Writing

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My Brilliant Careers

Well, that’s what I’d like to think, with a nod to the famous Australian book, My Brilliant Career, by Miles Franklin.
In reply to The Retiring Sort’s Future Challenge post about second and third careers  (which you can read more about here), I am much in favour of them. Gone (mostly) are the days when someone retired at a set age and expected to die a few years later of old age. People are starting new careers in their 40s, 50s, 60s and older.

CorrectsHistoryProfessor-RemembersBeingThere
It’s exciting to think, for example, that one of New Zealand’s best selling authors, Jenny Pattrick, did not have her first novel, The Denniston Rose, published until she was in her 60s. Now well into her 70s, she’s still going strong. Before she was a novelist, she had a long career as a jeweller.
The great British novelist P. D. James, now aged 92, did not have her first novel published until she was in her early 40s, and did not give up her career as a hospital administrator until she was 48.
After a couple of decades as a journalist, I did a PhD in literary studies in my 40s and have worked for five years as a university lecturer in media studies.
But it’s hard to get an ongoing position in this field: perhaps harder than it is to get a full-time journalism position these days. So I could be heading for a third career—I’m thinking I might become a secondary school teacher. That would require me to get a diploma, which would take two years part-time.
What I’d most like to do, of course, is be a full-time writer, instead of having to write in my “spare” time. I’ve already had two books published and I’d dearly like to do a third. Perhaps this will be my next career. I once asked my late father, who was a dentist, what career he would choose above all others if he had the talent to do anything. He replied that he’d be a best-selling novelist, because he could be famous without being recognised in the street (debatable though in these days of modern media). Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t write fiction.
I know many people in their 50s and older who are sick of the career they have chosen—because it has changed so much, because there is ageism in it, or because there is a drive to employ cheaper staff and casuals. I urge them to think about what they would like to do, to plan for it, retrain and take up something new. It took me five years to get my PhD while working full-time for most of the duration, but I’m very glad I did it.
Even if gaining a qualification doesn’t lead directly to a job, the sense of satisfaction involved is worth its weight in gold.

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What’s In a Name?

A few people have asked me to explain the title of my blog, The Crayon Files. It actually evolved from an apt nickname someone once gave me.
My first name, Caron, is a French surname (as in Leslie Caron, the dancer and star of Gigi, for whom I was named).

I’ve been writing constantly since I knew how. When I was a journalist, I always scribbled down my notes in shorthand. I worked for years in the 1990s at a tabloid TV magazine that had a big youth readership. During that time, I appeared in an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) series for children titled Writers and their World, or something similar.  I had thought it would be an innocuous little show screened during the day and forgotten. But the power of TV in those days was extraordinary. The series was shown during the day all right, but loads of children, their parents and teachers tuned in, and it was repeated for years. I was even recognised in the street! “Are you on TV?” a stranger asked me one day. “No,” I replied, truthfully I thought. “Well if you’re not, you’re a dead ringer for that girl on that show about writers,” he said. I had to then sheepishly admit that it was me after all. A local shopkeeper recognised me too.
Then the funniest part: I was then our magazine’s reporter for one of Australia’s highest rating shows, so the cast knew me well. So, one day, they were in the makeup room preparing for the day’s shooting. There was a TV in the room, which was tuned not to their own network but to the ABC.
Up pops Caron on the writers’ show episode. “Oh look,” said a cast member, one of the country’s best known actors and a writer himself now, “It’s Crayon”.
The name stuck, and quite a few colleagues called me Crayon for years—one still does.

Crayon-to-be: Caron at work at the magazine in 1990, about six years before the "Crayon" nickname came about.

Crayon-to-be: Caron at work at the magazine in 1990, about six years before the “Crayon” nickname came about.

I’ve also been nicknamed C.J., after my then initials, which morphed to Siege; and Biddle, by my parents when I was a baby, because I used to say “Biddle, biddle biddle” when I got frustrated.
Most people have had at least one nickname in their time—some stick and some don’t. If you’re Thai, you most likely use your nickname for all but the most formal of occasions.

I’d love to hear some of your nicknames and how they came about.

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Writer’s Diary #4: Build a bridge and find your inner engineer

An engineer taught me to write. I tell this story to anyone who asks me for advice about writing.

Years ago, when I was struggling to start writing my novel, The Occidentals, a structural engineer of close acquaintance told me that, in his mind, writing was fundamentally the same thing as building a segmental bridge.

At the time, this accomplished young engineer was working on a big elevated expressway that required thousands of prefabricated concrete segments to be precast off-site and then trucked in piece by piece. We would see the trucks, trundling along and not elegant at all, taking up space on the road and disturbing the traffic.

In its entirety, the engineer said, the project seemed vast and overwhelming. But once the design, construction plan and calculations were done, it was better to manage the project day by day than to think of it as a whole. So, he had goals for how many segments needed to be completed daily and weekly, in order to finish the project on time. As he explained, eventually, if you meet your target most days (and use others to make up ground), you have your finished bridge, ready for the public.

So, he said, he reckoned that if you attacked the writing of a novel the same way, you’d soon have your completed manuscript. Think about how many chapters (segments) you want and about how many pages will be in each. Set a deadline and work out how many chapters you want to finish a month. Perhaps you have 20 chapters and you will do two a month of about 20 pages each. Thus, you must write 10 pages a week. You have Saturday and two evenings a week to devote to writing. So, say, each Saturday you will commit to writing four pages, and each available evening to three pages.

After 10 months, you will have your completed 400-page manuscript, ready for the next stage, editing.

I’ve been thinking about this advice again, lately. I think there are more similarities between bridges and books than just a work ethic. Both bridges and books are more than the sum of their parts. When you look at a beautiful bridge like this…

The completed Pierre Pflimlin Bridge, which was opened in 2002.

The Pierre Pflimlin Bridge, opened in 2002, over the Rhine.

…you probably don’t think about the concrete, water, labour, segments and so on that made it, unless you’re an engineer. In other words, you don’t think of it under construction, like this:

Construction of the segmental Pierre Pflimlin Bridge over the Rhine in 2001. The bridge was opened in 2002.

Construction of the segmental Pierre Pflimlin Bridge in 2001.

Similarly, when a book is published, readers don’t think much about the blood, sweat and tears the author went through, first to write it at all, and second to get it published. Nor do they consider the work of the publisher in taking the novel from manuscript to book. A good book is, rather, a thing of beauty, a work of art, and like a bridge, a symbol of humankind’s infinite creative capabilities.

A monologue in Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes to mind here:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!  how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!

[The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, scene II. Text presented following the First Folio, 1623; published by Rex Library, 1973.]

 

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Bambi, the dentist and the Mona Lisa

How lovely it was for me when last Sunday, while I was on vacation in Fremantle, Western Australia, a crown on one of my teeth fell out during breakfast.  For the rest of our time there, mostly spent seeing family on both sides, I had to be careful not to smile too widely, lest I look like a pirate.
We returned to Melbourne in the early hours of Thursday morning, and this morning (Friday) saw me at my excellent dentist, Dr L., his able assistant, Ms K., and friendly administrator Ms V. “You’ve presented me with a challenge,” Dr L. said cheerfully. I won’t go too deeply into what had to be done, save that  it involved a “slow drill” and something called a “para-post”.
It’s all completely painless, of course, thanks to local anaesthetic. I read a lot of historical novels and it’s the one thing that makes me glad I wasn’t born before the 20th century. Anyhow, although dentistry doesn’t hurt now, it’s not particularly pleasant. So, I close my eyes and try to divert my mind. I used to think about a beautiful beach—white sand, turquoise water, a yellow umbrella. Then I played too much of an iPhone app called Distant Shore, and got sick of the perfect beach.
So, what do I think of now? Bambi. That is because Bambi is the sweetest little thing in the history of fictional characters, and Disney captured perfectly this essence of sweet innocence in its portrayal of the fawn in the 1942 movie.

Bambi
I’ve been wanting to write a piece about Bambi for a while, because suddenly, everywhere I look, are images of him. The protagonist of one of the earliest anti-hunting pro-environmental novels seems to be making a comeback—if he ever went away, that is. My earliest memory of Bambi is probably the Little Golden book with the Disney animation characters, but the story was first published in German in 1923 as a novel,  Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by the Ausrian-Hungarian writer Felix Salten,  who sold the film rights for $1000 in 1933.

Bambi_book_cover
Just before Christmas, I saw a 1950s ceramic Bambi ornament for sale at a shop near me called Retro Active, which sells 20th-century memorabilia, jewellery and furniture. It was $30 but, it being Christmas and not my birthday, I thought it wasn’t good form to buy a present for myself. However, shortly after Christmas, it is my birthday, so when the shop opened after the break, I went back to buy Bambi. Guess what? Bambi was gone. I imagine that dear little deer sitting now on someone else’s mantelpiece. Since then, I have seen a Bambi lamp for a baby’s room, and a fantastic Bambi book sculpture, which you can see here.
So synonymous has the term “Bambi” become with innocence and goodness, that to say something is “like killing Bambi” is to brand it just about the worst thing possible. So I was horrified, while researching this piece, to come across a discussion thread on the internet which started with the question, “Is it illegal to shoot a baby deer?”

Perhaps Bambi is making a comeback because, in this commodified, mediatised world in which we westerners can have just about anything we want, limited only by the size of our wallets, Bambi represents what is seen as a simpler, more honest time in which the goodies and the baddies were clearly delineated.We tend to apply this sentimentality or faulty nostalgia for “a simpler time” to many long-gone eras:   I mean, it’s all very well, for example, to look back to the early 19th century through sumptuous TV mini-series of Jane Austen novels and envy the seemingly peaceful and uncomplicated rural lifestyles back then. What we don’t see are the realities of life without all we take for granted today: electricity, refrigeration, and modern medicine, for example; and anaesthetic for visits to the dentist. Before 1844, dental anaesthetic was unknown: routine, reliable local anaesthetic without too many nasty side effects was not introduced until as late as the 1940s. More about that here.

Lack of proper anaesthetic meant restorative dental work was extremely limited before the 20th century. So, if the heroine of  the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, had toothache, she would simply have had the tooth pulled out. As my late father, a dentist, told me: a real Elizabeth Bennet would have lost many of her teeth by her 20s, and those she still had would probably have been brown with rot. She would definitely not have had a mouth full of white, even teeth. I never could persuade him from his view that period dramas should present characters with teeth like they would really have had.
He was always convinced he knew the secret to the Mona Lisa’s smile. “It’s obvious,” he said of the early 16th-century painting. “It’s because all her teeth would have been rotten or missing, and she smiles that strange way because she has chronic toothache.”

Mona Lisa

In Bambi’s idealised world, all the goodies, of course, would have perfect teeth and would never need to go to the dentist. I hope this is my last dental visit until my usual six-monthly check-up is due. Fingers crossed.

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Writer’s Diary #3: Into the unknown

Let your writing take you into the unknown. (By the way, I visited this jungle path, at Queen Sirikit's palace grounds on Doi Suthep, near Chiang Mai, Thailand, in November. I didn't realise until I got home that I had been there before, 20 years ago).

Let your writing take you into the unknown.
(By the way, I walked along this jungle-like path at Queen Sirikit’s palace grounds on Doi Suthep, near Chiang Mai, Thailand, in November. I didn’t realise until I got home that I had been there before, 20 years ago).

I’m not the first to say “Don’t necessarily write about what you know; write about what you don’t know”, but I am still in a minority, as conventional advice tells writers to write what they know and what they know about.

This seems strange to me, since writing is a journey of discovery, a journey into the unknown, even if you know your subject matter. There is always something mystical about good fiction writing: it is more than the sum of its parts.

More important to creative writing than knowing about your subject or theme is being passionate about them and being able to write about them in a way that no one has written before.

However, you do have to do your research. While it’s tempting to jump right into the writing, doing some research before you start is a huge help because it enables you to concentrate more on the writing when the time comes.

When I moved to Thailand in the early 1990s, I decided I would write a novel set in 19th-century Siam. I knew almost nothing then about history in that part of the world, except highly romanticised (and mostly incorrect) information from popular western culture.

When I found the Siam Society, a club in Bangkok promoting the study of South-East Asian culture and history, I was on my way. They had a library of 20,000 books, many of them on old Siam. I did six months’ research reading these books and taking notes before I started writing The Occidentals. In those days, research was not generally done on a computer screen or using the internet, and we kept track of our research using an index card system, as I wrote about here last week.

Actually, writing the first draft of my novel took me only three months—half as long as it took to do the research (though when it was accepted for publication, my editor asked me to add 100 pages, so I had to go back to my research, and I spent another three months on the addition). I wrote every day, six days a week, for five hours, 12.30-5.30pm.

The six months’ ground-work had ongoing benefits: I used it as the start of research for my PhD in the 2000s, which in turn became my second book, Imagining Siam: A Travellers’ Literary Guide to Thailand, and which has led to an academic career.

In saying don’t be afraid to write about what you don’t know, I’m in good company. For more on writing about the unknown, see this article in The Atlantic by Harvard Creative Writing Faculty director Bret Anthony Johnston.

I’d love to hear from you about your launch into the unknown for the sake of your writing.

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A Writer’s Diary #2: Goodbye, dear little filing system

1990s writer's filing system

Ye Olde Worlde Filing System, c1991.

Remember this? If you’re under 30, you’ve probably never seen one: it’s an index-card filing system. Before the internet, this is how we used to file our research. This is the one I compiled when I was writing my historical novel, The Occidentals, set in 19th-century Thailand.
I did six months of full-time research before I started writing the novel. This involved reading and indexing information from 42 books and hundreds of articles. Then, say, when I wanted to know about transport in Bangkok in the 1860s, I would look up the index card labelled “Transport”, and it would tell me the books, articles and page numbers where I would find the information.
Though I have not used this index since the late 1990s, I feel sentimental about it and have kept it all this time in my office. I’ve tried to throw it away several times, but something always stops me doing it. However, finally, I’ve agreed with myself, something once so useful has become just a waste of space.
So, I thought I would take a photo of it and write an obituary for my dear little filing system. Goodbye, you served me well, but now it’s time to go. Xoxo.

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A Writer’s Diary #1: Finding time to write

Books by Caron Eastgate Dann (previously James)This year, I have determined that I will find time to work on my creative writing, instead of just thinking about it. This will mean writing every day, even if I am tired and overworked from my day job.

I know I can find the time because of this: nearly two years ago, I took up painting as a hobby. Since then, I have produced more than 40 finished paintings, variously  in oils, watercolours, acrylics and pastel. I paint four or five evenings a week, sometimes only for 30 minutes, sometimes intermittently over five hours.

Writing after hours is more difficult to do because in my job as an academic, I am on a computer screen much of the day, working on scholarly articles, lectures, and so on, or I am standing in front of a class of up to 60 university students. I don’t feel like writing at the end of the day. I feel like watching TV, eating pasta and painting pictures.

So, my best option is probably to get up an hour earlier and write before the rest of the day starts. Or, just make myself write at the end of the day for an hour. Sometimes I don’t feel like painting at first, but if I just set out my equipment and start, I am soon engaged by it. Maybe it will be the same with writing.

My other problem is that I have made significant (but slow) progress on two novels, and I think it is better to choose just one to work on. They are both historical novels, and one is a sequel to my first book, The Occidentals, initially published as long ago as 1999, then in German editions in 2003, 2005 and 2007. Where has the time gone?

While I’ve done much of the research for these two new books, there is always more to do. Some time, however, I have to stop researching and get writing. I constantly toy with the possibility of writing a contemporary novel, too, and my head spins with ideas.

Ideas, however, do not a novel make; constant hard work every day does. Writing a novel is like climbing a mountain: then having to revisit the mountain and climb it all over again when the editing starts.

My new writing program starts on Thursday, January 10, because it’s the day after my birthday. Also, my day job doesn’t start until February, so I should have the time I need to get a good start on my projects. I’m looking forward to a fruitful writing year.

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Rediscovering a book from childhood

Is it not a beautiful thing to decide, on a day off, to take up the book you are reading, and to vow to read it all at once until it is finished?
That’s exactly what I did today. Well, I had only 36 pages left, so it didn’t take long.
I’ve been reading Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, for the first time in decades.  If you’ve been re-reading a book from long ago, I’d like to hear about it, too (see this post’s last sentence).

little-women
I’m re-reading Little Women because I intend to read March, by the Australian writer Geraldine Brooks. March takes up the story of the father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Robert March is a shadowy figure in Little Women, and little is divulged about his time away from home while serving with the Union forces during the American Civil War. Brooks takes up his story, and from all accounts, it is a masterful work, for which she won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was so long since I’d read Little Women that I thought I’d best refresh my memory.

Overly sentimental?
Little Women is rather a strange book: endearing central characters, a strong moral and Christian message, a sentimentality that is too much at times, set against the turbulent times of the Civil War. Despite its almost preachy tone, it is compelling, however.
I’m most interested in the character of Jo(sephine), definitively played by Winona Ryder in the 1994 film version. The character of Jo is a reminder of how far women have come toward gaining equality. Only by acting, speaking and wishing to be a man does Jo consider she can live a valid life. And, in the 1860s, middle-class women were restricted to domestic duties. At one point, Jo tells her mother that she wishes all four daughters had been born boys. Some women broke with tradition, of course, including Alcott herself, who never married and whose income brought her family out of poverty. I can’t help thinking the English children’s writer Enid Blyton must have been influenced by Jo when she wrote her own “tomboy” character of George (Georgina) in the Famous Five series.

In places, particularly in its first half, Little Women becomes tedious with its moral lectures. At other places, however, it contains some excellent advice still relevant today. Here is my favourite:
“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life becomes a beautiful success, in spite of poverty.” (Wordsworth Classics edition, 1993, p. 115).

Publishing history
Little Women’s book history is interesting. The first part was published in 1868—only three years after the war ended—and is partly autobiographical, drawing on Alcott’s childhood. Her father was Amos Bronson Alcott, a noted educator and writer. As in Little Women, there were four daughters in the family, and some of the events related in the story are descriptions of real events, notably in the sequel, Good Wives, Meg’s wedding (in reality that of Alcott’s sister, Anna). Good Wives was published in 1869, but the two are often published together now, although my book contains just the first. There are two more in the series: Little Men and Jo’s Boys.
Alcott, who never married, did not particularly want to write Little Women. She did so at her publisher’s insistence, and its great success made her family financially viable—just as well, because her scholarly father earned almost nothing for his work and relied on his wife and daughters to earn incomes.
One curious factor is that there are quite a few typographical errors in this book, and a few grammatical errors, too (“sung” instead of “sang” for example). You’d think these would have been fixed a century or so ago. But perhaps they crept in when books were re-keyed (and not copy-edited, obviously).

Literature in society
I work as a university lecturer and I’ve often thought it would be interesting to write an undergraduate subject called Lessons from Literature or Literature in Society. Over a 12-week semester, you would choose a number of classic books and examine the moral code of each. There would be a different theme each week. This wouldn’t be schmaltzy goody-two-shoes stuff: you could also choose a book that carried a message of evil, for example, and examine its effects. Through examining excerpts from these books, you could discuss social codes, ethics, morality and sensibility, in a bid to understand current moral systems, laws and social mores. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to do that one day.
Books with moral messages, such as parables, are still among our most popular. In the 19th century, there was A Christmas Carol; fast-forward to the 21st  century and you have The Five People You Meet in Heaven, for example.

What book or books do you most remember from childhood?
I’d like to hear what books readers of this blog remember favourably from childhood and which you have re-read. You could simply comment below, or you could post a link to your blog. Happy reading!

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Have you heard the one about the journalist who wanted to be a novelist?

Mark Twain as editor of the Territorial Enterprise, Virginia City, Nevada, 1863

Mark Twain as editor of the Territorial Enterprise, Virginia City, Nevada, 1863

I went to a fiction writing workshop in November at which the tutor, a university lecturer, insisted that “Very few good novels have been written by journalists”. I was astounded by this statement, but said nothing during the seminar, not wanting to be seen as adversarial or—as I am a university lecturer myself—as trying to be a know-it-all and trump the teacher.
I was offended, actually, because I am a former journalist and a published novelist, and I think I’m not bad at both.
Traditionally, many young people who want to be novelists have been steered into journalism as a way of making a living but still using their writing skills. It seems most journalists I know have a manuscript half-written or ambitions to write a novel.

Anyway, this got me thinking about great writers who also worked as journalists. Contrary to what the fiction workshop tutor said, there are many great novelist-journalists. What follows is a list of just a few that occur to me. They are in no particular order and they are eclectic: that is, some are world renowned, others are much lesser known; some are from a previous age and some are current; some are literary, some populist, some both.

Ernest Hemingway
Mark Twain (pictured above)
Geraldine Brooks
Graham Greene
Djuna Barnes
P G Wodehouse
Martin Amis
Willa Cather
Charles Dickens
George Orwell
Ruth Rendell
Will Self
Linda Grant
Tom Wolfe
Susan Kurosawa

In a recent article in the Guardian on this topic—specifically on the worth of Will Self’s work—Robert McCrum examines the cliché of the journalist as unable to write good fiction:  “What lies behind this prejudice, of course, is the idea that fiction (and poetry) is a higher calling,” McCrum says. “Journalism is hack writing (it doesn’t have to be) and novelists dwell closer to the top of Mount Parnassus (well, occasionally).” Read the full article here.

A 2006 scholarly book on the subject, Journalism and the Novel, by Professor Doug Underwood, examines why so many journalists have aspired to fiction writing careers. I think it’s often the other way round: many people aspire to the seemingly more romantic and mystical calling of fiction writing first, then realise they have to make a living as well. That’s what happened to me. I was going to be a famous actor, playwright and novelist. However, making a living as a journalist is not wasted time, for journalism is a fascinating occupation that allows access to people and places that others don’t get, thus providing much material a novelist can use.

Just because someone works as a journalist doesn’t mean they can’t write good fiction: that’s faulty logic. Just because I once worked at McDonald’s, for example, doesn’t mean I couldn’t become a chef at a fine-dining restaurant; and just because I worked at Target doesn’t mean I couldn’t become a high-end fashion designer. Making a generalisation, as my erstwhile tutor did, can manifest simply as a prejudice with no evidence to support it.

So, my advice to anyone who thinks journalists can’t write impressive fiction is, read The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn, March, and The Quiet American, then get back to me.

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Wrap it up: the dreaded to-do list

Today’s post is in response to the Weekly Writing Challenge call for bloggers to write about the year that was.

With only two weeks of the year left, I checked my personal non-urgent to-do list, written in January,  and discovered that I hadn’t  done anything on it this year! I was a bit disappointed in myself until I realised that I hadn’t done these things because I didn’t need to. On the other hand, my work-based to-do list is down to one final project, and even that is nearly complete.
I like making and working through to-do lists. These days, I use the Stickies app, virtual post-it notes in pink, yellow, blue, green and purple, stuck to the front of my desk-top computer. On my iPad and iPhone, although I have several specialist apps for lists, I use Notes for stuff I have to do right away. It automatically then sends my list to my email.
There’s something satisfying about writing a list and then crossing it off as you complete each task. It reminds me of school exams, in which the teacher would write the time in chalk on the board in 15-minute blocks until the finish. She or he would then cross off the time as it passed, so students could see where they were up to. A school friend of mine applied this concept to everyday tasks she didn’t like, such as maths class. At the beginning of the class she would draw up her list: 10.00, 10.15, 10.30, 10.45, 11.00. Then she would cross off each time as it occurred. She said it helped make the class go quicker! My father would have said “Don’t wish your life away”, but back then, we didn’t really understand what he meant.

Remember these? My Time Manager folder, 1988-1998.

Remember these? My Time Manager folder, 1988-1998.

In 1988, the bank where I worked as a corporate publications journalist sent me on a Time Manager-brand course, which included this marvelous thick black folder (pictured above), in which you could manage your life, and which I used for 10 years, until computers superseded it. I still have this folder and the sections inside reveal all sorts of fascinating snippets from 20 years ago: how much I paid for rent at various places, the cost of living in Bangkok in the early 1990s, my aspirations, a list of ideas for books, never written. Hmmm, that novel set in the Australian gold rush era could  be worth resurrecting…
There are even a couple of long-forgotten British stamps, sent to me by a relative because I needed to provide stamped self-addressed envelopes when I submitted work to publishers (no email submission in those days). Apparently, there was something called an international reply coupon, but I could never find out at any post office what this was or where to get it.
Unfortunately, I culled a lot of stuff from this folder years ago which would have made interesting reading now.
So, unfulfilled to-do lists aside, what were my top 10 achievements for 2012? I made a list! Here they are in no particular order:
1. Completed my 10th back-to-back teaching semester as a university lecturer. As a contractor, I don’t get sabbaticals or opportunities to use research grant money to pay others to teach for me, so I have no choice but to teach every semester. I spoke at a conference, chaired sessions at another, and finished or nearly finished writing three academic articles.
2. Spent two weeks in Thailand, including visiting Bangkok for the first time in 11 years. I attended the Reaching the World writers’ summit there and read from some of my work-in-progress at a women writers’ night in Bangkok.
3. Went to the dentist three times. I’m the daughter of a dentist, but my dad died suddenly nearly seven years ago, so it was a big step for me in 2009 to get up the courage to go again regularly, to someone else. After a load of appointments to make things right again, I now have to go only every six months.
4. Got a doctor and plan to have all the tests I should have. I’m a great avoider of doctors, but these things have to be done. I started to change my mind when I read a story about a woman whose friend died of an illness that could have been cured if they’d caught it earlier. “My friend died simply because she didn’t go to the doctor for 15 years,” the friend said.
5. Completed about 15 paintings. My “new” hobby will be two years old in February. A hobby is good for your soul—I urge everyone to take up something they thought they couldn’t do but would love to have a go at. Singing, playing the guitar, painting, running, swimming, whatever. The great thing about a hobby is you don’t need to be great at it and it doesn’t have to bring in any money and you don’t have to do it at a particular time; all you need do is enjoy it.
6. Read more books than last year.
7. Committed to having one day off work a week, most weeks. I have been much more relaxed this year as a result.
8. Cleaned out my wardrobe floor, disposed of unwanted and unworn shoes. Now all the shoes sit neatly in pairs.
9. Arranged a birthday bash for my husband, which was a great success.
10. Started a blog (this one).

It’s a wrap!