my mother. You’d have to know my Mum to understand why. My Mum is a wog mother and this means that her language is carefully worded emotional blackmail.

I remember once my brother and I were going through a tense moment and I was visiting Melbourne, but my brother and I had made no plans to get-together. She called me and told me he wanted to see me. She told him I wanted to see him and presto. Like two dorks forced on a blind-date we met and the shit hit the fan. So that’s why when she starts her reunions, I get suspicious.

Her other trick is to tell all of us are her favourites. She’s been having individual conversations with each of for years where she tells us with great sincerity and conviction that we are her absolutely favourite child. We twigged onto this when I was eight and he was six and we had a huge fight. I yelled out that I was Mum’s favourite, he did the same. We had a punch up and Mum came. She told us both that she doesn’t love one more than the other, and then, when the other wasn’t around, had another little conversation and told us each that we were favourites.

Well I’ve decided I’m moving back to Melbourne and real estate prices and my income means that I’ve decided to move to the same suburb as my Mum. The suburb that I spent my whole childhood and teen years trying to get out of. Mum off course is estatic. The prodigal child, her favourite returns. As Sam Beckett in Quantam Leap says: “Oh Boy!”

I’m having one of those disappearing weeks. You know the type of week when you fall into a self-indulging funk and do shit-all. Mind you I can’t blame all this on self-indulgence. There was a migraine that helped this along.

It all started on Thursday when I hooked up with my mate Suze at a shopping centre for day of gabbing, shopping and watching a movie. Suze shares my passion for op-shopping. I’m one of those people who can fork out money for books, cd’s or dvd’s but finds it really hard to part with dough for clothes. Ergo, I shop second-hand and score fabulous bargains that enable me to spend more money on books, cd’s and dvd’s.

I especially love buying clothes for work second-hand. I’m a office chick and this is strictly a ‘have to pay the bills and eat’ gig so there’s no way in hell I’m forking out my hard earned dough on threads to impress a bunch of fuckwits. So as you can see in the pic below I bought three skirts and three jackets for $16.00. You heard me right. God I love a bargain.

The only downside was that I had to lug around the bag of at least 5kg worth of clothes for the rest of the afternoon. This lugging around brought along a migraine and a sore knee so I was laid up in bed on Friday doped out on painkillers. But that was ok. It meant that I was able to indulge in my two other passions.

Having spent only $16 on clothes meant I was able to indulge in buying my absolute all-time favourite TV show Quantum Leap. Does anyone remember this? If you don’t you can read it about it here (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096684/)

I watched it when I was in high school until the network idiots put it on late at night. I tried to stay up late and watch the show and fucked up my sleeping patterns for life. I still claim this was the reason my insomnia started. So when I saw the DVD packets as below

I just had to get it and with Mr Credit Card paying, I did it pronto. I’ve got season two and three with season one on order. In searching for the website to link to I just realised that there are actually five seasons. Oh My God. I’m not going to do anything else for the rest of the year. In three days I’ve watched 16 episodes and I’m going to keep going. I hardly watched any episodes in Season Three so they’re all fresh. God I love this show. It makes me laugh, and cry and feel-good all at once. Plus the whole premise of leaping into other people’s lives and being someone else is just a hoot.

The best episodes are when Scott Bakula leaps into a woman’s body. My favourite episode so far in Season Three is Miss Deep South where he leaps into a beauty queen. There’s nothing like seeing hairy chest sticking out a evening gown to make you giggle.

My other indulgence of the day was buying figs which I just finished today. There’s nothing like ripe figs. I love them. We had a fig tree but we’d hardly ever get any because the bloody birds ate them, so whenever I see figs for sale, I heed the call and buy a bucket.

I’ve just finished reading my friend Gabrielle’s novel Learning How to Stay (http://www.gabrielleluthy.blogspot.com). I am in awe of her writing talent and the beautiful book she’s crafted. It’s one of those books that you stop your life for because you just want to be in that world and then when you reach the last page, you feel like crying. Because you feel so uplifted and joyous for being taken out of your everyday and given something beautiful and precious, and it’s ended and now you have to go back to your life, when all you want is more of the beautiful world.

I’ve known Gabrielle for a while and she’s one of those quiet achievers. She’s quietly working on her writing and doesn’t feel the need to talk about it or justify her life and decisions. She takes the attitude it will take as long as it will take to finish a novel, because it’s not the end that is important to her but what she has to show for it.

I love reading and I always have to have a back up book, but there’s something indescribable about reading a novel by someone you know, who you’ve walked with down the road of aspiring authorship, and to see what she’s crafted gives me hope. I truly believe that her novel will be published and she will be getting the call soon and knowing that, makes me feel hopeful. Because if I take her example to heart and quietly achieve, who knows.

I feel so privileged that she let me read her novel. Thank you Gabrielle. Is the phone ringing yet?

Had a bit of an up and down week. Felt really tired as if I was getting ill again. I was taking iron tablets for a while and then stopped, so now I’m back to taking them. I don’t know if it’s the vitamins or the fact that I’ve forced myself to keep writing even though I felt ill, but today I felt much better.

I have to wonder whether my feeling ill is psycho sematic. The rule of thumb in a project is that the last 20% is the hardest and as I’m pretty much at that mark I think I might be putting blocks up to stop myself from finishing. Good old-fashioned fear and procrastination changing their hats yet again to try and fool me.

I’m sitting at 69,000 words with the current draft and have 77,000 words when I count in some scenes that I’ve drafted previously and that need to be incorporated into the action and there is still a lot of writing to be done. So as I suspected my draft word count is now 100,000 words.

My husband has started reading my work and has so far read the first three chapters. Most writers get nothing but glowing praise from their partners but I’ve trained my boy well and he’s a really good at critiquing. He’ll point out things missing i.e “I was sitting so close I could smell her shampoo.” His comment-What does it smell like? He’s also good at picking awkward writing. He’s pointed out that the Mum’s voice is too formal so I need to keep an eye on this, and has given me suggestions on props and character action, i.e. the grandfather should roll his own cigarettes.

So far he’s happy with what he’s read. I’ve given it to him raw, i.e. I haven’t proofed it myself. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin these days when it comes to getting my work read, but I was so nervous about him reading my novel that I felt butterflies in my stomach when he wanted to discuss it.

For now I’m motivated, fighting through my fear and can see the end in sight. I feel confident in making my deadline of completing the draft by the beginning of May so I can send it off for the Vogel deadline 30 May. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

This morning I was huddled against the wall next to the fridge, crying hysterically over the salad my crazy tabby spilled. He was trying to kill a bug, which I usually find incredibly cute, so he jumped on the kitchen counter and knocked over the plastic container that I’d made the salad for lunch today. But off course, I wasn’t really crying over the salad.

It all starts with yesterday. I had to attend a meeting at central office. The last time I had to attend one of these meetings I woke up, got ready and went to work, instead of going to the central office. So I had nightmares all weekend about going to work and missing the meeting.

I wake up 7.30 am and get to work at 8.00. So yesterday I was waiting for the 7.30 train when it occurred to me that the meeting wouldn’t start until 9.00 and taking into account the twenty minutes of travel time, I would potentially be waiting over an hour for the meeting to start. So I went back home and left for work again half an hour later.

Got to the meeting only to be told that it was re-scheduled to 10.00 am. Threw a major temper tantrum and stormed off, only to bump into my boss in front of the train station. Thank God I phrased my whinge in the form of a question instead of continuing my temper tantrum. Seems that the meeting was always set for 10.00 am but along the way we received a calendar invite for 9.00 and an agenda and email stating 10.00 am, which is why three of us showed up at 9.00 am.

Had coffee until the meeting and then endured a two hour meeting that explored such riveting topics as “I put the data in the spreadsheet like this, not like that.” Went back to work for the afternoon and at about 3.30 pm, packed it all in and left work early and went home to sleep.

I think I’ve already mentioned that I live on top of a butcher shop and so have to sleep with ear plugs. So yesterday I got home and went to sleep, unbeknown to me, locking the latch on the door and locking my husband out. It took him 25 minutes to wake me up. His last resort, throwing rocks against the window until I finally woke up.

Last night had another restless sleep. Is it just me, or does everyone has those late-night bad thoughts where all the things you manage to hide away from yourself during the light of day, burst forth and start choking you? Last night musings focussed on the pointlessness of my life if my novel wasn’t published.

So this morning when the crazy tabby knocked over my salad, it literally became the straw that broke the camel’s back and set me off an a 15 minute crying fit.

I feel so tired. Last week I worked really hard and wrote 17,000 words and am feeling the effort. I didn’t sleep much over the weekend and already started the week off tired. And now with the sulky’s, it’s shaping up to be a humdinger week.

Having a bit of a tough week. Still pushing ahead with my novel and have hit the 55,000 word mark. Motivation is not the problem, the doubts are. When I first started drafting this novel in August of last year I came up with all these sub-plots and character twists and turns. Every time a new idea developed or I drafted a scene and learnt something new about my characters, I felt a buzz.

This feeling of certainty, destiny and excitement propelled me to complete an 80,000 word working draft. Since the beginning of this year I’ve been actually plotting the novel. Organising the scenes I sketched into a chronology, writing filler scenes, figuring out what’s missing and trying to organise a narrative structure that gives the reader a pay off, while also leaving them thirsty for more.

Two days ago I suddenly hit a brick wall. There was nothing in particular that set it off, but I just suddenly felt blue. I felt doubtful about all the ideas I’d thought were great and the work that I did so far was crap. While I don’t think “What’s the point of continuing?” I do feel like I’ve had to battle uphill with this big stone of doubt holding me back.

I’ve been dwelling on it and I think I’ve got it down to two things:
1. The novel is progressing. It is getting close to the end mark and I’m almost at the last little push.
2. I had the idea for my second novel titled Azra’s Birth. This is a novel I wanted to write for a long time exploring the stories of the women in my family. The overarching theme is how the time you’re born in, will decide your life-choices.

Between these two things the fear is building. The closer I get to finishing means that I’m getting closer to submitting. I already have one abandoned novel in my bottom drawer that I tortured myself over for three years and then let Rest In Peace. And while this will not happen a second time, there is a certain seductiveness in the idea. By deciding myself that my novel is not good enough for publication I effectively knock it out of the running and save myself from further rejection. And off course now that I have the next project in mind, this novel is so boring, so passé and my new novel idea is so shiny and new that I want to dip right into it. It’s always easier to start a new project than it is to struggle through and finish an old one.

Keris (http://www.keris-stainton.com/)was writing about how she’s struggled with finishing a novel and I can relate. I’m now at the point where I’m trying to cut out all these scenes that I’ve already foreshadowed because I can’t be stuffed writing. I keep reminding myself that my first instincts have to count for something and that it’s easy to cut, but first I need to have everything there so I can make a judgement call on what’s necessary and what’s not.

But anyway enough whingeing. I’m getting back to it now. The day is still young and there’s a lot I can achieve.

Today is International Women’s Day. Celebrated each year on 8th March and is commemorated by the United Nations. It is a day where women across the world, come together to celebrate and look back on past achievements and hardships.

The first IWD was held in 1909 when a group of women textile workers in New York walked off the job when a number of their co-workers were sacked on suspicion of supporting unionisation.

The first IWD march in Australia took place in Sydney in 1928 with demands for an eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work, paid annual leave and a living wage for the unemployed. If you want more info go to this link which was provided by my cute hubby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day

In honour of this day I thought I’d bitch about my pet peeve about women. Women in relationships who adopt their partner’s passions and interests. I know many such women. One woman I work with spends her weekends embarking on road trips to various car swap meets so her husband can indulge in his little boy obsession with toys. I have a friend who adopted a passion for AFL footy and for the first two years of her relationship spent every weekend at the footy ground cheering on her boyfriend as he coached.

Three words: What the Fuck!! Life is too short for it to be wasted on such useless pursuits. It’s because of things like this that so many women walk away from a failed relationship bemoaning the years they wasted. It’s because they gave up their own desires and wishes and adopted those of their partners. They essentially became an extension of their man and when he left, they didn’t know who they were.

My Mum is one such woman and her example has encouraged me never to walk in such shoes. I don’t believe in the concept of a love that lasts forever or for the rest of your life. While I hope my love and my marriage last that long, I’m not banking on it. There are too many things that can and will go wrong. My goal in my relationship has been to be able to evaluate every year of my life and answer one question in the affirmative: “Have I achieved my personal goals?” Every year of the nine years of my marriage the answer has been a resounding yes.

We talk about how much women have achieved toward equality, but we still have a lot of catching up to do. Women are socially programmed to be giving and selfless, to put other people’s needs first (their husband, their children, their employer, their parents), and not consider ourselves. Some people explain this as a woman’s nature. What bullshit!!! It’s social programming.

Women are supposed to be sugar and spice and all the things nice. We’re not supposed to be able to list our own achievements, we have to wait for others to praise us. I say-fuck that. Take back your power. Look at your life and find the ways in which you compromise your autonomy and desires, and put a stop to it.

I know it’s hard. We have women like Nicole Kidman, powerful, beautiful, successful women who talk about how when love comes along she’ll walk away from her career and cut back on movie-making. WTF!!! This tells you she’s not a fulfilled individual and doesn’t have a well-rounded life. She should not be waiting for some fucking man to give her life meaning, she needs to give her life meaning.

So draw that line in the sand and don’t cross it. If your partner doesn’t have a buddy to go to footy games with, tell him to grow up. His problem. Learn to speak about what you like and don’t like. And if they don’t listen, then shout. And if they still don’t listen, bonk them with a saucepan.

My husband goes alone to the footy cause he has no buddies. Once when I very insincerely offered to go with him, his response was: “I couldn’t inflict that on you.” The reason he said this is because I am very vocal about what I like and what I don’t like. I don’t play the martyr and indulge his passions and waste my life away. And because he loves me and he knows how I feel, he cannot put me through that kind of torture.

So stop doing the sugar and spice routine, and speak up. So many women in the world cannot take advantage of the opportunities to autonomy the way we in the Western World do. So stop fucking wasting them.

Rant over.

I’m cat lover. I’ve got two boys, a tabby and a black medium hair moggy. I got Trotsky, my medium hair boy first. He’s kind of the way my ideal cat looks like: chubby, fat-headed and fluffy.

This morning he used the kitty litter and did a number two. I was pulling him away so my husband could clean it and ended up with cat poo on my hand. Things people don’t tell you about fluffy cats-poo catches on their fluffy, furry butts.

The chase was on. My mission: try catching a cat with a pooey butt before he sits down on furniture and expands my cleaning area. His mission: avoid the bathroom and butt cleaning with every hair of his fluffy body.

Thankfully I snuck up on the bastard while he was stalking Roscoe and to the bathroom we went. My husband and I divided the labour. As we each concentrated on our cat ends: me holding, him butt cleaning, our faces were identical in their wrinkled prune looks.

So if you’re getting cat, be warned. Tabby’s are crazy cats, but at least they don’t get poo caught on them. Fluffy cats are cute but the cuteness factor disappears when the smell of poo envelopes them.