tears and fears

Another book I ordered came through this week. How about WANNABE A WRITER WE'VE HEARD OF? I thought, my publishing company is small and I know I'm expected to do a lot of the publicity. I've worked in marketing before - a bar and art gallery requiring a business plan - and I learnt how to 'circulate' and 'converse' on the diplomatic trail through Africa. I can do selling, I thought, and this well-recommended book might help order my timeframe.

But Mio Dio! The book is vigorous and fabulous, fuelled with humour and top tips, even the dark presence of Jane Wenham-Jones' agent The Fearsome One, whom I met (and liked) at my one and only writers' conference last year. But how frightening! The idea of striding out into the world and hawking my silly little book. I am scared! At first I thought of it in terms of a-great-excuse-for-a-designer-dress and had looked up some slim Alexander McQueen at COIN in Milan last year. But now I am chickening out. The idea of readings. The idea of question time. I am the girl who hid behind the jacaranda tree at uni tutorial time. The girl who after a childhood of piano and two recent years of study with a most serious maestro, only just lets herself swoon when she plays her nocturnes. Sure I like quickfire talk, but to an audience?

May I not still my qualms and palms with a gallon of prosecco?

And this morning at five. Bright moon shining through my window as I open my manuscript and find my red pen. Waiting for clarity, winking back.

Will anyone like my cover?

moving the mountain

Many mountains have moved this week. First, I am off to my final revision of The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy. Scared I will find new uneven patches or worse, that I won't be able to drive my uni student sons from the house. I have been working on better concentration now that the heave-ho of ski driving is over and I have caught up on some sleep, but I want purity. Crystalline. Chemical. The brain an unknotted strobe. No, not drugs silly, that just-woken serene but edgy lucidity that fades as soon as that first voice blots your brain.

Might have to do a slog month of the 5am alarm. But it works. Ti giuro!

And my other mountain came to me. Or me to him rather, through his organisation and rusty car. This divorcée has so much on her plate that this is the only way to savour such delights. Peaks from one window, rustling newly-fringed woods from another. Beaten hands, worn beautiful eyes. The deepest most unimaginable calm.