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

Vlog Intros

Hey readers, we posted a couple of introductory vlogs so you can get to know our faces as well as our words.

The Writing Process

This is Sarah’s book, and Sarah’s story, but as her co-writer I would like to pull back the curtain a little bit on our book and into the writing process. Turning a book from a dream into a reality is a long, hard process. When Sarah came to me, she had a completed first draft of her story, but it lacked structure. The characters and plotlines were all over the place, coming and going haphazardly, and while that fit in with the chaotic nature of the life reflected in those pages, it didn’t make for a compelling book yet. Whether we know it or not, we’ve all been raised on narrative structure – whether you’re reading a book, watching an Oscar-nominated movie, or binge-watching a sitcom on Netflix, there are certain expectations that a story needs to fulfill in order to feel complete.

Take Mean Girls as an example. Essentially, we expect an inciting incident (Cady gets put into regular school), rising action (Cady going from being an associate of the Plastics to gradually becoming entrenched in their club), conflict and climax (Regina finding out about Cady’s treachery and trying to bring her down, leading to the gymnasium scene where Regina gets ridiculed by the whole school and getting hit by a bus) and resolution (Cady coming to terms with herself). These tropes can take many different forms in many different films or books, but usually if you scratch beneath the surface of a well-told story you will uncover them.

In our story [SPOILER ALERT], Sarah’s inciting incident is going overseas to model for the first time – a change which opens all sorts of possibilities. The rising action occurs as she spends more and more time in Asia, losing touch a little bit with her life back home as she falls into a world of boys and jobs and tries to make it in the industry. The conflict comes as she oscillates between two men in different countries and her career begins to sputter, climaxing as she finally moves on from the man of her dreams and runs out on her agency to go join a car rally. The resolution is when she comes back to Canada to find herself again.

Even though we plan to market this book as creative non-fiction, it was important to me not to manufacture any of the above pieces of the puzzle. A true-to-life story will almost by nature not adhere as rigorously to the classic narrative structure, but it’s important to find these narratives as they exist in our lives. Sarah’s book appealed to me because I felt that the story that was hiding out in her original manuscript was one that could work beautifully if told right. All the ingredients to an exciting story were already in place – we had the ever-changing landscape of a story that takes place in at least five different countries. Just in boyfriends alone we had a wide cast of characters – from Japanese surfer dudes to sweet-talkers to sketchy club-owners to gay pretty-boys. We had a world which not many people have seen in close-up – a modelling scene outside of the hubs of Milan, New York and London. And we had the spectre of Sarah’s modelling career looming over the whole thing, a pipe dream which transformed into a reality that was everything she had hoped it would be, until it wasn’t.

I put these structures into place for our second draft, which was really more like a really long outline, and our third draft is where the pieces really begin to click into a fully realized story. Each chapter takes place in a different city from the previous one, and each chapter builds up the story in a slightly different way so that the action is always moving forward and never stalling. Currently, this third draft is incomplete, but it is our plan to complete it once we have found a platform for this story.  

Thanks for reading!

-Simon

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