If I close my eyes I am instantly back there, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our family room underneath the IKEA shelves and fold-out “architect’s desk,” scribbling on scraps of paper. Sunlight slants sideways from a big wall of windows, the curtains decorated with lime concentric circles. There are lime-and-red cushions on the chairs.

The family room is dominated by a gigantic, yellow, vinyl, double-sized beanbag. On days that I am sick and stay home from school, I lie lengthwise in this beanbag and Mum lets me watch daytime TV. On one particular afternoon, one that has gone down in family folklore, Mum lets the dog inside to “comfort” me. He races through the kitchen and leaps onto the beanbag, not realising I am already in it until it is too late. He lands on my head. From that day until the day he dies, that dog will never leap into that beanbag again.

I’m not in the beanbag when I close my eyes. I’m on the floor, under the furniture. I’m writing a book. Scraps of paper surround me and on each of them is a new page of my story, thick with misspellings and childlike illustrations. Later, Mum will staple all the pages together to create my book. I am rewriting Black Beauty. “Black is my favourite colour,” I tell Mum, “because I love black horses.”

That is the first time I can remember thinking I want to be a writer.

In the years that follow, I swell with pride when my story is printed in my primary school newsletter, the Panorama (because my school’s name is Wideview, get it?). I pen self-conscious and intensely melodramatic dramas during my hippie stage in high school, inspired by a blood moon rising beyond the horizon. Once, I create a mythology for “the birth of the sun.” In my description of the “raw power and force,” I believe I have tapped something deeply inspired. My English teacher tells me she feels as though she is reading a motorcycle advertisement.

Later, I write a fable about time. A travel memoir about growing up in the country. Poems about broken hearts. I subconsciously turn every job I have into a writing job, until I stumble into a commodity analyst/journalism role and my editor becomes my mentor. Writing is now my profession, but the words I create are a long way from those motorcycle-advertisement dramas. Now, I write about wool futures and cattle markets. About business leaders and political decisions. The subject matter is less than inspiring, but my editor teaches me about plain English, the elegance of minimalism, the value of self editing.

Hunched over my desk under a flickering flourescent light on a contract writing-job for a client, I write a novella in between memos and reports. At home, insomnia turns my brain into the rabbit hole to Wonderland. My novella spirals with it, and transforms into something unintentionally tainted with magic. When the editors at Curtin University’s Black Swan Press approach me to publish my book, I am as proud as I was the day the Panorama sent out photocopies of my Nancy Drew-inspired adventure. Possibly more.

The day I get the letter to say cutbacks in funding mean Black Swan will be closing, and my contract is void, I am devastated. I take it personally, and it is months before I write again. But then I do write, and I burden my next character with more humiliation than I have ever known. It is cathartic.

I am writing this on the floor of my lounge room, cross legged, wrapped up in my dressing gown with my lap top on my knees. My two children are upstairs asleep. Madeleine is two and two months, and she loves to create stories in her little notebook. “One day…” she will promise out loud, while scribbling across a page. Then she will mutter for a little while over more pages and more scribbles, before closing the book with a loud clap and announcing, “The End!”

My fingers on the keyboard are my livelihood but, more than that, they are the outlet for my deepest emotions. The telling of my story, and of theirs. The retelling, the rewriting, the foretelling.

Lately a lot of people have been asking me about the snail mail I send. I figured it’s been a while since I shared this story, and never in the one place, so I thought I’d give it a go today. Forgive me if you already know this story: please enjoy the pretty pictures and I’ll be back with something new tomorrow.

So back a few years ago, I wrote a little novella called Airmail. It was about snail mail between strangers. A girl chose a phone number out of the phone book, at random, and started writing letters to the stranger. As her letters became increasingly surreal and urgent the recipient, an old man by the name of G.L. Solomon, was moved to shake off the shackles of his curmudgeonly, routine-driven life and experienced something of a “life renaissance.”

When the book came out, I thought it would be a fun thing to write letters to readers. So I promised to write a personal letter of thanks to anyone who read Airmail (and I did). Some of them wrote back to me, which was wonderful.

As time went by, other readers found me online, and wrote to me from all over the world. Some of them drew pictures on their mail, sent ephemera, snippets of their lives. They wrote amazing things about how my book had reached them at the right moment in their lives. Letters like this:

I am staying at a youth hostel in East Berlin and stumbled across a copy of your book. I am a forty year-old woman traveling with my 14 year old son, and readily identified with Mr Solomon’s bemusement  when he first enters the hostel (it was my first time staying at a hostel!).  Being forty this year was hard for me and I too am traveling and gathering more marbles. It’s not so much that I haven’t lived an adventuresome life, it’s just that suddenly your life seems so much shorter while the list of things you want to do grows bigger, and you realize that you have spent the last 10 years of your life raising kids and working. (could this be what a mid-life crisis is all about……duh) It’s amazing how at certain critical points in your life the right book or the right experience occurs.  Your book is part of that for me.  Today I walked past some graffitti on the side of a cafe  -’ Life is not over yet ‘ it read.

You cannot imagine how that letter made my day! (Well probably you can.)

Since I started doing this – writing Airmail, writing to book readers, writing to blog readers – I discovered a whole new community of people who love snail mail. And they are the BEST people. There’s something about people who take the time to write and send letters, and read what others send them. Nine times out of ten (probably more), they are kind, considerate, lovely people. Often funny and clever. Always generous and creative. This community is the best thing to have come out of writing my book.

Meanwhile… we had originally planned a bit of a book launch when Airmail came out. A bookstore in Sydney was going to host it, and a local online magazine was going to host a bit of an ‘after party’ on a rooftop, with a snail mail theme. We ordered a box of books ready for this event (books were included in the ticket price), but then we moved from Sydney to Queensland. We figured I could still fly back to Sydney for the event, but planning it got a lot trickier. Then we moved from Queensland to Adelaide, and the planning got even more difficult. And a move back to Sydney seemed less and less likely. We started putting out feelers in Adelaide for bookstores that might host a book launch instead but to be honest by then my heart wasn’t really in it. Then I went overseas for a month. Then I fell pregnant. Then we moved yet again, this time to Melbourne. And by then it felt like the book had been out forever (it was less than a year but the gloss had come off), and I admit I felt kind of deflated and a bit of a failure.

People were still buying my book and reading it and writing me lovely letters, but that box of books from the launch-that-didn’t-happen sat sadly at the bottom of a cupboard, mocking me. Until you. I can’t tell you how honoured I feel that you come here to this little space of mine. That you read my blog, that you take the time to comment, and that you share your stories with me. Every time I hear from you, I am blown away. Every time! It is so amazing. YOU are so amazing.

So I decided to use that sad little box and turn it into something really happy: a way to say thank-you to you for taking the time to read this blog. And because I want you to know I care, I do my best to make the mail I send you as pretty as possible. Thank you!

ps. If you subscribe to this blog (or you want to) and you’d like me to send you mail like the parcels you see on this page, just leave me your details using the form on this page.

UPDATE 5 July 2014: as of today I have run out of copies of Airmail to send you. However I would still love to send you something nice by snail-mail to say thank you for reading this blog, and I will still do my best to make it look pretty. If you have subscribed to this blog (or you want to), simply fill in your postal details on this page. And if you’re still keen to read Airmail, there’s a list of stockists here.

My postcard featured a quote from Harry Potter author JK Rowling. “One thing is for sure: if you give up too soon, you’ll never know what you’ll be missing. Keep going and never quit.”

This was EXACTLY what I needed to hear today, as I struggled to get on top of everything on my plate, and grappled with self-doubt.

And it reminded me of JK Rowling’s incredibly inspiring commencement address on “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination,” made to Harvard students in 2008. Have you heard it? If you haven’t, do yourself a favour and watch it right now. The next 20 minutes may be one of the greatest gifts you could ever give yourself.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

… Or if you’re not a video watcher kind of Internet person (as I so often am not, because I don’t want to wake babies sleeping nearby), here is a link to the full transcript of the address. Get ye reading!

This is Madeleine, flying. The swing is her favourite thing in the world to do right now. She can stay on there for hours. Sometimes in silence. At other times, the park echoes to her jubilant shouts of joy: “Weeeeee!” she yells, mimicking Peppa Pig, as her funny little baby-mullet lifts in the wind and her knuckles turn white to my “Hold on tight!”

“More high? More high?” she begs, and I really  put my back into pushing her. “Do you feel like you’re flying?” I ask. She grins. “YES!”

I am swinging, too. Up: I am trying new things and I am taking the Blog With Pip course from Pip Lincoln and I am mapping out the beginnings of a new book… I am high and I am flying. Down: Harry is waking and staying awake throughout the night, I’m getting less than three hours of sleep in every 24 hours, and I ache with weariness. Sometimes my eyes can’t focus. Sometimes it physically hurts to sit up. But still I have to care and play and nurture and manage tantrums and comfort fevers and meet those pesky work deadlines… I am low and I am motion-sick. I am probably just one more sleepless night away from administering tea intravenously.

The swing is why things have gone a little quiet around here of late. I’m giving myself permission to focus on other things. Like survival! Yes, survival, but also very exciting changes to happen on this blog. I can’t wait to share them with you when I get them finished. Oh and that new book. Not the I’ve-been-working-on-it-forever novel, which will still happen ONE DAY, but something a little closer to the contents of this blog and I really hope you like it!

Way to be all circumspect, Naomi. I think on Facebook they call this “vaguebooking,” don’t they? I’m sorry, I just have to clarify everything in my mind and plot everything down on paper (I’m old-fashioned like that) before I will know how to share it with you. I can’t wait!

In the meantime, I hope you are well. Tell me what you have been doing! What have you been dreaming / planning / wishing for? Fill this space with your lovely words while mine take a back seat!

Yours truly,
Naomi xo

ps. Don’t forget there is one day left to enter to win family passes to both IMAX and the Museum, worth $75. Details and entry are the bottom of this post.

I like to leave my copy out on a coffee table for guests to thumb through. It’s fun watching their reactions as they turn the pages and, slowly, the realisation dawns that they are looking not at a random collection of clean and bold illustrations but, in fact, at a cleverly-constructed chain of interconnected events that are all occurring simultaneously on the flip side of one another.

It fascinated Madeleine, too, on the weekend. For approximately 30 seconds.

I managed to carve out some time during the past couple of weeks to write some mail and draw pictures on the envelopes, to send to blog readers. I hope these letters find them well, and that they enjoy their little parcels.

I really love sending pretty mail, so if you’d like some just let me know! At the moment, I’m posting copies of my book Airmail to people who subscribe to this blog. It doesn’t cost you anything or commit you to anything, it’s just my way of saying thanks for reading. If you’d like a copy, just follow the prompts on this page to send me your postal address (goes without saying that is never disclosed).

Yours truly (and all that),
Naomi xo

UPDATE 5 July 2014: as of today I have run out of copies of Airmail to send you. However I would still love to send you something nice by snail-mail to say thank you for reading this blog, and I will still do my best to make it look pretty. If you have subscribed to this blog (or you want to), simply fill in your postal details on this page. And if you’re still keen to read Airmail, there’s a list of stockists here.

The books are: My parents; My grandparents; My sisters; My cousins; My playtime; My pets; My dress-ups. These are not fancy, beautiful “record of my first year” books (although I’m still planning to make one of those for both of my children – one day!). They are simple, 12-page, hard-wearing board books, designed for a toddler to read and re-read (and drag around a room and throw away in a tantrum and smear with yoghurt).

I chose photographs with content that was meaningful to Madeleine, rather than beautiful and poetic (necessarily). There are blurry iPhone pictures in here, badly composed pictures, and pictures with bad lighting. The point was not aesthetics, but familiarity for her. It was interesting that by the time we gave these to her, three weeks after Harry had been born, she didn’t respond as positively as I’d expected to the photos in which she was a baby. It took me a little while to realise she thought she was looking at Harry instead of herself.

Madeleine loves them all, but her favourite books are “My parents” and “My pets.” It never gets old, having her open “My parents” in front of me and point to my face on every second page saying, ecstatically, “Mummy!”

I ordered these books from Pinhole Press, the only place I’d seen that made books in cardboard rather than paper (it would take Madeleine about two minutes to utterly destroy a paper book). The website is simple and easy to use, you just drop and drag photographs and type a very simple message / description in the facing page. Don’t plan anything too sophisticated and you will love it.

The only real challenge I faced was that after going to all the trouble of making all seven of these books, I got to the end of the order process and found they only delivered to the US or Canada. Even when I emailed to ask if they’d post to me, the answer was “no.” Don’t you find that strange, in this day and age, that a web-based company won’t do international shipping (even if the customer is willing to pay for it)? I’d still recommend them, but if you live elsewhere you’ll need to have a friend somewhere in North America who’s willing to take delivery and then forward anything you order on to you. (A big thanks to my friend Jacqs who did this for me, and carried Madeleine’s books all the way from LA to Melbourne on her holiday!)

What do you think? Have you ever made anything like this?

The folks at Out of Print Clothing say they “scour library stacks and dusty bookstores” to find the “classics and curiosities” that end up on their clothing. And they have a conscience, too: every purchase makes possible a donation of one book to a community in need, via their charity partner Books for Africa.

What book would you most like to see on a T-shirt?

I’d wear this edition of I Capture the Castle with pride. And of course we need to find Madeleine something with this. And then, well I just can’t help myself…