Diary

Sometime this year my book will be published. This is something I will only experience once, my transition into a new world. I will live it. It will feel like life and death at the time and then it will be done and I will begin the process of forgetting. I have decided to keep a diary. I know that most of the people who find this site do so because of the key words "horse in my vagina" or "fuck virgin girls in arse" and therefore you won't be particularly interested in the highs and lows of this run towards publication, but there are others out there who are in it for the writing and therefore I would like to keep a diary leading up to the date of publication. Rather than start a new blog, I will do this on Furious Vaginas or Furvag as my beautiful friend calls it. So if you are in it for the sex, just ignore the posts that are called Diary as these are not about the sex. These are about the art and therefore in a way you could say they are about wanking.

I begin it here. I begin as I ready myself to go down to Melbourne to meet my publisher. First I have to say it is the publisher I have always dreamed of. Every birthday cake, I would close my eyes and whisper 'Text Publishing' and make sure I did not touch the bottom with a knife. I would catch dandylion clocks on a gentle breeze and speak the name to them and let them go. A childish habit but one that underlined the importance of this particular publisher in the scheme of things.

As I prepare to have my first meeting with my editor all my insecurities bubble to the surface like acne. I take it out on my person, my intimate companion, not my partner, who I have learned to keep removed from this kind of thing, but my dearest friend. I turn on him and snap and snarl and looking back on it I know that it is all because of my insecurities. My fears are ridiculously amplified. What if I can't fix it in the edit, which is ridiculous because I am a voracious editor. What if I say something ridiculous - which is possible. I am prone to sudden bursts of ridiculousness. Worse, the main thing, the completely insane but terrible heart of it all, what if I am too ugly to market effectively.

Oh we are so superficial and predictable, we humans. Here I am at the brink of acheiving the thing I have desired most for so long, and I am concerned about my weight and my haircut. I fret over the author photograph incessantly.

I walked past a discount bookshop the other day and had a flash of the eventual fate of my own book. I saw it piled up and reduced to 7.95 which is their price for trade paperbacks. It was a soft moment of melancholy but I shrugged and walked on. I know how these things go. I am far more stressed about the author photograph anyway.