So, I've cracked the 10,000 word mark in NaNoWriMo. More specifically, my word count stands at 11,229 as of now.

So ... 39,000 words to go and 10 days left in November. That means I have to write 3878 words each day for the next 10. Ummm ...

I'm not going to admit defeat just yet. After all, I've written more in the past 3 weeks than I have in the previous 3 months!

Just wondering about the warped-ness of my mind that for some reasons thinks 3878 sounds SO much easier to write than 40,000? Now to use this Jedi mind trick to my advantage.

Write on!

The things you find when trawling the net (when you should be adding to your NaNoWriMo word count!)

Jason de Caires Taylor is an artist who has created a unique underwater sculpture garden at Grenada in the West Indies.


He uses sculptures to create artificial reefs, and the cement finish and chemical composition of the sculptures apparently “actively promotes colonisation of coral and marine life.”
I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

For my fellow writers, surely this can provide inspiration for some spec-fic! ☺

7163 words. I've slowed down dramatically. I've had days at the end of last week (and yesterday) when I've written nothing at all for NaNoWriMo, but not because I don't know what to write. For the first time I have a pretty clear idea of where I'm going thanks to all the work I've done on plot earlier in the year, which is entirely due to the Year of the Novel online course I've been doing with the Queensland Writers Centre. As has been the case for months now, things have got in the way of my writing.

I should rephrase that. I have let other things get in the way of my writing. Even slacker of me, I had realised that my usual habit of writing AFTER I've done everything else on my jobs list was the biggest problem, because by the time I've got towards the end of my "to do" list, there is little time left in the day and I want to spend time with my family.

So to combat this, I had decided that I would get up a couple of hours earlier in the morning and write then. Kim Wilkins (my YON course tutor) says that she get up at 5am and writes for a couple of hours each morning to combat the demands of family and work, and I've heard of others who do the same. I've been resisting that idea for a long time, because I'm not really a "morning person". I'm much more a night owl (and at times we don't go to bed until the wee small hours). But somehow I have to satisfy not only my own desire to write, but also the demands of family. (The Other Half and I had a "heated discussion" about this the other night - or more accurately, the other wee-small-hours).

But we lead a fairly luxurious lifestyle these days. We live only 3 houses away from the Boy Wonder's primary school which doesn't start until 9:10am. He hasn't been sleeping well at nights lately, waking a couple of times during the night, and so sleeping in the next day. We've found that he can get up at 8:30am and still make it to school on time. And the Other Half works only about 5 minutes drive away from home and also starts at 9am. So he can sleep in until about 8am, or even a bit later, and still get to work on time. So of course, I've been sleeping until then too. I'm not working at the moment, so don't need to be anywhere by a particular time most days, so I let the boys have their showers first. All this is very different to our life in Townsville, where my Other Half had to be at work by 7 and the Boy Wonder and I left for school before 8am.

So a couple of hours earlier just means getting up at 6, not hard to do when the sun is rising so much earlier and my bladder wakes me around that time anyway. I just have to make sure I don't go back to bed afterwards.

I'm easing myself into the earlier. I got up an hour earlier than needed this morning, and have managed to write about 250 as well as put the washing on and blog here. Tomorrow I'll try for an hour and a half earlier (and no blogging until later in the day!)

Celebrate the small wins!

I have recently reviewed Tony Bradman's retelling of "Shakespeare's Richard III" for Allen & Unwin's.

You can read my review on Allen & Unwin's website here in their Teachers' Reviews section.

So far I've written 6173 words of my novel.

So I'm a bit short in terms of the 1667 words I need to write each day. But I'm close.

And it's starting (slowly) to flow. Now THAT'S a good feeling :-)

By the way, here's a pic (courtesy of awesome local photographer and friend Rob Cleary) I'm using to visualise  my main character and her mother.

Very apt at the moment.

"To achieve great things, two things are
needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."
--Leonard Bernstein

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has officially started, and this year I am officially a NaNoWriMo-er. That means that I have committed myself to writing 50,000 words of my novel by the end of November.

50,000 words! Am I mad? Possibly. Actually, I'm kicking myself in the backside, because I should have written that much on my novel over the past few months, and haven't. So I'm joining the thousands of crazy November-novel-writers all over the world (including a few here in Coffs Harbour) to kick my own butt every day through November to get those words down on the page.

The idea with NaNoWriMo is just to write. No editing. So this will be very much a VERY rough draft. But that's fine, because if I can get 50,000 words written by 30th November, then it will be 50K MORE than I have got written now!

I will try to update my blog every few days this month so that you can see how I'm going with it. When I can get the word count widget to work properly (I've tried and had trouble with it), I will include that so you can watch my progress (and to keep me honest).

So far this month I have rewritten the first 3 scenes of my novel (I started it in 1st person, but have been thinking for quite some time that it would work better in 3rd person, so that's how I've rewritten it) and have written a few hundred words today. So far the word count is:

3106 (yesterday's rewrite)
+ 368 so far today
= 3474 words in total

I should add I stopped after the 368 words today to procrastinate by writing this blog post - but I can't add that to the total!   :-(

So now it's back to the novel again to see if I can add another 1300 words today (50,000 words in November means I need to write 1667 each day every day).
 

Anyone else NaNoWriMoing this month?

This gorgeous creature was found clinging to the back wall outside our kitchen last Tuesday morning. We think it must have got a little lost while looking for a place to stay once daylight came. I guess our covered back verandah looked like a good place to shelter. Perhaps the sheets I had hanging on the line which stretches across the verandah looked like it would provide a safe place to rest.

It's a glider of some sort - not a sugar glider, judging by the colouring, but possibly a yellow-bellied glider - at least that's why I think after looking in my how-to-identify-Australian-mammals book. For those non-Aussies of my friends, gliders are small marsupials - just like kangaroos, koalas and possums - but with one difference. They can fly - well, glide anyway! (In the words of Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, "That's not flying, it's falling - with style!" Gliders have flaps of skin between their fore and hind limbs that allow them to glide between the trees.

The Boy Wonders says he heard our cats making a bit of a ruckus early this morning but thought they were just having a spat between themselves. I was reading in bed,  so didn’t know anything about it until I got up to do washing and walked out on the back deck. Boy Wonder saw it first and said “What’s that?” When we realised what it was, we brought the 3 cats and the dog inside so that they would leave it alone and shut the kitchen window and the back doors so that we disturbed it as little as possible.

I rang the local wildlife rescue organisation, WIRES, and their glider-specialist came to collect him/ her and take it to the vet to check if it had been hurt by any of our cats.  If it had, it would need antibiotics to prevent infection. Cat scratches always seem to get infected, don't they? The WIRES lady told us that if the glider is OK, when it is ready to be released, she will bring it back here to release it so it's close to its territory.


We also had a koala visit us about a month ago. There are koalas in Coffs Harbour, and at the moment it's the mating season and a lot of the boys are wandering around looking for a mate. I read in the newspaper the other day that 5 koalas had been killed on our local roads lately.

We got quite a surprise to find the koala out the front of the neighbours house, just next to the footpath. The really surprising thing was that he wasn't in a gum tree. Instead he was sitting in a palm tree (possibly a Cocos Palm?), with his rump resting on the palm fronds. We think he got caught out away from other suitable trees while he was on the prowl. I took some photos (not great ones from below him) and then we left him alone.

Here's the best of my pics. Can you see him sitting on the palm fronds way up the top? He finally looked at me - you might be able to see his black nose.

Just loving this side to living in Coffs Harbour :-)

This is what happens in Australia from time to time. Millions of tons of dust gets picked up by the wind - topsoil from the interior of our huge continent - and is blown across the rest of the country to the coast.

I used to see dust storms when I lived in western Queensland. You'd see it coming - smell it coming - and would race inside to shut up all the doors and windows. Even so, somehow there would always be a fine layer of dust lying on everything afterwards. Sweeping it would only stir it up again. A mop was the best.

Then I moved to the coast. I haven't seen a dust storm for a while, but the 2 (yes 2) dust storms we've had on the east coast in the past few days have stirred up more than just dust for me.

On the left is what it usually looks like here in sunny Sawtell .... and on the right, how it looked here last Wednesday.

If you disagree with the Productivity Commissions's report about removing the restrictions on the Parallel Importation of books into Australia, and you haven’t already signed the Saving Aussie Books Petition which will be presented to Canberra, you can do so now online here.

Thanks to "Saving Aussie Books" for making it easy for our voice to be heard.

Kim Wilkins has written a great post about her editing process at her website, Hexebart's Well. Well worth checking out.

Kim is the tutor teaching me in the "Year of the Novel" course I'm doing online with the Queensland Writer's Centre. Everything she has had to say has been spot on. If you ever get a chance to do a course with her, grab the chance with both hands.

If you are an Australian writer or an avid reader, you probably have an opinion on the Productivity Commissions report to the Federal Government on the Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books.

There are numerous ways of making your opinion known. One of the simplest is an online poll that Choice has just started on the Australian territorial copyright issue. Let them know what you think and suggest your friends do so also.

Also, you can read the Productivity Commission's report Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books on their website.

For the record, I think the report's suggestions will have a devastating effect on the Australian publishing industry.

As someone who is writing a YA novel set in Australia, I am worried that I will have even more difficulties getting published if the government goes with the Productivity Commission's recommendations, than I would otherwise. As an avid reader, I'm also worried that we will see less and less Australian writing being published if it goes ahead. And we're not just talking 'literary fiction' here - what about all the Australian genre fiction writers and publishers?

What do you think?

One of my regular emails in my inbox comes from Urban Dictionary. Just had to share today's ...

I've always loved Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice". It's one of the few books that I've read and read again. And probably the only opening line that I can quote verbatim.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.

I've already managed to brainwash the Boy Wonder. He hasn't read it yet, but he did enjoy the Kiera Knightly film and the Lost in Austen series shown on the ABC earlier in the year.
My Other Half just doesn't get the attraction of Austen for me (especially Lizzie B), but even he enjoys the idea of this modern retelling. I haven't read it (and sorry, Seth Grahame-Smith, but I'm unlikely too because I'm not remotely into zombies) but the blurb had me chuckling in the bookshop the other day:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.

Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles.

And the cover cracks me up.

More my style is the Twitter version of P&P, which you can find here. Although I don't tweet (yet) myself, this is a very 2009 take on the classic. 

And now I see there is a Marvel comic version too! Gotta get my hands on that.

Recently I was able to put two of my hats on, that of teacher and of writer. I was asked to write a review of a new book titled Maralinga: The Anangu Story. It tells the story of the Anangu Aboriginal people, from the Dreamtime to the present. Christobel Mattingley has  written it in collaboration with the Anangu people themselves. The Anangu live in the western desert of South Australia, in the area of the 1950s and '60s atomic tests at Maralinga and the long-range weapons tests at Woomera in the '40s. The devastating impact of these tests on the people, as well as that of colonisation of their traditional culture and lifestyle is told in this moving book.

Allen & Unwin are the publishers of this important book. It is included on their website amongst their resources for schools, which are accompanied by reviews of the books written by teachers. It's a very useful site for teachers looking for appropriate resources for school. You can find my review, along with that of several other teachers, here on Allen & Unwin's website.

For anyone who doesn't understand why the apology made by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to indigenous Australians on 12 February 2008 was so important, then I would suggest reading this book is a good place to start.

I dipped into the Writers Digest Writing Clinic yesterday. What a useful and helpful book for writers! At the front is a table of editing/ proofreading marks, very useful for anyone critiquing their own or someone else's writing. This is followed by a sample of different aspects of writing - 'the hook', endings, dialogue, description. In each case, there is a very useful critique of the sample, including suggestions for improvement. I'm planning to take it along to my writers group this weekend and start working through it, because the tips for critiquing are really good. Well worth a look at if you're a writer and trying to improve your work.
I also dipped into The Gypsy Crown, but then I started reading Rosa and haven't been to drag myself away from it yet. (I'll get back to you soon, Kate, I promise!)

Don't you love that feeling of being completely consumed by a book?

The next best to being totally lost in a book is the discovery that your child has disappeared into a book.

Up until last year, reading was not on the Boy Wonder's list of priorities. Dont' get me wrong, he's always loved stories - being read to, or watching a great story on the screen, listening to Stephen Fry read "Harry Potter" in an audiobook - but not reading for himself. Then last year we discovered together the world of Deltora, Emily Rodda's wonderful fantasy series. We were halfway into me reading aloud the first series, when things got hectic and I wasn't able to read to him for several nights. But joy or joys! He was so caught up in the stories that he picked them up to read to himself and finished the first series by himself. We bought him the 2nd Deltora series for his birthday and he polished that off pretty quickly too. Now he's found the 3rd series in the school library and has returned to the exciting world of Del. A couple of nights ago I discovered him reading it in bed well after lights out. I had to pretend to be cross with him for being sneaking, but secretly was delighted that he loves reading so much now.
I brought home a couple of Asterix and a Tintin book from the library today from him. He grabbed them with glee as soon as he saw them.

"No reading until you've finished your homework," I growled at him.

But I purred inside.

You know what they say about changes and holidays.

I felt the page needed a change. So here it is.

What do you think?

At last I've managed to be online for long enough and at the right time on a Tuesday night to join the Australian Writers Marketplace's "Writing Race"again. It's been a few weeks since I've made it there, and I've missed it.

I've waxed lyrical before about the AWM's writing races, so if you've just joined us, you'll have to look back a few posts to find out more. Suffice to say it's great to spend a dedicated hour and a bit JUST on writing. The other racers always seem to inspire me to bigger and better things.

Tonight the guest racer was Trent Jamieson, Australian spec fiction writer (and Aurealis Award winner). Over the past couple of months I have also written in the company of Belinda Jeffrey (author of new novel "Brown Skin Blue"), Kim Wilkins (author of many adult, YA and kids' spec fic novels and also my tutor for the online "Year of the Novel" course). It's comforting to know that they, just like me and the other writer racers, are inspired by the writing race. A great sense of camaraderie seems to develop each week.

Trent left us with a great piece of writing advice tonight:

"Remember write hard, write what you love, and edit until your eyes bleed."

I've been thinking about family a lot the past few months.

We moved south, back to NSW where I grew up, specifically to be closer to my family. Unfortunately my Other Half's parents have both died in recent years, so we were no longer tied to north Queensland.
We now live only 90 minutes from my parents place. I've seen more of them in the 6 months we've been here than in the previous 6 years. It's great. And that word ('great') really doesn't express the comfort and satisfaction I feel from being so close. After 20 years of living several days’ drive away, 90 minutes is a luxury. It's close enough for them to visit and stay with the Boy Wonder when we had a quick overnighter to Sydney, close enough for me and the Boy Wonder to drive to their place for lunch one Friday when he was having a particularly rough 10 year old time of it at school. And when Mum ended up in the ICU of the local hospital earlier in the year, it was quick enough for me to be able to say, "I'll be there in a couple of hours." If it had happened last year I would have had to fly from Townsville to Sydney, then change for a flight to Port Macquarie and then Dad would have had to driven an hour to pick me up.

I am reminded of how happy I am in my little nuclear family. The Other Half scared me a week ago with an agonising and debilitating headache resulting in a trip to the GP followed by one to the emergency ward of Coffs Harbour hospital because of skyrocketing blood pressure. 10 hours, a CT scan and 3 (yes 3!) lumbar punctures later they were able to tell us that he hadn't had stroke and I could safely take him home. It was the first time I have had to take him to hospital and a reminder of how much my life has changed for the better in the 4 and a half years we have been together. I can't imagine him not being in the rocking chair next to me in another 40 years.

My brother and his family live in Canberra - still a day’s drive away from us, but that feels like nothing anymore. In a week and a half they're off to Europe and then the US for a year. My brother is a lecturer and will be on sabbatical there. I'm so excited for them and the wonderful experiences they will have together, but glad that they will be away for only a year. I know we will use the internet to keep in contact over those thousands of kilometres, just as we do now, but somehow being in another country seems different.
A friend from my school days is feeling the distance from her parents at the moment. Her father was horribly assaulted and has been in hospital for a couple of weeks. Reading her entries in her journal has reminded me of again of how precious our families are. After so many years living so far away from my parents, I'm not taking the geographical closeness for granted.

To paraphrase a great recent telephone company ad:
“Have you rung your Mum (or Dad) lately?”

What's a chronoptimist?

According to Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/) a chronoptimist is a person who always under estimates the time necessary to do something or get somewhere.

For example:

"Hey, Cindy. you know my parents are expecting us in 20 minutes."
"No problem. I just have to wash the dishes, take a shower, do my hair, walk the dog and then I'm all good to go. See you in 15."
"You are such a chronoptimist! I'll see you in 45."

Finally I have a word to describe my husband. And now you know why we're always running late! (Really, it's not my fault!)