17 "I Move Around A Lot From Island To Island" and "You've Gotta Kill Your Darlings"

Guest 1

[00:00:00] In order to get into the city, I have to wake up a little bit early in what not only have one route leading into the city and then coming out of the city, so you have to wake up a little bit early in order for you to go to work on time, because everybody's on the road. There's, you know, crazy traffic. You try to beat everyone and sometimes you don't. You have long lines of traffic. But people are very friendly. We have a lot of exotic beaches as well, and we use and a lot of stuff that you can, you know, enjoy in Vermont. I think most of most of our parents, they believe that, you know, it's good to get the kids out of the house, you know, get to experience that for themselves.

So I was sent to boarding school. I grew up mostly around the boarding school. I wasn't boarding school for a few years after that. I did a little bit of, schooling in, part of my education in Port Vila. And then after that I went to the Philippines. I stayed there for six years and then moved back to Port Vila. And then, yeah, I started working. I come from the central part of, of a north to, a small island called Panama. It's from the mainland of the province. It's a small island, but a lot of our people, from the island, most of them, they have moved out of the island to find jobs, places like, the capital city where the capital city is, which is Port Vila, and also on the, largest island of on water, which is Santo. I was born in one went to my parents are from Vanuatu. My dad works for the government. So he was a civil servant? Pretty much, moved around a lot. So, since my dad was, working in different places, he spent a few years in the capital city, and then he moved.

Because 1 or 2 is surrounded by the ocean. People tend to, like, work with, with the ocean. My brother and my dad, they pretty much work with Department of Fisheries that looks up at the ocean. So that's been more of that. I'm there and I grew up around that, you know, because my then tend to, you know, be on fishing boats. We tend to go out fishing and stuff like that. But my, interest was not in that I was more interested in politics and, you know, history, politics and stuff like that. I was very interested in that. So I went into that direction. I went and did my, bachelor's in political science, and then I came back and, started working for the government as well. So I worked for me from Monday through Friday. So it's, starts at 8:00 and you finish by five in the afternoon. You do a lot of oversight for the projects, government projects. And then also have been, programs that is happening in renovating. So I do a lot of, oversight on that. So we do a lot of reporting. And, because of reporting, I tend to move around a lot from island to island just to check on government projects. No. Was this year we had a project that we had to work on, and, we had to travel to, a few of the islands and the people that are associated with this project, like, say, for example, a road that goes through a village and, we talked to people that, you know, use this, you uses this road. So, for example, a mother or father or, you know, kids going to school.

We just want to see the experience of the road and how the project impacts their life. Sometimes we talk to, nurses as well, and, far of communities just to see, what are the challenges? What are what are the challenges and what are they faced with? And, yeah, we get to hear a lot of respects from them. And then usually when we we go out for this kind of tour, we bring along a video camera. So, we don't do, do a lot of video works as well. So we capture some of these stories and then we put them out for, you know, for everyone to see what life is like in the other places. They have times when people are not very cooperative. Sometimes when you tell them that, you know, you're working for this particular thing, and then you come in to check on the performance and the impact of how this thing is affecting their lives. They sometimes have people that implement such programs and then they don't show up, and then you come along and then people tend to put their frustrations on you. We do face a lot of, frustration sometimes from people. It's a good thing that you're giving us the feedback so we can, you know, put this feedback together and then, you know, give it to the right people for them to do something about it.

The feedback that you're raising, we work with pretty much a lot of, you know, groups, like, you know, from youth, church leaders and also community leaders. So and different people have different perspective on, you know, what things that you're trying to work. So yeah, sometimes we just try to, you know, put ourselves in the shoes when just to think from, you know, from the angle where they're coming from and, you know, just to listen to them. I love my job. It's a fun way of meeting new people. And you get to see a lot of things that you don't get to see, you know, like if you spend so much time in the capital city, you think that, you know, everything is is okay to go out and then you spend a good few weeks or maybe sometimes months out there. You tend to see that, you know, there's difference. And, there's a lot of people that might not have the same opportunity as you, but, but they are still enjoying life. So it gives you another perspective to look at life in a different way. [00:05:01][301.2]

Naty

[00:05:06] Hey folks, it's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break. What the hell is my job? [00:05:16][10.7]

Guest 2

[00:05:17] Well, there's an element of truth in that. You do write 10,000 words, and then you realize it's all terrible and you have to do it all over again. There's also a very, very romantic view about what writers do and what writing is. [00:05:29][11.7]

[00:05:33] I've been doing a lot of swimming recently. Up, up at the Ponds in Hampstead Heath, over the last year. And I find that a really nice way to sort of I just go there by myself and do a bit of just do a few laps and sort of float around and, that's a nice way to sort of decompress about all the day to day stuff and then think about the other stuff, because I do Ghostwrite that's one of my regular freelance money earners doing that since 2015. And I also do a bit of teaching, creative writing, teaching, and also another job I've been doing since last year helping a really cool author called Penny Pepper, who is a champion of the disability narrative and fiction, which is widely underrepresented. I help her do, her writing over, over zoom, actually, on Google Docs, because she just dictates to me. I also do a lot of book prize readings, so reading submissions for various writing competitions, including the Bridport Prize, which is a big, really nice, really cool international, competition, which I think you can enter, there's a poetry book competition, flash fiction, short fiction, and the novel won. So I read some of the short stories, but it was so long list, which is like the second stage reading for the novel award. So I do that in June and July. So there's a lot.

So June and July gets pretty intense because I have all my ghostwriting work to do. And also if I'm working on my own manuscript that I do, but then I also have to read a couple of hundred short stories in a month, and also maybe 120 novel extracts in two weeks. You get really good at skim reading, but you don't want to skim too much because you obviously need to feel the pace and get really into it. It's I mean, it's really gratifying job, but you've also got to be a bit cutthroat, with you got to you got to kill your darlings, even though they're not your darlings, other people's darlings. Lots of books that you think that's really nice, but it's just not going to make the cut. My three novels who came out with the with a publisher, a great publisher called, Derek, and then one of the sort of smaller independent publishers who are champions of getting out different kinds of books that might otherwise not make it, for a larger one, and also underrepresented voices, which I wouldn't say I class myself as, but, the most recent one came out in 2021, and I've recently this year finished, the fourth one, which is currently with my agent to work her magic.

Hopefully I'm already working on a new novel at the moment, which is kind of in no form in my notebook, but also, in my brain. So I do lots of this mixed bag stuff because with novel writing, yes. You do like sort of I do go on a lot of walks. I did do a lot of thinking. I think some people say writers are always working because even then when they're not writing, they're thinking, which definitely is true. But also you don't necessarily get that much money. And that's one of the romantic parts of it, the sort of misconstrued, you know, you get advances for the not huge necessarily. And royalties, they come and they go, and obviously the publishing industry, the fiction publishing industries, is, is really based on what's marketable, what's salable. And I started approach it in the same way I did the like the one before it because that worked and it got it, got it finished. And then you realized this is a different book, probably a bit of a different person, maybe, like I've something's changed or I'm writing about something different. And so you're like, okay, I've got to sort of figure this out again.

And then the book that I finished earlier this year, I think I had four drafts before. She was happy with it, during which it changed considerably, in fact, in the sense that, like the character, lots of the characters changed their relation to each other, changed, whole narrative tangents disappeared. And that was a lot to get my head around. But I think being able to visualize it literally using sort of, making a table or, or even and I have done this before printing the whole thing out and then read penning it and then putting it like on the floor in front of you and be like, okay, so that chunk is going to go here, that bit's got to go in the bin. I'll put the ending over there and then write a new ending. I find that really satisfying because then you sort of get a bit better picture, and you really start to think like you're making progress. The first lot is just a skeleton, and it might be shy, but then once you go back and you start actually tweaking bits, so like, okay, now it's looking cool.

And a lot of the time I'll start a book and it'll start. The first few chapters will feel like this. And by the time I get to the ending, it's complete different flavor. So when I have to go back anyway to make sure and the ending is the kind of flavor I want the whole thing to have, so I have to go back anyway to make sure the beginning in the middle has the same flavor as the ending, which is quite a fun way of doing it. So it can be like that. Whereas with ghost writing, which I do through an agency, that's though each one of those projects is part of a, an editorial team with a project manager, an editor, the ghost writer, which is me and an interviewer. So I never actually meet the client, the ghost writing clients. I get sent 90 minutes of audio from each interview, and then I build a narrative and I structure it. Based roughly on what they want. The client who we call the author. And that's actually quite easy to go back and change stuff in, because every two interviews they get a review copy of the manuscript and they can make notes and they can say this, I haven't got an emotional stake in it. So when they say, I want this here, I'm like, done, we'll do it. I'll make it work. When you're dealing with 80,000 words of prose that you've labored over, being told by a reader or your agent or whoever that something's not working or you need to do, this is a bit like head in your hands. I think with my last novel, my agent said, right, this isn't working. You need to I see what you're doing here, but you need to do this. And I think this needs to be quite drastic. I think I spent a month of just like, well, am I going to do? And then I somehow I worked it out and I was like, oh, okay. And then I did it and it was fine and it was way better because of it. [00:11:02][329.1]

Naty If you want to be featured on the show or you know someone who's perfect for the show, then just fill out the quick and easy form on our website and will contact you head to What the hell is My job.com for sign up. [00:11:03][0.0]

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