Did I tell you they are doing another print run today?

It's not so bad, that next book. The same night I posted a piece of what I now call confected angst, I read over my thesis-come-novel and thought, 'well, it's not really that bad.' There are just different forces at play in writing the story of the sealers and Pallawah women, to writing Salt Story. (Sorry Tom but I'm gonna write about writing here.)

Salt Story started from coming home after a night's fishing and feeding my experiences straight onto my blog for people to read. It was a chatty affair, full of ripping yarns, bravado, pathos and smelly seaweed. Salt Story was a shitload of fun to write and I think that is reflected in the writing itself.

Exiles and Island Wives was born in the archives and my obsession with a man born nearly two hundred years ago.

The novel deals with themes of pedophilia, infanticide, abduction and rape. And that's before you get to abuses of colonial power, contact experiences and the near extinction of fur seal in the early 1800's. It all sounds very grim and I feel that it probably was a grim life for the men, women and children involved, especially before I remove my comfortable contemporary lens to look upon that history. Despite the brutality though, finding beauty in landscape, language and people of the story is not difficult. It's just that sometimes, while writing it, I fall into a big black fucking hole. Reminder to self: invoke your inner Cormac McCarthy, Sarah.

It does bother me that people who have read Salt Story will read Exiles one day and say, "But I thought she wrote funny stories about fishing! This shit is really dark."
It is a re-creation of events gleaned from explorers' journals and Colonial Secretary reports. I've written it to please academic thesis examiners this time around and it will take some tweaking to make it palatable to the public. Apart from short snippets that I've posted on A WineDark Sea, the manuscript is unread by anyone except for my supervisor. It has become an endless feedback loop inside my head at times. So when I say it stinks ... well maybe it does but I'm dealing with my harshest critic here - myself.

There's something else that I would like to mull over regarding sequence and that is the blog-to-book scenario, as opposed to writing an historical novel with only a cat and my handler for feedback. (My handler says nice things. Bobcat also says nice things about my book - when she wants to be fed. She's gaining weight rapidly.) When I first started editing Salt Story with the idea of morphing my bloggy fishing yarns into a book, I simply cut and pasted the whole lot into a word document, printed it out, made a pot of tea and started reading.
It looked absolutely shocking.
Elizabeth Bryer, who posted a great review of Salt Story on Kill Your Darlings' blog Killings (here) beautifully sums up the difficulty of mashing genre and mediums:

It hardly bears stating that blogs and books are very different beasts. Part of the joy of a blog is its immediacy: the way an experience can be rapidly turned into a published piece that is, from that moment, accessible to the reader. As a WineDark Sea reader, I could be sitting at work, bored, and so decide to click through to the blog and dip into what Sarah had done that very morning: interview a fisherwoman, say, or spot the calling card of a shark in the Sound. 
There is such a thrill in knowing that the experience-turned-tale I’m reading right now has played out a long way from me spatially but very close to me in terms of time.  Another difference in form is the need, in a blog (something I struggle with!), for pithy posts that begin in medias res and capture a moment, which doesn’t necessarily translate to a book-length work given the aim, there, of immersion. How then would the tales-as-book, in sacrificing the illusion of time shared by author and reader, and in being translated to long form, fare?

It hardly bears stating that blogs and books are very different beasts. Part of the joy of a blog is its immediacy: the way an experience can be rapidly turned into a published piece that is, from that moment, accessible to the reader. As a WineDark Sea reader, I could be sitting at work, bored, and so decide to click through to the blog and dip into what Sarah had done that very morning: interview a fisherwoman, say, or spot the calling card of a shark in the Sound. There is such a thrill in knowing that the experience-turned-tale I’m reading right now has played out a long way from me spatially but very close to me in terms of time.  Another difference in form is the need, in a blog (something I struggle with!), for pithy posts that begin in medias res and capture a moment, which doesn’t necessarily translate to a book-length work given the aim, there, of immersion. How then would the tales-as-book, in sacrificing the illusion of time shared by author and reader, and in being translated to long form, fare? - See more at: http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2013/12/of-seadogs-and-fisherwomen-sarah-drummonds-salt-story/#sthash.T3FCecvH.dpuf

The time thing that Elizabeth mentions was the main reason why my lovely new word doc looked such a shambles. Although "Last night we fished the harbour ..." has an immediacy that is beguiling and entirely appropriate to the ever-shifting sands of the internet, it just does not work with the solidity and permanency of paper. So it took a good eighteen months for the editor of Fremantle Press and myself to wrestle the chronology of the chaotic, vodka-swilling, teenage street party that was Salt Story into some kind of order.

In the end, Salt Story was constructed in sixty two short pieces. (I use this tradie metaphor often because books are a construction plus I love my work being edited. Being edited is like a master builder coming into your shack, pointing, and saying "If you just put a brace there, that girder will stay put for another forty years and save you three thousand bucks.")

There is another thing about these sixty two pieces. I'm no great believer in the Death Of The Novel. Apparently the novel was borne of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism; when moneyed wives of the owners of the means of production had the leisure to lie about for days and read 'voraciously', supplanting the aristocracy in their access to education and therefore power blah blah blah.

Despite the moanings about the demise of print media during this more current and v. interesting knowledge revolution, I still believe in the novel. But maybe its form has to change as our brains are changing; filtering and adapting to snippets of information rather than long form narratives. Maybe Salt Story's sixty two short pieces, those gleaming moments that make up something greater than the mere sum of its parts, could be the way of narratives in the future. I dunno. David Ireland did it in the 1970s with The Glass Canoe and I believe that some bloke called Dickens did it a long time before Ireland.

Anyhoo ... if you are still with me, here is a link to a new, very lovely review by Lisa Hill: ANZ Lit Lovers.
And my Happy Moment for the week? Fremantle Press clicked 'yes please' on another print run today. Yes. That's right. Salt Story has nearly sold out, six weeks after publication.
Whoo!

It hardly bears stating that blogs and books are very different beasts. Part of the joy of a blog is its immediacy: the way an experience can be rapidly turned into a published piece that is, from that moment, accessible to the reader. As a WineDark Sea reader, I could be sitting at work, bored, and so decide to click through to the blog and dip into what Sarah had done that very morning: interview a fisherwoman, say, or spot the calling card of a shark in the Sound. There is such a thrill in knowing that the experience-turned-tale I’m reading right now has played out a long way from me spatially but very close to me in terms of time.  Another difference in form is the need, in a blog (something I struggle with!), for pithy posts that begin in medias res and capture a moment, which doesn’t necessarily translate to a book-length work given the aim, there, of immersion. How then would the tales-as-book, in sacrificing the illusion of time shared by author and reader, and in being translated to long form, fare? - See more at: http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2013/12/of-seadogs-and-fisherwomen-sarah-drummonds-salt-story/#sthash.T3FCecvH.dpuf