Meg Blomfield was the person I was before I married The Sexy-Hot Kelly Nerd. She had a social media presence under her maiden name so students wouldn’t find her to send her friend requests on Faceflop, or Twittillations on Tweetie-pie or follow her on Instaspam. She is not a born writer, just an entertainer with a touch of grammar-Nazi enthusiasm. All her Faceflop life, stories practically begged to come to life on her page to amuse and entertain you. ‘You must write a book,’ so many of her social contacts said.

Despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, the real stories almost never just ‘come to life’ as easily as we might have imagined. For most of us, writing (particularly when we formalise it: now I am sitting down To Write) tends to be a far more challenging process than we’d expected.

When the erstwhile Meg Blomfield was in the throes of emotional turmoil, writing was easy. I just sat and poured my heart out onto a laptop every night for eighteen months.

I went to the dam out of Ivanhoe where so much of my content was set, on Christmas Afternoon in 2018 with my dog and my hat and my chair and four litres of cold water, to write the last paragraphs of what I needed to write. It was symbolic, but it was also stinking hot. Stinking, stinking, stinkin, brain-stifling hot. I felt as if I were wrestling a multi-tentacled beast to the ground, but I dangled my feet in the rancid dam water and squeezed the last drops of my heart into that laptop.

The sun was setting, so I walked a lap around the dam. I paused where we’d scattered Lionel’s ashes fifteen months before and told him our book was finished. His bits had been totally dispersed and absorbed by the red clay, which was symbolic too. Lionel was out of my head and Meg Blomfield’s therapy was done. I took my dog and three-hundred-and-four thousand words home to my solitary house with the ginger cat Lionel had given me.                                                      

‘Best present I ever gave you,’ he’d said the night before he died.

I didn’t open that big Word file again for eighteen months. Then during Covid lockdowns, I felt the pressure of an unfulfilled obligation.  Promises are easy through a phone.                                                                                       

‘Write a book about me. I want the world to know about me and my cafe,’ Lionel had said.  The night before he died, he’d made me promise. He made me promise to find someone else too. I had done nothing about that one, but at least I’d written the book. Or had I?

 I realised in 2020, restricted to Dunedoo, doing online teaching and homesick for all that I’d had in Ivanhoe, that I hadn’t written that book at all. I’d basically written a very long journal entry about my own feelings. I didn’t know how to write a book. As I’d been with entering into a partnership with my erstwhile muse, I was totally unprepared.

So, I started buying books on how to structure other books. I wrote scene summaries on sticky Post-it notes and had them all over my cupboard door and tried again. I split my memoir, as I’d now come to think of it, into three roughly equal parts and just concentrated on the first. Eventually, I sent it to a professional structural editor.

I’m not a demonstrable sentimentalist. I don’t choose to wear my heart on my sleeve. I much prefer it tucked away safely where I can’t lose it. Next to my stiff upper lip. Getting that editor’s appraisal back was like the Christmas morning when I found my stocking full of old sheep bones. ‘You write beautifully,’ it started, and then it was all downhill from there. While Lionel was a indeed a funny character, she wanted to know all about me—my childhood, my feelings, what’d happened in my life.  Why were we drawn together? Too much philosophising; not enough action. It cost me nearly a thousand dollars to be knocked down to realistic shrunken-headed writer size.

On days when the writing just would not come, I’d chalk it up to my surroundings, my work—teaching, my roommate (only supposed to be temporary, but you know—Covid), my dog, the innumerable distractions that were keeping me from being more productive. Increasingly, I fantasised about buying a campervan, holing up on a riverbank somewhere, getting away from everything, focussing, being able to see it all clearly, figuring the whole thing out. I was sure that if only I could be there, I would be able to write more easily.

It was hard revisiting my own baggage, but I did a complete redraft and sent it to the Demoraliser Lady again together with a second goodly chunk of my hard-earned savings. It was like the second Christmas in a row being on the naughty list would’ve been. It was the time of Covid. Publishers were not taking memoirs, but even if they were, she needed more ‘show not tell’ in the really brutal scenes. She recommended a list of books that I might like to read.  I liked to read anyway, whether the books were recommended or not. I ordered them and read them, but felt little, almost-old Meg Blomfield could never write like that. Besides, I had continual hay-fever in Dunedoo. So continual, in fact, that when I did get Covid, I didn’t even realise until it was revealed on the twice-weekly compulsory test teachers were required to have.

 About the time I shelved the book idea again, I met the Sexy-Hot Nerd in a Faceslap group for ginger-cat owners. It was house-on-fire stuff metaphorically; no houses were actually destroyed in the building of this relationship. I had fulfilled one promise to Lionel. All four of us—two humans and two cats— bought a house and moved to Queensland. I retired, a wee bit early, but life had been beating me relentlessly and I needed to regroup.

Settled, hay-fever-free, I had time and freedom to travel a bit and to reflect on writing a lot. I re-envisioned my memoir as a novel and a funny novel at that, in which the boundaries between truth and exaggeration blurred and it morphed into fiction. I had a personal epiphany about the Autism Spectrum, so did months of research on Autism through joining groups and reading studies. I did the Post-it-note thing again and wrote detailed character analyses, plotted action build-ups and character arcs. I analysed every novel I read with colour-coded highlighters for what worked and researched. I invented characters and character traits and scenarios, but kept the settings and timelines the same because I’m not imaginative enough to reinvent the wheel of a lifetime. I still lacked momentum. I was afraid of failure. There had to be a magic bullet to bite.

At the beginning of 2024, I enrolled in the Australian Writers’ Centre’s ‘Write Your Novel’ Program(me) to give me incentive and skills to write. I was so afraid of appearing ‘dumb’ in amongst all those smart, mostly younger writers, that I pushed myself beyond the comfort zone. That did, in the end, what expensive retreats are designed to do: force the focus necessary to get the job done. But it was not the clarifying, easy-breezy path to writing a book that non-writers believe it to be. Your toughest critic is always yourself, but the more you learn about writing, the more you realise you suck at it.

As a teenager, I’d convinced myself that I needed a garret in Paris in order to write the stories and books that live in me. The truth is, that even if I did have that, the writing part would still feel as hard. (Actually, it would be even harder, because I’d want to be outside, exploring Paris.) Even a riverbank can distract by providing endless rocks to collect and paint.

So, two things to take away are:

1. Writing is birthing, wrenching and life-changing.

2. You can either hone your procrastination skills (I recommend stone painting) or hone your reading and writing skills. They’re inextricably linked. Believe me, they are.

I’m at a threshold again; the one where I feel that my book is on the verge of being published. I just have to have a healthy, functioning website to attract the eye of publishers apparently and prove you do a lot of writing.

That’s what this is about. This section is for my blogs about myself and my life as a writer and a spiritual homecoming hopefully for pet-loving, chin plucking, muffin-top-tuckers and IBS-warriors, who love to laugh. A big hairy hug of gratitude to Margaret R Kelly’s sexy nerd for being my web-developing champion.

 Hopefully, no blog on here will EVER will be as long as this one again because I need to give you time to read my forthcoming novel (how’s that for positivity?).

Yours in in hitherto dilatory* solidarity,

Meg Blomfield  (*Dilatory means a failure to act).