But let me start with this one. For my thirteenth birthday my father bought me a typewriter. I'd been scribbling stories in my exercise books for many, many years, but I'd impressed him greatly the previous two years by writing and finishing a novel. I wrote it long-hand in four exercise books and read parts of it to him every night when he got home from work. So he decided that if I was going to be a writer, I'd better have the writers' tools. Now, my dad was notorious for buying items off the back of trucks, so I'm still not entirely sure that that typewriter was ever really mine. But I decorated it with stickers and wrote the names of the guys out of Duran Duran on it in liquid paper, and I embarked upon my second novel. And this is it. It's an epic fantasy called "Trek into Freedom," and it features a heroine who looks quite suspiciously like I looked at thirteen, and yet she is far more popular. I'll give you a little reading from it.

***

I'd really like to say that I write less melodramatic stuff now, but I can't actually guarantee that I do.

I guess I wanted to start right off with challenging the notion that an author's first published novel is the first novel he or she wrote. To believe that is to be miserable. If you are an as-yet-unpublished writer, still trying to polish up that first thing you wrote, please, just put it aside and start something new. I promise you it will be better than what you're working on now. Writing is a bit like mining, but you're not drilling through layers of soil to get to the gold, you're drilling through layers of crap. Some people are lucky, they only have one or two inches of crap to get out of the way before they get to the good stuff, for others, the good stuff is located miles below the surface. The important thing is to get all the crap out of the way as quickly as possible. In all, I wrote eleven novels before I had anything published, and that's a lot of crap--more than half a million words of crap.

A particularly nasty review of The Infernal which was the first novel I had published, suggested that my novel, like "many first novels" was a thinly veiled wish-fulfillment fantasy. Now, apart from the fact that I'm staggered that anybody should think that my fondest wish is to make a pact with Satan and then pay for it by being pursued by a madman for the rest of eternity, it was nowhere near my first novel. Which I fully admit was a thinly veiled wish-fulfillment fantasy--and not even that thinly.

Anyway Grimoire, the book I'm supposed to be speaking about today, is actually my twelfth novel. And I'm happy to talk about my second published novel, but to be completely accurate, I have subtitled my speech here today "Twelfth-novelitis--the sophomore jinx + ten."

Yes, there is something very different about writing what will be your second published novel. And I'm afraid to say that everything that makes it different, makes it stressful. The most significant difference of course is that up until you have something published, you write with nobody looking over your shoulder. Your overwhelming conviction that you suck hardly makes a difference--you keep writing because you can console yourself by saying "oh, nobody's ever going to read it". The second time around, you have an audience. And writing with 10s of 1000s of people looking over your shoulder can freak you out.

You'll notice when you buy Grimoire that it's dedicated to my friend Kate. This is for a very real and rational reason--I was so appalled by the idea of pleasing all those people, that I had to do something about it. So I chose to focus on just one reader and make the others disappear. Kate and I always love exactly the same books, so whenever I got a bit anxious that this part or that part wouldn't please my audience, I would just think, "stuff everybody else, what would Kate like to read?" It's very liberating. It might mean that in the long run Kate has more books dedicated to her than Queen Elizabeth I, but this way I'll always know I'm keeping at least one reader happy.

In my own case, the fear of second book failure was made worse by the fact that the first book had won two national Spec Fiction prizes--the 1997 Aurealis Awards for best horror novel and, bafflingly, best fantasy novel. I never considered The Infernal (quite unlike "Trek into Freedom") as a fantasy novel, and freely admit that the judging panel that year tried something outrageous and different by awarding my book that prize. I thank them for it, but it means I can never live up to the first book. Because I can almost guarantee that nothing I write from here on in will qualify as fantasy, let alone win a fantasy award. I know you're supposed to have goals in your career, but those bastards at Aurealis moved the goal posts all the way off the field and into the suburbs.

Then there were the more Kim-specific reasons that Grimoire was so difficult to write. I had just finished my BA in 1997 and knew I was going to do an Honours year in 1998. So I set myself the Herculean task of finishing Grimoire before I resumed my studies in February--giving myself three months to write something like 130000 words. That I did it was a testament to my stupidity rather than my stamina. It meant that I commenced my Honours year--ostensibly the most important year in my academic career--in a state of complete physical and emotional exhaustion. And then the stress just got laid on thicker and thicker as I tried to edit the book, check the page-proofs etc while I was writing my thesis and keeping up with a gruelling coursework load. I finished the year as the walking dead, which is somewhat fitting for a horror writer, but not at all what a young woman should aspire to, really.

There are fish deep at the bottom of the sea who are used to living under such an enormous pressure of kilometres of water, that if you bring them to close to the surface, they'll actually explode. And I did. I won't go into the details--watch Oprah if you want to hear people talking about cracking up. I recovered, I always do. I took a recuperative holiday to Europe and then came home to discover the delights of dancing around my living room in my underwear to Abbey Road as a mode of stress relief. And I promised myself that next time it would all be different.

So now I'm working on novel #3. I'm right near the end, and earth-moving equipment has just moved in next door, laying the foundations for a new block of units which will no doubt be noisily assembled and then noisily occupied. When the workmen first arrived at the site, they had a truck door open and a radio playing really loudly--FM104 or something with lots of ads and lots of John Mellencamp. I got sooo angry, because I couldn't concentrate on my work, and I even took down the phone number of the company and was going to call them to complain. But then I thought, who am I to ring and complain? I get to work in a nice office with lots of plants and a cup of tea and my nice music playing and my scented candles burning, and they have to dig ditches in the hot sun, and I want to take away their one small solace of music? This is what upward class mobility does to you. So I just keep my window shut, no matter that the weather has turned Malaysian, and I keep my head down and my tail up and I keep working. All novels are hard to write--whether they're first, second or thirteenth. But it's still the most fun you can have while your boyfriend's out, and you can do it in your pyjamas. Thankyou.

(© Kim Wilkins 1999)