Amra Pajalic

On Tuesday 19 June I turned 30. I had to work so the day wasn’t really special. But throughout the day I had these butterflies in my stomach as I realised what this meant.

In entering my third decade I’m embarking on the adult phase of my life. I’ve got a mortgage, I’m planning to have kids. I see this whole different life stretching out in front of me.

It’s not that I’m freaked out by it, just more aware of the changes that it portends and the way it will be different to what’s happened up until now.

The only thing that’s made it bearable is that people still think I’m 25. Yes, I’m vain and it gets me through sometimes. To think that I spent my early twenties desperate to get older. When you’re 19 years old and married people assume you’re a fuckwit who doesn’t know how to use birth control and start mentally planning your marital decline.

Now I’m content and I’ll also stop counting my age.

I don’t have a good answer. I’ve started hooking up with friends who are writers once a month in order to motivate ourselves. After the meeting I felt all energised and was raring to go. Had lists of submissions, goals, stories I would write. Then I got my period and it was horendous. All my good intentions went out the window. Now I don’t feel the desire to do much of anything, except relax. All my drive and determination has deserted me.

Part of the reason is that it’s the heart of winter in Melbourne. It’s the sort of weather that makes you want to hibernate. You just want to curl up and watch the world go by, which is pretty much what I’m doing. Usually when I go through these down periods I come back even stronger and more determined than before. But there is also the other side which is the more you do nothing, the more you feel like doing nothing.

Add to that the story I started to write is going cold and dead while I bemoan not feeling like writing, while finding the time to write a blog post. Yeah, procrastionation and excuses, a writer’s toolbox.

Read Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper which has been on my to read list for the longest time. It was fabulous. Up til now I’ve found her books sensationalist and have read despite myself. I start out not liking the characters but Picoult’s skill at building tension propel me along and then at the end I feel left short, this was especially apparent in The Tenth Circle. I felt so ripped off. Perfect Match was a bit better, but My Sister’s Keeper was sublime.

As usual she’d set up a very controversial debate that was played out with the characters. Through the story you get to empathise with all points of view, but then she took the ending in a whole new angle and I loved it. The best fiction for me is when it takes you to the unexpected, somewhere you could not imagine you would end up when you started the novel.

I’ve also bought Season One and Two of Boston Legal which forms a pretty strong reason for not writing this weekend. I’m watching the show back to back and it is soooo goood. Alan Shore is so good he’s bad, or is he so bad he’s good? You’re never quite sure. Then there are the political messages that David E. Kelly adeptly plays out through the court room, while also entertaining the shit out of you with the almost slap-stick hilarity. But the best part is all the amazing one-liners, the great speeches and dialogue that rachets the tension, makes you feel, then makes you want to cry. It’s amazing.

Well I’m hoping tomorrow I’ll wake up and feel like doing something. We’ve had problems with our kitchen sink for quite a few months and the kitchen has been an absolute mess. This is something we’ve had to depend on others to help us with, which meant waiting on their schedule. It’s been very frustrating and in a sense I’ve had to use escapism to get through it. It’s like the elephant in the room you can’t put out of your mind, but you can’t talk about either. Hopefully once this is finished and I put my house in order, I can then metaphorically put my writing house in order too. Fingers crossed it works.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for the longest time. I met Keri through a romance writing group we were both members of. This was when I thought I wanted to be a romance writer. I learnt so much about myself about a writer, most importantly that I don’t do romance well, and made some great writing friends that I’m still in touch with.

It took me a while to get around to it because it was only recently released in Australia and it was an amazing read. Keri has managed to find a whole new spin to the paranormal genre featuring vampire/werewolf characters. The story has an undercurrent of sensuality and eroticism that is unselfconscious.

Full Moon Rising was a page-turner and I loved Riley and her world. Can’t wait to dip more into this universe and thankfully Keri is such a prolific writer that there are four more Riley books waiting for me to jump into. Best of all Full Moon Rising is set in Melbourne and this fact made this book even closer to my heart.

Keri also has a lot to teach aspiring novelists, myself included, and I wanted to share some of this.

Keri originally wrote for a small press publisher Imajin. She was a prolific writer who made me go green with envy in every writing meeting because there wasn’t a meeting I attended where she didn’t write over the 10,000 word mark.

This is where I make a terrible confession and hopefully rebound it into a retraction that will save me. So Keri was writing all these books for this small press and not getting much financial gain and I judged that this perhaps wasn’t the best use of her time. I even confess to saying I’d rather not be published than to publish books and not make money on them. Well the egg is on my face.

Keri kept writing, kept getting published, treated her writing as a professional career, learnt to self-promote, learnt to network and grew as a writer. A few years ago she got a three book deal with Bantam and her international career is launched.

I read one of her books published by Imajin and I can see the growth as a writer. She was always writing in the paranormal genre, but her world building has really expanded. I can see how she was developing her voice and Full Moon Rising is based on the backbone of being Riley’s point of view and in first person.

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine about what is the definition of professional writing. My friend and I did a writing course that was premised on promoting yourself as a ‘professional’ writer, and of course to be a professional writer you must be paid, otherwise you’re just an amateur, right?

We attended a workshop by Cate Kennedy, an Australian short story writer I admire. Cate was talking about her writing publications and how she was invited to submit her work in anthologies and avenues where she was not paid for her work, but the exposure she gained from this meant even greater opportunities and some of these stories then ended up being published in publications that did pay.

And this is what Keri also did. To her it wasn’t about what she could get from the publishing of her books financially, but what she could gain personally. With patience and persistence she has now gained amazing financial rewards. But that was not her first goal. Her first goal was to write for the love of it, her second goal was to write for the love of writing, and her third goal was to publish that writing in whatever forum was available to her.

Reading Keri’s book and being aware of her journey gives me so much hope. It perfectly illustrates that you should write what you love and damn everything else. She was writing paranormal romance novels before they became the trend because it was what she wanted to write and look at her now.