Spite Drafts and Christmas Stories

It’s been a wild ride since I last posted. Wedding ceremonies, scripts, illness and everything in between, but through it all I’ve been immersed in stories – the ones in my head, the ones I watch and read, and the ones I see unfolding in front of me in everyday life. In the madness of life, making things is the only thing that makes sense.

From the end of August, it was full steam ahead, first preparing for, then delivering a busy wedding season. I only do four or five a year – that’s enough for me for now with everything else - and this year they were all in the same six-week window. And we had a funeral too - we lost a dearly loved family member, a patriarch whose life was lived as an example of love in action and whose legacy is a family of beautiful humans.

It was a season of everything everywhere all at once – life, death, joy, grief. I fell apart for a little while.  I don’t know if I will ever be able to process it enough to articulate it well, so for now I’ll let it rest in my mind and heart.

And of course, we had the Christmas show! Each year for the past three years, I’ve appeared on stage with my dear friend and show-maker/writer/performer Tracy Crisp to present an original, funny, daggy, sweet show all about Christmas in Adelaide. It’s called Tracy Crisp’s Annual, One-night-only, World Famous, Live Christmas Letter Reading.

Last year, we ended up with a waiting list for tickets, so this year the show went to two nights, and two packed houses! I love doing the Christmas show and working with Tracy. As well as our friendship, we work well together. We’ve got into a working rhythm and format that means we put the show together over the course of a few meetings. We then write furiously to get our individual parts done – Tracy, her Christmas letter, together, our song that everyone joins in with, and me, my Christmas story.

Nothing makes you write like a deadline. Sometimes you just need to get past yourself and how you feel, and get the words on the page. The past two years I’d done something fictitious, but this year I dug into my own past. I told how moving to Adelaide when I was fourteen in the mid 1970s had bought me a few more years to be a kid. It reminded me how our stories live in our bones, and why it’s important for me to tell those stories. When we write our own narrative, when we take charge of the past events of our life, it lets us believe that even though we’re subject to the tides and eddies of personal and social circumstances, we still have agency. We still get to decide what those events meant, and how they worked to create the person we are today. We can decide whether it has strengthened or weakened us. We can decide that we are the captains of our fate.

Christmas 1974 - my new bike!

“There’s a photo of me on Christmas Day, 1974. Thirteen years old, three months into Australia. I’m grinning from ear to ear, perched on my brand-new bike, a paper Christmas cracker crown on my head. I’m wearing my Glasgow school disco dress – short hem, American tan tights, and platform shoes.

When I bought it, that outfit was meant to make me look older. Now I just looked like a thrilled kid - mid-transformation. The time machine was rewinding.

That photo was the moment I started becoming a child again, for just a little while longer.”

You would think that writing for the wedding ceremonies and the show took up all of my writing energies over the past few months. Well, not quite.

When it comes to my book, I’m still trying to find a publishing home for Tree Bird Fish Bell. I did a live pitching event in early November. I prepared for that event for weeks, writing and re-writing my pitch, and by the time the day came around, and with everything else happening all around me, I was running on adrenaline and stubbornness. I was not about to lapse now!

My nerves were at 11 on the dial. I had four pitches to do at round tables, where we would take turns with other writers. The first publisher I pitched to gave me some gold feedback on my spiel, and on my second table, I used it and connected with a publisher that I really felt an affinity with – they asked great questions, and I really felt they understood where I’m coming from with Tree Bird Fish Bell. So, you can imagine how pleased I was when, a week later, they contacted me to request my first three chapters and synopsis.

I know it’s a slow process, and I’m now getting used to the waiting game that is pitching your novel, so I’m making myself patient by attending to a couple of projects that I have in progress.

Actually, scrub that. I have to be honest. Patience schmatience.

What really happened was that directly after the pitching event, I was overwhelmed by how important it is for Australian publishers that there is a good amount of Australian content in the stories they select (understandable). I did feel a bit dejected and defensive, because my book is set in Glasgow. So, while some people drink wine when they get a whiff of rejection, I came home and furiously spite-drafted an entirely new novel set in South Australia. I’m letting that steep and simmer for a while, while I work on yet another book whose characters have been living in my head for some years. Both are starting to take shape.

And so, we come to the days in the run-up to Christmas.

This part of the year is usually like a fever dream anyway, as my full-time job winds down and wraps up for the end of the year. This year I’m getting the real-life fever dream - my gorgeous wee granddaughter decided to share her childcare germs with me, and I now approach Christmas with a fuzzy head, trembly legs and a throat like a cheese grater. But even though my body is toast, my brain is still simmering with stories.

I’m catching up on the deliciously awful Christmas movies and, of course, my yearly viewing of all six episodes of A Moody Christmas. That show is like a moving Renaissance painting. No matter what the main characters are saying, there are always lovely little vignettes of action happening in the background, so I see something different each time I watch.

It will be a new year soon, a particularly poignant time for Scots away from Scotland. In a lovely place like Australia, only ex-pat Scots can really empathise with each other over the amount of family history, hilarity, and dysfunction that comes flooding back around that time of year. Suffice to say that the world consists of two types of people: those who understand the command “Order! Wan singer wan song!”, and those who don’t.

Chaos will keep coming, but so will the stories.

Merry Christmas, and keep writing, until the clouds crack and the magic leaks in.