Never give up

I spend a disproportionate part of my day keeping in touch with friends by email.

     Why?  I have spent the last 20 years on an island accessible only by air.  I've not been able to afford the fares to see them so email has become an important part of my life.  It's a cheap and timely way of maintaining contact with old friends (pre-TI life) and then my departed TI friends.  Even though I am on the mainland now, I’ve kept up the practice.

     Facebook has been an option, but there’s something about the public nature of the pages and profile, the layout and the limited space for text that unsettles me.

     I love written words and I love the personal nature of individual emails.

     When My Island Homicide was short-listed in the Courier Mail People’s Choice Awards, my first thought was, ‘Shit, I should have got Facebook years ago.’

     If I had been a Facebooker, I’d have a trillion friends and been able to reach them all in an instant.

     So I hacked Tony’s rarely used Facebook profile/account/page (?) and after three days, worked out how to upload a photo and the link to the voting page for the awards.  I reached a few of his and my friends.

     Then another hurdle emerged.  I realised I have some serious competition; real writers.  They are the other short-listed authors whose works (plural) have been read by thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people. I shared my dismay with a friend who berated me for the use of the term, ‘real writers’.

     “And stop comparing yourself to ‘real writers.’ You are just as real as they are.”

     I didn’t feel as real.

     Below her signature panel was a William Blake poem, Eternity.

  He who binds to himself a joy

  Doth the winged life destroy,

  But he who kisses joy as it flies,

  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

     I shot back a reply:

  To writing’s joy I hath bound
  No harder pursuit to be found.
  Bugger the kissing of things a’flying
  I must write or I’ll die trying.

     I’ll die trying.  I remembered a poster affixed to the window of a Mossman fish and chip shop in 1993.  

     Not giving up meant attempting to reach, without Facebook or any social media app/device/program (?), people who might vote for my book. 

     And I’d have to do it by individual email.  Perish the thought of group emails.  They are impersonal and rude unless advising the change of venue for a sausage sizzle or the date for a book club meeting.  Or an emergency.  I’d feel dreadful contacting someone after years with a request to vote for my book and no other news.  

     Nope! I don’t do group emails.

     Then I realised I have something my competitors don’t have.  

     I have time.
     I don’t have a real writing job or a regular job for that matter. 
     I have time; time to email friends and interesting people and kindred spirits Tony and I had met over the years.  I'd been in email contact with them for a while until, with the increasing chaos of my life and probably their's, the emails dried up.

     What a delight these last few days have been.  Re-establishing contact with wonderful people who have touched our lives.  I shared not just news of the Courier Mail awards, but Titasey titbits from the past few years.

     And the best part has been receiving their news. 

     I have spent a disproportionate part of these days emailing old friends and reading emails from them.
     I don't have the professional or social contacts to win these awards, but I’ve had a bloody good time trying!