Before I committed to photography, I was pursuing a writing career.
I attended writing workshops with New Zealand writers and have this novel I've been carrying since the early 90's. As I develop, move countries, learn new things, so too does my main character. By chance.
Currently she's a war photographer who was in Iraq but who somehow ... happens to have relocated to Genova, Italy. Before that, she was a woman in retreat, living in the mountains of New Zealand, alone with her dog, once again retired from a previously intense life.
There's a book of interviews with New Zealand climbers and mountaineers, almost published, two publishing meetings and an apology but 'they didn't think there was a big reading public for it', despite them liking it a lot. The Everest tragedy happened later and climbing literature became more mainstream however, by then, I had enrolled at university: age 34.
I was heading for Bill Manhire's writing course in Wellington. I ended up in Istanbul.
It makes me laugh to write that. One never knows where life might take them if they allow it to take them ...
Anyway, back in my days of writing I used to drive my first husband crazy. No, that's not why he divorced me. I used to edit and correct as I wrote. I would reach 27,000 words and edit it down to 3,000 words. I was brutal and a perfectionist too.
But it was my editing that made him crazy. As I got closer to the final edit ... on a first chapter (hence I never finished the book), my editing would become minute. I would give him the manuscript to see what he thought of my edit. He would say, 'there's no change!'. Exasperated, I would explain that I had moved two 'the's' and deleted an 'and'. How could he not see the difference that made.
Children, never edit an unfinished manuscript. Write it. Fix it afterwards. Or you will never finish.
The reason I write all of this is because ... there was another photograph of B&B Baur, like the previous one but different. I think the edit isn't so small but perhaps it is tedious to those reading this blog.
This is me and I need to 'see' both of them here, so that I can happen upon them unexpectedly later, and really 'see' them as a stranger.
