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Nadia Mahjouri on finding writing support and submitting work to as many opportunities as possible · The Book Deal

• 0:09
  Tina Strachan: This is the Book Deal podcast
• 0:11
  Madeleine Cleary: where you will discover the inspiring stories behind your favorite books.
• 0:15
  Natasha Rai: We interview seasoned and debut authors, as well as publishing industry professionals to bring you the best
• 0:21
  The Book Deal: tips and advice on how to get that elusive book deal.
• 0:25
  Tina Strachan: So no matter what's.
• 0:26
  Tina Strachan: Stage of writing your at.
• 0:28
  Tina Strachan: We've got you covered.
• 0:29
  Tina Strachan: I'm Tina Strachan.
• 0:30
  Madeleine Cleary: I'm Madeline Cleary.
• 0:32
  Natasha Rai: And I'm Natasha Rai.
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  Tina Strachan: And join us as we pull back the curtain of published authors
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  Madeleine Cleary: one deal at a time.
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  Tina Strachan: The book Deal podcast acknowledges the traditional owners, the land and waters, which it's recorded on.
• 0:48
  Tina Strachan: And pays respect to their elders past, present, and emerging.
• 0:56
  Natasha Rai: Nadia Mahjouri is a Moroccan Australian writer, counselor, and group facilitator.
• 1:01
  Natasha Rai: Her professional background is in health policy, governance and academia, where her research focused on ethics and feminist philosophy.
• 1:10
  Natasha Rai: She's the host of the award-winning podcast, the Whole Truth, motherhood and the Writing Life.
• 1:16
  Natasha Rai: In this podcast, Nadia interviews authors about how they manage to keep writing while living in the messy middle of family life, work, and creativity.
• 1:25
  Natasha Rai: Half Truth is her debut novel.
• 1:28
  Natasha Rai: Nadia and her husband live in Hobart, Nepal, Luna, with varying combinations of their family, which includes three young adults, two school-aged children, and a black Labrador puppy called Russell Sprout.
• 1:45
  Natasha Rai: Good morning, Nadia Mahjouri.
• 1:47
  Natasha Rai: Welcome to the book to podcast.
• 1:49
  Natasha Rai: Thank you so much.
• 1:51
  Natasha Rai: It's great to have you.
• 1:52
  Natasha Rai: It's like long overdue.
• 1:54
  Natasha Rai: I think we talked about this months ago.
• 1:56
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 1:58
  Natasha Rai: So, no, thank you.
• 2:00
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 2:00
  Natasha Rai: So, half Truth, your debut novel came out in February of this year.
• 2:05
  Natasha Rai: Can we start, and you must be a pro at this now with your elevator pitch.
• 2:10
  Natasha Rai: It's
• 2:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: funny, I Avery, I still actually don't feel like I am good at this, which is just, you know, not okay.
• 2:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: Really.
• 2:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: But, um, I'll give it a go.
• 2:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: Okay.
• 2:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: I hear some people who, whose, whose pictures really are, um.
• 2:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: So Schmick and I, every time kind of have to go, well, what's the book about again?
• 2:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: So it is the story.
• 2:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: Half Truth, um, is the story of two women who are, you know, from very different worlds, very different lives, but unbeknownst to each other, are both missing and searching for the same man.
• 2:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: So who we first meet is Zara.
• 2:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: And Zara is a new mom.
• 2:46
  Nadia Mahjouri: She's living in a remote, um, part of Tasmania, and she's realizing that.
• 2:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Even though she's grown up in Tasmania with her white mom, she's realizing that she's actually wanting now to learn a bit more about the culture of her father and who her father was who, because he's from Morocco and she's never met him.
• 3:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: So having this baby is kind of the catalyst for her to start to do that investigation into kind of where her father is and what it is like to, you know, be a Moroccan.
• 3:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: So she heads off to Morocco and.
• 3:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, where she discovers her father's family, but discovers that her father himself hasn't been seen, um, for over 25 years.
• 3:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: So he's a missing person there.
• 3:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: And at the same time as we meet Zara, we meet Hadija who is, um, Zara's grandmother, and Hadija is an elderly Moroccan woman who.
• 3:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: Is looking back over her life and wondering if she will see her firstborn son again before she passes away.
• 3:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: So the journey is kind of the, the story is the journey of them both trying to work out what, what happened to this man.
• 3:55
  Natasha Rai: Thank you.
• 3:55
  Natasha Rai: That was a great pitch, by the way.
• 3:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: I don't know, it's, I'm still making it up as I go.
• 4:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: I should have a, I should have it just, you know.
• 4:03
  Natasha Rai: No, was I, I mean, I've read the book and I love, I love it and I think it's so beautiful.
• 4:09
  Natasha Rai: Oh, thank you.
• 4:09
  Natasha Rai: I could really feel myself getting quite emotional when you are talking, especially about, you know, will she ever see her firstborn son?
• 4:15
  Natasha Rai: I was like, oh gosh.
• 4:16
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Natasha Rai: It really, yeah.
• 4:18
  Natasha Rai: Tugs on.
• 4:19
  Natasha Rai: On that, but I'm so curious to ask you, because I know that part of it is based on your personal experience.
• 4:26
  Natasha Rai: Mm-hmm.
• 4:27
  Natasha Rai: Um, how did you make the choice to explore it through fiction as opposed to say memoir?
• 4:33
  Natasha Rai: Uh, that is a really good question
• 4:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: because I didn't, um, I didn't make that choice, um, until really quiet.
• 4:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Far down the down the track.
• 4:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: I originally started writing this novel as half memoir, half fiction, and it could never be a complete memoir because I was really interested to know my grandmother's story.
• 4:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: And my grandmother is, is, you know, the character Haddi is based on my grandmother's story.
• 4:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: I knew a few kind of big.
• 5:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, you know, I knew that she, I knew the village she grew up in outside of Marrakesh.
• 5:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'd been there.
• 5:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: I knew the, um, that she had been married 11, and I knew that she'd had my father at 13.
• 5:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: But besides that, and I knew she'd had had a traditional facial tattoo.
• 5:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 5:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so I knew a little bits about her life, but I was fascinated to get to know her.
• 5:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: But she'd actually passed away before.
• 5:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: I first went to Morocco, so it was always gonna be, it couldn't be a whole memoir'cause I was, that was actually the catalyst for me.
• 5:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: I wanted to kind of investigate what would life have been like for her?
• 5:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: What would her, um, you know, what would her kind of daily life have been like in the village?
• 5:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: What would her beliefs have been?
• 5:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: What kind of spiritual, you know, ideas were happening for her.
• 5:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 5:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: And also I was told by my family, Morocco, when I did get there, that she'd died of a broken heart because her first born son never came back.
• 5:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, you know, I just like, I just desperately wanted to kind of engage with her.
• 5:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: But at the same time, I had this feeling that my story of going to find my family Morocco was something that I wanted my kids to have.
• 6:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I actually just started writing it as a really personal kind of family project.
• 6:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: I just have this kind of record to give to my kids, you know, one day if they were to kind of go, hang on, how does this work that we live here and yet we've got this family in Morocco?
• 6:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, what, how did that all, you know, how did that all come to be?
• 6:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, um, so yeah, I started writing it as a, as half memoir and then fictionalizing the bits I didn't know, um, as it started to kind of get a bit of.
• 6:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, positive feedback that maybe there was something publishable as you know, in it.
• 6:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I started submitting it and I really wasn't sure at that point whether it there was more value in it being a true story and it being memoir.
• 6:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Do you know what I mean?
• 6:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: I just didn't know.
• 6:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: I couldn't tell whether it was better for me to, in terms of getting it published to write it as fiction, um, as completely fiction or not.
• 6:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and it wasn't until I, so I got the book deal in the end with.
• 7:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Half memoir, half fiction.
• 7:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: But it was clear from the beginning that, um, she wanted me, that my publisher wanted me to rewrite the, the memoir as fiction.
• 7:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: And it was the fictional, the fictionalization was really about simplifying the narrative to make it a little bit easier to understand for the readers.
• 7:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: So things, you know, in real life, things happened over seven years.
• 7:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: The events play out over seven years, um, in the novel.
• 7:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: They play out over one year.
• 7:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, in reality, the events, you know, my grandmother, for example, she had eight children, so I had eight, you know, aunts and uncles who all gave me little bits of information, you know?
• 7:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 7:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: In the novel, she only has three because it was just literally a matter of kind of, um, because it was already dual point of view, you know, dual timelines, it was already quite a complicated structure.
• 7:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: So it was just a matter of simplifying the narrative that to make it easier to follow.
• 8:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I think the word she said to me, my publisher, which I loved and really kind of took to heart, were, um, keep the emotional truth, but we don't need to be so attached to the facts.
• 8:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, you know, like it was something like, we don't need the, we don't need the factual truth, but, you know, the emotional truth is what's important.
• 8:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: And that's definitely, you know, it is, it is emotionally true to my journey also.
• 8:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: It's, you know, actually literally quite true to my journey.
• 8:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: It's just things are rearranged a little bit and, you know, they're kind of, um, connectors that are, people are given multiple, you know, multiple roles where they, in reality, they didn't have, they were, they were a conglomeration of people.
• 8:39
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 8:40
  Natasha Rai: Yeah, so, so making that change, um, were there aspects that you felt you lost and were there aspects that you felt you gained?
• 8:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, such a good question.
• 8:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and no one's asked me that before.
• 8:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I love that, um, because there were things I lost and I felt a bit sad about some of those things, actually.
• 9:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, because not only was it over seven years, the, the events of the story play out.
• 9:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I first went to Morocco.
• 9:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I discovered I, you know, after quite some, you know, work to find my family, when I did finally found find them, um, I spent about six weeks there, um, with aunts and uncles and so on, but I didn't really have any language skills.
• 9:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so I came home, went off to uni, learned to speak French, and then went back for six months.
• 9:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, you know, the next six months journey was quite, um, uh, epic.
• 9:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: And in the middle there I had separated from my.
• 9:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: Son's father.
• 9:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I went back as a single woman and actually had this beautiful relationship with a Moroccan man who taught me a lot about, um, and that was all in the memoir, this kind of romance element.
• 9:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm.
• 9:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just felt so sad to get rid of this character, the, the character man, because he had been, he himself was a, was an amazi or, or burber.
• 10:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 10:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Uh, activist, he was fighting very hard for the rights of the indigenous people in Morocco, the, the, um, to keep the language alive for the rights of indigenous, um, Moroccan Amazi people to speak their language and to have it recognized and taught in schools and so on.
• 10:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: So he was quite passionate about that and I learned a lot from him and.
• 10:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 10:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then in the story, I needed his character because he actually teaches Zara to, you know, a lot about her culture and about this part of her culture.
• 10:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Everyone else seems quite afraid to speak about politics, and that's for a very good reason because, you know, they have, they have lived for many years under a kind of authoritarian or, you know, quite, um, uh, what's the word?
• 10:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 10:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: But you know, it, it, it's been, it's a monarchy, but it's, it's quite a cruel regime.
• 10:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: So they're, they're very, and they're, there are strong, um, responses to dissidents, you know?
• 11:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 11:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 11:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: So people are very afraid.
• 11:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Were at that point, not so much now, but were at that point very, which was the late nineties, so it's said in the late nineties for anyone that hasn't read it.
• 11:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, so he was a really important character, but also.
• 11:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, there was this glorious kind of park back to my mother, which who had gone to Morocco, was a white woman and an Australian woman, and fallen in love with a Moroccan man.
• 11:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: And he was me, you know, 25 years later going back to Morocco as a single mom and falling in love with a Moroccan man.
• 11:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just kind of really loved that echo, you know?
• 11:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 11:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: But obviously when you, when you bring this seven years down to one year, you know, and down, you know, two long or three long trips to Morocco, down to one trip to Morocco, I would ha ha, she would've had to have been.
• 11:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, having a cheating on her partner.
• 11:46
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 11:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: Had the baby without the partner and like, it just story was, I, I, I didn't wanna kind of.
• 11:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: I didn't wanna make it that complicated.
• 11:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: So the whole, so the character's still there, but he loses the kind of, you know, there's one little kiss, you know, and it's funny to me because the friends, my friends are like, but that guy that, you know, that g that guy, he's made up, isn't he?
• 12:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 12:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
• 12:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: That guy is so real.
• 12:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: In fact, he is way more than the little kiss that they had by the beach
• 12:10
  Natasha Rai: or by the river.
• 12:11
  Natasha Rai: But I suppose as well, Nadia, the way you've just described that, if you ha, if you tried to cram that in, you'd be losing that beautiful emotional truth that you were.
• 12:19
  Natasha Rai: Looking for.
• 12:20
  Natasha Rai: Right, right.
• 12:20
  Natasha Rai: Because it Yeah, that's right.
• 12:21
  Natasha Rai: It goes down to something that's, doesn't even have half the depth of what you would've experienced.
• 12:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: Exactly.
• 12:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: And the emotion, the, I would've lost the emotional truth of what actually happened, but also I would've shifted it into a different emotional territory that it wasn't there.
• 12:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: It would've become like a, you know, a kind of cheating storyline or a, you know, like some other, some other storyline.
• 12:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 12:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, so it definitely, um.
• 12:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, it, it, it lost some things, but it, you know, it also, I can see the story as a, as a novel is much stronger.
• 12:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I can, I can see that, and I could see immediately the, the, the wisdom in what, you know, my publisher was suggesting.
• 13:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: And actually I'd hit a point where I just, when I got the, the, you know, contract for publication, I was so relieved to have access to someone else's mind.
• 13:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm.
• 13:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: To kind of'cause, you know, to look at this project and be able to say, this is what it needs.
• 13:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: Because I was really at a point where I didn't know how to make it better.
• 13:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was like, I can sit here and work on this manuscript and I'm making it different.
• 13:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, like I wrote, it was all in first person and now it's all in third person.
• 13:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I've made this different.
• 13:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: Is it better?
• 13:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: I have no idea.
• 13:36
  Nadia Mahjouri: Do you know what I mean?
• 13:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, I just didn't know the difference between different and better.
• 13:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 13:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: So to have someone else come in and say, no, this needs fictionalizing.
• 13:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: And Yes.
• 13:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: Leave that like that and, but change this bit, you know, and they don't tell you how to change it, but they tell you, you know what, you know, this needs to become fiction or these characters need to be clearer, or, you know,
• 13:55
  Natasha Rai: yeah.
• 13:55
  Natasha Rai: They give you that guidance.
• 13:56
  Natasha Rai: Um, and I do wanna come back to your, that was great.
• 13:58
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 13:59
  Natasha Rai: And I do wanna come back to your publication journey, but if we just go back a bit.
• 14:03
  Natasha Rai: Mm-hmm.
• 14:03
  Natasha Rai: When did you start writing and when did you call yourself a writer?
• 14:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: That is such a, yeah.
• 14:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: Such an interesting question.
• 14:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I, I do remember kind of.
• 14:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: Making a conscious decision to claim that, um, identity, I suppose because, I mean, I was a kid that I grew up, my mother was a librarian and I'm an only child, so, you know, books were my best friends and my, you know, siblings and my pastime.
• 14:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: I lived, you know, I was very lucky to live in a house full of books with a mother that loved children's literature, so I was so, yeah, so, so kind of reading.
• 14:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Primarily before writing, you know, was, was my, you know, it was a love of mine forever and just part of my life, but when it came to writing, I wrote creatively in, you know, school writing in high school.
• 14:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: I enjoyed it, but I never really thought it was something that was a viable option for a thing to do.
• 15:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I moved, you know, I, I always wrote.
• 15:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: Essays and, you know, applications for various things with kind of glee.
• 15:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, you know, like I, I enjoyed essays instead of like, you know, so I have always, everything I've ever done and ever felt kind of, um, that I had some, you know, talent in was always writing related, but I just hadn't given myself permission to play creatively with writing and it wasn't.
• 15:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I had this idea brewing about my grandmother's story for, since it happened, since I, since the late, late nineties.
• 15:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just kind of, I kept chewing it over and I knew that it was one of those things that one day.
• 15:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: I wanna write that story.
• 15:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: It wasn't writing in general, it was that story.
• 15:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, it was my grandmother's story.
• 15:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then at the same time, people would say to me all the time, I would tell them about going to Morocco and trying to find my father and what had happened.
• 15:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: And they would say, oh my God, that's gotta be a book.
• 15:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I didn't have that much interest in writing my own story.
• 16:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: I really wanted to write my grandmother's story, but then people would always say, oh, that you've gotta tell that story.
• 16:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, oh, well I really should for my kids.
• 16:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then.
• 16:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: Well, it took me probably 20 years to work out how those two things could Mm, you know, could work together.
• 16:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: And it wasn't till I kind of realized that, of course, these two women are linked.
• 16:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: By, you know, the absence of this man that I realized, and that wasn't till 20 20, 20 20, 20 19.
• 16:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: It was, it wasn't 2020 hadn't started yet.
• 16:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: So we weren't in the COVID years yet, but it was the end of 2019 and my husband and I had, um, gone away camping.
• 16:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: And he was turning 50 and we were having that conversation.
• 16:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: That's like, what would you, you know, what would you regret not doing?
• 16:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, if you get to the end of your life and you haven't, is there something that you would regret if you never did it, that you've done yet, that you haven't done yet?
• 16:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, and we were writing this list of like 50 things to do, you know, when you're 50, you know, like, you know Yep.
• 16:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: That he had stupid things like him.
• 16:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: Running a marathon, which, you know, like I, I never put running a marathon on my list.
• 17:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, I'm not stupid, but you know, like, uh, we decided, you know, I was like, I wanna see giraffes in the wild in, in Africa, you know, so we'd booked a safari for 2020'cause we were ticking things off our list, which obviously didn't happen.
• 17:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: Still.
• 17:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: I've never seen a giraffe in the wild.
• 17:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: That's too long.
• 17:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 17:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: But one of the things on my list obviously was I will really regret not having written.
• 17:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: This particular story, you know, I, I need to do that before I die, kind of thing.
• 17:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: To not like end up with deathbed regrets.
• 17:32
  Natasha Rai: So, and it's so I was just gonna say on that point, it's so interesting, isn't it?
• 17:37
  Natasha Rai: How many emerging aspiring writers, we need to have some specific thing that we do to give ourselves the permission.
• 17:46
  Natasha Rai: Like you, you had, okay, I wanna write about my grandmother, and then, oh, okay, let's make this list.
• 17:51
  Natasha Rai: Now I have permission to actually do it.
• 17:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 17:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 17:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: Even more than that, like the literal permission came because my daughter was going to, I'd been home.
• 18:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: With the kids.
• 18:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, I have, we've kind of got a, a blended family and I had a young child in 99, and then I didn't have more kids until, you know, nine, you know, the 20 thirteens.
• 18:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so my, my, um, youngest two kids, the youngest of those was heading off to kinder in 2020.
• 18:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: So we'd been living without my income, you know, or without me just doing little bits and pieces of, of.
• 18:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: Various freelance stuff here and there.
• 18:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: So we'd been living without my income for a while and I, my daughter was only gonna be at school three days a week, and they were only gonna short school days.
• 18:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so the conversation was really, how about I don't go back to work this year?
• 18:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: How about, you know, if we can survive?
• 18:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: How about I give myself this year to write this notebook, you know?
• 18:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then, um.
• 18:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, because then I, I can kind of, you know, like, so it literally was kind of a permission giving, you know, to to myself to say, okay, this year I'm not gonna, I'm gonna have three days without kids in the house, you know?
• 18:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then of course, 2020 happened, so the three days with the, with the kids, you know, outta the house just didn't happen at all.
• 19:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: But, you know, it, it got done anyway,
• 19:04
  Natasha Rai: so, yeah.
• 19:04
  Natasha Rai: So tell me, then you wrote, what was it, like a first draft or a draft of the whole, of, of half Truth.
• 19:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Uh, yeah, I did eventually, you know, obviously you've gotta, you know, I started, I got stuck at several points and had to reach out for, um, I think about 20,000 words.
• 19:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was like, oh, I don't know what I'm doing, you know, and I just found someone advertising in my local area that was a writing mentor.
• 19:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: So she kind of, and she didn't do much except kind of say.
• 19:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: It wasn't like we had an ongoing relationship or anything, but she just said, no, there's something here.
• 19:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I think that you can do it.
• 19:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, you know, I don't know, the dual point of views are working or something like that.
• 19:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 19:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: I just needed like, you know, someone else just say that
• 19:52
  Natasha Rai: you are okay and this is gonna work.
• 19:54
  Natasha Rai: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:54
  Natasha Rai: And
• 19:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: that you, you know, it's, yeah.
• 19:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: And you know, remember her, her exact words were, you know, she said, and if this gets published.
• 20:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: No, when this gets published.
• 20:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just remember, like, I love that that's the first time anyone had ever said, when this get published, you know?
• 20:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, oh, I wasn't even thinking about publication, but she was the first person to kind of use that phrase with me.
• 20:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just like, yeah, like I said, it stuck in my mind, you know, she, if no, when, when, um, and so then I started just en entering little bits and pieces into.
• 20:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I into little competitions, and so all of those were little kind of, you know.
• 20:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 20:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: So
• 20:34
  Natasha Rai: competitions where you didn't need a full manuscript.
• 20:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like little chapters as stories, I suppose, or, you know, um, yeah, nothing, nothing.
• 20:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, I, you know, nothing that had a kind of, um, what do you call it?
• 20:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like a.
• 20:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: A, a requirement or an expectation that we would have the whole, you know, that was even more, you know, just like, maybe this is, you know, I, I put a piece into the SBS emerging writers.
• 21:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, they had a competition.
• 21:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: I remember that.
• 21:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 21:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 21:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: There, there was another thing that's also gone now called the, um, Deborah Cas.
• 21:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, that's right.
• 21:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was short
• 21:14
  Natasha Rai: that that finished.
• 21:15
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 21:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 21:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: And that was for kind of diverse writers.
• 21:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so that was great too, you know, just to be shortlisted or long listed, whatever I was, you know, it just felt like a kind of, it's a real boost.
• 21:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: It.
• 21:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, yeah.
• 21:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: And it was a validation of the project, you know, it was a validation of my capacity to even.
• 21:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: Salude myself into thinking I could do this.
• 21:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, because I hadn't kind of come from, I, I hadn't written 20 novels before.
• 21:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: Do you know what I mean?
• 21:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, I wasn't, I wasn't one of those people that had like 20 in the, in the bottom drawer.
• 21:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, exactly.
• 21:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I, I don't have any in the bottom drawer.
• 21:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: There's nothing in my bottom drawer.
• 21:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, well, there is probably like a whole lot of rubbish in my bottom drawer, but it's not like, it's not, it's not, not as, um, functional as a novel.
• 21:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, yeah, I, um, and then I had applied to do a.
• 22:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Uh, what do you call?
• 22:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just did little courses and stuff, but I applied to do a mentorship, you know, with Kill Your Darlings.
• 22:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know how they have that?
• 22:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: Ah, yes, yes I do.
• 22:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: And they, I must have had about 60,000 words at that point or something like that, and she came back to me and they said, look, we think you're too far into your project for, you know, for what we are aiming this project to be.
• 22:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 22:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Why don't you book in a manuscript assessment?
• 22:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: She was like, but I'm not busy.
• 22:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm busy until like, I think at this point it was like November or maybe, I don't know, in, in 2020.
• 22:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: And she said, why don't you book it in for April next year?
• 22:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: So then I had a deadline.
• 22:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I booked in for a manuscript assessment of the entire manuscript in April, and I booked it in six months in advance.
• 22:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, okay, well this is your deadline now.
• 22:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, you've gotta
• 22:56
  Natasha Rai: get to, yeah.
• 22:57
  Natasha Rai: And, and with the assessor, did you that to choose or did they assign somebody to you?
• 23:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, that's a really good, I don't remember.
• 23:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: I've got, you don't remember?
• 23:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Okay.
• 23:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 23:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 23:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: I have no idea.
• 23:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: But it was Rebecca Stafford who did that.
• 23:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 23:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I don't actually remember whether, how that ended up being her.
• 23:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm.
• 23:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, but, but yeah, that also just worked for me to have a deadline to get up an entire manuscript.
• 23:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know,
• 23:21
  Natasha Rai: ready?
• 23:22
  Natasha Rai: Yes.
• 23:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 23:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: Ready.
• 23:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: And in a way that I thought was at least readable and
• 23:26
  Natasha Rai: presentable to, to someone.
• 23:28
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 23:28
  Natasha Rai: And considering you had 60,000 words, six months feels like a good enough time to Yeah.
• 23:34
  Natasha Rai: Get.
• 23:35
  Natasha Rai: A bit more done and finish it to a standard that you're comfortable with.
• 23:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, totally.
• 23:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, totally.
• 23:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Totally.
• 23:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I, I knew by, at that stage, I knew where I was heading.
• 23:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: Although of course, it, you know, it got, it, it changed many times after there, but I knew where I was heading for the end of the first draft at least, you know?
• 23:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 23:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, so what came out of that assessment?
• 23:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: Also the word publishable, which, you know, was in that assessment.
• 23:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, there was a whole lot of fantastic kind of advice about character and structure and, you know, the kind of how to, how to strengthen the manuscript, you know, pages and pages of, of, um, feedback that all of which was really, really useful.
• 24:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: But by far it was the, it was the sense that she said it was strong and that it had legs.
• 24:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, that was, that was really the thing.
• 24:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: That has stayed in my, you know, because at that point you just don't know.
• 24:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 24:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I hadn't been in this world ever before.
• 24:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: I felt like I was, and it was only then I started to say, writer.
• 24:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: You asked me really a long time ago, when did you start to use the word writer?
• 24:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: But it was only after that point.
• 24:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I was like, oh.
• 24:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Maybe I'm a writer, do you know what I mean?
• 24:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, maybe that's a thing I can say, because I feel I've got a whole novel sitting here now.
• 24:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like that means I'm an actual writer.
• 24:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I'm not an author, but I'm a writer because look at what I wrote.
• 24:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: And, you know, so yeah, I think that was about the point where my, I kind of, my confidence, um, in my capacity to write and in the fact that I was writing, you know, some little things got published and so on.
• 25:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: No, no, actually that's not even true.
• 25:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: But the, um.
• 25:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: The SBS emerging writers turned into a, into a anthology, you know, so there were just little things that felt like, yeah,
• 25:18
  Natasha Rai: yeah.
• 25:19
  Natasha Rai: You know, felt like.
• 25:20
  Natasha Rai: Okay.
• 25:21
  Natasha Rai: And at, at this point, Nadia, had you met any other writers?
• 25:24
  Natasha Rai: Did you know the writers did, did you have community?
• 25:28
  Natasha Rai: Um,
• 25:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: not in the way I do now.
• 25:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, not, not like, um, since publication and just, you know, once I had the book deal, then I felt like a whole kind of beautiful community opened up to me.
• 25:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I had a couple of friends that had one friend who had published, um, a couple of children's books, um, or, you know, not picture books, but children Children's, what do you call?
• 25:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: Middle grade fiction.
• 25:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 25:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: She'd published a series, so that was good.
• 25:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: She could kind of, you know, tell me not to panic or that things would be okay.
• 26:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: She read a couple, she read the first 20,000 words, you know, I'd kind of started handing it out to various people.
• 26:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: I had another friend who is doing, she's now doing a PhD in creative writing.
• 26:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: She's a beautiful writer.
• 26:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: And you know, I felt a little bit like, um.
• 26:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: She, we in our friendship group, she was already the writer, like writer was kind of, you know, the, the job, the job of writer was, was taken, was her.
• 26:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 26:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: There was no, yeah.
• 26:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: So who is this like, upstart thinking?
• 26:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: She can just start to write, you know, like, you know, and, and also does it I have not helped, but I mean, she is a very, very talented, very, very beautiful writer.
• 26:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, you know, I was like, oh, well, you know, she's clearly got writer covered, but, you know, so, so I knew people that were writing.
• 26:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, but no, not nothing like, oh, and I did a course, actually, that's what I did.
• 26:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: That was my first little writers group.
• 26:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: I did a course with Heather Rose during COVID, and it was an online course and it was in the early days of COVID.
• 27:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: And everyone was in that magical little bubble where, I don't know, the whole world seemed to kind of, we, we'd all stepped into an alternate universe and everything was kind of magical and weird.
• 27:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 27:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: And she had this beautiful kind of spiritual approach.
• 27:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: We almost, we did the artist's way kind of, you know, as a, as a kind of group every day for, for a couple of weeks at lunchtime, a couple of hours in the middle of the day.
• 27:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: And it was just this beautiful thing.
• 27:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so that group became, you know, became a writer.
• 27:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Kind of online writing community.
• 27:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and we are still, you know, in touch that, that group now.
• 27:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: And, um, and then, so yeah, so as I started to do more writing, um.
• 27:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Courses and activities, most of those would turn into writing friends, you know?
• 27:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Connections.
• 27:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Exactly.
• 27:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 27:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: That's right.
• 27:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: But it, it was a, when I started it, not really, like, there were, like I said, a couple of other people that I knew tangentially, you know, had, had written, but we weren't, our friendship
• 28:01
  Natasha Rai: wasn't based on that.
• 28:01
  Natasha Rai: But, so then coming back to after you had your assessment with Rebecca Stafford, what did you do then after that with your manuscript?
• 28:10
  Natasha Rai: What happened next?
• 28:12
  Natasha Rai: Excellent question.
• 28:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, I, I, you know, I spent some time taking on board that feedback that was, there was quite a bit of feedback, so I, I needed to do quite a lot of editing.
• 28:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, I mean, by that stage it was kind of, once I'd done what I might have called, like a second draft or, you know what I mean, like, I, I, yeah.
• 28:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Structured it all or whatever.
• 28:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, I might have called it at that point.
• 28:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I took on her feedback and.
• 28:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: I actually did another course.
• 28:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 28:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: That was the second course that I did was with, with was with Fiona Macintosh, her, and at this point I was just kind of scatter, gunning, applying for everything I could see.
• 28:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I did a Fiona Macintosh course, I applied for publishable, um, at Queensland Writer Center that year.
• 28:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: They, I didn't, I wasn't long listed or shortlisted for, um.
• 29:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: For publishable that year, but they gave you feedback, you could pay$50 and get feedback.
• 29:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, amazing.
• 29:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, on the, I think you sent in 10,000 words or something like that.
• 29:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 29:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I paid for that feedback and I had this great feedback session with him.
• 29:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and then I did this, um, Fiona Macintosh course, and she also gave feedback.
• 29:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: And this was all kind of on the first few chapters.
• 29:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like they were giving feedback on the first 10,000 words, first three chapters, that kind of thing.
• 29:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I remember having like.
• 29:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: Night and day.
• 29:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, they were like, they were like, one was, I really like the older woman, but not the younger woman.
• 29:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: And the other one was, I really like the young woman and not the old woman.
• 29:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, oh.
• 29:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: I realized at that point like, you've, I'm gonna have to, um, make some calls here.
• 29:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 29:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 29:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like your
• 29:49
  Natasha Rai: own, what feels right for you and your work like this.
• 29:52
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 29:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 29:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Because I was starting to kind of just, I'm a real people pleaser.
• 29:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: In a lot of ways.
• 29:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I just wanted to, it was like they were my teachers and I wanted to like exactly.
• 30:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: And make them happy and get like the nice mark.
• 30:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, exactly the be be the good student.
• 30:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 30:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 30:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I couldn't do both.
• 30:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, I couldn't make them both happy'cause they wanted different, like they wanted opposite things from me.
• 30:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: So it was quite a, I mean, it was actually quite good that it was so stark.
• 30:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: 'cause I did have to recognize that it was impossible.
• 30:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like I couldn't actually, and that I would have to chart my own course through this and that at some point, you know, this is my story and I have to be happy with it.
• 30:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: So that was really good.
• 30:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, at the same time, Fiona was really wonderful and she really liked what I'd sent.
• 30:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and she sent it off to, to Penguin, to her publisher who, um, passed it on to one of her colleagues.
• 30:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I heard back from that colleague eventually, and she was interested.
• 30:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Wow, what a moment.
• 30:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: It was such a moment.
• 30:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: I remember we were on a four month road trip at that point through, it was 2021, and we'd given up on the, um.
• 31:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Drafts and just, and decided that, um, we needed a holiday and it was gonna have to be an Australian holiday, and that we needed to tick something off our, always wanted to do list, but it had to be something in Australia.
• 31:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so the, the, the thing for me that I'd always wanted you in Australia was see the Kimberley.
• 31:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Ah, oh God.
• 31:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so, yeah, I was like, I've never been to the Kimberleys.
• 31:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: I really wanna see that part of, and the western Australian loo coast, I was like, this is my, these are my bucket list items for Australia.
• 31:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: So we took four months and we flew to Darwin and bought a carvan and a camper van, and we went.
• 31:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: Caravan in a car.
• 31:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then we did a four month trip to Perth and we sold everything in Perth.
• 31:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: We bought it all in Darwin, sold it again four months later in Perth for the same money.
• 31:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: 'cause it was at the time when caravans were kind of selling like, you know, oh yeah.
• 31:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: A caravan.
• 31:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like you couldn't leave Australia.
• 31:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: So yeah, we bought a brand new caravan and sold it four months later, still as a brand new caravan, which was weird.
• 31:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like amazing.
• 32:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 32:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Anyway, the point being that I was on a road trip, so I do remember that.
• 32:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: I remember the moment very much.
• 32:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: But of course.
• 32:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Life isn't as simple as that.
• 32:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I never heard back from her.
• 32:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, I heard back from her saying, I really like it.
• 32:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I'm going to, I'll, I'll get back in touch with you.
• 32:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: I think it was like a, you know, anyway, I didn't hear anything for months.
• 32:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was like, okay, okay, okay.
• 32:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: Eventually I messaged, I emailed.
• 32:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: Fiona.
• 32:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: 'cause it had been a really long time, maybe six months then, and I emailed Fiona back and just said, look, I don't know what to do.
• 32:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: I haven't heard back.
• 32:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 32:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: She said, oh, okay.
• 32:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, she probably should have got back to you because she said like, you know, it had been like, I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks.
• 32:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, it wasn't like a, it wasn't like a, you know, a submission thing.
• 32:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like she, anyway, I, I find, so Fiona followed up for me, which was lovely.
• 32:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: And what I heard back was.
• 33:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: I am so sorry, but I've left.
• 33:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm leaving my job next week.
• 33:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: I should, I should have got back to you, but I'm not allowed to take anything on because I'm leaving, you know?
• 33:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so that was that.
• 33:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: So then I was back in the trenches, you know?
• 33:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 33:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, which was fine.
• 33:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, you know, that that it, that was my first approach to publishers.
• 33:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: If it, you know, it would've been too good to be true for it to just kind of magically happen.
• 33:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: But there was validation then, you know.
• 33:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: Exactly, yes.
• 33:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 33:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: A publisher's seen it now and a publisher thought it was okay.
• 33:36
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I just started kind of taking every opportunity I could see, and I, you know, when they, the Emerging Writers Festival happened that you could do a practice pitch?
• 33:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I did the practice pitch and to hase, they requested a Manus, the manuscript.
• 33:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: I did a pitch to, oh no, I did a favor course about just a short course about how to work with a publisher or an editor.
• 34:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and there was a publisher there from Alan and Aman that was running that course.
• 34:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: She heard, you know, about my work or, you know, looked, read the first chapter and one of the rest she requested it.
• 34:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: So people, I just started putting my mm, bring it up there.
• 34:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: Hat, hat in every ring I could find.
• 34:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: Basically I reapplied for the next year's publishable.
• 34:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, you know, if I could, there was a little festival, writer's festival out at Tasmanian, like, you know.
• 34:33
  Nadia Mahjouri: I would go along and try and find the publisher and try and like, do you know what I mean?
• 34:36
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like I just would take every opportunity that, you know, came around and, um, and it, and, and then someone had told me about literary speed dating.
• 34:46
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I did speed dating.
• 34:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, I was trying agents at that point.
• 34:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: That's the other thing I'd been doing at that point, trying agents and not really getting anywhere with agents.
• 34:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like I had had quite a few kind of rejections from agents after.
• 35:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 35:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Usually after a request, but more likely it was a ghosting.
• 35:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: I didn't, I, I had more ghosting than I had rejections.
• 35:13
  Nadia Mahjouri: Lots of ghosting, like all of those people that I said.
• 35:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: Had requested it, like the Faber person that requested it, the, oh, Alan and Aman, the ette publisher that requested it.
• 35:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: And they had requested it from face-to-face conversations.
• 35:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 35:27
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I didn't hear back from any of those like, yeah, it was so interesting.
• 35:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I think what happens, someone said to me, nos are easy.
• 35:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like hell, yeses are easy, but there's a whole lot in the middle where you are not quite sure.
• 35:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I think the reality is now I realize I wasn't ready.
• 35:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: To be putting it out there.
• 35:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was putting it out there too early.
• 35:46
  Nadia Mahjouri: It wasn't yet.
• 35:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Okay.
• 35:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, you know, like it wasn't yet shiny enough, you know, or, you know, there was still more work to be done on it.
• 35:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm.
• 35:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I think that, yeah, I think that that's probably what was happening.
• 35:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: They could see the potential in it, which is why it wasn't an absolute no, no.
• 36:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, but.
• 36:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: It wasn't quite there yet, and they had to think quite a lot about how to make it there, you know, and they, you know, just weren't invested enough to kind of do that thinking work.
• 36:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, so, so I think that's what was going on there.
• 36:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I didn't, so yeah, in the end, I, uh, I, so I did literary speed dating and I pitched to text and I pitched to Ultimo, and they both requested.
• 36:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, one text came back very, very quickly saying, um, I don't think I'm the right person for this.
• 36:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: He's like, you know, and I completely understood that.
• 36:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 36:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, um, he, yeah, it just was, it wouldn't have been a good fit, I don't think, um, for the book, but just for the individual.
• 36:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, Ultimo said, didn't say anything for ages, and then when I kind of checked back in, said that.
• 37:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: That wasn't, I'm not the right person, but it's, but there's someone else at my team that I've passed it on to at Ultimo anyway, didn't hear anything back in the same time I was shortlist long-listed and shortlisted for publishable the second year.
• 37:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: Kind of unapplied for it.
• 37:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 37:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 37:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: So that was great.
• 37:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was set up with a, a mentor, um, Michael Ahmed through publishable, which was great because I hadn't really had anything to do with the Western Sydney.
• 37:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: I, you know, I'd read his work.
• 37:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: I loved his work, but I, I hadn't, um.
• 37:35
  Nadia Mahjouri: My, you know, my work set in the Arab world, you know, like it's about being kind of, you know, north African, um, Australian Rock and Australian.
• 37:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so there are a lot of crossovers between the work that a lot of people are doing.
• 37:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, he Lebanese Australian kind of work.
• 37:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: But, um, so it was really, it was great to be able to connect in with those guys.
• 37:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: 'cause I just think what they do is amazing.
• 37:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 37:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then I was shortlisted for publishable.
• 38:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then they said to me, okay, we are gonna arrange a pitch, um, to, do you want a pitch to an agent or to a publisher?
• 38:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I, I looked at the agents on the list and the agents on the list.
• 38:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: One of them was Gabby Nayer, and Gabby was.
• 38:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Heather Rose, who I'd done a course with, who also happens to be my cousin, because it's Tasmania second cousin.
• 38:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 38:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, she, her, that was her agent.
• 38:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: And so I thought, I'm gonna contact Heather and just see if she thinks it's worth me pitching to Gabby, because I was like, I'll see if she, you know, um.
• 38:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: If she's taking on new people.
• 38:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 38:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: If there's, you know, like if it's, even, like, if she's not even interested in the kind of stuff I do, I won't even bother to, you know, I won't say I wanna pitch to her, you know?
• 38:47
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, so I said, oh, Heather, can we have a coffee?
• 38:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Heather was in the middle of promoting her memoir, and she, she's like, oh, yes, but not yet.
• 38:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: Blah, blah, blah.
• 38:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: Anyway, so I didn't hear back from Heather Publishable, Queensland Writer Center.
• 38:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: Went ahead and booked a pitch anyway with Penguin.
• 39:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was like, okay, look, that's done.
• 39:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, that's done.
• 39:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'll pitch to Penguin.
• 39:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, anyway, so I pitched to Penguin, to Meredith Kerno.
• 39:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, it, it must have been like November, December.
• 39:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: Uh, and I, and then I fi then I heard back from Heather saying, I'm so sorry.
• 39:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm done now.
• 39:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: Can we have a coffee?
• 39:25
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like.
• 39:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, you know, I just wanted to know, blah, blah, blah.
• 39:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Just explained what the situation was and she's like, oh, I'll just put you in touch with Gabby.
• 39:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, like, so, so that was, so that way I kind of, you know, anyway, so I sent myself off to Gabby.
• 39:36
  Nadia Mahjouri: That was great.
• 39:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, you know, now Penguin was considering it and Gabby now was considering it, and I still hadn't heard back from Ultimo.
• 39:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh, yes.
• 39:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Okay.
• 39:46
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, so, so the, these balls are all in the air at once and it's kind of Christmas time, you know, and I got a call back from, from Meredith Kerno at Penguin, and she was like, look, you know, there are, you know, I really like it.
• 40:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: I really like, you know, but there's, there are these things that need to be worked on, blah, blah, blah.
• 40:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, why don't you go away and do some work on it?
• 40:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 40:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then bring it back to me.
• 40:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was like, okay, I'll go away and I'll do, I'll do those things, um, and I'll bring it back to you by this stage.
• 40:18
  Nadia Mahjouri: So kind of January went by, it must have been February.
• 40:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: I still hadn't heard back from Ultimo, so I sent that email to Ultimo going, you know, what's going on?
• 40:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: She said, oh, you know, that was when she told me, I'm sorry, I've sent it to someone else.
• 40:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 40:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 40:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Check up with her.
• 40:31
  Nadia Mahjouri: Anyway, I checked up with her, sent her an email.
• 40:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: She sends me back an email pretty much immediately saying.
• 40:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Oh yes.
• 40:39
  Nadia Mahjouri: Can you, can we have a Zoom?
• 40:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, yeah, sure.
• 40:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: Wow.
• 40:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I had a Zoom call with her and she's like, I wanna take it to acquisitions.
• 40:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: My little brain explodes because I'm chasing up a ghosting, like, you know, so I'm really not expecting a Yeah, exactly.
• 40:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 40:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm like, what?
• 40:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, you know, because I was just waiting for the, it was more for me just to check it off my list because a SA, when you do literary speed daddy and they actually have a three month, um, rule that you have to, you can't.
• 41:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: Take longer than three months to get back to someone, which is brilliant because it often does take, you know.
• 41:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 41:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: But a SA kind of promises that, that if you do literary speed dating, you get a request.
• 41:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: The publisher has agreed that to, they'll give you to you Yeah.
• 41:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: Give a response within three months.
• 41:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, you know, so it had been well over three months, so I was, you know, so I felt, I felt,'cause often it's hard to know if you should follow up in those situations.
• 41:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Sometimes you just let it go.
• 41:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I thought I was a little bit emboldened by knowing that rule.
• 41:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 41:42
  Nadia Mahjouri: Exactly that, that as SA said, if you, if they don't get back to you, you know, and you chase it up, you know, then we'll follow it up for you.
• 41:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Do you know what I mean?
• 41:48
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, because that's the kind of arrangement that they make and the publishers commit to that when they come into the program.
• 41:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 41:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I, um.
• 41:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 41:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: So anyway, turns out, yes, she wanted to take it to acquisitions.
• 42:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: I knew that Penguin hadn't said no, they hadn't said yess, right?
• 42:07
  Nadia Mahjouri: But they hadn't said no.
• 42:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: They were like, you know, fix this up and come back.
• 42:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I rang Gabby, who was still considering my thing, who I also hadn't heard back from.
• 42:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: But I sent her a message saying, look.
• 42:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, ultimately wanna take it to acquisitions.
• 42:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: I haven't had no from Penguin yet.
• 42:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, what shall I do?
• 42:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: What shall I do?
• 42:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and she went, leave it.
• 42:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, like, yes, all right, I'll take you on.
• 42:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: She's like, read your thing, I like it, you know, I'll take you on.
• 42:38
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, and kind of leave it to me.
• 42:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was like, I've got an offer from a publisher.
• 42:45
  Nadia Mahjouri: Just let me sign the damn deal.
• 42:49
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, just lemme sign it.
• 42:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like I was just, it was torture, not being able to sign the first deal that came across my desk.
• 42:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know?
• 42:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: She's like, so, so Ultimo did make an offer.
• 42:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: They did make an offer, yeah.
• 43:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: They did make an offer?
• 43:01
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 43:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 43:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 43:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: So yes, she made an offer.
• 43:05
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um.
• 43:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I was just, you know, ready.
• 43:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Uh, she was lovely.
• 43:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, Meredith was lovely.
• 43:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like they'd all been lovely.
• 43:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like, you know, I, I, and they both actually had similar visions.
• 43:15
  Nadia Mahjouri: They were like, you know, they both kind of knew, you know, it was obvious to them what needed to be done.
• 43:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: It wasn't obvious to me, obvious to the professionals.
• 43:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: Turns out I had no idea.
• 43:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: But, um.
• 43:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Anyway, so, no, actually, and then, you know, penguin came back with an offer too, and then there was negotiations, which just, you know, kind of blew my, blew my mind and obviously ended up with Penguin and have been very, very happy.
• 43:40
  Nadia Mahjouri: Although, I'm sure I would've also been happy, you know, with automotive.
• 43:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 43:44
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, it wasn't, it wasn't, again, you know, I just, I, I would've been happy with because they were both lovely, lovely editors and both great companies.
• 43:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: So, but yeah, turned out.
• 43:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: So at this point, Nadia, we, we, you are into 2023, right?
• 43:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 44:00
  Nadia Mahjouri: At this point I'm into 2023.
• 44:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 44:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 44:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: So that, so I, in terms of the publishable, I didn't, it was 2021.
• 44:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: I didn't make it through to the, that's final.
• 44:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 44:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then 2022, I did get to the, to the short list.
• 44:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: And then the, that pitch happened at the end of 2022.
• 44:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: So it was middle of 20, well, not middle, like March.
• 44:22
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, 20 April, 2023.
• 44:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 44:26
  Nadia Mahjouri: What all happened and then the book didn't come out till 2025.
• 44:28
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yes.
• 44:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I mean this, the speed is just
• 44:31
  Natasha Rai: mind blowing.
• 44:32
  Natasha Rai: Listen, I know.
• 44:33
  Natasha Rai: And I think, like, I always think it's valuable to really, um.
• 44:37
  Natasha Rai: Pay a lot of attention to that because yes, of course there are writers who are like, oh yeah, I was picked up and I signed this deal and it's coming out, you know, next year.
• 44:46
  Natasha Rai: But I don't know.
• 44:47
  Natasha Rai: I think your experience, my experience, a lot of the debut crew from this year's experience is that like it takes time and you have to persevere.
• 44:55
  Natasha Rai: Absolutely.
• 44:56
  Nadia Mahjouri: If that's what
• 44:57
  Natasha Rai: you want, right?
• 44:58
  Natasha Rai: Mm.
• 44:58
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 44:59
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I needed all of that time.
• 45:03
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm.
• 45:04
  Nadia Mahjouri: We were still making edits right up until kind of, I mean, it came out in February.
• 45:09
  Nadia Mahjouri: I was still making edits in November.
• 45:11
  Nadia Mahjouri: Like at the proof stage.
• 45:14
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:14
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:15
  Natasha Rai: It, yeah.
• 45:15
  Natasha Rai: You gotta, yeah.
• 45:16
  Natasha Rai: It takes the time.
• 45:17
  Natasha Rai: It takes, right?
• 45:18
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:18
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:19
  Natasha Rai: And it's hard to say it'll be this or this or this.
• 45:21
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:22
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:22
  Natasha Rai: That's right.
• 45:22
  Natasha Rai: And maybe other people write Nita a work What a, what a journey.
• 45:27
  Natasha Rai: And I'm so, yeah.
• 45:29
  Natasha Rai: I'm so happy that.
• 45:31
  Natasha Rai: It has been published'cause it's a gorgeous book.
• 45:33
  Natasha Rai: It's an gorgeous Oh, thank you.
• 45:34
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 45:35
  Natasha Rai: And I really, it was even, you know, even earlier when you said emotional truth, that's really landed for me because it definitely has that so much emotional truth.
• 45:44
  Natasha Rai: So amazing.
• 45:46
  Natasha Rai: Um, so before we wrap up Nadia, are there any tips that you would give an emerging or aspiring writer?
• 45:55
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, I.
• 45:57
  Nadia Mahjouri: My, my advice really is put yourself out there.
• 46:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, I think that's what I learned from my, you know, throw your hat into every ring.
• 46:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Keep an eye open for opportunities and, you know, what's the worst that can happen?
• 46:14
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, like you don't hear back.
• 46:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: Exactly.
• 46:16
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, there's, yeah.
• 46:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I would really, you know, I just think if you've got something that you think is.
• 46:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, got some legs then, then put it out there, you know, and also you have to be willing to, you know, to take the feedback that you get, you know, because if I had of kept trying to shop around the first draft that I'd put out there, well that wouldn't have gone anywhere.
• 46:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: Do you know what I mean?
• 46:41
  Nadia Mahjouri: But every time, if you're taking on the advice, then you are, you know, you're moving closer and closer to having a product that people are gonna wanna, or, you know, a, a publishable.
• 46:50
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, manuscript.
• 46:52
  Nadia Mahjouri: So yeah, take on the advice.
• 46:54
  Nadia Mahjouri: Be, um, but be brave, you know?
• 46:56
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 46:57
  Natasha Rai: And also your experience with the publishable program shows that you don't just have one shot you can resubmit and look what happened.
• 47:06
  Natasha Rai: You were shortlisted.
• 47:07
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 47:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 47:08
  Nadia Mahjouri: That's absolutely right.
• 47:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah, that's right.
• 47:10
  Nadia Mahjouri: And I mean.
• 47:12
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm so grateful that I took that 50 like that, you know, the$50$49 or something for feedback.
• 47:17
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, whenever they're offering feedback, take it, you know?
• 47:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 47:20
  Nadia Mahjouri: Another way too.
• 47:21
  Nadia Mahjouri: It's just so useful.
• 47:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 47:23
  Nadia Mahjouri: So useful if people are, even if you don't take it on board, and like I said, I had kind of differing feedback.
• 47:29
  Nadia Mahjouri: It was really interesting in itself, just to know that it's hitting different people differently, you know?
• 47:36
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 47:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Yeah.
• 47:37
  Nadia Mahjouri: Mm-hmm.
• 47:37
  Natasha Rai: And yeah.
• 47:38
  Natasha Rai: Yeah.
• 47:40
  Natasha Rai: Oh, well thank you so much for, uh, coming on the podcast and sharing your journey with me.
• 47:45
  Natasha Rai: It's been amazing to hear because I didn't actually know all of that.
• 47:48
  Natasha Rai: I know we've talked to loads about lead up to publication, but I actually didn't know there was, there was so much and, and it's such a typical journey as in the highs and lows, like when you think you've got somewhere and then bam, it's not Oh, yeah.
• 48:02
  Natasha Rai: And it can
• 48:02
  Nadia Mahjouri: be, I mean, that's probably the other thing I'd say is.
• 48:06
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, you do have to look after your emotional kind of mental health because it is a rollercoaster and you know, you, there are moments where you can feel quite disheartened by the whole thing.
• 48:19
  Nadia Mahjouri: And there are moments when you know, you're very hopeful and then that doesn't turn into something.
• 48:24
  Nadia Mahjouri: So I guess keeping some perspective around it is, you know, is really important.
• 48:30
  Nadia Mahjouri: Um, you know.
• 48:32
  Nadia Mahjouri: One No is not, no forever.
• 48:34
  Nadia Mahjouri: You know, like it's not exactly, you know, there, there are, there are always more opportunities and there's, you know, there's always next year's competition for me right now.
• 48:43
  Nadia Mahjouri: I'm like, well there's always, you know, I'm gonna write another book and another book and another book, and I hope that every book that I write is, you know, gonna be.
• 48:51
  Nadia Mahjouri: Kind of better than the last.
• 48:53
  Nadia Mahjouri: I don't know, my current second novel draft is looking pretty ugly, so like, it doesn't feel like that at the moment, but I'm like, I'll
• 48:59
  Natasha Rai: get there.
• 49:00
  Natasha Rai: Exactly.
• 49:01
  Natasha Rai: And you, and you know you, you can do it because you've done it already.
• 49:03
  Natasha Rai: So definitely.
• 49:05
  Natasha Rai: Yes, that's the plan.
• 49:08
  Natasha Rai: Well, thank you so much and for listeners that their half truth is out and makes a great Christmas present.
• 49:16
  Natasha Rai: Oh, thank you.
• 49:19
  Natasha Rai: Thanks, bye.
• 49:20
  Natasha Rai: Take care.
• 49:21
  Natasha Rai: Bye-bye.
• 49:25
  Natasha Rai: Having reflected on my conversation with Nadia, the intention that I'm setting for the next few weeks is about permission, and I really like the word Nadia used around being emboldened, so I'm thinking about giving myself permission to write.
• 49:44
  Natasha Rai: Or not to write, to call myself various things like a writer, a counselor, maybe a podcaster, a teacher, things that I haven't, especially around teaching and podcasting, things that I haven't really given myself full permission to call myself or to attach that title to myself.
• 50:06
  Natasha Rai: Thinking about what you give yourself permission to do.
• 50:09
  Natasha Rai: And if you write, and we've said this before many, many times, and it's worth repeating if you write your rev writer.
• 50:16
  Natasha Rai: So just check for yourself what gets in the way of giving yourself permission to name that or even to create time.
• 50:24
  Natasha Rai: What a carve out time to write for yourself, whether you want to pursue publication or whether it's something that you are doing for yourself.
• 50:33
  Natasha Rai: And lastly, the intention around getting or being emboldened.
• 50:38
  Natasha Rai: So I really liked what Nadia said was to chase every opportunity, put your hat in the ring for everything.
• 50:44
  Natasha Rai: And I actually had this conversation with Madeline, my co-host, just last night around writers writing.
• 50:53
  Natasha Rai: Yes.
• 50:53
  Natasha Rai: But also the skillset of making connections of putting yourself out there because it is scary, because it's not so simple as.
• 51:02
  Natasha Rai: I'll just have a go and see what happens because you're putting something very personal on the line, which I totally understand.
• 51:08
  Natasha Rai: And as Nadia said in the episode, the worst that's going to happen is somebody says no, or they ghost you.
• 51:15
  Natasha Rai: And after a while.
• 51:16
  Natasha Rai: I dunno, it doesn't hurt or sting as much.
• 51:18
  Natasha Rai: Maybe the first few times it might.
• 51:21
  Natasha Rai: So see if you can, even with that fear or sting, keep going.
• 51:25
  Natasha Rai: Keep putting your hat in the ring, especially if you are pursuing a publication deal or if you want feedback.
• 51:31
  Natasha Rai: I think the feedback component is so important and as Nadia said.
• 51:36
  Natasha Rai: Every time she got feedback and she incorporated it into her manuscript, it made it better and shinier.
• 51:42
  Natasha Rai: So that's my intention for the next few weeks, giving yourself permission and being emboldened enough to try something, putting yourself out there.
• 51:51
  Natasha Rai: Good luck.
• 51:55
  Tina Strachan: Thank you for listening to the book Deal podcast.
• 51:58
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• 52:03
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• 52:11
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• 52:14
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