Links of interest

I’m still in over my head trying to finish The Book, so please excuse the quietness around here. I’ll be human again next week. I hope.

The current challenge is writing the final scenes and drawing together the various plot and character threads – if not into a nice pretty bow, at least into some sort of neat, sea-worthy knot. (These characters aren’t really the pretty bow types 🙂  )

So while I’m busy doing that, you might want to hop on over and read Barbara Samuel’s recent post on Romancing the Blog, about not apologising for reading romance, and ways of dealing with the snide comments about the genre – and the frustrations they cause us.

Barbara is both a  wonderful writer and wonderful person. I first met her in Dallas a couple of years ago, when I had the privilege of moderating her workshop at the RWAmerica conference. Then she was one of the guests at last year’s RWAustralia conference, where I attended another of her workshops, and chatted with her a few times. Her blog, A Writer Afoot, is one of my regular blog reads – writing, food, travelling, and all in Barbara’s beautiful writing. I highly recommend it!

We’ve had a few grey days lately, so not much in the way of photos from my late afternoon walks with the dogs. But here’s one from a week or so back – taken from the north-west corner of our property, looking ‘over the fence’ where our place joins two other, much larger properties. I’m not sure if the grass is greener over there, but I always get an itch to climb through the fence, and explore what’s in the bush beyond the immediate view…

(The dogs would love to go through the fence, too, to chase the critters on the other side. There’s often sheep in one paddock, sometimes cattle in another, and twice we’ve seen an emu – not very common around here – just over the fence on the right there. They don’t know if the grass is greener over there, but it’s definitely smellier, as far as they’re concerned!)