You can see from my profile that I have a number of "lives", of which writer is only one! I have been pondering this strangely schizophrenic life. In my 'real' life (the one that pays the bills!), I am a senior executive with a large not-for profit organisation. For three days a week (in real time, more in emotional time!) I balance the demands of board meetings, board reports papers and ongoing requests for legal advice. For two days a week I try (not terribly successfully) to be Alison Stuart, writer...and in between I fit wife, mother etc. into the equation.
The people you meet and interact with in your day to day life form a certain image of you in their own mind. For many years, when I first started writing, I would no more have admitted to my secret life than stood up in front of a Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd and declared myself a born again Christian! It was even something a little shameful , a secret vice like eating too much chocolate ... or buying really expensive Italian shoes...
I had to really trust a person before I confessed my secret life, generally prefaced by something like: "Just for fun! Just stories, not great works of literature..." I was so afraid that if my colleagues knew I wrote historical fiction (with romance) my professional credibility would be undermined in some way. This is one of the reasons I chose to write under a pen name. It freed me up to be another person, the Jekkyl to my Hyde!
As I've gone on, I have gained a little more confidence in my work colleagues and most of them now know that beneath the senior executive in the tailored suits (that is a look I am definitely trying to shed!), there is a whole other side to my life. This has, in its turn, invited similar confidences about the secret lives of my work colleagues - martial arts champions, crime writers, poetry writers...
I would love to know how you balance your secret lives? Do you have work colleagues with secret lives? How does knowing a person's secret life affect the way you interact with them?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Book of My Heart!
If you have read my earlier blogs and visited my website, you will know that BY THE SWORD is the book of my heart. A little story that began when I visited Harvington Hall at the age of 11 and has been with me through thick and thin - endured rejection and rewrite, consignment to sock drawers and resurrection is now an Eppie Award winner.
The awards were announced in Portland on Saturday night but, of course, being in Melbourne Australia I did not see the results until Monday morning. My husband, hearing the shriek, came bounding up the stairs two at a time, convinced I was being savaged by a monster spider....
Thank you so much to those out there who have sent me so many good wishes that I am sloshing in cyber champagne and to Fiona Lowe and Mel Scott for "blogging me"...and most of all to those of you who have read and enjoyed the story. THAT is why I write :-)
The awards were announced in Portland on Saturday night but, of course, being in Melbourne Australia I did not see the results until Monday morning. My husband, hearing the shriek, came bounding up the stairs two at a time, convinced I was being savaged by a monster spider....
Thank you so much to those out there who have sent me so many good wishes that I am sloshing in cyber champagne and to Fiona Lowe and Mel Scott for "blogging me"...and most of all to those of you who have read and enjoyed the story. THAT is why I write :-)
Sunday, January 27, 2008
A Room of One's Own
I have no pretensions to be the next Virginia Woolf but that superlative writer wrote an essay on this subject which you can read in full at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt . In short she said to write fiction, a woman needed money and a room of her own.
I have always had, in one sense or another, a room of my own or should I say, a place of my own where I worked and I could make identifiably MY space. My sons had their bedrooms, my husband his shed and I claimed the room in the house loosely termed "the study". Two and a half years ago I lost that space when my husband's employer unilaterally decided my husband should work from home. I don't propose to go into the fine details of that (still ongoing arrangement) that left my desk stranded on a (large) landing.
I attempted to claim that space on the landing as my own, but nothing I could do altered the fact that it was still a thoroughfare. I mourned for my space and my writing effectively dried up, except, oddly, on those few days when I was home alone and the whole house once more became my space, but crammed into a corner and subject to the continual interruptions of sons and husband was not a good place for a writer.
There are probably those of you who say, a good writer can write anywhere, and certainly when the muse is with me, I could write in a train station in the middle of peak hour, but I need a sense of order around me to get that muse kick started and working on the landing, I never seemed to achieve that sense of physical or mental order.
When I lived in Asia, I learned quite a bit about Feng Shui - certainly enough to know that the basic precepts of not cluttering and freeing up energy lines have some considerable credence. Certainly they do for me!
My eldest son has upped stakes and is travelling overseas for the next year so I, after some basic consultation with him, claimed his room. Over the Christmas/New Year period I painted the room and moved all my "stuff" into it, hung my pictures on the wall and made the space mine. I am not just a writer, I also sew (quilting/ embroidery) and with all my sewing materials pushed into available spaces around the house, I have even felt myself unable to pursue that side of my creativity. Now it is all with me again and I feel the space in my head opening up again.
Along with the space, I have also embarked on some new year's resolutions which I fully intend to keep (and by declaring them publicly - I can keep myself honest!). The first was to undertake one of Margie Lawson's on-line courses on "Beating Self-Defeating Behaviours". Through the course, I have hooked up with a wonderful fellow-writer in Canada, Alice Valdal , to be my change coach. We share a lot in common - including the same self-defeating behaviours.
The second was that old chestnut - exercise! I have given up on the unused gym membership and taken up a programme called "Step Into Life" - group exercise in the great outdoors. With a stressful job and the general pressures of daily life, physical fitness is the most worthwhile investment I can give myself. So keep me honest! Exercising outside is wonderful at the moment because the days are long and the weather is warm - roll on winter and it may be a different story.
Two questions:
1. Do you need a "room of your own"? Or If you have a "room of your own" tell me about it.
2. What new year's resolutions are you absolutely committed to keeping this year?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Alison
I have always had, in one sense or another, a room of my own or should I say, a place of my own where I worked and I could make identifiably MY space. My sons had their bedrooms, my husband his shed and I claimed the room in the house loosely termed "the study". Two and a half years ago I lost that space when my husband's employer unilaterally decided my husband should work from home. I don't propose to go into the fine details of that (still ongoing arrangement) that left my desk stranded on a (large) landing.
I attempted to claim that space on the landing as my own, but nothing I could do altered the fact that it was still a thoroughfare. I mourned for my space and my writing effectively dried up, except, oddly, on those few days when I was home alone and the whole house once more became my space, but crammed into a corner and subject to the continual interruptions of sons and husband was not a good place for a writer.
There are probably those of you who say, a good writer can write anywhere, and certainly when the muse is with me, I could write in a train station in the middle of peak hour, but I need a sense of order around me to get that muse kick started and working on the landing, I never seemed to achieve that sense of physical or mental order.
When I lived in Asia, I learned quite a bit about Feng Shui - certainly enough to know that the basic precepts of not cluttering and freeing up energy lines have some considerable credence. Certainly they do for me!
My eldest son has upped stakes and is travelling overseas for the next year so I, after some basic consultation with him, claimed his room. Over the Christmas/New Year period I painted the room and moved all my "stuff" into it, hung my pictures on the wall and made the space mine. I am not just a writer, I also sew (quilting/ embroidery) and with all my sewing materials pushed into available spaces around the house, I have even felt myself unable to pursue that side of my creativity. Now it is all with me again and I feel the space in my head opening up again.
Along with the space, I have also embarked on some new year's resolutions which I fully intend to keep (and by declaring them publicly - I can keep myself honest!). The first was to undertake one of Margie Lawson's on-line courses on "Beating Self-Defeating Behaviours". Through the course, I have hooked up with a wonderful fellow-writer in Canada, Alice Valdal , to be my change coach. We share a lot in common - including the same self-defeating behaviours.
The second was that old chestnut - exercise! I have given up on the unused gym membership and taken up a programme called "Step Into Life" - group exercise in the great outdoors. With a stressful job and the general pressures of daily life, physical fitness is the most worthwhile investment I can give myself. So keep me honest! Exercising outside is wonderful at the moment because the days are long and the weather is warm - roll on winter and it may be a different story.
Two questions:
1. Do you need a "room of your own"? Or If you have a "room of your own" tell me about it.
2. What new year's resolutions are you absolutely committed to keeping this year?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Alison
Saturday, December 15, 2007
BY THE SWORD - 2008 Eppie Finalist
Welcome to my new blog page. I'm not sure if that is the correct term for it! My earlier blogs can be found at http://alisonstuart.bigblog.com.au/blog.do
Breaking news! By the Sword is a finalist in the 2008 Eppie Awards. "The Eppies" are the major awards for electronically published books. The winner won't be announced until March at the "Epicon" convention. Unfortunately, as I live in Australia and the convention is in Portland, Oregon it is unlikely I will be there, but it is such a thrill to be nominated.
By the Sword was actually my very first novel, although it bears little resemblance to the early "iteration" and chronologically comes before The King's Man. It is "the book of my heart" and I find it enormously satisfying that, after years of trying to find a publisher, of my two novels, it is the one that the readers (and judges!) seemed to favour.
If you would like to read an excerpt go to http://www.alisonstuart.com/excerpts.html#by%20the%20sword%20excerpt
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