Sunday, April 21, 2013

Work, sickies and Joanne Harris.

I love Joanne Harris. Joanne is a novelist who may still be best known for her 1999 novel which got turned into a movie by the same name, Chocolat.



I have a bookshelf at home that is all but dedicated to her books and have read all but two of them. Her writing is the kind that I love to dive into, her life is one I have enjoyed being voyeur to ever since I found her Twitter account (@joannechocolat) and her regular #Storytime segment is one I read every time and can't understand how it loses her followers.

Now, she is also someone with whom I can feel somewhat of a spirit of unity after reading this recent blog post of hers on Tumblr:


Sickie


When I was an accountant (oh yes, twelve months in hell), I pulled a sickie whenever I could. It was a sick environment: I was surrounded by people I loathed, whose conversation revolved entirely around money, their car, squash, money, Margaret Thatcher (whom they idolized) and their chances of discovering a fraud - which was every trainee accountant’s dream, the Suit equivalent of winning the Lottery.

I dreamed of stories (and wrote them, too, whenever I could). I had no money, no car. I didn’t play squash and I despised the Thatcher government. The other trainees called me “The Squaw” - because they thought I looked like an Indian. I had no interest whatever in fraud. I felt like a character in a Terry Gilliam movie, fighting a giant, bureaucratic machine.

Some days I played hookey, telling Accounts that I was working in Archives: telling Archives I was working in... (read more)



This is today's quick #Storytime for me, something that reminds me I'm not the only writer who's ever found it hard to juggle that-thing-we-love with that-thing-that-pays-our-bills.

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