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G'day {Name}
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Happy Easter - it's been a long time between reads, hasn't it. Much of my time has been eaten up by learning how to weather the continual demand of mummy, PLAY! without fraying at the seams. I'd love to play all day long, every day. It's also not really practical if we also wish to wear clothes, eat, or be clean. Everything else is icing on the cake, isn't it.
I've just printed and will be posting out this week the first issue of The Quarterly Correspondence, which is titled The Great, Untouchable Weapon.
It's such a long, intense topic that I was frightened to send it. After I wrote it, my teeth hurt, which was an indication that I didn't trust my decision-making. So eventually I sent it to a long-time client/friend whose perspective I trust, to gain her view as Alpha Reader. Her response blew me away.
She said something like, 'This is an amazing message and everyone needs to hear it'.
So I wondered, how might that happen?
And, as is typical of beautiful coaching relationships, she began to reverse-coach me. Just pitch it out! she commanded. Laughing, I did some preliminary searching around. But who, I wondered, would take such a deep, long-form essay? Especially one that is not referenced?
My style is not journalism or academia; therefore I don't reference every assertion. This is something very new in the public domain. Essays never used to be filled with references for fact-checking and anti-cancellation reasons. Read any essay you like. Take any famous essayist: Joan Didion, George Orwell, GK Chesterton, Simon Leys to see that for yourself.
But then I had a different idea, one that patterns more closely into my entire creative career. It involves self-publishing. It involves much more writing than I've done for a long time. It makes my heart sing.
Along the way, I've tentatively paired up with an editor to push my work into the next level. The most beautiful serendipity is that George Orwell is one of her literary heroes. So the entire direction just feels right.
And I'm not going to tell you the detail yet, because it would totally spoil my fun!
Instead, I'd like to share with you that I'm dipping my toe into homewares. I have loads of poetry and profound snippets from my writing life. And I thought about how fun it would be to have them on cushions.
So I'm in the process of setting up a dinky little online store to see if anyone wants them.
Here's a sample of what's on one: |
