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Even though I am a gadgetry harlot and would sell my soul for any item with the prefix i attached - iphone, ipod, ipad, isexybloke – nothing detracts from my adoration of a new book.

Brand new.  Spankingly firm and taunt of binding, wonderfully print-perfumed and creaseless and perfect.  Straight from the printer to the shipping container to hot little (clean) hands; begging to be read.  Pleading to be touched and inhaled, ingested and … opened.

But can you bring yourself to do this?  If you open it clumsily or while you’re having a coffee, there’s a chance that this magnificent, virgin-sheened bondage of pages is going to be spoiled.  What if the spine creaks and splits?  What if the title page folds inward on itself and embeds improperly.  What if the wind changes, you realize the book has been used and your face stays in that veneer of horror?

If you’re nodding along to any of this, chances are that you love a new book – hardcover, novel, coffee-table, bestseller – or you have (SO WRONGLY) folded the tip of a page as a bookmark, only to be discovered by the book owner/worshipper.

Will eBooks ever evoke such passion?  Is there a ‘sensuality’ to downloading the latest from your favourite author and transferring it to your Kindle, only to train your eyes to a digital tablet while you’re reading?  Is the concept of ‘books are sensual things’ really just weird and I need to seek help for the euphoria I feel when I receive a brand new one?

If so, I’ve outed myself as a new-book pervert.  Whoops.  Oh well, there are worse predilections to have, perhaps?

eBooks don’t appeal as much.  It’s nothing to do with the lack of i prefix, more the lack of book ‘theatre’ – the limited romance involved in holding a tablet compared to printed paper and colourful cover, or the loveless concept of switching ‘on’ text compared to peeping between the beautifully-swaddled sheets of a pristine novel fresh from a bountiful bookshop …

‘Ken Hell!  There’s that weirdo book erotism again!

And what to the question of storing books?  Having shelves and boxes and mantles filled with favourites gathering dust, never to be reread again?  Do we cull those books given to us as presents just because they are getting a bit crusty ’round their corners?  Do we ‘get rid of’ hardcovers because they are big and cumbersome and we are embracing the minimalist lifestyle?

The eBook is simply written over with the latest pop culture text or whatever takes your fancy at the time.  Less paper use means more trees survive all over the world and I’m sure choosing eBooks over traditional paper can relate to global warming/consumerism/oil prices/the Kyoto Protocol in some way.

It’s a quandary.  However, the crux of the matter still comes down to personal preference.  While we have a choice, I’d like my new novel with warm colour designs, neatly affixed pages and the straightest spine since the introduction of school backpacks helped prevent scoliosis in students all over the planet.  Please.

Until the advent of the iNovel with paper applications and dual-layer touch sensations.

*****

Lovely lady, friend and talented writer, Amy (she paid me) from Never True Tales is running a Friday initiative where blogs writers guest write at someone else’s place.  It’s called:

It’s my pleasure to welcome Fiona from Squirt Baby to write for Fangirl Sings the Blues this coming Friday, while I will visit her blog and write something about my expertise at dress design and fabric identification.  Then, it will be an honour to host Amy a week later.  I will be pen an entry for her Never-True Tales on the day she writes here.  It’s a great idea.  Being relatively new to the BlogO’rena, it’s a nice way to meet new people and read what they have to say.

Enjoy the week ahead and please look after your books.

Have you ever waded through slush?  According to northern hemisphere friends, there’s a fair chance they will be met by slush when they venture outside at the moment.

It’s a nasty image, isn’t it?  Then, slip on some nude pantyhose, pop on your best shoes as though you are going to meet someone special, only to open the door, realize it’s rained/snowed/spat from the heavens and your track is soiled by SLUSH.

It’s yuck and (potentially) gooey.  Dirty, sleety, wheaty (can be in Australia, anyway) slimy, creature-infused MUCK.

Slush.

Now imagine a pile of it.  And then conjure a piece of work you’ve bleed over for the past 12 months being shunted to the bottom of the slush pile and there you have the main topic of this micro-rant today.

I’ll call it a micro-rant because it’s trendy (in Australia, anyway) to pair any term with the prefix micro.  eg: Can you micro-manage some fries with that enormous burger you’ve ordered?

‘Slush Pile’: a glamourous publishing and writing term related to a bundle of manuscripts lying on the floor/desk/bottom of dog kennel/corner of the office lavatory in a publishing firm’s working area.  Apparently, it is the job of the ‘newer’ publishing house staff (read: shit-kickers) to plough through the slush to find a future best seller.

What a job!  It’s akin to shoveling the snow that’s assembled at your door and been sneezed upon, hoping to discover a Willy Wonka golden ticket amid the crud.

Perhaps the new publishing employee enjoys this line of work in her/his new job?  It’s not really part of this post to consider that but to establish that slush pile is a derogative term.  It is!  Whether the new writer takes it to heart and struggles with it personally is another matter.

Is there another ‘line’ of work where you may toil for a year or more, pour pun, pontification or poem onto parchment, only to send it away comprehending that your manuscript will end up in the slush pile?

Imagine you’re an Accountant.  You’ve been work with figures all year, getting hot and bothered (and very excited, I might add) about the end of financial year, only to have your excel spreadsheets printed off and heaped into mid-year recycling.  What about a teacher: slaving all year to bring students up to scratch, chastising them for not listening or failing to do homework, only to have the Principal send you to the staff slush corner at the end of school function.  What about the year’s work of a pilot?  A postal delivery person?  A cop (nah, perhaps they work in the real mire of slush)?  A butcher, a baker, a children-clothes maker?

Does their work enter a domain-de-la-slush – where only the crapola manuscripts hang out?

On the other side of the slush, I’m sure ‘publishing staff’ would mention that not all manuscripts are equal and some are not deserving of consideration.  We exist in a world where only the best are recognized/published/decorated/promoted/given concerts.  It’s life, and if it’s too damn hot, get outta the kitchen!  Still, it doesn’t make the term any less condescending.

In keeping with the ‘line’ of work I love – writing fiction –  I devised my own politically-correct slush pile on my computer.  It’s to accustom original writing to the harshest of treatment with an infinitely nicer name.    It’s a hard-drive folder titled ‘Try Hards’. This file contains original work that (I think) would seep to the bottom  of the publisher’s slush, never to be seen again.

If you’re a piece of fictional writing, Try Hards is a difficult place to dwell.  But you miss out on the slushy mushy.  There is no gold-star for trying in this folder, but it’s warmer than the publisher’s floor space on lavatory tiles.

‘Slush pile’ is an offensive term.  Knowing your work might find its way there is enough to keep any writer humble.  No one likes to miss out on basketball selection/cookery prizes/academic awards/winning Super Mario Bros on Wii.  I suppose it’s why only the best are ever on the court, even though the rest try as hard as buggery.

The third novel in the Fangirl series, by Rosie Jones, is due out in February. ‘ZOMG!  The Northern Fangirls’ is the title.  It has spent some time in the Try Hards folder, but recently swam against the slush to salvage itself.  Just.

It’s well known that nothing prepares a woman for labour nor her partner for the emotion associated with the birth of his offspring.

It’s well documented.  It’s spoken of at ‘dad’s nights’ and play groups and over morning tea.

Nothing prepares us for birth.

Nothing prepares us for death.

Where the labouring female bludgeons from the pit of her body, bays to the sympathies of Mother Earth and endures, so might those in grief.

As the birthing partner looks on, often feeling totally inept and unable to wrench any control away from Father Time, so, too, will those confronting loss.  And while the final frenzy of ushering a newborn into an imperfect world is usually accompanied by sweetened anguish, searing pain and life-altering tears, so the grief-stricken will encounter a similar purging.

Birth and Death.  Beginning and Beginning Again.  Joy and Sorrow and a massive movement of your heart space that will never, ever conform to expectation again.

I didn’t know how to grieve.  I didn’t know how to give birth, either.  I don’t know how to grieve, and  I can’t remember how to give birth after nearly seven years.  Birth and Re-Birth. The two elements of life over which we have very little control – if we have any control at all.  Some might argue that we can prevent or delay birth via contraception, chastity, the ‘smarts’.  Yet those who choose to believe in the concept of fate will suggest that nothing is ours to control.

She lost her sister two years ago and she still finds grieving so abstract, she wonders if it truly happened.  Where were the 5-7 measurable, time-lined stages of grief that she’d read somewhere, sometime?  Where were the clear delineations explaining how a sibling should grieve compared to how a mother should be affected?  Where was the wailing?  The acceptance?  The insight, the understanding, the comprehension?

She realized they were as accurate as the ‘stages of labour’ and the notion of ‘what to expect when you’re expecting.’  Not predictable, not measurable, not specific to an individual.  Such unique pain.

So, she was lost.  There was no guidance manual, but there were helpful people mentioning grief counseling and the value of time.  Yet the thing she remembers most about that period is the bubble of vague her body enclosed about her.  She’d overheard that humans have a hormone that ‘does this’ – places the shattering, zombie of walking heartbreak into a physiological cocoon, so that the figure of grief wanders dully through the shards of sorrow left behind by the deceased.

She didn’t know that.  She wouldn’t have believed it possible had she not experienced it.  But what about the balm for the broken heart?  What about the antacid for the soul that threatened to rupture whenever the bereft woke to remember the passing?  What about the short-term healing.

Didn’t happen.  It’s the cross of the living to be left with the hole in their life.  They bear it until their time comes.

My sister died two years ago and I still can’t believe it happened.  We don’t know what normal is, but I still expect her to be on some sort of extended time away, and I’ll awaken one day to find her there – just like before – with advice, a cuppa, and a chat for the disillusioned.  Perhaps that’s right!  It’s what will happen when we meet again, the intervening years being a type of suspended animation until such a reunion.

But that’s a question of faith.  A question for another time.

Losing a special person in your life is bloody hard.  Ask anyone.  Losing a sibling is as difficult, and  I stumbled about for a while not really knowing how to define myself without her in my life.  Strange, that.  We might think the same thing happens when we lose a beloved parent – they have also been in our lives for our entire existence – but perhaps we (rightly or wrongly) expect them to pass before us.  It’s nature’s way.  They birthed us, and it’s their right to go before their children.

No control.  We don’t hold the remote control in this screening of our lives.

Lea bought empathy, creativity, love of people, the environment and learning into this life with her.  She conjured conversation and colour, she flipped the coin and experienced the downside of life too.  She teenaged in an era where The Who sang ‘hope I die before I get old,’ and she questioned and ran the gauntlet of convention on a couple of occasions.  She was typical, but atypical; loved a laugh, but loved her own space.  Could be outspoken, but also drank from the well of introversion.  She bitched and birthed, ran amuck and made amends, and took her rightful place in the hierarchy of a large family.

When she lost her sister, she lost touch with the familial structure that had defined her.  It was no longer there.  The foundations had crumbled.

I work to find my way.  We help each other walk in the shadow of her loss, and we miss her.

Rest peacefully, sister.