The Joy & The Sadness

This weekend I spent some quality time with wonderful author friends – Susanne Bellamy, Noelle Clark, Demelza Carlton and TP Hogan, as well as partying with favourites Suzi Love, Hazel Gower, Tamara Gill and Khloe Wren (okay, okay, enough name dropping).

Noelle pointed out that authors are a strange mix of introverts and extroverts. We spend so much time in our own heads, bringing stories and characters to life. And in many respects it is a solo journey that, if we’re lucky, we’ll have a spouse, a friend, a fellow author that we can share some of the road with.

It is a painstaking and sometimes slow process.

Then there is another side to us. The extrovert side. Perhaps it comes from being too confined in our imaginations for so many months that when we’re finally let loose among real living, breathing, walking-around people we go a little crazy. And moreover, these people we meet get us in a way very few others do – they’re writers, bloggers, reviewers and readers.

They don’t think it at all strange to want to talk about fictional characters as if they are real – because in that space and time, those characters are real.

That is the joy.

The sadness is two-fold.

First, like all good things, it has to come to an end. People have to go home, back to their day jobs, their families and back to the ‘writing cave’, having had the wellspring of imagination replenished.

Secondly, in the case of Readers Writers Down Under, we were told at last night’s gala dinner, that the event just past would be the last. We were saddened but we understood. Jodie O’Brien has driven this project for three years – each time improving the experience for everyone, but the physical, emotional and financial toll were too much.

Hopefully, someone else might pick up the baton, but we authors owe a debt of gratitude for Jodie’s dedication in bringing authors and readers together.