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Seven years ago I was attending a writers workshop in Cape Town, South Africa along with a group of other mostly women, each one hoping to write that novel we all have secreted inside of us.

I had been working on mine for years, my concentration and enthusiasm for it having been recurrently interrupted by two pregnancies, births, newborns and toddlers, a semigration from Johannesburg to Cape Town and work commitments on diversity literacy which was bringing in some much needed nappy money.

But this time I was Serious. It was Now or Never. I wanted To Finish. The problem is, as so many of us find, that Finishing is a very different business to Beginning. It has a particularly exacting energy and requires very different emotional and writing muscles. Whereas beginnings can tolerate the chaos of inspiration and the various explosions of insight that propel all of us to write in the first place, finishing is about tidying up afterwards. It’s the clearing away of the dirty plates, and the scrubbing down of the floors. It is the neatening of loose ends and the dusting down of surfaces.


The problem is I am a horrible, simple ghastly housekeeper and have no attention span for the activity of completion much as I lose interest in tidying up when I am half-way through a drawer or cupboard surrounded by things I can’t begin to work out where to put or file or even to figure out if I ought to be throwing them out. Finishing requires us to put on those gumboats and wade into the swamp of our creativity. It requires a big black garbage bag. It asks of us ruthless decision-making. The cutting away of extraneous bits, the folding down of corners and the smoothing down of edges. Finishing is the art of narrative origami, with a couple of bloody swipes with a samurai sword.


If Beginning is the Interior designer, Finishing is the housekeeper. Beginnings are for artists, Finishing is for accountants. To be a successful writer, we have to be able to do both. Writing is a discipline as much as it is a flamboyance.

But at that particular juncture, I was committed to this task of Finishing. Though my book had become feral, and had grown from a few pages on a screen to about seven files, with I-can’t-remember-how-many-ver sions-or-which-one-I-last-wor ked-on, and three boxes of research, I knew that I just had to wade in and work it out. Tax accountants do it all the time – work their way through papers, one by one (or bird by bird, to quote Anne Lamott) and make some order out of it all.

I was well aware that I was going to need some motivation to carry me through this ordeal.

What I lacked, I think, was the confidence that this part (the really hard part) was worth it. That far from it being a futile hobby, like trainspotting or bird-watching, there was some point to it all, some uber-rationale. That maybe what I had written, was worth the effort and um… (to be whispered) someone might actually read what I’d written.

Most writers suffer at some point from this crushing lack of self-confidence. Ironically it often kicks it at a point in time when we are just about to achieve something, to make a breakthrough, turn a corner, manifest a transformation. We often don’t recognize the guerilla tactics of our own self-sabotaging psyches.

So in the spirit of mentoring my uncertain self, I made small cards with the words ‘I AM A WRITER’ on them. I laminated them. I handed them out to all the participants in that writing workshop. And at the back of the card, I wrote ‘Don’t forget the book and the magic it carries. You can do it.’



With blutak I pinned this card up on my computer screen. Each day when I sat down to write, those words looked down on me.

There are a gazillion books out there which talk about the power of affirmation, (The Secret being just one of these). An affirmation is an assertion, a verbal visualization, a pronouncement about a state of affairs. When we aver in the present tense something we really wish for in the future, so the theory goes, we create our reality. The power of the declaration makes it so.

I have no way of measuring the power of that card on the course my life took, which did in fact, bring me to a point in my life where I have three published books and am working on my fourth. I no longer cringe when I say, ‘I am a writer.’ It is true now. But it wasn’t when I first wrote that affirmation.

I guess if there was magic in those words they cast their spell. If there was invocation in their presence, they summonsed unknown powers.


Some of the women in that workshop contacted me years later to tell me they kept that card up in their studies, on their computer screens and in their diaries. Some have emailed me to say that the card serves to remind them of their writerly mission, that their book awaits them.

I don’t know enough about the sacred hidden geometries of intention and how they interact with and exert forces over a seemingly random destiny. But I’m going to put this affirmation thing to the test once more. I’m putting up ‘I am a millionaire’ on a little card on my computer screen. Stay posted. Maybe this is all much simpler than we imagine.

www.joannefedler.com
Things Without A Name book trailer
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Why I hate Mother's Day

May 12th 2008 23:38


I think mothers are bloody heroes. Each and every one. Those with or without post-natal depression. Those who find motherhood easy-as-pie and those who claw their way through each day. On a day like Mothers Day, I think of mothers – bless them all, the long and the short and the tall.

I am all for a celebration of the mostly thankless litany of chores that mothers do for others day in and day out. A day off. A day where mothers are both seen and cheered. When we take off our aprons, come out of the kitchens and have our breakfasts cooked, served and blessedly CLEANED up by other people.

But there is a massive flaw design in Mother’s Day. Sufficient, I reckon to justify a complete recall. It revolves around the disastrous indulgence in expectation, reminiscent of the devastating disappointment New Years’ Eve often turns into.

I love the enthusiasm for the concept of Mother’s Day. But invariably things go pear-shaped very early on. By way of illustration: on Saturday, I discovered I had been given a lovely pre-Mother’s Day gift by my kids. It began with the scratchy feeling on my scalp. Upon inspection, I discovered I have lice. When I checked my children’s hair, they had it too. I must have contracted this when lying head-to-head with my son this past week in bed, reading him bedtime stories. I spent the first half of my Mother’s Day weekend KP 24-ed up to my eyeballs. I shaved my son’s head. I spent an hour combing through my daughter’s hair and another hour through my own. I did seven loads of laundry. By the time Mother’s Day got here, I was a little over it.

I was woken on Sunday morning at 6am. Is this one too hard to work out - that it is sleep mothers crave more than a Myers gift voucher or bunch of overpriced roses? My daughter had gone to so much trouble to make me the most spectacular Mother’s Day card. But this in turn gave my son performance anxiety so he started to cry before he even handed his over. ‘I’m sorry my card isn’t as good as hers… mine sucks.’ So there I was, managing sibling rivalry at 6.10 on a Sunday morning when all I wanted was a little more dream time.

Thankfully I was spared breakfast in bed. I realize this sounds crass, but I have never fancied forcing down an early breakfast made by hands that have more than likely forgotten to wash after flushing. It may be the thought that counts, but think of the germs…

I was lavished with some very thoughtfully chosen GO-LO gifts purchased by my kids at the Mother’s Day stall at school. I was just grateful my children didn’t repurchase the gifts I had sent in (which did happen a couple of years ago). For those who don’t know how the system works, each child brings in a present to contribute to the stall, and then $5 to buy a present. It ultimately works out so that you, the mother pays $10 for your own Mother’s Day gift which you could have purchased for $2 had you really really wanted a mug that says YUMMY MUMMY and some floating candles in the shape of frangi panis.

My husband went to get coffees and a newspaper from the village, and returned with free NRL cards for my son, which put my daughter in a ‘what-about-me?’ mood which lasted throughout breakfast. Breakfast, by the way, which was supposed to be a HUGE treat, took 45 minutes to come, given how full our favourite café was with other mothers straining to smile through their Mother’s Day breakfast. I sank into a gloom through my son’s ‘I’m-so-hungry-I’m-gonna-die’ wingeing. And my daughter kept up her huff and even started to do that sulky thing pre-teen daughters are wont to do when mothers ‘just don’t get it.’ I’m sure if we’d just stayed home and had Weetbix everyone would have had a much better morning.

To be honest, I don’t get it. I don’t get what goes wrong on Mothers’ Day. I don’t need expensive gifts or to be lavished with too much attention or be told I am the World’s Best Mother when the contents of my children’s lunchboxes is clear evidence to the contrary.

Some ideas for how to give your mother a spectacular mothers’ day:
1. let her sleep in
2. run her a bath
3. feed the cats
4. do the laundry
5. unload the dishwasher
6. get takeouts
7. no fighting
8. no fussing
9. no whingeing
10. A moratorium – for twelve hours of sunlight - on mother chores.

I think the problem is that on Mother’s Day I just want to feel like something other than a mother.

I am not the Grinch who stole Mothers’ Day. I think I am just the grump that was woken up too early.





www.joannefedler.com
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This is the truth of the matter. Size DOES count.

There is only one kind of man it is worth loving, shagging and shacking up with if you’re inclining towards the ‘til-death-do-us-part’ arrangement. And that is a man with a very very very big brain.

When it comes to men, the bigger the brain, the better. I have never understood why nerds get such a raw deal. The bigger the brains and the smaller the egos, the sexier the man. Ok, I am biased. My husband is one of those men. I once heard him described by a third party as someone with a brain that could cut diamonds. He’s got the added sex appeal of a wicked sense of humour.

See, all this cleverness makes him competent in a range of areas. He once dismantled a new washing machine that couldn’t fit through the very narrow doorway of our laundry room. Then he proceeded to reassemble it. I couldn’t watch. But he did it. I wanted to ravish him on the spot.

He never ceases to surprise me.

So this weekend, with the release of my new book just a matter of weeks away, he promised me a book trailer.

‘But you’re a lawyer, Zed, how are you going to make a book trailer?’ I enquired. He just smiled.

And with a hand-held video camera, and a computer programme and a click here and there, and a friend of ours who generously allowed us to use his music, my husband of the Very Big Brain produced this book trailer for Things Without A Name.

Things Without A Name trailer

Girls, please, take it from me. You will never get tired of a man who can make a book trailer for you.

www.joannefedler.com
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My eight year old son is very pleased with his penis. Is this a boy thing? This unbridled joy (which apparently must be shared with others) at this anatomical ownership. I personally for one, have never felt the need to brag about my vagina. Yet I find I am most pleased with it.

When I was a kid I thought it would be fantastic if I could see into other peoples’ minds and read their thoughts. I especially wanted this power so I could find out if Jonathan Fisher even knew I existed


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I watched Pulp Fiction again on Saturday night to drown out the squealing, high-heeled party our twenty-something neighbours were having upstairs. (The revelry of childless professionals is a thing of rare narcissism.) Tarantino’s gruesome genius with all that thumping gunfire and mother****ing expletives thankfully got me to midnight without the indignity of having to bang on their door in a wild huff and my PJ’s confirming that I am, very much ‘out of it.’

Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction

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Geez, I've been a grouch the last few days. The Troy Buswell thing got me started off on the wrong foot this week, and then there was that brain-wave I had about doing 1000 stairs to tighten the glutes - nothing like a pain in the arse to keep you pissed off with everyone. I knew I was in trouble when this morning, while I was dragging my aching butt cheeks off for a walk along the Coogee walkway, and was waved away by a camera crew because I was getting in the way, I found myself growling, 'Oh of course, I wouldn't want to disturb your **FILMING**' and I flapped my hands in the air like shimmery lights. I'm never that much of a gratuitous bitch.

But then I found this. And despite how sore it is to sit, this brought such a smile to my face. Honestly, sometimes there is something so unassailably sweet, that it could melt the heart of the most mean-spirited of us. I challenge you not to find this utterly adorable


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If ever there was a reason to vote Labour over Liberal, Troy Buswell is it.

Question: how does a man who ‘sniffs the chair of a female Liberal Party staff member’ (irrespective of whether this gesture was driven by perversion, or that testosterone-fuelled-showing- off-thing some men do in front of other men to get a laugh, or because, he sniffed before he thought about how this might look to the general public, more than half of whom are women) get to stay on as Liberal leader in Western Australia


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Remember the movie Pay it Forward with Kevin Spacey? The premise was that instead of paying someone back, you do something wonderful for someone and in return, you ask them to do something for someone else, and so on and so on until we’ve changed the DNA of the planet and there are no more wars, terrorism, greed and general degenerative human behaviour.

I try to live my life this way as much as I can even when it seems counter-intuitive and quite apparent that some people think it is stupid to do something when there’s nothing in it for them. I am a big believer in karma. And quite selfishly, there is an adrenalin-rush one gets from random acts of kindness that selfish behaviour just doesn't generate. I remind myself to make chicken soup for the sick, or help someone move furniture when I am feeling sorry for myself and need to step out of the pigpen of my own self-pity. Bizarrely I always feel better when I stop focusing on my own crap and try to help someone with theirs


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Those of us who write fiction are inclined to stuff our fingers in our ears and go ‘lalalalala’ when we’re told that ‘fiction doesn’t sell.’ Given how much fiction I read personally, and that I have to make do without a market research team at my beck and call, I have to rely on those who know better for my data on this matter. It is also abhorrently difficult to hear this when I know, as I know the texture of my children’s skin, that part of the reason I am here, is to write stories.

It took me ten years on and off to write my first novel, The Dreamcloth which sold a staggering 1800 copies in South Africa. My publisher there was ‘very pleased’ with the sales. I worked out that for every year of writing, I got 180 readers. Which works out to about 0.49 readers for every day of those ten years. Really, it was just as well I didn’t give up my day job back then


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A few months ago I posted the sad saga of how a group of dedicated actors, directors, producers, sound specialists, editors and cameramen spent a day in the rain to produce a short film over 24 hours for the Coogee Film Festival, Stinkwater 24. And that we missed the deadline by about half an hour.

Finally, we've managed to download the movie I wrote, Manifestation to youtube, and here it is for those who have nothing better to do for five minutes


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