Contemporaneous: Chapters 16 – 17
16. I leave Melody’s manuscript sitting there in my email, festering like … and I can’t come up with metaphor or simile that will illustrate what a festering, diseased, terminal clusterfuck it is, so I’ll just say that it sat there in my email, festering like only her manuscript could. Despite my disdain, I still want to get the best out of it and out of Melody, so I need to work out a strategy. But I’m frazzled now. And feel an edge, like Melody’s dismissal isn’t the indifferent vainglory of some cocky young writer, but divine condemnation that exemplifies my own failures. There are other manuscript on my…
Contemporaneous: Chapters’ 14 – 15
I sit back to read the opening of Melody’s manuscript: 14. Tianna was named after Tiananmen Square, her Chinese mother romanticising the homeland before she fled to Australia – or West Australia, to be precise, where she met Dylan Copley, a mail sorter sorting mail in the city’s central post office, although at different stages of his life he had aspired to play lead guitar in a band, become an actor, to be a stand-up comedian, before life’s little cruelties had sorted his aspirations into the impossibles basket. Of course, Tianna knew none of this as she picked at her lumpy mashed potatoes during family dinner. Mother insisted…