Yesterday I popped by Sydney* for a celebratory lunch with my lovely agent and the fine team from Pan Macmillan. These are the people who have dried my tears, answered my insane 1am emails and crafted The Bit In Between into everything I could ever have dreamed it would be. It was my first time meeting many of them in person and we had a wonderful lunch before they took me for a looksy at Pan Mac’s office** and pointed me in the direction of Kinokuniya, which is probably the most incredible, dense bookstore I have ever seen. There’s no point to this blog other than to send a massive blubbering thanks to each of them because they have been so kind, passionate and supportive.

* ‘Cos that’s how I roll. Me? Flush with cash, y’all. Took my private jet. It’s like Clive Palmer’s but bigger.

** It’s in the CBD. 25th floor. City views. Etc.

I rambled into the camera on my laptop for a while and the good people at Pan Macmillan turned it into an intro promo for the book! There are a lot of facial expressions happening in this video. I’ll probably get an Oscar nod. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: I am home sick today because I seem to have caught some of that winter that has been going around. If anyone from work is reading this, I am genuinely sick and am writing this with a tissue planted up either nostril and the kettle on permanent rolling boil. Please excuse any incoherent sentences as most of my brain seems to be congested amongst my sinuses at present.

As part of promotion for The Bit In Between Pan Macmillan have organised a blog tour. Initially, to me, this sounded as if I would be sucked into my computer screen in the manner of an eighties teen movie and then forced to spend eternity traipsing from one blog to the next in search of an exit route back to the world of the living. Turns out it is actually a series of reviews, Q&A’s and guest posts hosted by the very kind people of the blogosphere.

My blog tour kicks off (posts off?) at the start of August so I’ve been working on the guest posts early in order to not explode from the brain outwards come end o’ July. This has made me discover something very intriguing about myself: I have two very distinct blogging voices. The first – for blogs that ask about myself, my background, my story etc – that voice is gleefully playful, happy to self-deprecate and drop borderline crap puns with ease and abandon. But for those that ask about my writing and the book itself, I seem to suddenly transform into a well-tenured humanities professor who has long ago lost touch with the flesh-and-blood world and uses phrases like ‘affording each literary character dignity’ and ‘respecting the process as much as the outcome’.

I’ve been trying to think on why this is (not today. Today I’ve just been trying to breathe without sneezing). I’ve come to the vague conclusion that whilst I am happy to throw myself on the flippant altar of humour, my characters and the underlying themes of my writing are serious messages masquerading beneath the Trojan horse of comedy. For a long time I’ve appreciated the strategy of Terry Pratchett, Caitlin Moran and Cosmo from Singin’ in the Rain, which is if people are laughing they might not notice the serious socio-political commentary you are scattering amongst their literary bickies and cheese. And in that way I don’t feel it is fair to laugh at or tease my characters because they are really trying to do so much within my little stories.

So perhaps this is it. Regardless, you can all see for yourselves from August 1 in the Claire Varley Bit In Between Blog Tour ’15: coming to an internet near you!

As a child I was always asked to refrain from scrawling my name across the pages of my books. In fairness to my mother’s pleas, my handwriting has never been neat and for a long time I had trouble spelling my own name which has a glut of letters for something monosyllabic.* Picture books just aren’t the same when all the characters have ‘cLAiRE’ tattooed across their eyes and stomachs. So it has long been drilled into me that You Don’t Write in Books.

Last week the Willy Lit Fest designated a period of time for us authors to sign copies of the Love Stories anthology for the punters. And, very generously, people wanted our scribbles. While Alexis and Susan, the other two authors, raised their pens with the poise of true professions, I felt markedly anxious. Firstly, You Don’t Write in Books, and secondly, what was I meant to write?

When the first book was laid open before me I panicked and just signed my name exactly as I would if signing for a parcel or completing my timesheet at work. So there’s definitely one person in the Greater Melbourne region who can now forge my credit card signature. The second I hastily scrawled my initials, then realised everyone else was writing nice little comments in theirs, and that I, on the other hand, was giving nothing more than a faint touch of barely legible ink as if I were Angelina Jolie acquiescing to the request of my adoring public who had come to LAX especially to greet me. For the third I spent a large amount of time just staring at the page before finally writing something as poetic as ‘I hope you enjoy the story’. I mean, you can see why people pay me to write, right?

Soon, I was on a roll. Alexis gave me her book and I wrote ‘I like your story better than mine.’ Susan gave me hers and I wrote ‘Your story makes me happy.’ David, the MC, gave us his and I wrote ‘Thanks David.’ It was like Shakespeare himself had taken over my body like a benevolent poltergeist and was reinvigorating the world with words.

I have now made the commitment, with 6 weeks until The Bit In Between hits shelves, to practise signing my name every night, alongside flossing my teeth, mediating and doing my pelvic floor exercises. And, just like all the others, I have remembered to do it once this week. So bring on future book signings and may we all enjoy my concise, uninspiring messaging.

*Contrary to most people’s preference, my version of Claire has both the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ because why not? Why not let’s break the bank buying vowels in life’s version of Wheel of Fortune…

I’ll be joining the talented Susan Pyke and Alexis Drevikovsky to read from our contributions to Australian Love Stories as part of the Williamstown Literature Festival, 13 June, 10.30am. Details here.

I remember one of my uni lecturers saying that every picture tells a story. For mine, that story is normally ‘I just got out of maximum security prison and I’m coming for you.’ I don’t photograph well. I have two smiles: The first is a seemingly casual close-lipped smile – more ennui than ingénue – that looks like I know a secret, and that secret is disdain. The second is a toothy little number that looks like every single emotion is exploding from my face like an over-caffeinated Movie World back up dancer. There is no middle ground, and my natural resting face suggests something terrible once happened to me and I am now dead inside. There’s not a lot to work with.

So when Pan Macmillan requested some author images I reluctantly prepared to bust out a little bit of #1, #2 and heck, why not, even ol’ dead eyes for the camera. Author photos are important. They accompany press stuff, adorn book jackets and fill that insatiable urge humans have to have a visual reference for all things. They also, truth on the table, are part of marketing authors. Depending on the genre or style, they should convey the sense of someone you want to be/be friends with/be in awe of. For me, I suppose I want to seem like someone who will meet you for brunch, make you chuckle, then promise to pay you back because I left my wallet in the car again. You know, your bog standard friend. Easy, right? RIGHT?

Photo attempt 1: Me and John down by the schoolyard

My man-friend John has a fancy camera and I take a ‘glass half empty’ approach to my bank balance, so we decided we could produce a quality image on our own. I took my usual approach to grooming – get up, wash face, leave house – and off we went to CERES, a local environmental park. We wandered around for a couple of hours find interesting things for me to stand in front of and smile demonically into the camera. There was lots of this –

John: Okay, smile.

Me: I am smiling. This is how I smile.

John: …Really?

And also lots of me hissing like a vampire and covering my face whenever people who were not part of our ‘photo shoot’ strolled by.

The results were average; of the several hundred photos there were one or two where my eyes were open and I didn’t appear to be wincing in pain. So these were sent to Pan Mac. They responded with a very nice, very kindly worded suggestion that perhaps I might like to have another try. In fairness, while Beyoncé wakes up looking flawless, I wake up looking like the Babadook.

This led to…

Photo attempt 2: Friends with camera skills!

I don’t wear make up and have what we of the Mediterranean fondly describe as ‘ethnic hair’: it’s thick, it’s curly and it doesn’t give a crap what you do to it because it just wants to BE FREE! In preparation for the photos, two work colleagues helped me buy make up (ie I sat there mutely while they conversed with the makeup girls, before I helpfully explained ‘I just want to look like a better version of me, please.’) I also got my hair did, which for me means gripping the arm rests as a determined hairdressers goes forth at my hair with an electric hedge trimmer. The night before, in preparation, I watched The September Issue, practising my ‘Wintour is coming’ glare and thrusting my elbows about in awkward model-esque shapes. Windmill! Vogue! Popped collarbone! Strut!

My flat is dark and gloomy and looks like somewhere goblins come to dwell and hoard stolen coins and kidnapped first-born royal infants, so we took the photos at a friend’s house. I did my windmill arms and vogue face until my friends asked me to sit quietly and look normal. Then my friend adjusted some settings on the camera and just held down the button on autofire, figuring surely there’d be one or two decent ones. This theory, based loosely on the mathematics of a thousand monkeys at a thousand type writers*, worked and we managed to capture a bunch of photos where I look like someone you just might brunch with if you’re other plans fell through.

So hurrah! And this will now be my author photo for the next decade, at least.

*don’t think too deeply about that.

A few years ago a presenter at the Emerging Writers Festival said that one of the most important things a writer could do was to start calling themselves a writer. Not when they first placed in a short story competition, not when they got their first publication, but right now. Because if not, the point for measuring this would always seem just out of reach.

I always assumed that if I ever got a book contract this would be that moment of acceptance. That a sense of calm self-assurance would envelope me and the consuming writerly self-doubt would dissolve into nothing. Turns out, no.

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