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Spring
Spring has sprung, the grass has riz,
I wonder where the froggy is?
The frog is on the branch..
But there’s a bird! Oh, good, it lost its chance…
(My apologies to Ogden Nash!)
Yes, Spring is here, and our patch of bush is busy with activity. Down at the dam in the evening the frogs and insects are loud and cheerful. Birds flutter around the house during the day, and I love watching them, especially the fairy wrens – although they move too fast for a decent picture! The wattles have been out for weeks, brightening up the scenery with their yellow buds. We have at least three types of wattles in the immediate vicinity – there’s plenty of black wattles through the bush, a low-growing one in front of the house, and a graceful Guyra wattle over by the dog run. Nothing quite says ‘Spring’ in this part of the world as much as a flowering wattle against the blue sky:
Another sign of Spring is the reappearance of slithery things – I saw the first snake of the season a couple of days ago. But we didn’t bother it, and it slithered away peacefully.
Things continue on, quietly busy. I’m currently doing a major clear out and declutter in our sunroom, hoping to finally transform it into a workable office/craft space for me. It’s not finished yet, but progress has definitely been made!
I haven’t heard a date yet for my surgery, so that’s all still up in the air, but I do have something great to look forward to – my sister is coming to visit next week! We’re planning to head west to Inverell and that district and spend a couple of days there, so I can research the area that is the broad inspiration for the fictional settings in my current book. I’ve been through that area numerous times before, but not with a writer’s eye and a story in mind. It will be fun to go with Andrea, and to have someone to bounce ideas off as we travel. Other than getting together in Sydney when I’ve had surgeries, we haven’t had a relaxed holday, just the two of us, for a lot of years, so it will be a fun few days, I’m sure.
Good times
I had a wonderful time at the Romance Writers of Australia conference two weeks or so ago, and enjoyed every minute of it. I learned from my experience last year, when I overdid things with two conferences one after the other, packed full, and instead took things easy this time. The Published Author Day on the Thursday was a first for the RWA conference, and had some great sessions. The three I found particularly interesting were psychologist John Barletta, media/PR professional Jennifer St George, and the woman (who’s name I have temporarily forgotten, but if I go searching for my notes I might never finish this blog post!) who co-wrote the scripts for the Underbelly TV series, about organised crime in Australia. I found it fascinating hearing about the decisions they had to take to turn complex, real-life crimes and criminals into a cohesive TV program. There were definitely lessons in there about choosing what to focus on for dramatic cohesion and effect!
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:
Our wild life
One of the things I love about living out in the bush is the wildlife we frequently see. We have 100 acres of mostly regrowth eucalypt forest, and we’re in the midst of much, much larger grazing properties, with the gorge country not far away. Kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos are around almost all the time; we frequently see echidnas and possums, and the regular birdlife includes choughs, magpies, fairy wrens, tiny firetails, rosellas, kookaburras, wedge-tailed eagles, and tawny frogmouths.
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!
Knit 1, Write 2
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!
The Long Paddock
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.
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