You’re invited to the official launch of Three Gold Coins.
This is going to be fun!
Antipasti, bubbles, books, Caroline Hutchinson, the wonderful Nat and Lu from The River Read, actual Story Dogs dogs, and me, signing books! I’d love to see you there. X
‘I need more time.’
‘I don’t have time.’
‘If only I could find more time.’
Does this sound familiar?
When speaking to fellow creative types, the thing I hear the most is the lament for the lack of time to devote to our much-loved art form, be it writing novels, painting landscapes, composing songs or quilting. Artists of all varieties need access to resources—technology, paints, textiles and education, for example—and included in that list is possibly the most coveted of all, time.
Until recently, I thought of time as a finite resource, and struggled with a year planner to work out how quickly I could write my next book, and the next one after that, and so on. With my fourth novel in progress right now, and further contract discussions at hand, I am forced to squash my creativity (by definition, nebulous) hard up against deadlines. But how can I possibly know how long it will take me to write a novel before I’ve even started?
The tricky thing for me to estimate, which I am sure is true for many other creatives, is ‘brew’ time. That is, the time I set aside for my creative project to marinate, so that when I later go back to it, I am looking at it with fresh eyes and lively new ideas. That ‘resting time’ for a creative project helps it mature to greater depth and richness. But is there a way to shorten the brew time, still get a pleasing outcome, and potentially increase my productive output?
Yes, I now think so.
In my struggle to understand how to do this, I spoke with author of twenty-seven novels, Dr Kim Wilkins (who also writes under the name Kimberley Freeman), and who coincidentally happened to be writing an academic paper on just this topic, and asked her about finding the balance between allowing a project time to brew and pushing forward towards a deadline.
‘I’m still learning, but I think I know instinctively if I’m procrastinating. There are also things I do to make the brew happen, like going for a walk, or sitting with my notebook and gazing out the window. I find if I keep connected to the project, and make time for it (including time to research, read, and think) it usually comes. I never force it. The writing is awful when you force it.
‘The incubation period is an acknowledged part of creative activity across all fields. It’s like an exercise rest day: it feels like you’re getting nowhere but you actually are. It can’t always be forward motion.
Kim’s idea that she can ‘make the brew happen’ piques my interest. I now realise that I have been thinking of my brew time as a completely passive activity, when maybe I could speed up my process by specifically allocating smaller portions of time to focused and active ‘thinking’ rather than having long lengths of amorphous subconscious brewing where I wait for the messages to swim up from the deep.
Possibly to my own detriment, having long breaks may even slow me down in more ways than I think. In Kim’s forthcoming academic paper, Writing Time: Coleridge, Creativity and Commerce, she says that ‘As in physics, the initial energy required to start motion (in this case, writing) is greater than that required once momentum is achieved. Interruptions force inertia, and that initial energy must be found again and again.’
The lesson I am receiving, then, is that smaller parcels of active time done more frequently will get me further than longer periods of action after lengthy stretches of rest. Possibly too, if I constantly see my manuscript with fresh eyes after extended absences I will simply reinvent the piece (creating more work for myself), rather than digging deep enough into what I already have to bring it to fruition as it is.
Kim also reminds us that time isn’t just time. Yes, there are sixty seconds in a minute but we don’t necessarily perceive it that way. I’m sure we’ve all had that experience of a minute feeling like an hour and vice versa. Perhaps if I engage my thinking time more actively I might even trick myself and my creative flow into believing I have more time than I actually do.
Most of us will have also at some point found our ‘bliss point’ in an activity where we reach a sense of timelessness, or time standing still, or time meaning nothing. At varying points in our life, time shape shifts and bends. I am often reminded of that saying that goes around in the circles of new mothers—the days are long but the years are short.
Maybe the answer to my struggles lie in applying this same level of intense attentiveness to my novel as I did to my new born, where the whole world fell away to just leave he and I together, working it through, getting to know every different type of cry and facial expression, the sound of every breath and feel of skin. Every day was a marathon that lasted a week. And yet he has just turned five and it’s all happened in the blink of an eye.
Time is merely a notion. I now believe that it might just be possible to increase my productive output while simultaneously slowing down my experience to something that serves both my novel and myself just perfectly, perhaps simply by being more present with the time that I have.
I still get a thrill whenever I see my words in print. there is something really magical when ideas–intangible things–transform into black marks on a solid page. I am thrilled to have my article Dew of the Sea, a meditation on the virtues of the humble rosemary plant, in this month’s Salt magazine.
Since I’m sure you can’t read the tiny writing in the photo, I have copied here for you.
I hope you enjoy it; and please feel free to comment here and tell me what you love about rosemary too.
Lately, I’ve been pondering the virtues of the humble rosemary plant.
At our house, rosemary bushes grow in a garden bed near the chook houses, sharing space with lavender (a close relative in the Lamiaceae family) and a few sprawling zucchini and broccoli plants as well as some exotics I’d rather weren’t there. It’s growing in pots on my verandah and for months now I’ve been actively cutting and striking new plants, delighted at how easily posies of cuttings grow new roots while sitting in tiny jars of water on the kitchen bench.
I’m a lazy yet enchanted gardener by nature so hardy plants like rosemary, which tolerate my neglect with patience and fortitude, are enthusiastically welcomed into my motley crew of vegetation. Rosemary and lavender are possibly two of my favourite plants of all time.
Rosmarinus officinalis comes from the Latin ros, meaning dew, and marinus, meaning sea. It is therefore known as ‘dew of the sea’, appropriate for where we live here on the coast and in the hinterland.
Rosemary, for all its culinary and medicinal wonders, is also steeped in legend, folklore and tradition, associated with the goddess Aphrodite, Jesus and Mother Mary, and mentioned in no less than five of Shakespeare’s plays. Historically, it has been burned to purify the air of sickness and plagues and to ward off evil spirits. Brides carried wreaths of woven rosemary on their wedding day and gold-dipped sprigs were given to guests. Bundles were thrown into graves along with coffins and the bushes were reported to attract good fairy folk and protect babies from bad fairy folk.
Rosemary has the unusual gift of symbolising both love and death; it is the complete circle of life in one and reminds us that we can never have one without the other.
A common theme that weaves its way through most of rosemary’s history is that of remembrance. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia directly says, “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”. Culturally, we wear it on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day to help us remember the fallen and, poignantly for Australians, rosemary actually grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula.
In aromatherapy circles, the essential oil is touted as the ‘oil of students’, promoted for its ability to help our recall during exam time. Greek students are said to have worn crowns of rosemary on their heads while studying to improve their cognitive abilities. Recent clinical research has backed this up, with BBC news only months ago reporting that inhaling rosemary essential oil may indeed improve exam results. Another study showed that the use of rosemary essential oil may improve cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer’s.
I have always loved rosemary for its resilience, its purple blooms and its fragrance, but recently fell in love with it again as I began cooking Tuscan food after a trip to Italy last year. In fact, I began a whole ‘Tuscan garden’ on my verandah, with olive and citrus trees in pots, along with sage, thyme, oregano, parsley, basil, lavender and of course rosemary. I toss the rosemary into bone broths, casseroles, soups, roasting meats and slow-cooked dishes. We threw a Tuscan-inspired Easter dinner this year for family and friends and posies and branches of rosemary served both as feast ingredients and as decorations.
Since then, my passion has only increased. Search on Pinterest for rosemary and you’ll find inspiration for simple yet tasty creations, like rosemary and lemon sea salt, rosemary-infused olive oil, or rosemary and cucumber iced water. Feel like baking? How about rosemary and cranberry biscuits, or rosemary and zucchini bread. (I made the latter with my abundance of home grown zucchini; it was so delicious that it was gone in less than twenty-four hours.) Or what about rosemary lemon cake with lemon curd filling and rosemary butter cream?
So besotted have I become with the hard-working, honest and versatile rosemary plant that I have even chosen it as my new author logo.
With its captivating fragrance, culinary delights, its hardy constitution and tolerance for a wide range of growing conditions (and for even the laziness of gardeners), its beautiful gift of memory recall and its place in our country’s traditions of remembrance, rosemary offers us an endless bounty of botanical gifts to enjoy all year round.
Are you writing a novel? Writing memoir? Writing for blogs or social media?
Food connects us all.
Everyone has stories in their memory and in their heart that include food. Days spent in the kitchen with your mother or grandmother making biscuits. Afternoons wandering the apple orchard, picking fruit with your brothers and sisters. Maybe brewing some cheeky cider with your dad in the back shed. The first time you tasted seafood. The warm, hearty stews that kept you going through a difficult winter. The endless lasagnes left on your doorstep after a bereavement. Every day, we eat. Every day, we create more memories.
Perhaps you would like to take some of those memories and get them onto paper. Maybe you would like to channel your passion for food into writing for magazines. Maybe you would like to know how to enhance your fiction writing with the joy of food.
This workshop is for you.
Join with me to discover diverse ways to use food in story. This one-day course gives you a raft of new writing tools to approach food in your writing with more fun, depth and elegance. Bring your pages to life with mouthwatering descriptions and tantalising facts to hook your reader and keep them reading till the very last bite.
To find out more about the workshop, go to my WORKSHOPS page.
Sunday, 5 November, 9am-4pm, Cooroy (Noosa hinterland, Qld)
To book, follow the link here.
I hope to see you soon!
It’s been really cold (relative for the Sunshine Coast) and wet here lately so yesterday I made my first warming soup for the season and boy was it good! So I thought I’d share it with you.
This is my Tuscan-inspired white bean soup and I am declaring it my best soup ever! The lemon and thyme together just bring this soup to a whole new level. Enjoy! xx
Ingredients
1 large leek (or 2 small ones)
2 garlic cloves
1 potato (I use Dutch Cream potatoes all the time, just because I love them the best)
1 parsnip
Half a head of cauliflower
1 carrot (optional… it will change the colour of your soup, but it’s a good way to use up vegetables in your crisper!)
2 cans of cannellini beans (drained of juice)
4 cups stock (I use lamb bone broth)
Salt and pepper to taste
The leaves of a few sprigs of fresh thyme (just pick them, wash them and use your fingers to strip the sprigs)
2 Tbs lemon juice
Pecorino cheese (optional)
Method
Chop all your vegetables.
Quick competition!
I have TWO copies of The Beekeeper’s Secret paperback edition to give away, anywhere in the world! Just like this post (share if you like) and say “me please!” (Or similar) in the comments. Competition drawn on Wednesday at 7pm AEST. Good luck!
Would you like to WIN an hour with ME hosting your next book club or gathering of reader friends? Tell me in 25 words or less why you’d love me to host your book club (and which of my books you’d choose to discuss) in the comments below. Then, share this post and you’re in the running to win! It’s that easy!
Also, if you’re the winner, you and each person who attends your book club event receive a signed book plate for their copy of my book. Check out the terms and conditions on my website if you’d like more info. Entries close on 12 May. I’m so excited to be part of someone’s book club – and it may be yours! Happy posting!
(Click here for T&Cs.)
Just today, I was having coffee with a friend of mine and we got onto the topic of just how important it is to do something you love. I mentioned that doing the ‘wrong’ thing, for me, led to chronic fatigue syndrome. And my life changed. Here is a piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014 urging us all to try to find some space to do exactly what our soul calls us to do, before we’ve lost the chance.
xx
__________________
It’s 6.45 am, our toddler is in the bath and my laptop is perched on a sliver of the kitchen bench because, frankly, it looks like we had an out-of-control party here last night. Meanwhile, the dogs are trotting muddy paws across the floor, and my husband is nuzzling my neck.
If I died right now, I would actually die all over again of shame, knowing that someone would find me in this disaster. But then I’d get over the fact that the cat is eating out of the cereal bowl and there’s the smell of something rotting in the air, and I’d only be sorry I hadn’t got more books out into the world.
Because that is my calling in life: to write. It’s a calling I almost missed while I was busy leading the wrong life in the corporate jungle. But I didn’t truly start to listen to what I had to do until I had chronic fatigue syndrome and couldn’t work any more. Until the eczema spread all over my face and I couldn’t ignore it when I looked in the mirror.
So many women have amazing creative skills and yearn to leave their “day job” in favour of this passion. There’s a sadness that can’t be healed because that passion, that thing they want to do more than anything else, is also the thing that will, ultimately, make them happy.
I used to be one of those women, leaving for work and getting home in the dark, marching in silence with the hundreds of other rats racing through the tunnels on our way to the towers of soul-destroying “real work”, numbing ourselves with earphones in an attempt to ignore the fact that our true selves, our innate creative selves, were dying inside.
Some women love that life and if that’s you, I’m happy for you, truly. But for me, that life nearly destroyed me.
Unlike a virus that knocks you down for a few weeks before you start to recover, chronic fatigue doesn’t just get better. It takes time, lots of time, with an unknown finish date. Time I didn’t have. I had bills. I was a freelancer. I was a single woman. I was stuck in a horrible cycle of knowing that I needed to invest money in myself to get better, but not being able to make money to do that.
I accrued enormous debts, treading water until I could earn more money, believing one day I’d wake up and be better and everything would be fine. Eventually, I had to accept that I might not get better, that this might be as good as it got. And if that was the case then I had to start living the life that brought me joy.
It was like that saying – people work hard all their life to be wealthy, then retire and have to spend their money to save the health they ruined by working hard. Except I was only 29.
I made tough choices and changed lots of habits, not least of which was learning to accept myself rather than striving for (imagined) perfection. I had to learn to lower the bar. Do less. Expect less. Earn less. Work less. And then I had to start doing more of what truly nurtured my body and soul, even if it was by taking just one tiny step at a time.
Western medicine said it couldn’t offer me much, except perhaps for cortisone, which I didn’t feel was right. I couldn’t afford the plethora of complementary medicines being pitched my way. But I had to keep eating, so that was where I started – with food. Organic farmers’ markets became the place where I began to, finally, invest in myself.
None of these changes happened overnight. You can’t steer a ship in the wrong direction for 30 years and then expect it to turn on a dime. It’s an ongoing process.
We’re always waiting for the perfect time. And we bargain with ourselves by saying we’ll just be happy when we’ve paid off the bills, finished that degree, got that promotion, had three kids, got a cleaner, got a new car … whatever. And yet we all know the truth: there is only the now. And you can’t be temporarily unhappy to be happy.
Deep down we know this, yet we find myriad ways to delay our dreams. We think creativity is something separate from life. But it is life, not something you do for an hour on a Saturday afternoon. We’re running ourselves into the ground with pie charts and timetables and life coaches trying to find the work-life balance when there is no such thing. There is only life. And you only have one of those.
I want everyone to have what I have now – a career that fulfils me and financially supports me. One that gives me energy, not takes it away. I know that seems rare. But it doesn’t have to be. You can have that too. I honestly believe that. You just need to start and keep going. Don’t worry about how long it will take you, because you’ll still be the same age whether you do it or not. Don’t wait for the perfect time because that time is here, right now, messy kitchen and all.
Did you know I’m still an aspiring writer? Four books published and another scheduled for 2018 and I’m still in the same place as so many other writers out there: the beginning.
My heart still burns with the passion, frustration and disappointment of the unpublished writer. Why? Because I want to be a children’s author.
Right now, I have half a dozen picture book manuscripts ‘marinating’ in my hard drive, and one young readers’ (7-10 year old) 30,000-word chapter book bursting with promise to get out into the world.
The reality of publishing is that is is difficult to cross that magic line and become “published”; and this is even more true for those of us who aspire to be children’s authors. Like so many of you out there, I too am writing, editing, sending out for review, submitting, following competitions and so on. It still doesn’t feel that long ago that I was in this position as a totally unpublished writer. The feelings are all too familiar!
It might be tempting for me to think, oh well, I already achieved the dream of being a published author and making a living from my writing, why bother chasing another one? Here’s why I am so passionate about making this dream come true.
So here I am, an aspiring author, working away invisibly alongside so many other aspiring authors, wanting to write the best books I can possibly create to bring the greatest gifts to the world.
Write on!
‘You could come and see my bees if you like. I’d be happy to show you around the hives.’
The beekeeper was standing at my local market stall, his pyramids of honey for sale around him. We’d been talking for about a minute and a half when he made his offer, one I think he actually regretted the moment it came out of his mouth. But all I could think was it’s a sign!
When I begin research on a book, I look for signs. Signs that I’m going the right way. Signs that the universe/muse/creative spirit (whatever you like to call it) is onboard with what I’m doing and will support the direction my work is going.
I’d previously been researching coffee for my third foodie fiction novel, but although I was really intellectually interested in the history of coffee, particularly, I knew I didn’t have enough fire in the belly to sustain it over the course of a couple of years to get a whole novel out. So I let it go and started looking for something else, and everywhere I went I saw bees. I started reading about them in books and online and watching loads of YouTube videos on bee handling. And then I met the beekeeper and he offered to take me to his hives, which was so random that I knew I was definitely on the right path.
I took the beekeeper’s number but later thought, hmm, as nice as that offer was, maybe I shouldn’t actually be heading out into the bush with a complete stranger!
But the universe wasn’t done with me yet. I continued my research and went to the Ginger Factory’s Super Bee Show here on the Sunshine Coast. Gayle Currie, head beekeeper, conducted the show and her knowledge and enthusiasm was addictive. We got talking over a number of weeks and then she too invited me to see her bees.
What I learned while researching and writing this book is that there is no ‘one’ way to handle and keep bees. Beekeepers all do things differently (much like horse people or dog people do, I suppose). And there’s a huge range of humane, ethical and holistic ways to do this (or not). Something I loved so much about Gayle was her very obvious and real love for her bees, her exceptional reverence and respect for them, and her very ‘feminine’ way of handling them. Those values and details carried through to Maria, my main character, who treats her bees as family.
Until I started researching bees, I didn’t even realise that we had an array of native bees in Australia. I always thought bees were great, but I had no idea just how outstanding they are and how much humans depend on them and how much we need to be urgently acting to save them right now. I do hope my book inspires others to love bees, just as I fell in love with them when researching.
___________________
This post is currently featured as a guest post on ‘Love That Book’, a blog by Melissa Sargent.
Pic credit “Autan” from Flickr.