Yesterday I spent $100 trying to save a $5 fish. We have a large tank/terrarium which has green tree frogs in the top half and a couple of fish in the bottom half. Ostensibly they are for bio-control in case the frogs decide to make four-hundred babies. The fish eat the frog eggs before they’re fertilised and they also clean up the frog poo when it splashes down. It’s a win-win.

But given they’re the aquatic equivalent of working-dogs for us, I hadn’t expected to feel such a strong level of responsibility for them. Until one of them got sick.  Really very sick. He disappeared for a day or so and when he appeared out from under the frogs’ island he was missing most of his tail and fins and having trouble staying upright.

This fish cost us $5, but I found myself incapable of leaving it to be eaten by the other fish (yeah, nature is cruel as well as pragmatic) or taking it out and euthanizing it. Death by freezer.

Our penultimate fish-sling. The net kept him from sinking and the fabric kept him from tipping over (w/out his fins and tail)

So $100, a hasty hospital tank and several days later, our little fish euthanized itself. The shock of whatever took its fins and the relentless handling of us trying desperately to keep the fish upright took their toll. But not before we got really creative with our fish-prop devices, finally taking the shape of a sling to keep the fish upright in the water while he healed. None of it worked.

But I faced this with my guinea-pig, too, when the vets said we should euthanize that rather than spend $400 making him better. ‘It’s just a rodent’,  he said.

To me, a pet is more than the sum of its parts. A pet is a responsibility, and an obligation, and a statement about the person you are. It’s a creature you share your space with and expend your energy on. How you treat it in life and in death, matters.

Am I the kind of person that would let a living creature die to save $100?

No, I’m not.

I have a friend who spent $20,000 over several weeks trying to save her dog. In the end the dog just wasn’t strong enough to battle the massive infection raging through his body. So they were $20K down and they lost him anyway.

Did they regret their choice? No. Obviously they’d rather not have spent $20K on a dog that wasn’t going to make it, but they know they did absolutely everything they could to give him a chance. He cost them $1K a decade before and they spent twenty times that trying to save his life.

My fish cost me $5 and I did the same.

RIP little fish. We may not have given you a name, but I hope we gave you a more comfortable end.

Just a sample of the learning ahead of me...

So… Some friends of mine realised when they reached for their 4yo’s book on planes, trains and automobilesto answer a question about how much fuel a 747 could hold in its wings that maybe their world had become a little too closed in. They promptly enrolled in Philosophy 101 to broaden their horizons a wee bit.

In the middle of a dinner party that I was really enjoying I realised that I felt like I had nothing to talk about except my day job and my writing. And I got the sneaking suspicion that I was half-way to being a social bore.

OMG!

I’ve never exactly been a party-girl but the idea of being the one people smile tightly at while thinking of ways of excusing themselves… Horrors.  Now since then I’ve spoken to a few people who all assured me–genuinely as far as I could tell–that it isn’t at all true but by then the damage was done. I’d bored myself!  So I set about doing something to change that.

I signed up with a company called ‘Great Courses’ who provide thousands of hours of learning on audiobook, CD or DVD. One hundred hours of comparative religion. Classic mythology. A Brief History of the World. The story of Medival England. Big History: the big bang thorough to today.  All in 30-minute increments just perfect for driving to work, or walking the block, or while having breakfast. All with accompanying course notes. All presented by leading experts. And all 80% off. Yay.

I’m only twelve lectures into ‘Big History’ but I’ve learned:

• the basic principles behind universe formation,
• how matter was formed, how stars are born and how they die,
• how hot they have to be to convert hydrogen into helium and how much hotter to then convert helium into oxygen and so on to make the building blocks of our solar system,
• what the four elements are that determine complexity,
• how planets are made and the forces that shape them,
• what E=MC2 actually means
• why scientists look for evidence of earth-like planets (not becuase they can’t conceive of worlds different to ours, but because the earth is the earth for very good reasons and life truly does seem to form only on planets with certain traits, so finding more solar systems that could support earth-like planets is a good way of possibly finding other life ‘out there’)
• how our planet was formed
• how continental drift and techtonic plate movement was first revealed…

I can’t imagine what is still to come when we’ve squeezed the entire of creation (and billions of years) into just a quarter of the content.

So… the trick now will be to take that knowledge and absorb it and hold it close to me internally so that–in striving not to be a social bore–I don’t accidentally turn into a social know-it-all, way too excited by my own new learnings. And I’ll have to be patient, too. Can’t tell you how many times a week I see ‘The Story of Medieval England’ staring out at me expectantly from my iPod menu and know I have to finish the entire history of life, the universe and everything first.

The phrase ‘patience Grasshopper‘ has never been more apt.

xx

Valentines Day at my house is a sparse sort of event. I just don’t buy into the idea that you should do something lovely for each other one day a year. I say do it every day of the year or don’t do it at all. However, that said, I have made a supreme effort this Valentines Day eve to do something nice for my other half and myself.

I made a pie.

Big news, I know. But to put this in context I am *so* not a cook. People ask me what we eat if I don’t cook and I tell them ‘I prepare food, I just don’t *cook*’. As in cook-cook. Master chef kind of cook.

I have a slow cooker which is one of the best inventions ever, and I throw things in that and food comes out the other side, but that’s about the extent of my culinary exploits. I just don’t get that whole cooking for the fun of it thing.

But it’s Valentines eve so I thought I should make an effort. So today I made a Guinness Pie. I walked to the store for the beef *cue amazement* and I threw it and some onions and a can of Guinness ale into the slow cooker and then ignored it for the next 6 hours. And just now I threw the result into little bowls and chucked some pastry over the top and into the oven.

Guiness Pie. Not very romantic to most, but when you’re the anti-cook, it’s quite something. I hope to god that it tastes as good as it smells. I’ll know in about 12 minutes.

Wish me luck!

This phrase gets bandied around—a lot—in writing circles. We all know that the big six are a core group of publishers who’ve held the power in publishing for a long time. We know they’re all based in NY city. We know they’re all now scrabbling for their lives to ensure they stay relevant—and dominant—in the face of the e- and self-publishing revolution.

But exactly who are they?

• Simon & Schuster – Pocket Books; Touchstone; Fireside; (and others)
• Hachette Book Group (USA) – Little Brown & Co; Grand Central
• Harper Collins – Avon; Harper Mass Market/Paperback/One/Business; William Morrow.
• Bertelsmann AG – Random House; Ballantine; Bantam Dell; DelRay; Doubleday (and heaps of others)
• Penguin Group (USA) – Penguin; Berkley; (Putnam, Signet, Viking, Plume, Grosset, Ace, Tarcher, Dutton, Penguin Press, Pedigree, Portfolio)
• McMillan US – St Martin’s Press; Henry Holt & Co; Farrar, Straus & Giroux

If the list wasn’t so US-centric it might also include Harlequin Enterprises which has its headquarters in Toronto, Canada.

Or I might just be biased

I’ve been nominated as Australian Romance Author of the year in ARRA’s annual awards. A surprise and an honour. Thanks so much to everyone who voted. Keep supporting those Aussie titles.

“Rapunzel in New York” has been nominated in ARRA’s Best Short/Category list. Not bad for a book not released here yet! Thanks to the members of the Australian Romance Readers Association for the vote of confidence.

The purpose of subtext in fiction—just like in life—is to add meaning to your story and to what is happening on the page. A novel devoted to the exploration of a romantic relationship (romance) therefore needs multiple layers of subtext to ensure that it adds as much meaning as possible. Subtext, then, becomes an author tool to help make your scenes and dialogues work harder for your story.

Dialogue: Subtext is most literally and commonly recognised to be everything characters are not saying in between what they are saying. Body language during the dialogue (like in life) gives away subtext—to the characters and the reader—and dialogue tags or inner dialogue can reveal the subtext for the reader but not the other character.

So for instance if your heroine is madly trying not to let on that she’s been thinking about the hero since their one night together a year ago you might exploit subtext like this:

Ingrid crossed her slim arms hard across her chest making herself into a human bullet. ‘You think I lie awake at night wondering what went wrong between us, Gabe?’

Strength had its downside. But he was a Marque and well-practiced at not reacting to sarcasm. He half-smiled. ‘I would be a fool to imagine that.’

And so it was official. His father was right; he was l’imbecile.

The heroine might be saying that she hasn’t given him much thought since  they last met but her body language tells us (and him) that she’s defensive  about it and therefore probably not being totally honest. That’s subtext.

Similarly, the hero’s half-smile tells us a lot about the next thing he says (‘I would be a fool to imagine that.’). In other words he had imagined that,  in his weaker moments, and despises that about himself. As humans and  readers we decode a half-smile as being deprecating, so it adds that tone to  what he’s actually saying out loud. Subtext.

And finally (just in case anyone missed the other clues), the hero’s internal dialogue adds confirmation that he was fool enough to think she’d been thinking of him (and some opportunistic backstory about his family relationship for good measure).

In this case the characters may not be heavily conscious of the subtext, but it does start to influence the meaning they take from conversations with each other.

Setting/Mise en scene: If a hero ends a relationship with the heroine over lunch in the middle of a work day it sends a totally different message to the one who breaks up with her the moment they wake the morning after she was chief bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding. Subtextually, the bedroom setting and the fact she still has the bridesmaid dress hanging on the back of the door adds a whole lot of extra meaning (and ouch) to the breakup scene. And the reader becomes very conscious that no-one’s mentioning the wedding and so it’s probably relevant. So the reader gets a clue about the hero’s commitment issues before the (devastated) heroine thinks it through and long before he realises.

Internal/External conflict: many people say that the external conflict is what the characters believe is going on between them and the internal conflict is what’s *really* going on between them. That makes the entire internal conflict a kind of subtext. It’s the thing driving, changing, and affecting the story without either character (and possibly the reader, at first) knowing it’s there. And it may not be fully revealed/exposed until the resolution.

So the breaking up couple think they’re breaking up over the fact that she’s working for his competitor and he thinks she’s been leaking information (for instance) but what’s really going on is that he’s falling for her and is scared of his emotions because he came from a broken home. So all those traits and foibles can be a kind of subtext.

A story about relationships that doesn’t have any subtext going on would be pretty flat because our real relationships are saturated with subtext all the time and we are sensitive to it without even realising. That makes it a really useful tool for an author to influence the reader’s experience.

And therefore essential.

All fonts are created equal. But some are more equal than others.

The terms ‘proportional’ and ‘non-proportional’ are quite misleading. Contrary to what their names suggest, a proportional font is one where different shaped letters can take up different amounts of space (eg: Times New Roman).

For the purposes of a manuscript (and particularly wordcount or booklength in publishing) it is important that you use a non-proportional font (or monospaced or fixed-width font). That is, a font where every character takes up the same amount of space regardless of whether it’s our skinny friends ‘i’, ‘l’ or ‘t’; or our fat little friends ‘w’ and ‘m’.

This is so that you can reliably know that each 60-space line will have 60 characters in it for the purposes of accurate word-counting. (Try it; Courier = 60 ‘i’s to a line whereas Times Roman = 120 ‘i’s to a line).

NOTES ABOUT FONT SELECTION

• Don’t buck the system when it comes to fonts. You might think that providing your manuscript in Goudy Oldstyle instead of Courier will be delightfully refreshing or a point of difference; it won’t, it might just annoy an editor or editorial assistant enough that they won’t put your book through to the next pass.
• ‘Serif’ (with little dressy bits on letters) or ‘sans serif’ (without little dressy bits) is not the same as proportional and non-proportional.

2012… the ‘future’.

I’m still waiting for the jet-pack I was promised by implication that we’d all be wearing in ‘the future’ back when I was 9 years old. But here we are–just days away from the future–and no jet-pack. No hover-craft. No waterless-showers or roast dinners that you make by putting a capsule in some kind of re-hydration machine.

Back in the early 70′s, 2012 seemed like an utterly impossible date. Even movies only stretched their imaginations to 2001 (A Space Odyssey). So if we had space travel and computers-gone-rogue in 2001, surely the world (or at least civilisation as we know it) would be well over by 2012.

The Mayans thought so; except they didn’t really—all the palava over the end-of-the-world is greatly overrated. At best the Mayan calendar  forecast a shift in consciousness around this time. The end of the world as we know it, not just the end of the world. Apocalypse in the true sense of the word (‘lifting the veil’ ‘revelation’), not an apocalyptic event.

We’ve already had the Rapture-fail this year when one-out-of-six people suddenly didn’t de-materialise and leave piles of clothes where they stood and their friends blinking in confusion. I don’t think I’m up for another cosmic disappointment so soon.

And so…as we approach the dawn of 2012…I wanted to look for evidence of the future here in our present. It may not look like fiction would  have us believe but there certainly are signs that the future did come as promised.

I may not have a single, Jetsons-esque robot maid to do my bidding but I have machines to do most of my more onerous chores. As I sit in my office and write, a machine washes my clothes and another would offer to dry them for me if I didn’t live in the world’s most natural-dry conducive city, a machine washes my dishes, a machine slow-cooks my dinner, a machine does my vacuuming without me. Another machine cools me (or warms me depending on my needs), while another helps me to write much faster than I ever could by hand.

I don’t have re-constitutable dinner capsules but I have a machine that can cook in a fraction of the natural time and another one that can  freeze-dry and vaccum seal meals for my later re-hydration.

We don’t move through our cities Bladerunner style in levitating hovercraft but someone does, in a lab somewhere, and scientists have  managed to replicate genuine levitation and get a gold sphere to rise on its own. Surely hover-craft can’t be far away.

We may not have amphibious vehicles as the movies portrayed them, but we have snorkel-bearing off-raod vehicles and—surely—they’re just as good and just as useless?

We may not be able to beam ourselves around the place at will but entertainment beams to us—streaming movies, games, online entertainment. You’re reading this now because I was able to create something and, effectively, teleport it somewhere else so you could read it. In fact, scientists have been able to genuinely transfer information from atom to atom—and over vast distances like 1m—without any wires  or connections whatsoever. Actual teleportation.

We have the internet—god help us all—and it’s every bit as dangerous and amazing as author Orson Scott Card conceived back in the  seventies when his characters used the Ansible to communicate on a wirelessly/time-immediate network between planets. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a tangible living entity just like Card’s Jane. At all.

So, while none of it looks like I imagined the future would back when I was nine, I guess we have facsimiles of what we were promised in  fictional form. Maybe we’re not doing so badly at all for only a few decades.

It stands to reason that if we only have a facscimile of the techonology of the future then we should only have a facsimilie of the doom of the future. This time next year we may only experience a warm fuzzy feeling in lieu of global shifting and mass extinctions. I’m certainly ready for some new enlightenment on the part of the masses. I think we’ve banged sticks and shouted at each other long enough.

Though a small part of me will be a bit disappointed come December equinox–I was looking forward to watching the apocalypse from 400m in the air on my jet-pack.

So a month or so ago I got an email from my editor letting me know my latest book had been accepted (yay) and asking me whether I could ‘squeeze in’ a novella before my next deadline. I hesitated because my schedule was carefully constructed to give me some time off over Christmas after I wrote-through the last two holiday seasons.

“It’s a Christmas book…” she hinted.

Mmmmm… vaguely more interested, I’ve never written a Christmas book… Then she brought out the kryptonite

“…and it has to have puppies in it.” 

A puppy-based Christmas book. SOLD!

Image courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons

Instead, mine’s about a litter of wild-dogs and the conservationists working to help save them.

Aren’t they adorabubble!! African Wild Dog pups. I’ll let you know how I go when it’s all over!!  Back to the keyboard…

I’ve just sold another book to Harlequin (part of an eight-book continuity fantastically sandwiched between Marion Lennox and Patricia Thayer *sigh*) and it’s been given a title and release date.

Release: August 2012
Title: Slow Dance with the Sheriff

I don’t always get excited by the titles given to my books by Harlequin’s marketing team but this one I *love*. It’s exactly right for the tone and the story.

Nice work marketing peeps!

My writing desk.

Where my legs go.

This is clearly not conducive to a good day’s writing for me, so I’ve painstakingly trained him to accept a compromise. When storms hit we go to my smallish study, we turn off the lights and we crank up classical music. I’ve played that for him since he was a pup at times of great relaxation or joy (like car trips, cuddles and leisurely grooming sessions) specifically with the intent that it be like a kryptonite for his anxiety superpower.

So… there’s a big storm raging right now. Fellas big and small are locked in the study with me, I’m writing in the dark and Bizet is blaring out of my speakers. And everyone (but me) is fast asleep.

Fellas (big and small) the last time a storm hit

Now. It took a while.

But…I write barefoot. I sit on a chair which sits on a plastic carpet protector. And I just spun around to go refresh my cup of tea and stepped into an enormous puddle of stress drool.

There is nothing–nothing–quite as icky as dog saliva between the toes.

But I do feel a certain sense of achievement that I have been able, at all, to get the Big Fella back down the stress Richter scale enough to actually fall asleep (albeit an emotionally exhausted one).

Sleep well Big Fella. For as long as you sleep… I write.

x

Welcome, everyone, to my new website. This baby has been a work-in-progress over a few months for MadCat Digital Design but eighteen months coming for me.

The previous content is all there and there’s some new surprises too (hint, you might want to become a regular of the excerpt section).

Stick around, browse, enjoy.

Every book on the banner above could be yours in my first new website COMPETITION! Check out my competition page for details of how to enter.

New title
My latest book, set in Texas, has been scheduled for release August 2012 and titled Slow Dance with the Sheriff. Loving that title.

Nominated!!
‘The Soldier’s Untamed Heart’ has been nominated for an RT Reviewers’ Choice award for series romance. Huge honour.

New website coming soon
The time has come. Having lots of fun working with the designers on a new nature look.

So today I was stuck in traffic on the freeway and I noticed a large moth fly out from beneath the car in front. It fluttered around the rear of the car, sped up and then flew back under to its hiding place.

Then, a few moments later it flew out again, fluttered around in the wake of the car and then sped-up and flew back under the car.

It did this until we hit about 60km/hr and then it stayed under the car.

Even though it was large, moths still have flimsy wings and fairly flimsy body structures. But this thing was keeping up with a car doing up to 60kms. I have to assume it was taking a lot of it’s movement from the draft of the car (like cyclists do to conserve energy) but I became entirely transfixed on this display while driving (and terrified that I’d run it over if it slipped out of the car’s ‘jet stream’).

It didn’t. I didn’t. And I have no idea where it ended up.

God’s speed, little moth! Nature really is amazingly well designed.

On a comfy sofa? In bed? On the beach? In a hot-air balloon above Turkey?

Wait…what?

Check out my excerpts for some amazing places to read one of my books.

I mixed the sound for these myself from samples made available under creative-commons over at www.freesound.com. An amazing array of sound effects so that I could create the layered, rich sounds for you to read by.