A special anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of my exit from the banker's life. Wow.

My first class!

I had the first night of my Writers' Studio Unlocking Creativity class last night. It felt great to be starting finally, to be aiming towards something I love and want to do. There are about 15 people in the class, of whom a handful seem serious. I have this fierce, almost overwhelming, need to be the best in the class. We have daily writing exercises of some 300 words or so, in which we are told to "keep the pen moving and capture first thoughts". Don't let the internal critic silence the tentative creative voice. The first writing exercise is on the theme of "I remember", and I decide to base it on one of the characters (perhaps) from my novel, Sister Mary O'Grady:

I remember when Mother Antonia told me she had a calling to go to Australia and asked, "Do you want to come? It would be a glorious work of God and of service". I had not the faintest understanding of what she was asking. I was just nineteen, and had taken the veil only a year before. And before that, years of looking after my three younger brothers and baby Lucy, years of pots and ovens, brooms and diapers. My only respite was Sacred Heart convent school.

So I think I chose to become a nun because it was an escape from doing the same pots and diapers all over again, except this time for a man who would want other things as well - things of which I only had the vaguest understanding but which made me feel quite nauseated nonetheless. And of course I believed in God, of course I did. But I didn’t have a very good understanding of Him.

I believe in God still, but after 38 years in the Kimberly, where there is every manner of person, I know that belief can be as searing as the desert sun, but also as changeable as the tide. God is not what He seemed to be when I was nineteen. Mother Antonia was such a crafty old thing, God rest her soul, firing me up with so much pride and fervour so that I agreed to come and do God’s work in Australia, when I utterly failed to understand even the most simple thing about it.

Waiting for the gates to open

Late February and most of March, I do very little on the writing front. I try to settle into my new life in Sydney, and make the last of the summer weather. I am concious of an active avoidance of my writing, though I make some efforts to write in my journal (which seems to be a nonstop lament about my insecurities and my rather grim sex and love life). I also send amusing amusing little email updates to my friends and family around the world (which are the subject of my manabouttheworld blog).

I attend a course at the University of Sydney on what publishers are looking for in travel writers. God, there are a lot of keen people here. I hate them. They network with a rapacity during the break, smarm up to the teachers and the publishers. I can't stand it. So during the break I go outside into the autumn sunshine and phone my friends. One of the panelists remarks that if you make more than $50,000 (presumably Australian, and that doesn't improve the financial picture) as a travel writer, you are doing well. Yikes. It ain't good.