At the end of 2017, I heard that a friend of mine had written a book that was going to be published. It was a memoir, not something I had ever thought of doing, but it made me think. While we were on holiday in Hermanus with my parents over Christmas, I had a thought - why not revisit the book that had been floating around in my head ever since I was in High School? I started dreaming and thinking about it, and thought I might as well give it a try.
I started writing
Alex on the Edge when I was fifteen. I began it on my own at home, and expanded it a little when we had to hand in a "Creativity File" for English class in Grade 10. Our teacher encouraged us to try out our creativity however we chose, and gave us free reign to hand in whatever we liked. I handed in a thick file of poems, pictures, a short story or two and of course - a chapter or two of my great teen beach romance novel. I have never forgotten the encouraging comments my teacher wrote on my file, urging me to carry on and finish it. But it was the nineties - I was fifteen and lazy, we didn't have a computer in the house, and my mom's ancient manual typewriter had torn ribbons and hurt my fingers after half a page.
I tried again when I was twenty, after doing a creative writing course at University. My lecturer asked us to write episodes of our lives, and I wrote one about my innocent aborted attempt at novel writing. To my surprise I was encouraged again to keep going and finish! I tried again, this time on the family PC in the lounge, printing out my efforts on the back of scrap paper. I managed a few more chapters this time, but gave it up as way too much like hard work. I still have a pink plastic-covered folder with those faded old pages in it.
So about a year ago I opened a file and called it
Rocks and Islands - the original name from version one. It came from a Simon and Garfunkel Song about someone who shut himself in his room and cut himself off from people after a heartbreak, because "a rock feels no pain" and "an island never cries". Somehow that angle wasn't part of the story any more, but I kept the working title. Once I got into it I couldn't stop - Alex and Jill came alive in new ways and new characters formed themselves in my mind, sometimes surprising me with the things they said and did. My house got messy and my kids ate fewer vegetables, the TV was boring and when I went to bed at night I dreamed about Marshall Bay and Lesotho. It was hard but it was wonderful. I had never, since I had directed a school play in my early years of teaching high school,
loved any kind of work so much.
So that's how this new chapter began. It's been a good one, and I hope this is just the beginning :)
