Just a quick post. I’m in Sydney again for a week or so – came down for another medical procedure, which went very well, and I was allowed out of hospital after only one night, instead of two as I expected. I’m staying down here another week, though, just in case of any complications arising.

Sydney, as usual, is noisy and busy and crowded – but the jacarandas are out, spreading blue-flowered branches over parks and pathways,  and there’s a red-flowering tree that often appears near a jacaranda, creating a gorgeous red/green/blue vista. As always in Sydney, I’m stunned by the rich greens of the foliage, much denser than we see inland, and the many flowering plants with large, tropical-style flowers.

The people in Sydney are such a rich, complex, mix – all sorts from trendy young things, artistic types, business professionals, to older immigrants from less fortunate places than here. Just across the road from the internet cafe I’m in, there’s a man busking, playing the Chinese violin – I’ve forgotten what it’s called. But its a fascinating contrast – the ancient Chinese music, flowing in and out of the hum of the traffic rushing by.

No photos in today’s post, I’m sorry, but I’ll try to get some in the next few days. Today is forecast to be stormy and rainy, but tomorrow should be fine – and I might be feeling up to wandering a little further afield!

After seven years of mostly below average rainfall, we’ve had a good spring this year, with rain nicely sprinkled through the past few months. This past week, it’s been gray skies and rain every day; not often heavy, but good soaking rain – around 2 inches over five days or so. There’s not been enough run-off to make much difference in the levels of our dams, but they have risen a little. We’re moving into summer storm season, so we’ll likely have a few brief late afternoon storms with heavy rainfall in the next couple of months – the type of rain that can fill the dams quite quickly!

This morning, the sun is shining, the frogs are creating a noisy celebration down in the little dam in front of the house, the young choughs (black birds with white wing-tips) in the resident extended family group are screeching for food from their relatives, and the fairy wrens are flitting around the overgrown herb-garden. The landscape is, for us, quite green – not an Irish or a New Zealand green, but definitely more green than brown! And the trees and bushes are shooting out new growth at quite a pace:

The three callistemon (bottlebrush) bushes near the house have been flowering for a couple of weeks. Bottle brushes come in a range of colours, and the ones we have are a deep pink.

They’re always a gorgeous sight – and, for me, they have a ‘Christmas’ type of feel – even though they will probably have faded by Christmas itself. They remind me though that summer is coming, and for us in the southern hemisphere that includes Christmas!

I enjoy Christmas, and making preparations for it. This year, the DH and I are travelling to Canberra to spend a few days with my family over Christmas. We’ll travel down over two days, probably exploring a few back roads on the way, and staying overnight in Mudgee or somewhere else. We’ve booked into a nice hotel near the centre of Canberra, so we can spoil ourselves a little. I’m looking forward to the trip – my family are wonderful, and our Christmas celebrations are low-key but pleasant, without the dramas or the stresses that some families have, so it should be a lovely time. I’m having fun gathering together Christmas gifts, and I’m planning to make a Christmas pudding to take. I’ve got a bit to get through before then – another trip to Sydney for medical stuff, and of course a novel to work on! – but it’s good to have something cheerful in the not-too-distant future to think about!

The problems with the Romance Writers of Australia website have now been sorted out, thanks to all the hard work of our web mistresses, Kiki and Tracey.

Because of the website being offline for a while last month, the giveaway contest has been extended until the end of November. So, if you’d like to enter for a chance to win one of five copies of As Darkness Falls, head over to the giveaway page and email in your entry before the end of the month.

My publisher, Hachette Australia, are donating the books, thanks to the wonderful Louisa, the publicity manager, who will also be arranging the mailing to the winners.

My ’study’ is the corner of the guest room. The guest room isn’t large, and with a queen bed taking up most of the room, there’s only space around the edges for my writing and research paraphanelia. I’ve also got some space in the sunroom, but as there’s a very large weaving loom in there, my crafting and textiles things are again fitted in around the edges.

The study was working fairly well, though – until I resigned from my university job at the end of last year. When I left there, I brought home a heap of research materials and books and papers from the work office – and since there wasn’t really anywhere for them to go, they sat on the bed. Fortunately, we don’t have overnight guests very often at all, because the bed gradually got covered by things that I couldn’t find a home for.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve gradually been sorting through stuff, reorganising into limited space, trying to set things up properly for working full-time at home. It wasn’t too bad in winter, because I mostly worked at the dining table where it’s warmer, and could close the door on the ’study’. But once the warmer weather started, I felt the need to get the workspace set up more effectively.

I threw out a heap of papers from the old, 2-drawer filing cabinet. I bought a new, 3-drawer filing cabinet. I sorted out numerous copies of manuscript drafts and shredded some, keeping only significant stages, and put those into archive boxes -  there being a strong historian streak in me, that needs to see important things archived.

I cleaned out the drawers of the desk my Dad built for me years ago. One drawer was full of old disks – backups disks, old files etc. I got determined and threw them out, and that freed up a drawer. Another drawer had software manuals and boxes – I tossed some, found better spaces for others.

The top drawer is the drawer I toss pens, clips, tape, scissors and other useful things into. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I do buy a few pens, because I like decent ones that write properly and are comfortable to hold. I also use mechanical pencils in varying sizes. But conference pens, hotel pens, author’s pens, and sample promotional pens, all ended up in the drawer as well. So, I started sorting out the top drawer. I put all the pens and pencils that worked on top of the desk, tossing the ones that didn’t work.

Ahem. There were quite a few:

At least, if the power fails for a lengthy period, I won’t run out of ink to write by hand Nor paper – because when I put all the notebooks and writing pads in one place, there were about a dozen of them.

A year or two back, I’d bashed together some rough shelves to go above the desk and the boxes beside the desk, but once I put the new filing cabinet in place of the boxes, the shelves no longer fitted. So, I had to rebuild the shelves – and made them stronger in the process, using angle brackets instead of nails. I do not have the carpentry skills or patience of my father (or the tools), but I finally finished remaking the shelves and staining them a couple of days ago, and I’m fairly happy with the results. They’re more ‘rustic’ than beautiful – and the stain recommended by the guy in the paint shop was darker then I wanted – but they’ll do the job.

Today I’ll be moving the laptop back to the desk and settling in there to work again. The bed still isn’t all cleared, but now I have the filing cabinet and shelves I can do that a bit at a time, in the mornings which aren’t my best creative times. As long as nobody wants to come and stay soon!

It feels like it’s been a very busy few days. This morning I submitted a workshop proposal for next year’s RWAmerica conference – I’ve had an idea for a while, and it took me a few days to shape the proposal, including a late-night session last night finishing it off, because I’d got dates confused and thought I had a little longer! However, it is safely submitted, and now I just have to wait until early February to find out if it’s been accepted or not.

The workshop proposal has brought my neglected PhD study back into my brain space again, as the proposal explores some ideas that my research and contemplation of the romance genre has highlighted for me – in part, about the difficulties we have as a society in conceptualising and talking about love in a meaningful way, and the ways in which this has impacted on perceptions of the genre. I’ll possibly write a post about that sometime, when I don’t have a book dreadline weighing on me!

I also had a meeting with my PhD supervisor this morning, for which I needed to organise some material – and thoughts! I have a new supervisor this year as my previous supervisor left for another position, but I’m a fairly independent student and with both of them I’ve had a fairly relaxed, unstructured supervision relationship. I’m a part-time student, so we don’t have quite the same pressure of time for completion as full-time candidates do. However, it was really refreshing this morning to have a long discussion with Dugald about progress this year and the way my thinking is shaping as a result of my research. We discussed my proposed thesis outline, and the key apporaches and arguments, and he was happy with that. In our system, a PhD is entirely by thesis, with no course-work involved – so ‘all’ I have to do now is actually write the 80,000 – 100,000 word thesis!

I’ll focus on that more early next year, and will probably post some draft sections/articles here for general comment or discussion. But for now, my priority is finishing book 2, which is moving, but slower than I would like. My publisher emailed me the first cover roughs yesterday, and we talked about timetables and deadlines and other important details which make book 2 seem very real. So, I’d better get back to writing it!