Sam van Zweden

It’s always exciting when a new project pops up, and Tincture Journal is no exception.

Under the guidance of Sydney-based editor Daniel Young, Tincture is a digital publication looking to publish quality short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. It promises to be a publication that takes itself, and the business of lit-journal-ing, seriously. Published writers will be paid (a token amount to start with, but this is a generous gesture). The e-book format of the journal presumably makes it both an affordable publication to produce and a friendly one to read on your device of choice. The publication will be sold for a small amount, which I think is yet to be decided.

From their website:
“E-books are not a lower-class of book, and Tincture endeavours to publish high quality writing in high quality electronic formats” – I have a whole lot of respect for Tincture‘s valuing electronic publishing in this way; it’s something I feel is really important.

It’s impossible to tell what a publication will be before its first issue. But the attitude of the people producing Tincture, and the kinds of people I’ve so far seen engaging with it via Facebook and Twitter (lit people, whose work I like, shan’t name-drop), bode well for this new lit journal, whose first issue will be out in the next month or two.

Tincture are currently taking submissions. Poetry submissions have been closed due to a flood of interest, but they’re still taking submissions (through the brilliant Submittable portal) of short stories and non-fiction.

So take a punt. These guys have their head screwed on straight, and if you send them good work, they’ll be publishing good work!

Graeme Simsion is quite the man of the hour – you’ll have seen him in one or all of the books pages lately. People are excited. Winner of the Premier’s Literary Award for best unpublished fiction manuscript, Simsion’s novel The Rosie Project is a humorous, sharp, and fun story about how “you don’t find love: love finds you.”

The novel’s protagonist, Don Tillman, is a totally endearing cross between Mr Darcy and Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Though never directly stated in the book, Don is suggested to be a high-functioning autistic. He lives his life by strict rules, mapping out schedules and standardizing everyday events (meals, exercise, showering, etc) to minimize the chance of unexpected emotional challenges which cause his brain to “overload”. Don is socially awkward, caused mainly by his inability to think in any way but literally – however, his brute honesty, intelligence, and lack of personal insight (causing lots of those “a-ha” moments from readers watching over the protagonist’s shoulder), are exactly what makes Don such a loveable character.

Like the rest of his life, Don approaches the “problem” of finding a wife as scientifically as possible. He creates a questionnaire, ranks preferable answers, and tries to find the perfect woman based on her quiz results.

Enter Rosie Jarman. If this were a film, you might say that Rosie is the “Manic Pixie Dreamgirl” character. She’s unpredictable, emotional, and disorganized. She arrives late, she drinks too much, she doesn’t plan things in advance. She’s everything that Don is not looking for in a wife.

So after the first date, Don rules Rosie out as a potential partner, and keeps their relationship in a strictly platonic compartment in his head. While Rosie’s flightiness can unsettle Don, he knows that all this is separate from The Wife Project.

…or is it?

There’s a lot of nice tie-in stuff happening with The Rosie Project. You can chat to @ProfDonTillman on Twitter, or you can watch the book trailer and take a quiz to find out which character you’re most like on the Text website.

Simsion’s novel is a lot of fun, and is a great light read for curling up in the sun with. It reads much like a rom-com film, and indeed, the work did start life as a screenplay. While it’s not the kind of book I would have picked up without the hype, I am glad that I did.

The Rosie Project was a nice way to spend a few reading days.

I have two particular quotes circling around my head to keep me going this week.

“If failure don’t hurt, then failure don’t work”, and, “Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The first is from a Boy & Bear song, and the second from Samuel Beckett. While the folk band and the playwright are worlds apart, both of their words have been really important reminders to me.

I got a few rejections, see. I also stopped writing for a few weeks. And I slipped into a depressive slump – rising early, avoiding my study, eating too much and not washing (clothes, self, dishes, everything). I’d sent off the applications before the depressive slump, but by the time the rejections came in I was in this place: “REJECTION + DEPRESSION = DEVASTATION AND DESPAIR”.

This has nothing to do with the rejections themselves, really. I mean, I was sad I didn’t achieve the things I was aiming for, but I was mainly just having some kind of bizarre, unnecessary existential crisis. I let myself sulk for a day after the second rejection, but then I started remembering Beckett and Boy & Bear’s words about failure.

It’s part of being a writer, and I suspect it’s part of being creative in any way. I think you need to get knocked back for things that matter occasionally. For me, these rejections have served as a wake-up call: What am I doing? What am I aiming for? Shut the fuck up, put your head down, and write. I was getting lost in all the extraneous stuff: numbers, other people’s opinions, hits, selling my work. None of this matters. What matters is that I have something to say, and I know that if I commit, I can say what I want quite well. I needed to refocus, or else 2013, “my year off study”, would fly by without me achieving anything.

I ripped everything off my pin board last night. I dedicated space to my ideas, my goals, and deadlines. I put up the names of places I want my writing to take me, and publications I’d love to write for. I put up all the article and story ideas I’ve had and decided to start another day, so that there’s always something for me to be working on. Today I’ve come home from my half-day at work, and (apart from a few episodes of Girls with lunch), I’ve stuck to my reading and writing routine.

I’m taking it one inch at a time, as Anne Lamott advises:

“The first useful concept is the idea of short assignments. Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of — oh, say — say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It’s hard to get your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.” 

Lamott keeps a one-inch picture frame on her desk, which reminds her to only bite off an inch at a time, as a small assignment. This is the tactic I’m taking. Just small bits.

I fell down, but I’m getting back up. I tried, and I failed. No matter – I’ll try again…

The call has gone out for interns for the 2013 Emerging Writers Festival.

I was an intern (Associate Producer, thankyouverymuch!) at the 2012 Festival, and it’s been one of the best moves I’ve made. I made awesome friends, got to know people better, got to know myself better. Survived on beer and chips for a few weeks in June. It was a fun experience, but it was also a really challenging experience, pushing a lot of limits I didn’t know I’d set for myself.

As an intern at EWF, you actually get assigned an event, and you make it happen. With guidance and support, of course, but the end result is something you can be proud of, and something amazing to put on your resume. In 2012, I got to organize the Melbourne and online teams for The Rabbit Hole, and it’s an event people are still talking about. As an EWF Associate Producer, you’ll get to make a difference at the festival, and in the lives and careers of emerging writers.

Applications close on the 23rd of January. You are a capable person. I believe in you – more importantly, the festival will believe in you.

Okay, #loveattack over.

Go. Now. Apply. You won’t regret it.

As you may recall, during my time at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, I was involved in organizing the Melbourne and online chapters of the event, “The Rabbit Hole”, which originated with the Queensland Writers’ Centre. Other teams were writing in Brisbane and Hobart.

It’s super-exciting to see, then, that the Review of Australian Fiction have kindly dedicated an issue of their fair journal to the fruits of the Rabbit writers’ labours! It’s free to download, and it’s available here. Congratulations to all the writers involved, who took their work this one step further, and special “Huzzah!” to my writing friend Jodi Cleghorn, whose dedication to her Elyora project is … well, it’s nuts.  Jodi really goes for it with everything she does, it’s very admirable.

If you’ve not heard of or seen the Review of Australian Fiction before, stick around their website to check out what they do. Every two weeks, RAF team up emerging and established writers, who workshop to put together an edition of RAF with two short works that complement one another. It’s a great opportunity for emerging writers, and a fantastic use of digital publishing – it really lends itself to short works.

Enjoy!