My take-it-easy strategy meant that I didn’t register for the workshop on Friday, and I was glad of that decision! Instead, I went into Newtown (an inner Sydney suburb) and met up with my good friend, librarian Vassiliki, for morning tea, in one of Newtown’s many cafés. Then a stroll down King Street, and short visits to an amazing button shop, a bead shop, and A Coffee and a Yarn. I managed to resist the temptation of pretty things, however, and didn’t buy anything.

Friday afternoon was the booksigning, organised by the Australian romance Readers Association in conjunction with RWA. It was great fun! We authors were seated alphabetically – so I was between my good friend, Valerie Parv, and fellow Outback Romances author Fiona Palmer.

After the booksigning came the cocktail party. There’s always a fancy dress theme, although no requirement to dress up. I had originally planned not to wear a costume, but then had an idea that fell in to the Fantasy theme, and was easy to execute. I fast-forwarded to 2012, and wrote up a series of frontpage newspaper articles, announcing major literary prize wins for various romance authors. I stuck them onto two sheets of cardboard, which I wore as a sandwich board. It was a fun bit of fantasy, and gave a few people a good laugh.

Highlights of the rest of the conference included, of course, the awards dinner on Saturday night. It’s always a lovely night, friendly and buzzing with positivity, and this year was no exception. I didn’t win the R*BY award in my category, but huge congrats to my good friend Tracey O’Hara, who did! The winners in the short romance categories were the lovely Sharon Archer, and wonderful Madam Res of RWA, Amy Andrews. The long romance category went to historical author Sophia James, who I haven’t met, but I’m sure she’s fantastic, too!

The workshops on Sunday included a very interesting, if somewhat unsettling one, by a Forensic Pathologist. A lot of very valuable information, sensitively delivered, about investigating the cause of death. After lunch, I attended quite a different workshop, delivered by a martial arts expert who trains the military, police, journalists going abroad, and airline staff, in fighting techniques. Not only did he know his stuff, he was a great performer, too, with expert comic timing. I guess it was less serious because we’re fiction writers, and not frequently confronting potentially dangerous situations in real life ourselves. But I learned heaps, both of relevance to writing fight scenes, and to real life. Hopefully I’ll never have to use any in real life, but at least I have more knowledge than I did!

Another part of my take-it-easy strategy was to stay on in Sydney on Sunday night, instead of racing home Sunday afternoon. I am SO glad I did. It was so much more relaxed, and I enjoyed the winding-down with friends, having a cocktail in the bar with a few others, then going out to dinner with a small crowd.

On Monday, I drove home with the wonderful Kelly Hunter, and we had a great trip. She drove, and I took notes while we brainstormed ideas for her next book series. It was a heap of fun, bouncing ideas and possibilities around, and now I can’t wait for her to write the series!

Since getting home, life has continued on, quietly busy. I’m still waiting on word about my next surgery, but it may be some weeks yet before I know the date. In the meantime, I finished putting together a photo album for Gordon’s mother’s 80th birthday, and posted it off – only a day or two late! (She didn’t seem to mind!)

Yesterday was another pleasant trip ‘down the hill’ to Bellingen, two hours drive away, for a meeting of the north coast 4 Points Author Network group of RWA. It’s a a great group of women, and a lovely drive amongst the peaks and ridges of the Great Dividing Range to the Dorrigo Plateau, and then down the escarpment to Bellingen, nestled into the river valley at the foot of the hills.

I’ll leave you with a couple of views from the road to Dorrigo:

Most of the native wildlife is nocturnal, though, so we often wonder about what we don’t see, or see only rarely – like koalas, dingoes and feather gliders…

Our dogs spend each night in the dog ‘run’ – a large fenced area, about 25 metres by 25 metres (yes, bigger than the average house block!) There are plenty of trees in the run, and it’s surrounded by trees. The dogs often bark at night creatures, and every now and then a possum spends the night up one of ‘their’ trees, having wandered into the run during the evening when the dogs aren’t there. (A few weeks back, we rescued a baby possum, huddled on top of a fence post; we took it to a tree outside the run, which it scampered up quickly!)

On Tuesday morning, when Gordon went to take the dogs for their morning walk, they were interested in the occupant of a tree on the edge of the run. This is one of Gordon’s photos:

No, it’s not a possum (Australian possums are cuter than North American ones). We’ve never seen one of these before, and had to check on the internet… it’s a spotted quoll, a carnivorous marsupial, native to Australia and a threatened species. It scampered off to somewhere safer while Gordon and the dogs were out for their morning run – we don’t know if it lives locally, or if its territory is further away – apparently they can roam about 6 kilometres in a night.

Maybe we should go out spotlighting at night some time, and see what else is living in the bush with us!

There’s not a lot of news to report from here, since my butt is firmly in my chair, day after day after day, gradually making progress on book 3. Some days are good, some days are frustrating…. at some stage in my writing career, I may actually learn the lesson that those frustrating days could well be a sign that I’m approaching a scene the wrong way. Yes, 2,000+ words went out the window the other day when I realised, after three days of struggling with a scene, that it was simply all wrong and needed deleting. Sigh. I’m not a fast writer, so tossing out a large chunk of words is always painful. However, the new scene worked much better.

I do take breaks from the writing – making cups of tea, bringing the dogs in from the run, taking the dogs for a walk, giving dogs tummy-rubs, and their favourite – playing biscuit-games. (For my US readers, biscuits=cookies.) Tansy, being a smart bundle of energy, likes the games with running in them, and is always trying to anticipate when I’ll give the order to ‘come’. Jaffa, aka The Princess Dog, is slowing down, due to her seizure medication, and possibly just her temperament. Her favourite biscuit game is ‘I’ll just sit at your feet looking adorable, and you give me a biscuit.”

We’ve had a lot of summer rain, so everything is looking very green – the greenest I have ever seen this district. Most of the trees around here are stringy-bark eucalypts, but there are peppermint gums (eucalypts) and box gums as well, and the box gums are flowering, white blossoms high in the canopy attracting a constant buzz of insects. The native blackthorns are also flowering, and as we have a lot of them, it’s a delight to see the haze of tiny white blossoms as we walk around the block. They’re quite straggly bushes, but the bunches of flowers are lovely:

And yes, I do think it’s a lovely coincidence that the title of the German edition of As Darkness Falls, coming out next month, translates to ‘Black Thorns’. The translator probably didn’t have such a pretty image in mind when coming up with the title, however

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s because one of the strategies I use to keep my butt in my chair and my brain focused on my book, is to knit while I’m staring at the screen. As mentioned before, I’m not a fast writer. Some people write quickly, get a ‘dirty draft’ down, and then go back and polish it – sometimes revising it multiple times. I write slowly, spend a lot of time getting each part right, and therefore do a great deal of staring at the words, thinking how best to express the mood of the characters, and weave together the plot elements. So, for me, knitting something uncomplicated is a good way to help the concentration process – it keeps my hands busy, and away from the mouse and the temptation of clicking all over the internet (or even just over other files on the computer), and it relaxes the restless part of my brain, with the simple, repetitive rhythms, and just the sheer pleasure of holding beautiful yarns. It also dramatically reduces any desire to get up and go and clean bathrooms, spring clean the house, or any of those other procrastination devices that afflict restless students and workers.

I usually keep my knitting ramblings over on my textile blog, but just to pretty up this post a little more, here’s a photo of second shawl I recently knitted from a pattern I designed:

(It looks more complicated than it is – the lace pattern was easy rhythmic knitting, and so suited to knitting while writing! I did take a few breaks, though, earlier in January, to write up the pattern, and after test-knitting by some friends, the pattern’s now available on Ravelry, the big knitting community.)

Okay, now that I’ve had a short break to communicate with the world beyond my computer, I’ll go and wash my breakfast dishes, and then get back into the writing. The current knitting is another shawl, in a rich dark red wool – dramatic shades for a dramatic scene!

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.

But I do get up early sometimes, and once I’ve convinced the brain and the wanting-to-close eyes that it’s okay to actually be awake, I can almost enjoy early mornings. If I go outside, I love them.

This morning, I was out before sunrise. We woke about 5.30am; it was light outside, but the soft, pearly light before the sun is visible. I took the camera out. The frogs were croaking away quite loudly in the dam – we’ve had rain recently, and they’re still singing about that, with all their little froggy hearts. The air was still, and while it wasn’t exactly quiet, with the frogs singing and the choughs squawking amongst the trees, there was a sense of quiet, each sound distinct in the stillness.

Our place is surrounded by bush; at that time of morning, the trees are silhouetted against the sky. A patch of lighter sky, low on the eastern horizon, signals the coming sun.

To the west, the sky has a soft pink edge to it, reflecting the new light.

The sun breaks above the horizon of distant trees, and the light transforms from pink, through apricot, to gold:

..and its rays scatter through the trees, catching some of them in shafts of gold:

So, why, I hear you ask, did I get up early this morning? To take photos And why did I want to take photos? To put on my blog.

And why is today’s blog about the early morning?

Because it seemed like a good way to create an atmosphere for my readers, in which I can announce that my publisher and I have decided that the title for my third book in the Dungirri series will be: First Light.

I love the title. It fits well with the As Darkness Falls and Dark Country, and completes the arc, from the fall of night, through the darkness, to the fresh promise of a new day.

Now I just have to finish writing it…

I’m not quite sure where October went – whoosh! – but I did promise a giveaway draw for subscribers to my newsletter, as something of an apology for the newsletter software snafu in September. So, on Sunday, I’m going to draw one name from the list of subscribers, and that person will win their choice of a signed copy of BOTH my books, OR, if they already have both books, a gift certificate from a bookseller of their choice ($30US/$40Aus), OR a combination of a book plus a gift certificate ($15US/$20Aus). If you’d like to sign up for my newsletter, you can do so here (or click the link at the top of the page). I send out a maximum of one newsletter per month, and I respect your privacy and abhor spam, so I’ll never giveaway or sell your email address.

In general news, things have been quietly busy here. Most of my time is focused on writing book 3, which is moving along, although a little slower than I’d like. The hero, Mark, has been proving a little elusive; there’s a lot underneath his controlled public face, but he’s reluctant to let anyone see it. However, I’m now getting to know him much better, and finding out many interesting things about him – and so will the heroine, Kate

So, I’d better get back to it, and settle in for, I hope, a productive day of writing! I’ll leave you with a few images from my recent morning walks. Our driveway is almost a kilometre long, so down to the gate and back is a reasonable amount of exercise. This morning, though, I hitched a ride with Gordon when he left for work, and hopped out another kilometre down our road, to walk back home. The combination of recent rain and warm spring weather has given a burst of green growth – but I’m sure it will brown off very quickly.

Down the driveway

Old farm cottage

The neighbours cattle - who see few pedestrians!

Here’s the satellite image from Google Maps of the area:

View Larger Map

The ridge that starts slightly right of the centre top of the photo is the ridge we drove down, to Top Creek (runs from centre left of the photo roughly through the midle), not far from where it joins the Macleay River. Later in the afternoon, we drove back up Top Creek, to the junction with Rafferty’s Creek – a lovely spot!

I tested out the video function of the new iPod a few times. The following short videos are a little shaky (hand-held iPod!) but might give some sense of the landscape:

A 360 degree view from a spot beside Top Creek – the site of the old stockyards and hut, now long gone:

A 360 degree where Top Creek flows (or doesn’t flow, in drier weather) into the Macleay River:

The junction of Top Creek and Rafferty’s Creek:

For those who aren’t able to view videos, here’s a few photos:

Clearing a fallen tree from the track

Track along the top of the ridge

Probable site of hut on Top Creek

Carrai Plateau across the Macleay River

Macleay River

Junction of Top Creek and Rafferty's Creek

And finally, a photo from the vehicle as we were driving back along the ridge, looking across to other ridges:

Ridges through the trees

It’s wild, isolated country – but very beautiful! And to connect this image-heavy post to writing, this kind of area is likely to be the inspiration for the fictional setting of the series of books I’ll write after the third Dungirri book. Still very much in the embryonic stage yet, but the ideas are developing, and we’ll see how it grows

The IASPR (International Association for the Study of Popular Romance) conference is on Thursday and Friday, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will be the first gathering in Australia of scholars and others interested in popular romance, and the program is packed full or what, I am sure, will be fascinating and thought-provoking papers and discussions.

The RWAustralia conference starts (for me) on the Friday evening, with the cocktail party, and then runs all weekend. My publisher, Bernadette Foley, and I are presenting a workshop on Saturday morning about negotiating the author-publisher relationship. Then there’s a great lineup of workshops and keynotes, as well as the chance to meet and catch up with many friends and fellow writers. Plus the Awards dinner on Saturday night, where the winners of the Romantic Book of the Year Awards will be announced – always a special night, but especially so this year, as As Darkness Falls is a finalist in the Romantic Elements category.

I’ll be driving home on Monday, and maybe catching up with my sister for coffee along the way. Then I’m home for two days, before I head off to Melbourne!

Needless to say, with all this travelling and conferencing, the blog may be a little quiet – although since I’ll have the iPhone, I may be able to send some short blogs and iPhone photos – we’ll see!

So, to keep my regular readers entertained while I’m away, here’s a few photos from recent afternoon walks:

Our road, heading into the neighbour's paddocks

Our creek paddock - and possibly the site of the original hut

Late light on the trees - a natural Monet effect!

My walking companions (or gratuitous dog photo!)

Frost in the west paddock

Morning frost on native blackthorn leaves

Frost on eucalyptus leaves

As we were walking back to the house, down by our little dam, I saw something unusual hanging from a clump of native mistletoe on a eucalypt. Closer inspection revealed this:

Caterpillars

I’ve never seen anything quite like it before – I’m not sure what type of caterpillars they are.

The forecast for tomorrow morning is only for -1,  but as I was well-rugged up this morning, and didn’t feel the cold too badly, I should be fine tomorrow.

The rest of our outback trip went well. We had planned to spend two nights in Oodnadatta, but as the rain clouds threatened – and the town is at least 280km of dirt road from anywhere – we ended up leaving a day early to avoid the rain, which reached us just before we got to the sealed road at Marla. So, we stayed for two nights at the opal-mining town of Coober Pedy instead, which gave us a relaxing day wandering around the town and seeing some of the area. (But I didn’t buy any opals!)

Our next overnight stop was Quorn, an old, pretty town at the southern end of the Flinders Ranges, with many nineteenth century buildings, including the old railway station on the old Ghan line.

Railway Station, Quorn, South Australia

The next day we travelled on across South Australia and back into New South Wales, to the outback town of Broken Hill. Sustained by mining for well over 100 years, Broken Hill is an interesting town – a place I’d love to have more time to explore. However, sadly I had to leave Gordon and our friends in Broken Hill, and fly to Sydney on the Thursday and then the Gold Coast on the Friday for my next adventure…

The Gold Coast Literati events were great fun. There were about 30 authors in attendance, and the program kicked off with the Literati Feast on Friday night, at the Gold Coast Arts Centre. With two authors per table, moving to a different table each course, it was a great way to meet people and talk about books, writing, and other subjects. Good food, good company, and lively conversation – I enjoyed the evening, and hope the many guests did, too.

On the Saturday morning, I was on a panel with the delightful Toni Jordan and Karen Foxlee at Broadbeach Library, where we talked about the pleasures and pain of writing a second book after a successful debut novel. About thirty people attended, including Eric, a long time reader of this blog, and it was great to meet him at last!

The only shadow over these few days of the time away was that my father was ill in Canberra. We’d previously arranged that my older sister, who lives an hour or so from the Gold Coast, would come and stay with me on the Saturday night, and as it turned out rather than me going home on Sunday, both of us travelled to Canberra to see Dad. Fortunately, by the time we got there he was a lot better, and he continues to improve, so after spending most of Monday with him in the hospital, I was comfortable enough to fly home that evening. Just to top off the ‘adventure’ though, the plane circled my town trying to land three times, but because of low cloud we couldn’t, and we were eventually diverted to Tamworth, and then bussed up to Armidale – getting in 2.5 hours later than planned. Then I had to pick up my car from my friend’s place, and drive home… I finally got home, to a cold empty house, about midnight – not the most fun part of the trip!

The week since then has been busy with work, and with battling the cold/flu that I picked up somewhere along the way. I have managed to download the photos from the outback trip, although we did so much driving that there aren’t a lot of them. I’ll go through them in the next week or so and put any good ones in a a gallery.

Tomorrow is a public holiday here, and I have proof pages of book 2 to work on, and to get the house a little tidier for my honorary brother and niece who are visiting overnight – I’m looking forward to seeing them. But now it’s late, and I need to get to bed.