Eating My Words is the second coming of a food blog I started some years ago when I had the idea that combining my love of writing and books with my interest in food and cooking might create a happy synergy. In what seemed proof of this, I discovered there was a postgraduate course in food writing at the University of Adelaide run by Barbara Santich, the eminent Australian food writer. So, I enrolled, completed the course and learned that food writing wasn’t any easier than writing in any other genre. I also learned that the Masters degree in Creative Writing I’d already completed didn’t equip me with any superior qualifications that mattered. Like writing a novel, the creative drive must be birthed anew at the start of every venture.

I’d secretly hoped the course might open doors to the ranks of published food writers, but this didn’t happen. Opening such doors requires far more than certificates, diplomas, degrees or even skill in some cases. What it does require is persistence, patience, good contacts and a lot of luck. Nevertheless, I went on to write a few articles and to create a food blog called Epicurean Epistles which had a relatively short but vigorous life. Its demise was entirely self-inflicted – a case of shooting myself in the foot, wrongheaded assumptions, stupid choices I have made, or all three. I killed it off to make way for the next great Australian novel (albeit not set in Australia), aka THE BOOK. Once embarked on THE BOOK I knew there would be no time for frivolous discourses on how to get the most out of your crop of mulberries. Looking back, I can see my mistake. It was like tossing a sprouting butterfly bush into the compost to make way for a Bird of Paradise that never arrived.

Frivolous or not, the picturesquely (pretentiously?) named Epicurean Epistles did satisfy my writing urge and provided a space to exercise my nascent food writing skills. But THE BOOK, like a torrential flood, swept all before it and sucked from me every vestige of inventive and mental energy, not to mention whatever tenuous grip on reality I’d ever had. A common enough experience for first-time novel writers. Spurred on by the idea that the project is a fully realizable goal, we throw ourselves into a state of self-flagellation which can consume years, destroy relationships, annihilate all social life and devour prodigious amounts of money, time and other resources that might have been better spent doing something less dispiriting. Of course, once having divulged the Grand Project to others, it becomes impossible to give up. Those friends and family who you’ve been dumb enough to tell, get inordinately excited on your behalf, checking in regularly for updates on how THE BOOK is going, saying things like soon I’ll be able to say I know a famous author, or who would you choose to play the male lead in the film version. That such well-meant support comes from people unversed in the difficulty of writing books doesn’t detract from its impact. You must soldier on because how can you let them down?

As anyone who has ever indulged their novel writing fancies would know, the internet is a seething morass of advice on how to write, what to write, when to write, how to get an editor, agent, publisher, manage rejection, deal with failure, despair, suicidal urges and more. What also becomes clear from a cursory scanning of all this is that the numbers of aspiring novelists out there are roughly equivalent to the population of China. Of these, the proportion who ultimately get published is less than 1%. These facts aren’t encouraging but did not in themselves lead to the consignment of THE BOOK to the bulging bottom drawer of past failures. That, like most things, was a more drawn out and complicated process and one that makes depressing reading, so I’ll spare you.

However, I’ve since discovered that writing nothing leaves not just an emptiness on the page but a vacuum in the mind.

So, I thought I’d resurrect Epicurean Epistles. Only to find the great god Google had despatched it to oblivion. Resurrection therefore became a matter of reinventing the wheel, hence Eating My Words. This blog reflects a different slant, as reinvented wheels tend to do, being more a loose receptacle for ideas and observations than its more didactic predecessor. There won’t be any recipes for a start. Nor any advice about anything. While any underpinning philosophy is yet to become clear, it could best be described as doodling on paper tablecloths in that it gives me somewhere to articulate what’s going on in my head and potentially staves off senile dementia.

Elizabeth Hardwick once pointed out the dangers of the private journal, noting the “outrageous vanity of presuming to offer simply one’s own ideas and moods“, and also describing the diarist as the “most egotistical of beings“. To the extent that a blog is a private journal, I suppose the judgment applies. But self-indulgence and “outrageous vanity” aside, this form of writing makes things clearer to me, if no-one else. For example, this post tells me there’s a definite cyclical trend to my writing projects which doesn’t promise but doesn’t altogether rule out the fact that THE BOOK might be resurrected or reinvented at some indeterminate time. If I live that long.