The Angus & Robertson Top 100 is a list of the 100 best books, as voted by you. Vote for your favourite book now to see it on the new list when it launches in July, plus go into the draw to win some great prizes!

If you’d like to vote (and be eligible to win prizes!), you’ll need to register on the Angus & Robertson website. You can then vote for up to 10 books – and they can be any of the over 2 million books A&R have listed on their website. But you can only vote once for each of your ten books.

Voting closes on March 31st, so that gives you a few weeks to decide which books you want to see in the Top 100!

Hmm… I’d better start thinking about what books I want to vote for…

I know that’s going to be a little disappointing for some of you wonderful readers, but we felt that a good book, published a little later, was far, far better than a rushed book published earlier. And, since I have to have another medical procedure in late March, it does save us all from the risk of trying to fit revisions and copy-edits around recovery time! Hopefully the procedure will go wonderfully well and only involve a couple of nights in hospital, and I’ll be able to get right back into polishing First Light, but there is a risk of complications, so, while I’m a little disappointed about the publishing delay, I’m also relieved, too, as it lifts most of the pressure and stress.

Once First Light is finished and in, I’ll be able to get going on the next series! I’m currently not letting myself think too much about it, because I don’t want to get distracted from Dungirri, but the fun of creating a new community and new characters will I hope lessen the sadness of saying farewell to Dungirri. But before I leap into the new series, I might just polish up a couple of Dungirri short story ideas that have been floating in my head for a while – and perhaps those will make the wait for First Light a little easier!

If Australian readers have already read Dark Country, then keep an eye out for Helene Young’s Border Watch, which will be released here in March. I’ve been lucky enough to read a proof copy of this, and it’s a great read – suspense, romance, planes, and the far North Queensland land & seascapes. Congratulations, Helene, on a fantastic debut novel!

Back in 2008, when I went to the RWAmerica conference in San Francisco, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting writer and knitter Rachael Herron. Rachael took me and a couple of other knitting writers around some SF yarn shops, and a great day was had by all of us. A day or so later, at the conference itself, I bumped into Rachael in the coffee queue, and so we sat together and had a great chat before she headed off for a pitch appointment with an editor. Now, I can’t remember which editor she pitched to then, but not long afterwards a very sensible one offered her a publishing contract – and Rachael’s first book will be published in March, in both the US and here in Australia. However, in one of those quirks of publishing and marketing, in the US it’s titled ‘How to Knit a Love Song’ – and in Australia it’s called ‘Eliza’s Gift’.

So, there you going – some great reading for March!

(And there’s more coming up in April, but I’ll leave that for another post…)

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!!

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:

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!

I enjoyed writing it; it gave me the opportunity to bring to life a couple of characters from Dungirri’s past, and to give readers a peek at Alec and Bella from As Darkness Falls, after that book closes.

Unfortunately it’s not available online, but I hope local readers will pick up the magazine and enjoy the story!

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.

(Edited to temporarily remove link due to virus problem).

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…