It’s now 22 years since I first moved up to this part of the world. It’s referred to as New England, apparently because the early explorers/settlers thought it looked like England’s green fields – which always kind of puzzled me, because apart from some similarity in gentle rolling hills, I’ve never really seen the resemblance.

However, we’ve had a fair amount of rain this summer. In this part of the country we don’t get cyclones, or a ‘wet’ season, but in summer we do sometimes get the tail-end/after effects of the cyclonic weather systems that occur in northern Australia. So, we get mild summer storms, and sometimes periods of rain – and this year, although there’s been no really big storms, we’ve had some good falls, and lighter falls on a regular basis. Gordon keeps track of rainfall, and we had 134mm in January (that’s 6+ inches), and yesterday was the first day in about 12 days that we didn’t have rain. I was thinking just the other day what a wonderful climate – no too hot, not too humid, gorgeous sunshine, beautiful fresh mornings, a fall of rain in the afternoon or evening – what could be better?

The result of all this rain is that the countryside is currently green. Not the thin hint of new-growth green which is what we usually call ‘green’, but long, green-grass green – lush, abundant, green. Greener than I have ever seen in my 22 years here.

Now it looks like England! Walking along the road yesterday morning, I was reminded of wandering across fields and down lanes in the UK – although there are certainly differences. Wider roads, no hedges, and no village every couple of kilometres!

Here’s a few photos from yesterday’s morning walk:

While many areas in the state are still in drought, we’ve been lucky this past couple of months to have had a reasonable amount of rain. Not quite enough to fill the dams, but the tanks are full, and the grass is the longest and greenest I’ve ever seen it around here.

The main road into town is a stock route, part of a network of roads, tracks and reserves that are an important part in Australia’s grazing history. Stock routes originally enabled the movement of stock between properties and markets; these days, most stock are transported to market by truck, but the stock routes still play a critical role, providing alternative grazing in times of drought, and enabling graziers to keep some stock rather than having to sell it off when their own paddocks are dust. Mobs can be out in the ‘Long Paddock’ for months, accompanied by a few drovers and their dogs, horses and bikes.

For the past couple of weeks, there’s been a large mob of cattle out on the main road, gradually moving up and down the road, overnighting in the Travelling Stock Reserves that are located every five or so kilometres. For a couple of nights, they camped on the first kilometre of our minor dirt road, penned in by a very rough temporary fence, which I had to open and close to get home the other day  – I managed to avoid the barbed wire, fortunately!

Temporary fences aside, I don’t mind the cattle on the road. It slows the trip into town somewhat, as you have to slow down to a crawl in places, and the mob can spread over a couple of kilometres in a lazy day’s grazing, but it’s part of Australian bush life, and I’d rather see stock out droving rather than starving in their home paddock, or going to the abattoir for a few cents a kilo. Plus there’s something quite peaceful about cattle grazing in the long grass beside the road, just mooching along, strolling across the road when the grass seems greener or longer on the other side, finding a nice shady tree in the middle of the hot summer’s day….

You don’t see this so often in eastern NSW, but in the west of the state, and on back roads, it’s reasonably common. I remember one trip to Canberra on the back roads, some years ago when the drought was terrible, and I passed through more than twenty mobs of cattle and sheep in one day, the long paddock their owners’ only hope of retaining some stock.

I confess to a little envy, though, for life on the road – although the realistic side of me wouldn’t really want to do it for long! Being a writer, though, I can give my characters experiences like that – in As Darkness Falls, Bella spent a lot of time, as a youngster, with her drover father, out on the roads in the west of NSW.

Australia Day is tomorrow – so, when we’re celebrating the great things about this country, I’ll be thinking not about beaches, but about the road through the bush, or over the flat plains, and a mob of cattle, mooching along in the sunshine.

It’s hard to believe that it’s 2010 – and we’re already well into the second week of the new year. ‘Two-thousand and ten’ or ‘twenty-ten’? I’m not sure which is going to be what I’ll say – out of habit, I’m still doing the ‘two-thousand and ten’, but ‘twenty-ten’ is two syllables shorter

I hope everyone had a joyful Christmas season, and that 2010 will shape up to be a wonderful year for you all.

The year isn’t my only new beginning lately. I’ve been working on book 3… but I was struggling. I was behind after the medical dramas, it took some weeks to get my concentration back to normal – and then the book still wasn’t working, every word and scene a battle. On December 28 or thereabouts, as I was thinking about the book, the thought occurred to me… ‘what if I changed it?’ On December 29, at around 1pm, I opened a brand new Word document, and started all over again. Same premise, same characters, but a different beginning, leading to some key differences in the plot.

Sometimes, you have to know when to start again. Tough as it was to throw out a heap of work (okay, it’s saved on the computer, just ‘thrown out’ in my mind), the structure of the story simply wasn’t going to work as it was. It’s now much better, much stronger. The heroine – a new character to Dungirri – is active from page 1, and in danger from about page 6, which is a good way to start a story! I’ve also found a better way of dealing with some of the challenges of this book; the hero, Mark, was a secondary character in the previous two books, and is – or rather, was – a politician. Yes, I know – making a (former) politician heroic is a tough ask! I do like Mark as a character, though – I’ve always seen him as a man of integrity, dedicated to serving his community, and with many layers beneath the courteous surface. The new structure sees him introduced in the book in chapter 2, but as a hard-working grazier, out in the paddocks, rather than in any political role. We see him, too, through the heroine’s eyes, and she doesn’t know him, so she sees him as he is, the man behind the public face.

I’m so much happier with the story now, and on the right track with it. However, it’s due in at the end of February – so things are going to be quiet around here for the next two months, while I take inspiration from Nora Roberts’ hard working example and discipline myself to write, write, write!

Sometimes a writer’s just got to do what a writer’s got to do….

Kat over at BookThingo recently posted a thoughtful review of Dark Country, and she’s giving away a signed copy of the book in what I think is a lovely contest:

For a chance to win a SIGNED copy of Dark Country, in 25 words or less tell us who you consider the most romantic Aussie couple and why. It can be a book, film, real-life story, or you can make up your ultimate Aussie romance.

You need to enter over at BookThing, in the comments section of the review post, by midnight Friday Sydney time. I’m enjoying reading the entries, so do go and join in the discussion.

I’d find it hard to enter, though – there are too many Aussie romantic couples I love! From the classics – Meg and Alan from Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, and other books; Norah and Wally from Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong books; and of course there’s also CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke and his Doreen – a little different from the previous two, being written in colloquial language, for adults, by a male writer, about a rough, working-class larrikin from Melbourne’s back streets, but wonderful and touching as The Bloke falls head over heels for Doreen.

Then there’s also D’Arcy Niland’s Call Me When the Cross Turns Over – the Cross in the title referring to the Southern Cross constellation – with it’s story of Barbie Cazabon and Jack ‘Fascinatin’ Kippilaw. These are two great characters, neither of them perfect, but definitely a great match, despite the trials they endure before they finally work it all out. The book is out of print now, but if you like Australian literature from the 1950s, it’s worth checking second-hand book shops for it.

As for real-life romantic couples, since I was a small child, I was always inspired by my aunt and uncle, Eileen and Arthur:

This is a photo through glass of a scan of a photo – but aren’t those smiles just beautiful? In my memory, they were like that all the time – aware of each other, devoted to each other, and showing that love constantly in many ways. Much older than my parents, they had grandchildren around my age, and it was wonderful a few months ago when one of the grandchildren and his wife came and stayed with us – and they smiled at each other in just the same way

Things have been quiet here on the blog lately because I’ve been in Sydney, dealing with more medical dramas. I headed down to Sydney on the 9th for surgery on the 11th, hoping I’d only be in hospital a night or two, but planning to stay in Sydney for a week or so afterwards, close to major hospitals and specialists. Unfortunately, the surgery (attempting to insert a stent inside the existing stents in my cerebral aneurysm) did not go well, and despite the best efforts of my wonderful doctors, I ended up with multiple complications – a small brain hemorrhage, some damage to the retina in my right eye, an abdominal bleed, and a tear in my femoral artery which gave me a large bruise/haematoma on almost my entire upper right leg. So, as a result, I was eight days in hospital, and had to have further surgery to repair the femoral artery, and it’s taken me a while to get back to something approaching normal health. So I do apologise for any unanswered emails, comments etc lately – I’m slowly catching up, now I’m out and about.

A week of bed-rest does give one plenty of time to observe the surreal nature of hospital life. In addition to being a patient in one several times, my first full-time job was in the personnel office of a city hospital, so I have multiple perspectives on the world. One of my favourite authors for a good fun read is Terry Pratchett, and I love his DiscWorld series and the way in which he uses the narrow edge between reality and absurdity to highlight the strengths, depths and frailities of humanity (and dwarves, trolls, witches, and Death….)

So, for those of you who have both read Pratchett and experienced a long hospital stay, it will probably come as no surprise that I idled away some of the long, long hours wondering how Mr Pratchett might write a book about hospitals. There are plenty of absurdities and strange customs in hospitworld and I’m sure he’d have great fun with it. If you’ve not read Pratchett, most of the rest of this post will not make any sense

Hospital time is a law unto itself. An event scheduled for 10am is almost guaranteed NOT to occur at any time with a ‘10′ in it, and there is probably some strange mathematical formula involving parabolic equations and corkscrew time movements with a relationship of inverse proportions to the length of time for which the patient has had to fast! (And a note of warning here – do not read certain Nora Roberts novels while fasting prior to an operation, because her descriptions of food are too damn good.)

Speaking of food, it’s all catered for en masse these days, to keep costs down. And it’s a truth universally acknowledged that the taste of hospital scrambled eggs manages, by some distortion of the senses, to remain on the palate for at least 72 hours. (The pannacotta, however, was quite enjoyable – although that may have been a relative enjoyment, rather than a perfect one.)

There are certain elements of hospital administration, many reflected in hospital forms that require completion by the patient, that make it entirely easy to suspect that one (or more) hospital administrators may in fact be orangutans. And of course, there has to be a controlling force behind the whole system to keep it running, and given that every piece of hospital linen (towels, sheets etc) has either printed or woven into the fabric the stern pronouncement that it is the property of Central Sydney Health Service, in large unfriendly letters, I did not find it had to imagine a Patrician-like character overseeing the supply and distribution chain, and terrifying all involved with dire threats if a single sheet or towel is not properly accounted for.

But on the plus side, of course, there’s the magic – the medical kind – and the variety of lively personalities of the wizards doctors and nurses who practice it. I was very well cared for, by some wonderful and interesting people. One of my doctors – unbeknown to him – also helped me to envision the hero I’m currently writing a little more clearly, as he had a similar focus, dedication, courtesy and gentleness that I’d given my hero, as well as being very good-looking. A couple of the young female doctors also gave me some more insight into my heroine, who just happens to be a doctor So, there were some positives about the experience.

I’ve been back home for a few days now, and it was lovely to come back to the peace and serenity of the bush after the weeks in the city. I have to take things a bit easy for a while, but my strength is gradually rebuilding, and I’m now doing most of my normal activities – just a little more slowly than usual, with frequent rest breaks!

I’ll be heading back to Sydney in a couple of weeks for some specialists’ appointments, and then going on down to Canberra for an early Christmas celebration with my family, then back home again to have Summer Solstice and Christmas with Gordon. And throughout it all I’ll be working on book 3, as I’m currently still hoping to meet my January deadline. My characters, Mark and Kate, are having a challenging time – although I did write the hospital scenes before my recent experiences!