Today’s quick post has great news and not so great news.

The great news is that Dark Country is a finalist in the 2009 Australian Romance Readers Awards , in the Favourite Romantic Suspense category. The ARRA web page has the full list of finalists in all the categories.

And, to top it off, I am a finalist for the Favourite Australian Romance Author of 2009 award. There’s some pretty wonderful competition though – and huge congrats to the other finalists!
* Angela Verdenius
* Anna Campbell
* Anne Gracie
* Christine Wells
* Denise Rossetti
* Keri Arthur
* Paula Roe
* Stephanie Laurens
* Tracey O’hara

ARRA members are currently voting to determine the winner – if you’re an ARRA member, don’t forget to check your email for the link to cast your vote. The winners will be announced at a gala dinner in Sydney in May. Many thanks to those who nominated me and Dark Country in the nomination round – I’m delighted to make the finals.

The not-so-great news is that we’re having internet connection woes, and will probably be offline for a few days. Our internet box has to be replaced, but they apparently disconnect the old one when the new one is shipped – and it will take probably three days to get here. So, we’ll be internetless from any time now, until it arrives. I can connect via my iPhone to check emails and do the basics, but it’s tricky to read and write on the small screen, so I’ll only be doing urgent things. On the bright side, I hope this will take away some distractions and give me more focus to write!!

January 25 for my last post? And now it’s Feb 6th… my, how time flies when there’s a deadline looming!

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!

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….

Each year, my university runs a mentor program to support Year 12 students in the region who are taking the English Extension course for their Higher School Certificate, for which they have to write a major creative work – a (long) short story, a series of poems, a speech, a film script being some of the options.

I’ve been involved in the mentor program for the past three years. I really enjoy it – there’s an online discussion board, plus we have full-day workshops when the students travel to the university to work in small groups with the program mentors. Because we’re in a regional area, some of the students travel quite some distance, arriving here the evening before the workshop, and staying in the University’s residential colleges overnight. As well as the workshop, it gives them a chance to experience a taste of uni life.

For various reasons, we’ve only got a small group this year, and therefore had only one workshop – which was yesterday. Eight students and their teachers from three different schools came, so Martin, the other mentor and I had a group of four students each to work with during the day. The young people in the program are always bright, interesting students, with great ideas for their major works, and yesterday’s group were no exception. It was a real delight to work with them.

So, thanks, Rosalie, Sarah, Sophie and Maree for a great day! I hope you went away with some useful ideas for your projects, and a boost to your inspiration and motivation. I sure did!

This is me, hiding from my manuscript, so it can’t find me….

Yesterday wasn’t the best writing day. I ended up scrapping most of what I’d written the previous day, and agonising over how to bring various threads and plot points together into the final act. I still haven’t got all the answers, but I think I finally made some progress – in my head, anyway. I’ve still got to get it down on paper screen.

This morning, I’m going to take a bit of a break and go into town – I haven’t left our place, so haven’t seen anyone but Gordon, since Monday. The grocery shopping needs doing, so I volunteered – yes, the exciting life of a writer, when the grocery shopping becomes a break from routine! Although I’ll probably have morning tea in my regular cafe, as well.

Oh, and the photo is of an echidna. We have a few on our place – Gordon has seen three at the same time – so we see them reasonably often. This one is hiding from me and the dogs. I did leave the dogs some distance away, so I could wait quietly nearby to get a better photo – but just as it decided it might be safe to move, my camera battery died.

And to finish this on a positive note, I have walked in the treadmill EVERY morning for 16 days in a row now. (So, I’d better go now and get on it and make it 17 days in a row…)