After last year's experience of Christmas, I swore I'd skip the family rituals in 2009 and disappear overseas somewhere. My mate Heather signed up for the getaway option too, but our resolve melted away during the year. Usual problems -- too little money, too much guilt/sense of responsibility.
So I had a big think about why I've never been able to pull off a great Christmas since my kids have grown up.
I decided to shrug off those things I couldn't change:
1. My mother's annual depression / bitchiness attack. One of her brothers died on Christmas Day when she was a child and she's never got over the mixture of grief, guilt and resentment the surviving siblings felt about the occasion.
2. My partner always spends Christmas with his adult children in Perth. Not only do I miss him, but my mother tends to be narkier when I don't have a man around.
On the other hand, I realised that I could do something about the two other big issues:
3. Cramped space. Among my immediate family (spread between Melbourne and Brisbane), no one has enough sleeping and dining space to host a combined shindig.
4. Separation anxiety. Whichever city we plump for, one of us always seems to be out of sorts. Usually it's my son missing his girlfriend and pals.
So what was my brainwave? Lacking the money to rent a big holiday place, I decided to try to swing a house-swap. And guess what -- although I joined an Australian home exchange site and started lobbying there for a deal, it was the international site I belong to that delivered the solution. Out of the blue, even though I hadn't signalled interest in Queensland, I received an offer from a lovely couple in a spot roughly half way between where my son lives and where my daughter will be staying with her in-laws. Hallelujah. I can host a Hannah family shindig and drop in for extended family howdy-doodies.
Now all I have to worry about are the family dramas.
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Merry Christmas
ReplyDeleteHere's your present
http://www.authonomy.com/
CJS
Thanks for this CJS. I've just joined. Are you a member? If so, what's your screen name? I'm keen to interact more.
ReplyDeleteCJS000 at hotmail dot com
ReplyDeleteAfter a few weeks at Authonomy ,I realise it may not be a way to beat the slush pile.
ReplyDeleteThere are about 4,800 books and about half of these are complete. If we assume half of those are at first draft stage then there are about 1200 “finished” novels. The way it works is as follows. Authors get to vote on each other’s works. Each month Harper Collins review the top five. To get to the top five, the trick is to get enough votes, and the best way to do this is to swap reads with another author. Most of those who make the list have swapped about 1,000 reads! This leads to two things;
Reads are often brief and so give you little real feedback. If your work sucks, the other author will still say it’s good rather than risk having you fail to back his book.
You spend more time swapping reads rather than writing your book.
Even if you make it to the top, you are still not sure of a contract. So far, Harper Collins has given out three of these. This indicated that they are not seriously using Authonomy as a source. Sorry to be a bearer of bad news but I may drop out of the site soon.
CJS
Understand your reasoning. I've always done best in life through narrow focusing. It's too easy to get distracted.
ReplyDelete