Two birds and a sunset...

Well, you know what they say about counting chickens before they're hatched...

I'm afraid our candling predictions were accurate. We only had ONE baby chick ready to be hatched. The other eggs weren't doing their thang. And yet the mother had been sitting on them out in a rain lashed paddock of long grass for four weeks!

Anyhoo... that's Nature as they say... Mum's now happily back in the coop with her husband and his other wife. And the sweet little lavender baby is in the nursery.

While on the subject of birds. We had a lovely visitor in our Euodia tree -- a scarlet honeyeater, found mostly in rainforest in NE QLD.

To attract birds, we've planted as many flowering natives as we can, and over lunch, E & I counted the number of birds we can remember sighting here. Counted over 60 varieties.

Over the weekend, we had rather a lot of wind and rain as ex Cyclone Olga finished her dance around the Gulf and headed south to the west of us, down to the Channel Country. She left rather interesting skies in her wake.

Update

We have a keet (chick) peeping and cheeping and pecking at the inside of an egg!!! E is beside himself with nervous excitement. As a first time guinea father, he's doing everything right. Much more involved than when his first child was born (when he went home and fell asleep and a neighbour had to wake him with the news.)

Latest bulletin -- the egg is cracking!!

No babies yet...

Our eggs are still eggs... and we now have two mother guinea hens sitting on nests out in the rain. Last night we decided to candle some of the eggs that we're expecting to hatch. This process happens in a dark room and it involves setting a cardboard roll (or something similar) over a torch and then holding the egg over the tunnel of light so you can see the dark shape of the chick and the yolk inside.

And now we're not so sure... only one of the four eggs we tried looked as if it might hold a chick almost ready to be born. The other dark blobs were much smaller. From E's research the first of the thirty eggs that were laid should have stayed 'dormant' for want of a better word until the mother turned broody and began sitting on them. Then they should all start developing at much the same pace.

But, we dunno...

Anyway, on the writing front, I've had news from my editor that another book has been accepted. So my books for 2010 will now be:

March -- The Rancher's (or Cattleman's) Adopted Family

May -- Exectutive: Expecting Tiny Twins (# Book 2 in The Brides of Bella Rosa, a new series that starts in April)

September -- A Miracle for His Secret Son (in my editor's words -- a very powerful and emotional story)

At the moment I'm having fun with a very different style of book -- still for HM&B, but lighter in tone and rather experimental in style. I know readers don't like it when authors change their writing style too much, but I have to say it's great fun from a writer's point of view. Very refreshing and invigorating. Won't say too much just yet, because I still don't know if I can pull it off, but so far, I'm enjoying the process.

a mercy dash

We're heading up the highway through rain and floods because, by E's calculations, the guinea fowl babies are due to hatch tonight. If we don't get there to bring them into safety and warmth, their mother will just abandon them in the rain and the long grass and they won't survive. Apparently, in the wild they have a 4% survival rate. Hope we can raise those odds.

Happy Australia Day!

It's that day again.

It's raining...

It's raining, raining, raining...

Thanks to ex Cyclone Neville and ex Cyclone Olga, we are being drenched...

This morning when I went to the bakery, I got out the blue floral umbrella I've had since I first went to England to meet my editor in 1998. Outside my office, the rain is falling noisily on window eaves and splashing in the open passageways in the centre of our building. It's so gloomy inside my office that I have all the lights on and the red Indian throw on the sofa glows in the warm light.

I love the monsoon season when Queensland loses all pretense of being the Sunshine State.

Settings and weather...

The cyclone season is here again, and this weekend we have one tracking towards Cooktown. This Cape York country (especially the orange area on the map) is where my next book The Cattleman's (or Rancher's)Adopted Family is set. My book actually starts with a low pressure system looming close.

We're in Townsville, but a cousin and his girlfriend are staying at our Tarzali cottage this weekend and keeping us informed (as well as looking after the guineas). Tarzali is inland, between Innisfail and Cairns and should be safe as long as the predictions are accurate. Good luck to other Far North Queenslanders. I always say that wind and rain make for good writing weather.

Not lost in translation?

Google alert sent me a link to this blog and it was rather fascinating to read about the excitement of a Norwegian translator who's first translated book is my Blind Date with the Boss.

Great chance for aspiring authors...

Harlequin Romance author Donna Alward is holding a pitch contest at eharlequin this year and it kicks off today. If you’re interested in linking to the thread etc, it’s here:

The contest is for unpublished writers and runs all this week. The winner gets Donna for a mentor all year. Pretty cool...

CD blues

I've written before about my love of audio books. Given our frequent travel back and forth between the city and the country, we've come to really look forward to our books on CD. For our last trip, I had a George Smiley story actually read by John Le Carre and another Joanna Trollope, and I was SO looking forward to listening to them.

Disaster, however, awaited us.

Well, maybe disaster is a bit melodramatic, but disappointment is certainly accurate. The very first disk got stuck in our CD player and subsequently the whole (six stacker) thing ceased to function. No matter what we tried or how many pages of the car's maitenance handbook we trawled, we could only get an Error 99 message flashing at us.

On returning to the city, we took the car to a car-audio place and it cost $75 to have the library's disk extracted, and we were told that the whole unit was damaged and would have to be replaced.

Why?

When someone at the library stuck a see-through plastic label on the CD with the library's logo etc, he/she let a little bit of plastic overlap into the hole in the centre of the CD. This teensy bit of plastic caught on the drive shaft in our player and seized up the whole thing.

Sigh.

Dear reader, be warned: check out those centre holes in your CDs very carefully.

The odds of finding true love...

According to yahoo news...
A university student has discovered that finding the perfect partner is only 100 times more likely than finding an alien.

Economist Peter Backus, a 30-year-old tutor at the University of Warwick, has calculated that the chances of ending up with his dream woman are just 1 in 285,000, reports Click Liverpool.

Backus used a famous maths formula known as The Drake Equation, which was originally used to estimate the existence of extra-terrestrial life, to determine why he was single.

The complex equation takes into account the number of women in the country, then narrows it down to those aged 24 to 34, who live in his home city, are single, have a university education and would share a physical attraction with him.

In his "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" thesis, Backus found that of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends."So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.0000034 per cent chance of meeting one of these special people.

That's a 1 in 285,000 chance, so it's not great," the PhD hopeful surmised.

The Drake equation, developed in 1961 reads N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L, and helped scientist Professor Drake predict there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy.

"The research may sound depressing to people looking for love, but the good news for singles is, it's probably not your fault," Backus said.

Beetlemania...

The last few nights we've been bombarded by brown beetles. (Another untold joy of country life)
The poor things -- every summer, as soon as the rain comes, these plain brown beetles struggle out of the ground only to end up stunned and on their backs on our veranda, or smashed against our windows, or, worse, into the car headlights.
We don't have screens at Tarzali, so we have to shut all the windows and listen to the sounds of beetle suicide. Last night I was reading in bed, hearing the soft but tragic bump, bump, bump against the bedroom window. I couldn't stand it any longer, had to abandon the book, but the split second (I swear... the absolute, exact, split second I turned the light out, the noise stopped as if the beetles had been in the middle of flinging themselves at the glass and were then propped in mid air.


In the morning, the front veranda was covered with beetle carcasses, and of course, how the guinea hens loved that!


But I decided I needed to know how this whole attraction to light thing happens. (As a romance writer I've written often enough about similarities between moths and flames and falling dangerously, headlong in love, but I've never really understood the science behind it). The answer is interesting, and as we might have guessed, the moon plays a part. You can read about it here.

January...

Verandas baked with musky sleep,

Mulberry faces dozing deep,

And dogs that lick the sunlight up

Like paste of gold

These lines from Kenneth Slessor's poem Country Towns remind me of January in Australia.

As you may almost certainly have noticed, I gave myself a blog holiday after Christmas. Relaxing at Noosa with family members was just so ... well... relaxing, it seemed almost too much effort to drag myself to the laptop. The weather was fine and hot, the surf gorgeous and frothy as sparkling wine and the board games were as much fun as ever.

But now I'm back in the north, and driven by a New Year and conversations with my daughter, I'm in the middle of a detox. Gosh, have you ever tried giving up caffeine? I was shocked by how hard and painful it was. I had no idea that my habit of frequent cups of tea had such a strong hold on my body. It was like the worst kind of debilitating hangover. Why do we do these things to ourselves in January?

Anyway, I'm now having one or two cups a day again (have had a weekend of serial visitors and how do you manage that without cups of tea? or glasses of wine for that matter?), but am trying very hard not to let the number of cuppas creep back up to... well... to where they were.

We've been doing the entertaining during a maintenance run to Tarzali and in between visitors we have been working hard, cutting grass, planting trees, watching over the guineas. There's a new clutch of eggs, which Elliot's talking about taking back to Townsville to hatch. The mother sits out in long grass in the rain (this is the wet season and we've had massive downpours) would you believe? And because she's not a good mother, the babies' chances of surviving once they're hatched are v low.

And as we head back to T'ville today, (possibly with a cargo of eggs) I'll be thinking hard about the book I have to start writing. This is the longest break I've had from writing. Usually I feel twitchy and as if something's missing in my life, but I must say that this break has been good for me. I feel refreshed, re-invigorated and all things beginning with "re."

Happy New Year!

Our Christmas...

Hosted by daughter Emma and her husband Carson, this Christmas was quite possibly the best ever... Here's the photographic evidence... Pappy and Andy helping to prepare bugs (lobster) in the kitchenAn impromptu four generations choir accompanied by our guitar hero, Thomas...
and below, happy me...

I've always loved those sleepy, reflective moments in the afternoon when people examine presents more closely... in our case there were quite a few cook books.

And then... chatting by candlelight at the end of the day...

Christmas countdown,,,

Brisbane is famous for its thunderstorms in late afternoons in summer and on Tuesday we had a beauty. Vicki and I were in the city doing last minute gift shopping and we were shocked when we came out of the stores into almost total darkness.

E was at home taking photographs of what was going on in the heavens. Apparently it was quite spectacular.

Now, the Christmas preparations are well underway. Tomorrow we'll all be heading to Emma's where Andrew and my Mum will join us. Last night we made a late journey to the seafood markets and the esky is full of oysters, bugs (lobsters) and prawns (shrimp). It will be a cold Christmas lunch with salads and seafood and a baked ham for us. I've made a mango trifle (courtesy of a fab recipe from even fabber Marion Lennox) and V was up till midnight making shortbread. Just a few more presents to wrap... another social gathering with friends... a possible trip into the cathedral tonight... and Christmas will be here.

I hope you all have a wonderful day... whether it's quiet or hectic... I hope there are many special moments, and I leave you with a photo of this year's Christmas Creek sign .

Where am I now?

After the book was sent last Tuesday, I spent a few relaxing days at Noosa, and I'm now in Brisbane, having a lovely time catching up with sisters, daughters, my mum and old friends from my single, flatting days (and being spoiled rotten with the most scrumptious food). Vicki and Matt below are our fab hosts.We're staying at their lovely flat at Red Hill and this spot is full of nostalgic memories for me. Just down the road on Enogerra Terrace is my very first library (I started with reading a series about twins who lived all over the world --The Dutch Twins, The Eskimo Twins etc... and I fell in love with a story about a girl whose family lived above their shop.) From here I can see my old primary school and the church where I was married, and that distant gap in the hills is the suburb of The Gap, where I went to high school.

Am v happy in this lead in to Christmas. Hope you are, too.

And you didn't even ask for them...

The bulls of Rockhampton... a small sample...

Then we continued driving south and came to Miriam Vale where we always stop for the most delicious fresh crab sandwiches... and you know, I'd never noticed the old fellow on the roof before, but these days I'm totally atune...

Now we're in Noosa and I've finished my book, so I'm officially on holidays. I was sad to let these characters go, actually, but last night E and I had a divine dinner at a restaurant right on the edge of the sand to send them off in style. Can you guess what we talked about (at least some of the time?) yeah... my next book.:)

Travelling south...

We are now in Rockhampton, halfway down the coast of Queensland, on our way to a southern family Christmas. Yesterday we were on the road for ten hours. It's a big state!!!!!!!!! Be warned, if you're an overseas traveller.
We're driving, rather than flying, because we want to use our car while were in the SE and we'll be away for too long to make car hire an option. We've made this journey many, many times, so we know the ropes. Yesterday, our morning tea stop was Bowen (where much of the movie Australia was filmed). That's Cape Gloucester in the background. They now have big posters boasting about how much Hugh Jackman loved Bowen.For some reason (which I think is peculiar to Aussie country towns) we have big plastic statues of the local product. There are big bananas and big pineapples. In Bowen there's a big mango. Bowen mangoes are truly sensational, possibly the most divine fruit in the world, and we bought a whole bucketful -- that's fifteen mangoes for eight dollars -- and we got to keep the bucket!! (Green ones down the bottom)One of my writers friends from Victoria was recently thrilled that she'd bought mangoes for $1.78 each to make a mango trifle -- (pretty much traditional trifle, but with lemon jelly and slices of mango -- sounds yummy, except it's never become a staple in our household because I have a husband who doesn't like custard and a son who doesn't like jelly, sigh).
Here in Rockhampton, we're in the heart of beautiful cattle country, so there are cow statues everywhere. I'll try to get a shot for you.

to market, to market...

Interesting marketing strategies... have resulted in totally different packaging for the same story. My next book will be released in the UK and North America in March. It's set in Australia's Cape York, in wild, rugged and very distinctive tropical coastline that's described in a fair amount of detail in the book.

In the UK it's called The Cattleman's Adopted Family and it's in a 2 in 1 with Margaret Way's Outback Bachelor (lucky me) and looks like this.

In North America, it's called The Rancher's Adopted Family and looks like this.

My editor loved the setting I described, but obviously marketing has its own way of thinking... I hope American readers won't feel conned.

guinea gossip...

The saga of the guinea fowl continues…
Can’t show photos at the moment as I cleverly left my laptop and its attachments behind in T’ville!! It had to happen one time, but why did it happen when I’m on deadline? Arrgh!
Anyway, to start with – good news. Young Lazarus/Gloria is thriving. After being hand fed the whole time we were in Townsville last week, it’s nearly twice its size and last night spent a night back in the main coop, sleeping inside one of E’s flannelette shirts.
Also, we’ve discovered that Icarus, the young male who kept flying up and hitting his head on the roof, was actually being pecked by the other more dominant male. On further observation, we felt so sorry for him that we decided to let him out and he now lives quite happily outside the pen, although he often calls to the females to follow him.
One female seems keen, I must say.
Today, for the first time, we’ve let all the adults out to explore our block and they’re having a wonderful time, constantly pecking, presumably at insects. Sometimes they’re in pairs, but often the dominant male lures both females to wander with him and chases poor Icarus away, so we’re giving serious thought to the best way to manage Icarus’s romantic interests, and we’re very much hoping that the young keet is Gloria. Alpha males are more trouble than they’re worth.
On the writing front, I’m in the final part of my book, (bless E for letting me use his laptop) and tomorrow I’m having another gathering of NQ romance writers, which should be fun.