* Or, what happens when a publisher calls, and you lose the power of coherent speech.
For nearly my whole life, I’ve had a vague sense that I’m going to write books. One day.
Because I’ve been a writer and wordy type forever. At school, writing was my thing. Then I did a degree in English lit. And since then, I’ve been a copywriter - sketching out brand stories and crafting taglines and churning out sales copy and TV commercials - for a bunch of businesses in the advertising world.
But it took having kids to actually reel in that daydreamy notion about the future and grasp it in my cold little (actually sticky, avocado and pear puree-covered) hand.
I started writing picture books when my daughter was about one. We’d been loitering in libraries a lot (maternity leave was lonely) and I was fascinated by the richness and variety of the children’s section. Every week, we’d go to Wriggle and Read and sit entranced as the librarian flipped pages, sang songs and did funny voices. Picture books were about more than reading, I realised. They were something magical that happened in the space between parent and child, librarian and audience, something more like theatre. Just theatre that you go to wearing stained leggings, with a little imprint of snot on your shoulder.
So I started writing, just scraps here and there. I did the Australian Writers Centre picture book course, on my laptop during naptime. Then I heard about the CYA competition, and the day before the deadline, as my daughter did daycare orientation and I tried to hold my heart together, installed myself in the library and wrote a picture book text in a single sitting. It ended up coming 11th, and I ended up officially hooked. Wherever I looked, there was another idea just waiting to be written.
Naturopolis was born during a quiet afternoon staring out the window at my office job, seven levels above the concrete-scape of inner Melbourne. In the gutter of the building next door, something green was growing. It was large and leafy, and must have been there for a while - just metres away from my window, unreachable across the glass-paned chasm. It made me wonder what else I’d overlooked, living right here in the city.
The manuscript that resulted won me a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors (thank you, Katrina Lehman) and after tinkering with it for a year or so, with another baby in between, I submitted it to Storytorch. A month later, when I got a call to say they’d like to publish it, I was 70% sure I was being punk’d.
‘Ahhh, really? How what!!’ I said.
I knew a bit about publishing, the way I knew a bit about a moon landing. I could understand the concept in a theoretical way, but I hadn’t thought I’d actually step foot there, into that moondust.
But it was OK, because back on earth the baby was farting (loudly) on my lap and I felt the need to explain that the sounds were not, in fact, coming from me.
PLOOOOP! Perils of speakerphone. The baby shat.
It was an extremely glamorous entry into the publishing world.
(Naturopolis will be published in 2022, by the way.)