A Dream Come True - Halfway!
Can you help make it the whole way?
I was always a vaguely normal person. I always had that dream of writing, like so many other vaguely normal people, kept a diary with the usual outpouring of emotions for over eighteen years and wrote hugely self-indulgent poems, like so many more vaguely normal people.
I did write a Mills and Boon, and even wrote a book called 'Gullible's Travels' but, like most vaguely normal people, never believed in myself enough to think they could possibly be published.
But then, having quit the dream of writing, and drowning in the exhaustion of breast feeding the third child, I had a dream. I sat bolt upright in bed and realised that this was it. I had been born to write and not just write anything but to write Rabelais. It must have come from some deeply unconscious zone because I had only skipped over Rabelais at university and had almost forgotten the original book's existence. For those of you who don’t know, Rabelais is akin to the French Shakespeare and inspired Cervantes, Swift, Joyce and even Monty Python…
Carried away with enthusiasm, I sat at a desk with toddlers cavorting around me and wrote. I wrote the first Gargantua pretty quickly and touted it around to a few publishers. One said it was very publishable but not by him. But then I had a second dream. This time I woke up sweating and realised I had been a complete idiot: I could not possibly be Gargantua the giant-as I had written it- Gargantua was meant to be a pure being-not tainted with my anger and other negativity! What an idiot! I put the book away in a drawer.
And then my marriage fell apart. When I was so scared of financial pressures and considering getting a high powered full-time job instead of the therapy work I so enjoyed which allowed little windows of time to write and be a mother, someone I respect and whose intuition I trust enormously gave me some writing paper...So instead, in the black pits of despair, I sat and wrote a children's version of Gargantua with the kids still gambolling all around me. 'Gargantua and the rainbowman'. A brilliant book but after four or five rejections I knew it would be too hard to get published and put that in a drawer as well...
‘Gargantua Now takes one physically and mentally through the rhythms of its absurd wisdom. There are sublime moments’ JJ
