Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This
Christmas
I would
like to put
up a tree in my
heart, and instead
of hanging presents,
I would like to put the
names of all my friends.
Close friends and not so close
friends. The old friends, the new
friends. Those that I see every day
and the ones that I rarely see. The ones
that I always remember and the ones that
I sometimes forget. The ones that are always
there and the ones that seldom are. The friends of
difficult times and the ones of happy times. Friends
who, without meaning to, I have hurt, or without meaning
to have hurt me. Those that I know well and those I only know
by name. Those that owe me little and those that I owe so much.
My humble friends and my important friends. The names of all those
that have passed through my life no matter how fleetingly. A tree with
very deep roots and very long
and strong branches so that

their names may never be
plucked from my heart. So

that new names from all
over may join the existing ones. A tree with a very
pleasant shade so that our friendship may take a
moment of rest from the battles of life. May the
happy moments of Christmas brighten every

                             day of the New Year. My sincere wishes.

 

Love,

Danielle

I wish I knew who wrote and set up this Christmas tree. One of my Byron College Creative Writing students from 2001, Pat Kowal, who lives in the US sent it to me. She didn’t know who had written it, just found it somewhere on the net. I’m afraid it lost something along the way: Her version was every colour of the rainbow, and so pretty. But when I transferred it, the colour disappeared, and I have no idea how to fix that.  Even after 4 months at this, I’m still a Luddite!

Anyway, have a lovely Christmas everyone, and a safe and happy New Year. Let’s hope the Mayans were wrong

HAZARD!

Last week I told you about my father, his roses, and the sneaky rosebud clipper. My father’s snipped rosebuds were in the nature of a small hazard. Much larger hazards can swoop on us at any time. They can come in the form of financial reversal —  worse still, the illness or death of a loved one. When they come, cleverness will not deal with them, and beauty will not bale us out. The much vaunted romantic love often packs its bags at the first sign and catches the stagecoach out of town.

What are we left with?

Courage, for one thing. I believe courage is the most important single factor in dealing with adversity. Oddly enough, it’s not developed by leading an easy life. Courage is built in the hard times, not the easy ones. What the Victorians used to call ‘character-building times’, what Tibetan Buddhists these days call ‘the situation as guru’.

What about having a well developed spiritual life? Surely that would be helpful.

How many people do you know who really have a deeply spiritual view of the world? What most have is a religious view, and that’s not the same thing. Religion’s great if you don’t lose it at the critical moment, but I can’t count the number of people I’ve heard wailing when the chips came down, ‘Why has God allowed this to happen to me’?

This kind of ‘spirituality’ will not be around in the hard times.

So we need courage.

We also need endurance, which is courage over the long haul. And, as Thomas Power of Ecademy said, we also need resilience.

The other thing we need in hard times is the support of friends and family. This can often form a net that will help to break our fall, at least to some extent.

No matter what’s happening in your life, no matter how high you’re flying, never lose sight of that bird of prey, hazard. No sparrow, this one.

Is courage the single most important factor in dealing with adversity — or do you think it’s something else?

One week to Christmas. Go safely.

 

My father, his roses and the sneaky rosebud clipper

I’ve been thinking all day of my father, who died fifty years ago. When he wasn’t working on diesel engines, he was a rose afficionado. In his garden, he had dozens of varieties — ‘Peace, Granite, Mrs Harold Alston’ — all dear to his heart. There came a morning when he strode across the lawn to admire the dew on his roses, only to find two or three buds lying on the ground, their stems cleanly severed as if by a knife.

He was enraged. Boys must be doing this, he decided, to torment him. But were there any boys of the right age in our neighbourhood for that kind of mischief? We couldn’t think of any. It was a mystery. The buds appeared on the lawn only after the sun had risen. If my father went out with a torch at three in the morning — and he did — there would be no snipped rosebuds lying on our lawn.

He became obsessed. He would catch the sneaky rosebud clipper if it took him the rest of his life. He arranged a comfortable chair overlooking the rose garden, got up each morning before the dawn and settled down to watch. Of course, he left his lookout sometimes to make a cup of tea or to go to the toilet. Often, to his chagrin, when he returned, there would be a fresh rosebud lying on the ground.

My father sat on. He was determined to catch the culprit and do him some damage. On the third morning, as he was keeping watch, a sparrow came swooping over the rose garden. It came in low and, with a barely discernable change of motion, sliced a ‘Maud Alston’ bud from its bush, dropped it on the lawn. All my father’s theories — and by now, he had many — fell to the ground with the flower.

Sometimes, it’s just hazard.

My father’s snipped rosebuds were in the nature of a small hazard. Much larger hazards than that can swoop on us out of the blue. More on this subject next week, when I’ll invite comments on how to deal with what someone (possibly Shakespeare) called ‘the slings and arrows of outragous fortune’ .

Hope to see you then. In the meantime, go safely in this wild and crazy pre-Christmas time.

Danielle

Story, anyone? An 8-minute read

[This story won the Inaugural Nicholas Shand-Beach Hotel short story competition in 1997, was published in the Byron Shire Echo, 9 September 1997 and recently recorded on BayFM radio 18 November 2011 on Pip Morrissey’s book program.]

 

A Happily Married Man

[908 words]

I was waiting for her when she came out of the Chinese restaurant. I called to her from the shadow of the pile of lumber that stood beside the hardware store in the main side street of the small country town.

“What do you want?” She sounded frightened, as if talking to me was a crime for which someone might punish her — which was not so far from the truth now; I’ve heard the stories about how that he’s treating her.

I just stood there. I heard the XPT whistle at the level crossing that traversed the main street one block to the east of us. The XPT whistled twice; still, I didn’t answer. I wanted to tell her I was going to save her, that I’d had a message, so clear, perfectly pure and beautiful, and that after tonight we’d be together again the way we used to be. But I couldn’t say anything.

Crystal’s eyes followed the line of hills to the west and the little barred clouds. It was high summer and, although it was almost eight, it was still daylight.

“Why don’t you just go away and leave us alone? I don’t owe you anything,” she said.

  The angel’s wings were white.

       The angel’s voice was golden.

       “I have a message from the Lord,” he told me.

       And here I am.

 

The track led downwards to the bottom of the valley where the creek ran through it. As you approached the shack from the last hill all you could see was the roof, and the trees with the vines dangling from them. If the wood stove in the lean-to was lit you’d see  smoke drifting through the clearing.

Some nights I’d wake up beside Crystal in our shack in the valley. The moon would be shining through the branches, the dog would be lying before the dying wood stove with one eye open, and someone would be pounding on iron a long way up the creek. In those still nights I could almost feel the universe breathing. It was a good feeling.

  The angel’s hair was gold.

       The angel’s sword was silver.

       “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” he told me.

       Well, here I am.

 

They say I went crazy when she left me. I never believed them. Sure, I was upset but I wasn’t crazy.

Her last words to me were “You’re nothing. You’re no better than a dog”!

Every night after that, I’d start drinking when the sun went down. Then I’d roam, drunk, around the multiple occupancy we shared with eight other families, howling “NOOO better than a dog”!

        I fell into the creeks, got covered in mud, scrabbling up the creek banks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The neighbours locked their doors and windows, which bothered me; I was just grieving. After twelve years she was everything to me.

It wasn’t her fault, the break-up. He misled her. She was vulnerable and he knew it — everyone knew it; her so small and fine, looking fragile in her old St Vinnie’s jeans. I should never have taken the job in Murwillumbah: gone at dawn, working twelve-hour days in the bananas, six days a week. Come Sundays I was no good for anything.

Now I know better. It’ll be different next time.

The way I see it, she was lonely with me away all the time, and he was there. Yeah, he was there. And I say to myself — I said it to myself again this morning when I saw them together in the main street — it’s his being there that’s the problem.

If he wasn’t there things’d be just like they used to be. We’d sit in front of the wood stove in the evenings, with the kero lamps burning, listening to the radio, getting up before dawn. Christ, we had everything we wanted! She knows that too. She just doesn’t know how to get free of him. It’s one of her failings: she’s so gentle. She could never be cruel to anyone.

In the early days when I was desperate, I used to dream of burning him out. But there’s no need for that; I see that now. I’m going round to his place tonight while she’s at Golden Beach with The True Viners. I’m taking an iron bar and a rifle. I want to talk to this bloke, make him understand he’s not important, that he just doesn’t figure in the Great Plan for her and me.

If he agrees to leave I’ll put him on the train to Sydney — no hard feelings. If he doesn’t . . . well, I s’pose I’ll think of something.

But I wanted to see her first to get up courage. Sometimes, I don’t know, I get confused. Sometimes, you know, the vision falters. But I’m okay now; I’ve got it all thought out. Then when she comes back to his place in the morning, I’ll surprise her. Hey baby, the nightmare’s over!

Christ, I love being married. Some people, they can’t take it — all the ins and outs, the ups and downs. But when you love someone the way I love Crystal . . .

She depends on me. I won’t let her down.

       The angel’s robe was silver.

       Was it my heart like lead that called him?

       “‘Free her!’ saith the Lord,” he told me.

       Lord, here I am                                             

END

DANIELLE DE VALERA’s short stories have appeared in such diverse publications as Penthouse, dotlit and the Women’s Weekly, and are currently in 6 anthologies.  In 2011, her full length fiction manuscript A Few Brief Seasons was one of 4 shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award. She has been a manuscript assessor and mentor since 1992, and is listed in the Writers’ Services section of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace. 

So You Want to Give twitter the Bird …

Ah twitter, what a waste of time. It’s got to epitomise the worst of the social media – frivolous, banal, no use to anyone. Certainly not to a struggling writer like yourself.

Think again.

I’ve only been investigating social media for six weeks and twitter for two. What I’ve discovered might amaze you. While it’s true that twitter and Facebook have a lot of rubbish in them, twitter is also doing something else.

It’s broadcasting. In real time — assuming you have a phone that will take the app. I don’t have one at the moment, but after what I’ve seen in the last two weeks, I can see that, as a serious writer, just as I once had to have a computer rather than an electric typewriter, now I’m going to have to buy a phone that will take a twitter application.

For those of you as innocent as I was of twitter and how it works, the basis is this:

On twitter, you choose to Follow certain people. Other people may choose to Follow you. How did these followers find you? They found you on other social media sites. The tweets from the people you are following come up on your screen. Your tweets only appear on the screens of those who are following you.

I currently have 6 followers. Right. So what use could I possibly get out of twitter?

Twitter acts as a broadcaster. A recent survey, whose figures I can’t exactly remember, so puleese don’t quote me, said that 40% of twitter is banality; 30% is self-promotion and the rest is information — which, if you have chosen Who to Follow carefully is information that might be relevant to you. For example, last week, Pier 9, an Australian publishing house in the Murdoch empire, advertised that they were looking for an editor with 2-3 years experience in the trade.

As far as I know, THEY DIDN’T PUT THE AD IN THE NEWSPAPER, THEY PUT IT ON TWITTER.

Agents, publishers, editors are putting stuff out that might be relevant to you. And you can follow them.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, you can broadcast your own stuff. Wot stuff? Well, recently I had a short story scheduled to be read out on BayFM, the radio station in Byron Bay. It’s not every day I get a story read out on radio, I wanted people to tune in and listen, so I tweeted this to my 6 followers.

You tweeted it to six followers! What possible use could that be to you? I mean to say, 6 people are going to hear about it this way, you’d have been better off texting them. Wrong. Because I was also a member of that powerful social media site Ecademy (the first on the scene in 1998, BTW, compared with Facebook’s 2004) I had been lucky enough to meet Sam Borrett, one of the highflyers there. I became one of his followers, and he graciously become one of mine. When I tweeted to 6 people, he retweeted my message to his followers who number around 5,000. Some of those followers have 20,000 followers.

Are you getting the picture now?

Working on the old six-degrees-of-separation theory, even if you’re not fortunate enough to have a powerful follower at first hand as I had, you can bet your boots that somewhere down the track, one of your followers’ followers has. If you’re thinking of putting out a book in the future, get onto twitter. When your time comes, you’ll have a following, who also have a following, who also have a following, and that’s how something can become viral.

Let’s suppose you don’t use twitter and you have a book coming out. You go for newspapers and a bit of radio if you’re lucky.

How many people do you think will hear about your book?

[More in a fortnight on the social media scene in general, and why, as a writer, you need to be in it.]

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com#!/de_valera

Why Am I Here?

This isn’t going to be a blog about the meaning of life, a discourse in which I try to sell you my philosophy, all wrapped up in The Wonder of Me. Rather, it’s an overview of how and why I’m currently upping my profile on the web.

It’s all about book promotion.

As you might (or might not) know, I’ve a little freelance manuscript assessment business, specialising in the novel and the memoir. What I began to notice was that it was becoming so hard to get your first novel published by a large company in Australia that more and more emerging writers were taking to e book self-publishing or going with very small e book publishers who also had Print on Demand (POD) facilities in Australia. Urged on by cries that the internet was the coming thing, what with Kindle, etc. they were excited. Think of the size of the web! they said to me. Millions of people will see my book.

Hmmm, said I to myself. (Perhaps this is the place to admit that I have a streak of cynicism in my makeup. Well hidden, but it’s there.) Back to the point. Most of these writers had little coverage on the net, and the results of their digiPOD publishing ventures were extremely disappointing, to say the least. As the assessor/mentor, the one who had held their hands through all the rewrites, and who had kept in touch with them afterwards to see how this wondrous new digiPOD sally turned out, I was one of the first to hear the cries of disappointment and disillusion.

I felt for them. What to do?

I’m so old I can remember the time in Australia when all you had to do was write out your novel in longhand on a block of foolscap, pay a typist to type it up for you, send it off to a publisher and Bob’s your uncle — you’d be a published author in no time. This doesn’t happen anymore. But the ease and low cost of digiPOD publishing with such sites as the UK Council of the Arts funded Youwrite on, is persuading emerging writers that this is the new, modern book explosion. Just put up your website, and watch the sales roll in.

Ho.

As I was pondering this dilemma, the flyer for Sam Borrett’s social media networking seminar fell into my letterbox. I’m now sallying forth into what feels to me like The Wilderness of Zin. (This phrase, which I’d give my eye teeth to have written, is the name of a paper written by Leonard Woolley and T E Lawrence for the British Museum in 1914 — Lawrence later achieved fame as Lawrence of Arabia, for his part in raising the Arab revolt against the Turks during WWI.) The wails of the disappointed writers have woken me from my happy delusion that all the internet was good for was research and email, and putting up pictures of you with your new hair colour. So here I am, floundering about the wilderness, trying to discover things I can take back home to help those emerging writers.

Will I find anything that can help them? It’s too soon to know. But tell you what: I’m fascinated. There’s definitely something out there.

Wish me luck.

Danielle

Tips for Writers NOT: Asphalt carpet, Snake on the Stairs

 

Like the American Indian narrator of that fine book One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest says at the end of the novel, “I’ve been away a long time”.  Things have been happening here.

First, the landlord decided to replace the living room carpet in my little 2-storey broom cupboard 300 metres from the Pacific; the carpet had come with the building thirty-five years ago. Everyth piece of furniture in the room had to be emptied and the furniture carried outside. This was followed by an orgy of washing 12 years of dust off the furniture – writers aren’t renowned for their housekeeping. After the new carpet had been laid I discovered that the LL had chosen a carpet shade so dark it’s like living on a bitumen road. I have to stop myself from looking left and right when I cross the room): Perhaps it was on special.

Then my male cat bought in Snake No. 3 (it’s Spring over here in beautiful, downtown Australia). He likes to take them into the bathroom upstairs, figuring the shower recess is the best place for an interrogation and easy for me to hose down afterwards. BUT this one was larger than the previous two and he lost it halfway up the internal staircase. I couldn’t do the bucket trip I’d applied in the bathroom scenario on the previous two occasions and had to resort to waiting until the snake  reached the living room floor and corralling it with a straw In basket, held down by an antique flat iron; these were the only things to hand at the time. What to do next? That took some thinking. I managed to slide an old Barry Manilow vinyl record cover under the In basket and then transfer the whole lot to a giant garbage bag which I carried down to the canal. The captive looked none the worse for wear when I released him – standing well back and retrieving the various items afterwards. He made for the water and I made my way home with tips for writers the last thing on my mind.