An Award (and a fantasy)

I said in my last post that I was hoping to be a bit more frequent with my posts. Ah well, so much for plans. This week has been as hectic as usual.

Tonight I am going to get to something that has been on the backburner for a while. Way back in June Denise at L’Aussie Writing passed on the Versatile Blogger Award to me.

Thank you Denise!

With this award comes a few duties. Those are:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.

2. Share seven things about yourself.

3. Pass this award along to fifteen bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason!

4. Contact the bloggers you’ve picked and let them know about the award.

Now I have decided to “cheat a bit” and tell part of an episode of my life in seven paragraphs so here we go:

When our kids were small, we (that is Deb, the three girls and I) lived for a couple of years all crammed in a tiny mill cottage surrounded by rainforest. The cottage is on a farm on the Dorrigo Plateau in NSW. It is on the “back block” of a property owned by my mum and her husband. Deb and I had decided we both needed to do further studies, so we sold our house and car (we bought a cheap second hand car) and lived rent free for a while to be able to study full time.

The cottage had no mains power. We had a small solar panel with a truck battery that provided our lighting. We had a refrigerator that ran on gas. Heating, cooking and hot water were provided by a slow combustion stove. I used to cut firewood for the stove from regrowth timber on the farm.

Our house used spring water. Although we were on a ridge high on the western side of the Dorrigo Plateau (about 3600 feet) the spring that fed our house is still higher. The spring is on the other side of the valley and the water is fed by gravity down a long pipe all the way to the valley floor and then up to a holding tank behind the house.

We used to drive an old four wheel drive three miles down a muddy track every day to take the older girls to school. Luckily the local state primary school was literally at the bottom of “our driveway”. When we needed to go into town for supplies we drove four miles down a different track to “the front block” where we kept our road car at my mum’s house.

My favourite thing of all was to get up soon after dawn. The plateau to the east would still be covered with morning mist. It was like looking out over a still sea of white. Through the mist would come the noise of the dawn chorus of the birds. In particular there were lyrebirds which are incredible mimics. They mostly mimic other birds, but will mimic other sounds they hear. I have heard them mimicking things like chainsaws and camera motor-drives. I have never seen the dance they do as they sing (they are very shy) but their song is amazing anyway. You will get a tiny patch of forest with all these different bird calls coming out one after the other. Then at the end of the sequence the lyrebird sings his own song before beginning again.

The time living up there was amongst the happiest in my life. But alas the needs of growing girls and the need to go back to the workforce meant we had to leave our patch of paradise and go back to the ‘real world’.

Now our girls are all but grown up, and it doesn’t look like it will be too many years before they achieve independence, I am cultivating a fantasy. In that fantasy Deb and I move back to our mountain paradise. I dream we will build a writer’s retreat. There we will host other writers who need a break with peace and quiet only broken by birdsong and the wind. So with the income generated by the (very reasonable) fees we will charge I will be able to devote myself full time to writing.

Like I say it’s a fantasy.
But you never know.

Now for the fifteen bloggers I want to pass this award to:

1. Niki at Wool ‘N Nuts
2. Angelique at Vampires and Tofu
3. Jennifer at Ten Lives and Second Chances
4. Elspeth at It’s a Mystery
5. Lisa K. at Writing on Thin Ice
6. Shannon at Book Dreaming
7. B. at B miler Fiction
8. Carolyn at Checkerboard Squares
9. Rebecca at Sonshine Thoughts
10. Kyna at Crystal Coast Gardener
11. Charmaine at Wagging Tales
12. Sarah at Falen Formulates Fiction
13. Alexandra at The Publication Follies of Alexandra Shostak
14. Sharon at Random Thoughts (the rules said discovered recently and I figure tonight is as about as recent as it gets).
15. Amanda at a Library of My Own (I have been following Amanda for a while but she has changed blogs because she no longer lives in NYC )

Please forgive me if you have already been given this award. I just don’t have time to check tonight. I am sorry for displaying such a cavalier attitude, but you are just going to have to deal with the trauma as best you can :-)

Now finally a couple of piccies.
By The way on the subject of piccies My last post features a giveaway check it out!

So the piccies, I am a bit pressed for time tonight so just three piccies of two birds I snapped on my recent holiday.

The first two are of a Crimson Rosella, another of our gaudy parrots. Not quite as friendly as the Rainbow Lorikeets I posted a while ago, but I think just as beautiful.
Finally a small woodland bird, an Eastern Yellow Robin.
These guys are not really shy, but they are quite active so this is the first time I have managed to photograph one.

The Journey Continues

When Pat Stone warned me getting published was the hard part she spoke words of wisdom.

With a manuscript I was more or less happy with under my belt, I began the usual trick of querying Agents and the odd publisher. What a painfully slow process it is. Send out the usual letter, synopsis, and sample chapters that their submission guidelines ask for and wait and wait…
Then when finally something arrives…
A rejection, not surprising, not unexpected, yet still surprisingly distressing.
Then you begin again, and again.

When I have talked about my writing in the past I have always said that it was an end in itself. I have always said that if nothing I write ever sees the light of day it will not matter.

That is still true, but also it is not, not quite. I still write mainly for myself, but now somehow, it is not quite enough. Now I want to share my work with others, to have an audience.

Yet the process of trying to get published is very trying. I suppose it is a major character flaw, but I find myself getting very wrapped up the rejections, in trying to craft “a better query”, and then brooding on a reply.

The worst thing about the process is it takes so much energy away from what I would really like to be doing, writing the next novel.

Enough moaning for today.

It has been cold winter weather here for the past few weeks. Not miserable enough to stop us getting out and about though.
I know, I know, days with a maximum of 15° C (59° F) don’t seem very cold to many in the Northern Hemisphere, but we are used to summer temperatures in the 30s to 40s (86 to 104) in fact this past summer we had a days up to 47° (116° F) in February.
Also here in Southern Victoria the wind comes straight in off the Bass Straight and Southern Ocean so it feels much colder than it is.

Anyway last weekend we went for a quick run (about 2 ½ hours drive) down to Wilson’s Promontory (the most southerly point on the Australian mainland) It was wet so we didn’t walk much.

This photo shows the state of some of the walking tracks at the moment.

I did snap a heap of photos (don’t you love digital) but the light was not good so I don’t think many were worth the effort.
Towards evening, the cloud broke up a bit and in the pale watery light, I got a few shots that were almost worthwhile.

Doesn’t that water look cold.
Almost at the end of the day this chap showed up with a couple of mates and let me get close enough for this.

He/she is a Crimson Rosella, one of the many, many parrot species we enjoy in Oz. If being in such a beautiful environment (even with the wind) wasn’t enough, how could anyone grumble too much with such a bright creature on hand.