Front Page Archive 6th March 2005

I'm starting to realise that I might not actually like having articles written about me. On the one hand there's a sense of loss of control in letting someone else describe you to total strangers. Will they emphasise the aspects of your life that you would if you were meeting them for the first time? Does the picture they paint reflect the picture of yourself that you like to keep in your head, or does it reflect the other picture, the one you're not so fond of?

On the other hand, at the same time that my ego is doing its loop-de-loops dealing with the above, the writer in me is checking things out on another level. How well is the article written? If I had written that inteview, would these be the points I would have chosen to emphasise? Does the article flow well? Does it give the reader an enjoyable reading experience and thus, reflect well on its subject (ie, me)?

So every time a review or an article about me comes out, my wee brain starts its a-frettin' and in all truth there's no way I could ever be truly satisfied with the end product. In that ideal world of perfection, compared to the actual end product, these articles could always have been better, so why weren't they?

I'm working this out slowly and starting to realise that all the little doubts I have about this sort of situation make it so that there is no way that I can tell if the article is any good or not. That's where outside opinion comes in handy. And what better outside opinion than the love of one's life, who is sworn to support you as you grow old, as much with honest criticism as praise?

Which is a long-winded way of saying I didn't think much of the interview that came out in the Courier-Mail a couple of weeks ago, but Anna says it's a decent enough example of that kind of thing, so I'm resisting the urge to ignore its existence and I've uploaded a fairly crap photocopy of it to the press section, along with comments from one of the judges of the One Book, One Brisbane award as to why Man Bites Dog was shortlisted, and a little review from a mag called the Cheat Sheet that came out in 2003, but which I only found via my weekly self-google session about a month ago.

Voting in the OBOB doover ends this afternoon, so I'll probably have some news about how that ended up pretty soon.