Jealousy, FOMO & Carly Findlay on memoir, activism & love trumping hate

Image: Woman with red face and short, dark curly hair.  She’s smiling.

In this episode the hosts discuss FOMO.  Yes, Fear of Missing Out. They also discuss it’s counterpart: Actually Missing Out (AMO?) .

Kate read this article by Jane Sullivan in The Age, which said writers should aim for a hundred rejections a year.  Katherine says it’s two a day, YES she should have said two a week.

What follows is a discussion on feelings, including jealousy…

See, what happened was, Kate went on holiday and had no internet the whole time. When she got back to the real world, everyone was doing great things.  New books!  Awards! Successful funding applications! And it was…

Kind of awful.

What do you do when you feel happy for your friends but also a teeny tiny, massive bit terrible too?

Kate mentions there’s great advice in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. In fact, it includes a whole chapter on jealousy. Anne also quotes Clive James’s poem: The Book of my enemy has been remaindered and I am pleased.

See also, Cheryl Strayed, in this Dear Sugar, Write like a Motherfucker piece.

Katherine, meanwhile, says Stephen King’s book On Writing is pretty freaking great.

Then Katherine speaks to award winning writer, speaker and appearance activist, Carly Findlay.

Carly writes on disability and appearance diversity issues for a range of publications and was named one of Australia’s most influential women in the 2014 Australian Financial Review and Westpac 100 Women of Influence Awards.  Carly identifies as a proud disabled women—she live with a rare severe skin condition—Ichthyosis.

On the day Carly and Katherine catch up, Carly’s book has just come out! Carly appeared on The Project the night before. Check her out here.

Carly wrote for a long time on her blog and in the media before she started Say Hello.

She was inspired by Roxanne Gay’s Hunger, Clementine Ford’s Fight Like Girl and Lindy West and wanted to write something similar, i.e. part memoir, part manifesto or polemic.

After being approached by publishers Carly contacted literary agent, Jacinta di Mase about representation.  Jacinta sign her immediately (as you would). Check out these episodes, which include interviews with Jacinta di Mase and di Mase Management’s Agent at Large, Danielle Binks.

Carly read 32 books in 2018.  She talks about Ginger Gorman’s incredible new book, Troll Hunting.

Things Carly wasn’t prepared for? The amount of love. ‘There’s been so much love… As a mostly online writer there’s often so much hate.’ See this Instagram post.

What’s next?

Carly’s editing Growing up Disabled in Australia (Black Inc.).  Submissions are open until May 31^st, 2019.  And beyond that, maybe fiction?

Carly’s advice for debut authors?  ‘The love you receive will triumph the hate.  The warmth and the excitement is amazing, so lap it up.’

Other highlights: A friend linked to her son who also has ichythosis, and saw carly on The Project and he said, ‘That’s my friend Carly. She has the same skin as me.’ If that doesn’t melt your heart nothing will.