My Life: Then and Now

Modelling is not a normal job. I don’t think you could really even call it a job. As a model I was wild and free and caught in the cycle of loving/hating the fashion industry. I had no commitments other than to be beautiful and to show up to jobs and countries. I made pretty great money, travelled all over the world, stayed in (mostly) nice places, got to (or was made to) socialize with the VIPs in the cities I was visiting. I was around beauty in every way. It’s like most high school movies where the geeky girl gets accepted into the cool crowd and then feels like a million bucks, then while enjoying the natural high of being a “someone" gets swept up into it and begins to change her outlook on life. I started seeing the world in a different way. I started thinking I could actually become someone. It was doable.

But looking back, I realize I was living a bit of a lie. When you get greedy and only start thinking of the money, it clouds your judgement. My life seemed so grand but in a way it all felt so superficial. Eventually reality hits. Currently I’m working at a job that pays very little money, where I wear a horrible uniform and get dirty everyday driving and cleaning trucks. It has great benefits but that’s about it. It’s so different from the glamorous life I had before. Now when I’m cleaning up shit (literally, sometimes), it feels like I really could only go up from here. I’m at such a low point career-wise. It is in no way to do with my career aspirations and is not even close to anything I’m interested in. But sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Maybe that’s growing up.

I’m six-and-a-half months pregnant. That might not sound like too far along, but believe me - it’s a lot of work growing a child inside you! My new (and hopefully forever) life partner and I have started a committed relationship. I have never really been in one before this - or even wanted to be, if I’m being completely honest. He truly is everything I have been looking for. You really do need to kiss a lot of toads before getting your Prince. I thank God everyday for him and my new family. I’m also doing an online course for financial accounting (which I completely should not have done at this moment in time since I already have too much stuff going on). My exam is tomorrow and I hope to God I pass. That’s not to mention that I am working on finishing this book and keeping up with this blog.

My life now is a total 360. I’ve transformed from this immature, wild, young female into a committed mom-to-be. We just moved into a new place to prepare for our new child. It feels like I have been unpacking for weeks. I have been organizing a baby shower as well. It has been a lot of work, but my mom and best girlfriend have been helping as well. All in all it’s been tough. I never have time to just chill at home. It’s such a huge change from my old life where I could relax when I needed and was able to sleep in at least twice a week. That never happens anymore. Do I wish sometimes I could just get up and leave it all behind? Yes. I miss the way that back then I was able to just pick up and leave the moment I didn’t like my situation. But then I think there’s no way I want to leave this family I’m starting to create. This - this - is what I have so desperately wanted my whole life. In a way this is what I was searching for during all those years of globetrotting. For my whole life, I have been praying for a family and then success. In that order.

Now I have faith. That’s the only advice I can give to anyone else out there - just have faith and work your ass off. Don’t stop till you get there - wherever your “there” is - and then enjoy the hell out it!


-Sarah

So What Is SWTMW Anyway?

Some people who click onto this blog might be confused about what exactly Sleeping With The Material World is. Especially if you don’t know us and you’re simply clicking over from the Facebook or Twitter page, you may not be familiar with the story of the book or what we’re trying to do with it. I mean, it’s pretty clear from the introduction up top that it is a book, but since there’s no widget on the website offering you a copy for sale or linking to it on Amazon, some might find themselves asking how they could obtain said book. And it’s an understandable question.

To be clear: Sleeping With the Material World is an unpublished book. Technically speaking, the final draft is not even completed yet. This page exists to raise awareness about our book project in anticipation of selling it to a publisher. Because as Sarah found out the hard way when she submitted her first draft to several publishers, turning your raw manuscript into a published masterpiece that can be found on Indigo’s shelves is actually pretty damn hard.

I know in the past while exploring the internet I’ve come across certain author webpages that refer to a book that doesn’t appear to actually exist, and it’s frustrating. You feel like if the book was published and all you had to do was click on a link, you would be more than willing to support the artist. But how are you supposed to go about supporting an unpublished author?

Sarah has been working on this book for multiple years and in its first iteration it was mostly just a jumble of stories. Since I came in, I’ve radically restructured the narrative. We now see SWTMW as a creative non-fiction "bildingroman," which is a fancy word for a coming-of-age story. It’s a story about growing up, and while the characters may be zany and all over the place, it’s really about a girl who travelled the world to find herself. SWTMW is laid out into 15 chapters, with each chapter taking place in a different city than the previous one. Many locations pop up multiple times, but some don’t – this is just a tour of Sarah’s world in her years in the modelling industry.

As such, on some level it’s a combination of a travel book and a modelling book, which is a little bit unique. There are a few first-person modelling narratives out there – notably Model: A Memoir by Cheryl Diamond, which I read and quite enjoyed, although I didn’t find that it had much of a narrative resolution – but few have really explored the experience of being a model, being flown in and out of different countries and immersing yourself in a new culture for a few months before being plopped down somewhere else. Our whole book is an adventure, as new opportunities pop up and disappear before Sarah’s eyes.

Sarah brought me in because I went to school for creative writing and I have a much better understanding of the process of writing an engaging, readable book with a story arc, but that doesn’t mean I have an in to the industry itself. The key right now is finding a baseline for our pitch that will make what we think can be an excellent book into something that is worth investing in for a significant publisher. So in a way, our goal right now is to brand the book as something that is worth reading. Part of that is demonstrating what’s enticing about this particular story, part of it is showing that we have the ability to write for a large audience, and part of it is finding that audience ahead of time.

Because of the way the industry is today, with the rise of the internet and Kindle and the focus on bestsellers and literary fiction, it’s very important for us to find our audience before we even sell the book itself. When I came into this process over a year ago, as I mentioned, I had the know-how, but I didn’t have much in the way of actual credentials aside from a few isolated articles. Since then, I’ve had my first short fiction piece accepted for publication in a literary journal (scheduled for March of next year) and landed regular gigs writing for TheRichest.com and RaptorsRapture.com. That’s a start, but it’s certainly not going to wow any publishers. Neither of us are going to get in the door because of our resumes alone, so in order to get this book finished and produced, we need to find out who is going to read it. This blog is a part of that process.

In addition, we’d love to explore any other networking opportunities that the internet has to offer – be it guest posts, podcasts, or the like. Most of all, we would love for you to subscribe to this blog (there's a big box on the right-hand side!), and then give our Twitter and our Facebook a follow. And then, maybe even more importantly, share it with all of your closest friends! This might seem like shameless advertising, and to be honest, it totally is.

But we hope you want to see this book get made as much as we do.

-Simon

Dating Diary: The Angry Artist

Here’s another doozy of a dating story. You can’t make this shit up.

A friend I worked with named Peter had some art done by a local tattoo artist. I saw the tat after he got it done and immediately fell in love with it. Peter told me that the guy who did it was amazing and super chill and down to earth. He told me he was Asian and had tattoos all over the place and hinted that I might really like the guy. I do have a soft spot for Asian guys and tats, but when I first went to see him I was more interested in getting some of his art.

At first, I emailed him to ask about getting something done, but I didn’t hear anything back I added him on Instagram and thoughtlessly liked a bunch of his posts. Like I said, he was an amazing artist, and I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that he could see who was liking his stuff. He added me back and suddenly I noticed that he was liking a bunch of my posts.

“Is this a liking contest?” he messaged me.

I told him I loved his art and had emailed him about a job. We set up an appointment and I went into his studio for a quick look and to set up the actual appointment. In between the meeting and the appointment we texted back and forth a bunch. It was mostly just about the artwork but I tried to flirt with him a bit. He was a hottie.

On the day of my appointment we hung out for about three hours, just talking about everything. I thought that he was fun and interesting and seemed to be into all the same things as me. I was totally into him. I thought we had connected and was waiting for him to ask me out, but he didn’t say anything that day. Over the next couple of days we texted back and forth. I told him I was very intuitive and he asked what I was thinking.

“I think you want to ask me something but you’re holding yourself back,” I replied.

“Wow. UR Psychic.”

“Look if you want to ask me out just do it.”

“I don’t know. U might think I’m boring LOL. Lemme sleep on it.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said. But I was thinking, Are you kidding me?  He certainly wasn’t boring, but that whole exchange was a bit of a red flag that he was a bit weird. I waited all day the next day to hear something and then in the evening I finally texted him something like, “if your heart is telling you you should then you should.” He got the message and finally asked me out.

Our first date was probably the best date I have ever had. We had brunch at a lovely little place that my friend had recommended and then went to the valley by Old Mill subway station and watched the salmon migrating upstream for about five hours. We didn’t kiss, but the whole experience was amazing.

Over the next few weeks the guy was just such a sweetheart. I had had a few too many bad experiences and had resolved to try and wait a month before I slept with anyone. With this guy, it was easy to play it off as inconvenient at first because my Mom was staying with me at the time and he still lived with his parents while he saved up for a studio, so a “sleepover” would have been awkward. Most guys seemed to give up and leave long before we had made it a month, but this guy just stuck around. I enjoyed hanging out with him tons. He was so affectionate, loving, friendly, chilled, and easy going. Just lovely. He only texted me which caused a few misunderstandings because I like guys to call me as well. But he was great. With everything going so well, after the first couple of weeks it was getting hard for me not to sleep with him and hard to explain why I wanted to wait. Even though a month isn’t that long, in the modern world it feels like a lifetime, especially for men.

Finally it happened. We had made it about a month so I went to bed with him and the first time it…wasn’t that great. It was fine, but there was nothing memorable or exciting about it. The second time, though, was different. The tender guy I had been falling for turned into a completely different person. He went at me like a jackhammer, smacked me in the face, and called me dirty names. He tried to strangle me and talked way – WAY – too much throughout the entire thing. I let him finish and thought – nope.

I didn’t say anything about how I felt immediately but a few days later I brought it up over text. (I had wanted to talk it over in person but he didn’t want to wait until we met up.) I told him that I didn’t like it like that, and that girls who did probably think about sex differently than me. I even suggested that maybe the girls who do have had some sexual abuse in their lives (I’m not saying that they necessarily have, but that was my personal opinion at the time). And even if I had been willing to go along with some of what he did, he needed to bring it into our relationship way slower – one thing at a time – and warn me in advance about what kind of stuff he was going to be pulling out. Even then, I don’t know if I would have been into it. But at least I would have been willing to try rather than noping the fuck out.

After I told him all of that, he told me he was super embarrassed and sorry. He told me his last girlfriend had been into some crazy shit and he had transferred it over to me. He told me he could go along with whatever I liked. But I’m not like that. I don’t want to direct the whole process when I’m in bed with someone. I’ve never had to do that and I didn’t really want to start.

The question of whether we could make it work simmered for a few days. Finally I asked him straight out, “Is that what you’re into or not?”

He got angry and defensive, and I realized things would never work between us. A few days later we officially ended it. I never slept with him again, because I just didn’t think that I would enjoy it. We’re still friends and I think he’s a great guy and an incredibly talented artist. I don’t hold any of it against him. 

But sometimes two people are just incompatible…

-Sarah