Thank you to everyone who entered the Australia Day Book Giveaway – what a great tour of wonderful places in Australia you’ve taken me on! Our internet was on go-slow yesterday, so I’m a little late replying to comments and drawing the winners, but I’ve set random.org to work today to select two winners and they are:
Congratulations, Melissa and Terese! I’ll send you an email and get your addresses so that I can get copies of Storm Clouds off to you asap 🙂
Seven days, 1760+ kilometres, and six events . . . I arrived home from the second half of my Storm Clouds tour yesterday afternoon, tired but very happy! It was wonderful to be on the road, driving through parts of rural Australia, seeing familiar and new landscapes, and meeting heaps of old friends and new ones.
I’m home just in time for the Australia Day long weekend, and for the Australia Day Book Giveaway Blog Hop, hosted by Shelleyrae at the Book’d Out blog. I’ve ‘known’ Shelleyrae online for a few years, but on Thursday I was delighted to meet her in person, at the book signing at Manning Valley Books in Wingham.
Shelleyrae has been coordinating the Australia Day Book Giveaway Blog Hop for a few years now, and it’s a great way to celebrate Australian books and to discover new authors – and to be in with a chance to win books!
I’m going to give away two copies of Storm Clouds! For Australian residents, if you’re one of the winners I’ll send a signed, print copy of the book. Due to the high costs of overseas postage from Australia, I’m not able to post books outside Australia, however, international readers can still enter, and if you win, I’ll send an ebook of Storm Clouds through one of the major e-book retailers (amazon, kobo, apple.)
To enter, comment on this post and share one of your favourite places in Australia; if you’re from overseas and not (yet) visited, tell us one of the places you’d like to see in this huge and beautiful country!
(Please note that due to getting lots of spam, comments on the blog are moderated, and your comment won’t appear straight away.)
Entries close at midnight on Tuesday January 27, Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time. I’ll draw the winners on Wednesday and notify them by email.
There are many, many places I love in Australia. I wish that photographs could truly capture the sense of a place; the sounds, the scents, the context and the people.
Here, though, is one of my favourites – one of the paths that Tansy and I walk most mornings, through the trees on our block, a few hundred metres from our house. There are often wallabies and kangaroos around, birds in the trees, the tiny blossoms of native flowers, and the sunlight dances with the shadows of the leaves.
The dates and places for my Storm Clouds launch tour are finalised! You can click on the links for more event details.
Armidale Launch – Saturday 10th January, 12.30pm, Reader’s Companion bookstore;
Canberra Launch – Tuesday 13th January, 6.00pm, Harry Hartog’s bookstore, Westfield Woden;
Inverell dinner and author talk – Friday 16th January,The Dust Jacket bookstore and Out the Back cafe, time TBC;
Mudgee Library author talk – Monday 19th January, 2pm;
Edgeworth Library author talk – Tuesday 20th January, 5pm;
Morisset Library morning tea – Wednesday 21st January, 10am;
Manning Valley Books (Wingham) meet the author – Thursday 22nd January, 12noon;
Bellingen Library author talk – Friday 23rd January, 11am (TBC).
I’m looking forward to getting on the road and sharing book talk with readers. I’m flying to and from Canberra and having a couple of days with my Mum, but the rest of the tour will be me and my old faithful Corolla, with just enough time between events to explore a by-way or two.
I wish I could visit more places but as I’m not comfortable driving at night that’s limited how much ground I can cover – and I do have to write the next book, too! Maybe a little later in the year I’ll get on the road again.
It’s New Year’s Day, 2015 – and release month for Storm Clouds! Officially, the release date is January 13th, but copies have already been spotted in (and purchased from!) various Big W stores so the new book is now out there on some shelves. I’ll try not to start chewing my nails, waiting to hear how people liked it!
We had a lovely quiet Christmas at home, including Christmas pudding with my Mum here for a brief visit while she was on a tour of the district. Gordon had the days between Christmas and New Year off work, so he’s been pottering around. My niece, Lauren, drove up to stay for a few days, and we had a wonderful time together, mostly at home, planing and sewing costumes for the Jane Austen Festival in April. She went home yesterday, G goes back to work tomorrow, and I’ll have to get back into the swing of writing, too.
The new year is going to be a full one, and January is already shaping up to have plenty of events. The Armidale launch of Storm Clouds is on January 10th, at Reader’s Companion bookshop. Then I’m flying off to Canberra, for a Canberra launch on January 13th at the new Harry Hartog bookshop in Westfield Woden Plaza. I grew up in Canberra, so it will be good to return to the old home town to celebrate a new book! (Plus my Mum won’t have to travel far!)
I’m just confirming some other January events, so those of you in northern NSW stay tuned!
After January, there’s the Australian Romance Readers Convention in March, and then the Jane Austen Festival in April – both in Canberra. My Mum will get to see me a few times in the next few months 🙂
Wishing you all the very best for 2015 – love, laughter, good health, accomplishments, the company of family and friends, only as many storm clouds as the land around you needs, and plenty of good books to read on rainy days!
Why don’t they just go read a good book instead of spending their time spamming web sites?
There is currently a deluge of spam comments. I’ve got all comments on moderation at present so they’re not showing up to readers, but it’s a pain going through and deleting them from the moderation queue.
Oh, well, the blog needed an upgrade and refresh anyway. I hope using a different theme instead of the common one might reduce the spammage. So my apologies in advance if things look a little strange around here while I’m putting in a new design.
And there’ll be more interesting posts – book launches! Library visits! Bookshop visits! – coming very soon, just as soon as I’ve put a reasonable anti-spam solution in place.
In the mean time, here’s a couple of photos of what’s been happening here lately: close encounters with an inquisitive joey!
