The unutterable sadness of not finding a publisher.

Sometimes the search for a publisher calls for desperate
measures and most of the time I feel heartily ashamed
of asking my friends, who are already published, to put in a word for me here or
there. 
It seems disgraceful and yet it’s
what people do, especially when we do not have a reputation, when we do not
have a name.  
In desperate circumstances,
pride slips away. 
Most weeknights before I go to bed
or first thing in the morning before 7 am, I check the street for cars, my
family’s cars.  We live on a Clear Way in
the mornings from 7 am to 9 am.  Any cars
parked on our side of the road between those hours, during the week but not on weekends, will be booked by council
inspectors and then towed away.
To retrieve the car you pay $300.00
to the man in charge of the depot in Collingwood to where the car is towed and later
– you have a few weeks grace here – you also pay the council a fine of
$144.00. 
It’s an expensive exercise to park
in front of my house between the hours of 7 am and 9 am on weekdays. Visitors
beware.
On this morning when I had elected
to sleep till fifteen minutes past seven, I went outside first thing to collect
the newspaper.  To my horror my daughter’s
car was parked directly in front of our house. 
I ran back inside to get her car keys and to put on my shoes. 
I do not like to drive cars with
bare feet besides I’d need to park the car in the side street some distance
from home.  I pulled on my boots but did
not zip them up and ran flip flopping out of the house in my salmon pink terry
towelling gown.
 
The man was already dragging the car up onto his tow truck.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘It’s my daughter’s car.  She
needs it for work.’
My daughter, still asleep in bed, was
oblivious to all this. 
‘Sorry, but it’s already been
booked,’ the man said.  ‘Once it’s booked
I have no choice.’
He looked sorry enough, but even
then I figured the business of towing cars is his bread and butter.
It was only later after the drama
had died down that I recognised a mixture of compassion in the tow truck man’s eyes and
also his surprise.  I must have looked
like a wild woman, my undone boots flapping, my pink dressing gown and my
shrill voice.
 
My daughter paid
the price.  Fortunately, my husband could
get her to Collingwood to collect the car before she started work. 
Her excuse for leaving the car on
the street was one of confusion the night before.  She had come home late from friends and was
tired.  For some reason, she had thought
it was already Friday night.  
If I had planned to go out onto the
street and encounter a stranger from whom I would beg for mercy I might have dressed
better.  That is, if I had the time and presence of mind to prepare. 
But in desperate circumstances, we
behave desperately and bugger the consequences. 

A luddite on the rampage

Last Tuesday my computer seized up
and died.  The young man at our local computer
shop, Streetwise, was confident he’d be able to fix it, just a soft wear problem
he said, but as the days passed the story developed first from a soft wear problem
to one of irretrievable decay. 
We bought a new computer and the
Streetwise fellow offered – for a price – to install my old data, which we had
saved onto a backup disk, as all sensible people do.  The Streetwise chap had hoped to be able to save
it from the original damaged hard drive but no such luck. 
Then the back up drive only coughed
up data to 2011, the rest is not there. 
A problem with the way the back up disk was connected to our computer
via Time Zone or some such guff.  And so
we needed to take the damaged hard drive to a fellow in St Kilda Road who
retrieves lost data, again for a price.
He’s confident, this second fellow
tells me, that he can retrieve my data. 
For $440.00 economy, it will take approximately ten days; for $900 priority, he’ll need four to five days, or for emergency, he can retrieve it all in
one to two days for $1200.00.  Despite my
desire to have my data back now, right now, I opted for economy.  I can wait.
But to wait, when it feels as though
half of my life is on ice.  I exaggerate,
but this business of losing my data has unhinged me.
Strange dreams in which I move
house with two of my children as youngsters and the place, filled with many
rooms – a mansion of a place – is chaotic. 
No matter how hard I try to tidy, the kids drag toys out from everywhere
and I cannot get my house into order. 
A new computer is one thing, a fun
thing you might say, but for me it’s cruel the time it has taken to get my new
computer running and all of this dependency on the genius of my children, who
are au fait with the lingo and all things computers, is debilitating. 
I bought an IMAC but did not
realise I needed Microsoft office until I made another visit to Streetwise.  Until then almost nothing would run, and then another visit later, this time to
Office Works because Streetwise had closed by then, to get a new separate disc drive
because the newest computers are slim and lighter to carry than their
predecessors and in line with the view that one day soon DVDs will disappear altogether
as Videos did before them, the new computers no longer have the capacity to
insert discs.
I sound like a luddite or an ancient
person who cannot bear change. 
I had resisted up grading my computer
for this reason.  My computer was eight years old,
they tell me, a good long life for a hard drive. 
It seems computers do not live as
long as pets. Hard drives are destined to fail sooner or later, they tell me.  Human error and the limitations of all things mechanical. 
Inbuilt redundancy, I reckon.  It enrages me and adds
to the stockpile of junk, unless we can recycle.    And all this new stuff to
learn again. 

But then I tell myself, it’s
character building, the re-learning that is, not the accumulation of junk.