Following on from my last post here are even more reasons you might need a manuscript appraisal.
Oh… I Feel This!
I wrote 10 manuscripts in 12 years before I got a contract. During that time, I won short story competitions, I wrote freelance, I was shortlisted for two publishing awards, I had agents request my work and then reject it. I was scammed by dodgy publishers with dodgy contracts. I was scammed by writing competitions (that then publish your work and then sell the work back to you). My spreadsheet of rejections hit 100 (and then I deleted it in disgust). (Oh, and I had been working full time, part time, casually, in my own business, running a charity and while pregnant.) I had reached the end of my tether. It took just one final piece to get me over the line. For you, that final piece might be a manuscript assessment.
The pain!
Even published authors sometimes need manuscript assessments! I mentioned above that I once had to ditch 50,000 words of a novel. A novel that was on contract. With a deadline. I knew ‘something’ wasn’t right. This was going to be my fourth contracted novel, so it was surprising when I realised I was absolutely stuck. I paid for a manuscript assessment with my favourite editor, who I trust, completely. And like a really good editor, she didn’t tell me what to do. Instead, she asked questions and made astute observations and in reading her report I knew I had to abandon that manuscript. (There is a happy ending to this story, which I will share with you when we begin work together.)
Listen to That Voice
So you just read that bit above where I had to ditch 50,000 words, right? If I had listened to my inner voice, my gut feeling, just a little bit earlier, I might not have had to lose so much time, energy, and spinal integrity while sitting in a chair, working on something that was built on shifting sands.
This is why I’m here to help, with your manuscript, be it fiction, non-fiction, novel or memoir 🙂
Lovely ones, I am for the first time ever opening my doors to mentor, coach and assist developing writers. Why now? Maybe because The Wonderful Thing About Phoenix Rose is my 10th book, which has a nice feel to it. Maybe because I’ve been in this game for a long time now (with a string of bestsellers, international publications and never out of contract) and, ridiculously, it’s only just occurred to me that i could share my skills and knowledge and others might even appreciate it 🙂 (Yep, I’ve been the queen of imposter syndrome and have just realised how wrong I’ve been.)
(It’s also highly possible that the introduction of ADHD medication has finally given me the energy, focus and capacity to do a heap of things I am passionate about but never had the energy to do. But, I digress…)
It’s certainly because I remember how difficult it was when I was a writer who was past ‘the beginner’ stage but not yet at the ‘accomplished’ stage (a truly awkward and at times isolating experience). Maybe it’s because I am a homeschooler now and there’s something about homeschooling that makes you think differently about, well, everything. And it’s certainly because my ‘teacher genes’ have been re-activated over the past year. And as much as I remember that awkward ‘in between’ stage of writer development, I have huge passion for beginning writers too and in homeschooling I’ve become exceptionally sympathetic to the plight of writers who simply don’t believe they start, better their work, or finish a work. (Newsflash, you can.
If you’re a writer and would like some help, please do check out the four programs I have put together (just to get us started…. because spending weeks of website maintenance is really not my favourite thing to do and four was all I could manage right now!). And because I am committed to helping you long term, you’ll find I’ve built in long term support past your initial package. (See this example.)
If this is the year you want to write or you want to move to the next level of writing, I am here for it. I’d love nothing more.
Raw beginners through to published authors are welcome, as are all ages and abilities.
(Also, if you are an NDIS client, you may be able to claim your investment. Email me for more details on NDIS.)
Anyway…. I’ve made a guide of 23 things you can do after closing the book to keep the love going. Perfect if you have a book hangover and you just aren’t ready to let the story go.
Sign up now to make sure you get yours! Hurry! I’ll be sending it out soon!
A writer’s “voice” is a difficult thing to explain but you know it when you hear it / read it. Compare the voices of Jane Austen, Anh Do, Liane Moriarty and James Herriot: all of them are very distinctive. They’re the kind of voices you might guess easily if you started a new book with no author name on the jacket.
So what is it?
The voice is the way the words are constructed (syntax). It’s the words that are chosen or left out. It’s the tone, it’s the style, it’s the dialogue, it’s the humour (or not), it’s the spareness or the abundance of words, it’s the details that are fixated on or overlooked. It’s the content, too. It’s the themes, pace, punctuation, familiarity or formality, local/regional dialect and so much more.
It’s very much about authenticity. It’s also a big part of your ‘band’; it’s that thing that will shape your reading audience (draw people to you or not). A consistent voice allows a reader to trust you and relax into a story with a feeling of trust in you. Your subject matter can change, of course, but your voice will carry through across the body of your work.
The voice is the thing that makes you the writer YOU are and it takes time to develop. You find it by writing a lot of words. Short stories are a perfect place to practise your voice. Your voice might change over time, even after you’re published, and that is normal too, though it would be unusual, I think, to have vast variation in voice. But if that was the case, you would probably choose to write under a different pen name so as not to alienate your dedicated audience.
These days, I have a pretty good instinct about when I have slipped out of my voice, when the words just aren’t hitting the page in a very ‘Jo Moon’ way. The voice is the thing I’ve come to trust, even if it’s taking me to places in the story that scare me. I’ve come to know that if I follow my voice, I’ll be okay.
It is only recently that I have come to fully accept this as a potentially permanent situation and learn to heal the internalised shame of this particularly frustrating dilemma. But to explain how this happened, I’m going to have to go back in time.
I learnt to read early. I was an enthusiastic reader. I had very specific interests in stories, especially anything with horses or animals or fairies and magic. I can decode text. I am not dyslexic. I was a good student and, generally speaking, excelled in almost everything (until senior years when I had exceptional highs and lows and nothing in between (I was never going to be mediocre, only top or bottom… but that is a completely different story).
However, despite being a good reader, I was always baffled at how quickly other (good reading) kids finished books. I distinctly remember thinking at a young age and beyond: I’m a good reader so why can’t I read as much as the other good readers? I was an accurate reader and I had high comprehension but I was not fast. I realise now that I compensated for a lot of this by being the best student. I did all the work. I spent whole days working on one project. The moment I didn’t get a near-perfect mark, I was asking for tutoring. I made copious colour-coded notes and taped them all over the house. I read out and recorded my study notes onto a cassette tape and played it back to myself while I slept. (I’m not even kidding.) In short, I worked and worked and worked (setting up a lifetime pattern of burnout).
As an adult, I’ve always been truly confounded by readers who say, ‘Oh, I loved it and finished it an a day.’
A day?! What?! How?!?
For me, even if I LOVED a book as hard as you could LOVE a book, to finish a novel in TWO WEEKS would be a fast rate for me.
Then I had my son and it all ended. I couldn’t read anymore.
What I didn’t know back then, which I do now, is that I am Autistic and ADHD and knowing what I know now, here is what I think happened. When I had my son (and I got book contracts, and I had to move house and renovate a house and wind-up a charity and lots more), my poor brain’s less-than-optimal executive functioning skills were pushed to levels they’d never been to before. Our brains are very clever, though, and mine worked this out and made the choice for me: my son was the priority. Essentially, my brain shut down a whole lot of other pathways in order to prioritise my child. Reading was cut from the list. I also now know I was in Autistic burnout, which I had been for most of my life since the age of 15 and burnt out brains have no qualms about dropping your hard-won skillsets.
For the past ten years, I have essentially convinced myself that this is a temporary problem. But reading ability has never recovered.
Reading and ADHD
Difficulty with reading is a common ADHD complaint. Every AuDHDer is different but for me, these are some of the ways reading poses challenges for me.
I have ADHD impatience but I also have the strong Autistic need to finish something I started and do it really well (preferably perfectly), but having a slow reading rate means it simply takes me too long to get there and those conflicting drives create stress.
The AuDHD brain craves novelty and keen interest. If the content hasn’t grabbed me by the second chapter, I’m out. I simply CAN NOT go on. (I do want to make it super clear here that often people think ADHDers have a choice in their behaviour… that if they just tried harderor if they just focused more they could get it done… but it doesn’t work that way. That’s a longer conversation for another day, all about transmitters and dopamine.)
Inertia: once I get interrupted, it is difficult (sometimes impossible) to initiate the task again.
My sensory processing difficulties (e.g. noise, smells, temperature, clothing, body position) are such high distractors that I can lose focus and have to start again.
I can’t read off a screen. (I don’t know why exactly but I just can’t.)
If I do get distracted, I need to go back and re-read passages or pages over and over because I need to feel that I have read it deeply and properly (I do not skim read!). This becomes tedious and fatiguing.
Unfriendly font types and lack of white space are a problem. I have been reading about dyslexia-friendly fonts lately and exploring those but I don’t feel I’m knowledgable enough about them to say more about that at this stage.
Having to be still is a big problem for me. Until recently, I had NO IDEA how much I fidget. Something is always twitching. This is challenging for long hours of reading. (I also can’t sit through an entire movie.)
I will finish with a final (but exceptionally important) challenge, and that is that I am a highly visual and sensory reader. If there is trauma on the page, I don’t read that in a theoretical sense with a bit of sympathy… I FEEL it. Literally. In my body. In my organs. And I SEE it in minute detail in my head and it NEVER GOES AWAY. So often, I am traumatised by fiction and simply cannot read on.
Non-fiction books
I have been able to read more non-fiction in paperback form than fiction, which I think is largely due to the amount of white space, bullet points and diagrams that break up long-form text. It’s also easier to put down a non-fiction book (whose content is grouped in chapters and sections) and then pick it up again later because the next chapter doesn’t necessarily depend on having read the previous chapter, whereas reading fiction requires that you keep a lot of story-world and character information in your head in order to link earlier information to later information to make sense of the whole story.You can also often flick through non-fiction books and skip the bits that don’t have high interest, unlike a novel, which requires you to read all of it.
A Hereditary Problem?
We know that ADHD is highly heritable. Interestingly, both my mother and maternal grandmother were also great readers until they hit a point in their life where they said they simply couldn’t read any more. I’m guessing this was about when they hit burnout and their executive functioning took a long walk up a mountain to rest.
So What Do I Do?
Firstly, I read almost exclusively on audio. If it’s not on audio, I can’t read it. (So please, publishers, can we have everything on audio at all times? It’s an issue of equity and access for all.) For example, with tremendous irony, I am waiting to ‘read’ Sally Rippin’s book, Wild Things(which is ALL about kids having difficulty reading, which my son does too) but I can’t read the book and so I am impatiently waiting to get it on audio at the end of this year. Oh, the irony 🙂
Over the years, several people have said to me that ‘audio books are cheating’ or that ‘it doesn’t count as reading if it’s not a book’ or that ‘it’s lazy’. Loves, this hurts.
Some people have very rigid beliefs and ideas. I mean, if a blind person listens to an audio book, would you tell them it was cheating?! No, because (a) what does that even mean?! (b) I doubt you are that rude and thoughtless because it is perfectly okay for someone to access a story in whatever way supports them best; and (c) story is story! It still teaches you empathy, history, culture and mood. (Hello, our Indigenous populations thrived for many thousands of years on oral storytelling.) You can still visualise the story in your head. You still cry and laugh and shudder and gasp. You’re still transported to other worlds, relax and get excited. Your brain is still working; it’s just working differently. (At which point, I’d like to refer everyone in the world to Chloe Hayden’s book, Different, Not Less.) To say it’s cheating or doesn’t count is such an ableist, elitist, privileged, crappy thing to say. Please don’t take away our joy, and don’t shame us for not being able to do what you can do.
Okay… taking a deep breath… and moving on.
Secondly, I HAVE pushed through a handful of paperbacks in the past decade in order to review them or support author friends but it is agony and NOT because their book is agony (their books are great!) but because it is just so difficult for me: it takes so much energy. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me, which I guess is how kids with reading difficulties feel too. Big, huge, warm, fuzzy hugs for all the kids struggling with this right now. It gets better, I promise.
Thirdly, in my book club, there are two of us who need books on audio (one of us with ADHD and one of us with vision requirements) so we will only choose books that are available in formats that suit us all. Easy.
Where to From Here?
I am now taking ADHD medication. Will my reading ability (as slow as it was) come back? Only time will tell. And maybe when I finally get hold of Sally Rippin’s book I will know what to do 🙂
I am learning, though, to be kinder to myself. Neurodivergent individuals hear, read and absorb a staggering amount of negativity in their lifetime. We become exceptionally good at taking on this criticism and turning it into our own internal voices.
I have been carrying a big load of shame about being an author who cannot read. I’ve also had to start saying no to requests for cover quotes for books (something I see as a tremendous privilege and honour, and something I know is extremely important to authors) because I simply cannot read the manuscript. (It can take me a week, or more, simply to read my own manuscript during editing phases.)
I am learning that, as much as I might want to, I will never be able to keep up with a lot of stuff that goes on in the publishing world and that I will never be able to contribute as much in terms of reading and reviewing and talking about others’ work as much as I want to because I am atypical. And I’ll never be able to travel as much and speak as much and be as productive business-wise as I truly want to be. Honestly, that makes me pretty teary.
Difficulties with reading and writing (and learning disorders, ADHD and Autism) may contribute to poor self esteem but what I want to do more than anything is be a role model for my son, to help him learn to undo the damage that’s been done to his sense of self through the schooling system (side bar: we are now homeschooling) and know that some of us (actually, quite a lot of us in the world) do things differently because we need to and that’s okay. What’s not okay is that we don’t yet have full supports in place as normal access rather than them being ‘extra’ or ‘special’ supports.
But I am nothing if not a hopeful person who sees a problem and tries her best to change it. So here I am, talking about the stuff I still find hard to talk about because as Glennon Doyle always says, We Can Do Hard Things.
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In #2 of this series, I will look at the ways ADHD has negatively impacted me as an author. In #3, I will look at the ways ADHD has positively impacted me as an author.
*Autistic burnout (Sidebar: I run Autistic & ADHD Retreats on Burnout on the Sunshine Coast, just in case you know anyone who needs a retreat.)
P.S. I’m just going to finish here by encouraging anyone who thinks they have a child with a neurodivergence of any kind to seek early assessments and support as soon as possible. It is much more difficult to rewrite your understanding of yourself and your brain, and learn what supports you need in life, and to avoid myriad damaging flow-on effects and co-occurring conditions when you are in your 40s than it is when you are still in primary school. We need to know why we struggle. We need to learn how to navigate this world.
Honestly, we get to chat to such wonderful authors in book club! Our March guest is the very talented Jessica Dettmann with her new book This Has Been Absolutely Lovely. To register for this event click here.
The blurb reads…
Family is forever, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The charming, hilarious and all-too-relatable new novel from the author of How to be Second Best
Molly’s a millennial home organiser about to have her first baby. Obviously her mum, Annie, will help with the childcare. Everyone else’s parents are doing it.
But Annie’s dreams of music stardom have been on hold for thirty-five years, paused by childbirth then buried under her responsibilities as a mother, wage earner, wife, and only child of ailing parents. Finally, she can taste freedom.
As Molly and her siblings gather in the close quarters of the family home over one fraught summer, shocking revelations come to light. Everyone is forced to confront the question of what it means to be a family.
This Has Been Absolutely Lovely is a story about growing up and giving in, of parents and children, of hope and failure, of bravery and defied expectation, and whether it is ever too late to try again.
It was my absolute pleasure to speak to Christine Anu on ABC radio last night on the ‘Evenings’ program and to create a virtual three-course dessert degustation for listeners to enjoy. I took the recipes from my book, The Cake Maker’s Wish, and matched them with accompanying drinks and (as spontaneously requested on air!) music as well. I had a wonderful time talking about one of my favourite topics: food.
“Could not put down book full of wonderful things to learn about incredible bees. Great characters – great book.”
“Another great story from the pen of Josephine Moon. Have spent Christmas with my head in this book. Couldn’t put it down. I learnt a lot about bees too. Can’t wait for your next book Josephine.”
“This was a lovely enjoyable story, and I know that Josephine Moon’s style will be one I like for a long time to come.”
“Could not put this one down. Deals with two very relevant issues in a sensitive and thought provoking way. Riveting.
Since I started writing The Cake Maker’s Wish (all the way back in 2015), my imaginary idea of reviving a dying little village by importing people from around the globe has gone a little more global (and viral).
Today, you can buy an Italian house for only 1 Euro, in the same country that previously gave away castles, monasteries and towers. Ireland has called for residents of Australia and USA to emigrate to the tiny island of Arranmore. Spain has had a problem of abandoned villages across the country, so the officials from Galicia set about giving away one of these villages. In all of these examples, the goal has been to give the properties to someone who has detailed plans to renovate, restore and add capital back into the local area, to save a dying population and/or economy, and restore economic trade to the local business owners. This is exactly the premise that I used for the setting of The Cake Maker’s Wish, though at the time, I didn’t know it was really ‘a thing’.
Where it all began…
In 2015 I travelled to the UK on a writing trip to meet with my UK publisher and agent, to delivery an author talk in Abergavenny in Wales and to do research to look for a new story. I travelled with my dad, my sister and my sister’s baby (who was 14 months old). As part of that trip, we rented a stone cottage in the Cotswolds where we based ourselves for ten days and travelled the area from there.
I was lucky enough to get to know some of the locals. Two of them—men who’d grown up in the village in the fifties—made me a cup of tea to tell me about what life was like when they were young. In that conversation, they lamented the fact that the village had changed so much from when it was owned by the Lord of the Manor, which had created a unified, collaborated feel through the workers, with a thriving community spirit. Over time, as the village was sold off, wealthy investors from the city would buy up cottages as holiday homes, but that meant that most of the properties were sitting empty for most of the year. The village couldn’t function as it used to, no longer community-sufficient, with people having to travel further and further away to find work and services and the house prices forcing workers out of the market.
I was really touched by their sadness and went back to my rented cottage and sat down with a notebook and pen and thought, well, I’m a writer, surely I can bring this village back to life on the page. And that’s how it started.
And now…
I confess to being truly delighted that my imagination has conjured something that isn’t completely out of the box at all, that its themes and efforts of small communities trying to survive and hold onto their connections is very real, and that equally real efforts are happening around the world right now to save them. In my heart, I am a girl from the village. I may have been born in Brisbane but I have now spent almost fifteen years living in small country towns. I know the huge beating hearts that live in them and how important it is to support them and celebrate them. This is exactly what my new novel does.
The Cake Maker’s Wish is out 2 June but you can pre-order it now from all good bookstores and online retailers. I look forward to sharing the imaginary village of Stoneden in the Cotswolds with you very soon!
I have teamed up with best-selling author Rachel Bailey to create The Writers Emporium, a collaboration focused on bringing high-quality professional writing development workshops, retreats and training here to the beautiful Sunshine Coast.
We will be kicking off 2020 with a two-day event from 8-9th February called the Sunshine Writing Lab. We’ve called it a ‘lab’ because we want you to get your fingers into your work! Our point of difference is that we are so committed to bringing you value in our programs that we are running two streams of training alongside each other across both days. This gives us the flexibility to provide quality opportunities to writers of all stages, from beginners through to those more advanced. You can choose from formal workshops, one-on-on session with either Rachel or myself, or small group sessions (three people maximum). The power is in your hands.
If you’re interstate, no worries! Our location at The Sebel hotel in Maroochydore is just minutes from the Sunshine Coast airport so you can fly in and fly out again and stay at the hotel with the discounted room rate.
Rachel and I both love teaching and we’re so excited to join forces to help you reach your writing dreams.
