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Happy New Year!

Posted in A writer's life, am wrinting, Australian author, Trying to focus, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I’m up reasonably early on the 1st of January. I managed to sleep later than normal. Yay!

Happy New Year! May 2026 fulfill your hopes and dreams.

I hope for peace and good sense to prevail the world over. I want to be optimistic for the future of the world. Being a science fiction (and fantasy) aficcionado and Star Trek fan, I have had faith in Humankind and that we will move beyond wars and famine and that we will survive into the future. However, I admit that that faith has been shaken of late.

I hope for me that I can find that optimism again. That my faith in us will be restored.

Now for more mundane things.

I have to admit I piked on staying up until 12 and left the party around 10pm. We had a family get together.

Now I just don’t want to eat more food! Everything was delicious but now I have to think about the waistline. I wish it was called the wasteline and I could watch myself waistline waste away but alas…

This morning, I took my blood pressure reading before the meds kicked in and well that’s not good is it? I thought cutting back salt was going to help there but health wise I’ve been a bit over the place. Next in the queue is a blood test scheduled for next week. I’ve been having sleep disturbances between 1-3 am most nights lately, which is very annoying. Nothing too serious except I feel like my head is in a paper bag most of the day. Aching and tingling in the fingers and toes, so much so that I have to get up and take painkillers at night, tired, fatigued, etc. I have sub-clinical Hashimotos and I have these flare ups where I gain weight, go through the fatigue, sluggishness etc and then when I’m tested they say my thyroid is reading normal. This has been going on for 10 years, since I was first diagnosed (confirmed through blood test and identification of antibodies). The other not so interesting thing is the inflammation where my partial knee replacements are. At first I thought they were loosening and the specialist thought not. However, he is monitoring six monthly, unless I have extreme pain. Each day I’m noticing it is harder to move around and my knees are stiff and sore. So after this post is done I’m going for a walk. Best thing to get the joints warm.

The new spectacles after surgery were a bit hard to deal with at first. Multifocals and two very divergent eyes now. Left eye is still seeing blurry but better than when I first developed a full thickness macular hole in August. I can report that my eyes and brain are getting used to the new glasses but when I take them off my eyes/brain go what the hell!

I have received print versions of The Prudential Light. My daughter-in-law picked up an issue with one of the Chinese characters in the book. Two missing strokes that were wiped when I did ‘remove background’. I have replaced that image with a new one and uploaded new versions everywhere. I had to redo the hardback versions because I had matt finish on the cover instead of gloss and I had gloss finish on the other hardback versions. Paperback is matt finish. That was completed this morning.

There are four different sets of Chinese characters in the book, drawn by a friend, who is a scholar of Chinese art. Modern Chinese characters have been simplified and the ones in The Prudential Light are meant to be traditional and hopefully ones in use in 1840s. As for the pinyin version, I cannot tell you if I have stuck to the Cantonese pinyin or strayed to the Mandarin. Brain is not functional. Pinyin is the romanised version of the word to help with pronunciation. Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages but use the same characters.

Yesterday I posted my writing to do list. I also reorganised my working space. (I’m laughing because I’m on my couch with the lap top on my lap). I bought and assembled a hutch. I wish I’d taken before and aftershots. I’m camped out in my bedroom for another nine months I guess while my grandkids are living here. While I had a desk, I had a great big mess there. Along with my day job work space and my imac working space, there was just a junk yard of crap, scribbled on manuscript pages, pens (which I could never find, other desk junk. With a hutch I can lift things up, put them where I can find them. I’m so pleased with it now. I have so many pens and I threw away the ones that don’t work. So diligent of me.

I’ve also put up my planner on the wall. Time to commit to writing on the planner and getting some work done on the books I want to write. While I have a kind of full and hectic schedule for writing new books, I have some that are already written and I have to find time to tweak/revise them and send them out for submission. If I have no luck getting an agent, I guess they will be self published too by the end of the year. I was also wishing I could fit a nice epic fantasy series in my schedule too. I also mulled the idea of retiring Dani Kristoff–where I write paranormal romance with sorcerer’s and werewolves and witches under that name. It might be my lack of promotion but they are not as popular as the Dragon Wine series and Cry Havoc. Another novel I want to write is a sci fi romance that has been in my brain since the early days. So that might fill the Dani Kristoff slot in my schedule.

Who knows…the future is yet to be written.

Best wishes to all.

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Procrastawriting or taking care of business

Posted in A writer's life, Australian author, author appearances, Author signing event, Book cover, book signing, Conflux, Creative passion, fantasy, Geeking out, research, revision, Science fiction conventions, Steampunk, Victorian, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday, I did zero work on my current WIP, The Prudential Light. I did not have the excuse of the previous couple of days of recovering from my shingles vaccination, which really did knock me about. I did procrastawriting.

I wrote and sent a newsletter, and prior to that I signed up to Benventi for preorders for Books and Beyond 28 September. That took time. Here is a link to that preorder form. This is evidence and also if you are in the Central Coast and want to check out the event, please do. I’d love to say hi. It’s a first time, small writer event, which I think is free for the public.

I’ll be at the Geekmarkets on the CSFG table in the morning of 19 July with some of my books on offer. Also, free and fun.

I’ve signed up to Gamacon 6 September and I will have another appearance in August to announce soon.

Early October, it’s Conflux in Canberra, where I’ll have a table too. Not sure if I’ll make it onto any panels yet. That’s 3-5 October over the long weekend. A great SF con and a real experience if you have never been. I am hoping to launch The Prudential Light there but if so I need to get cracking.

I have other events later in the year as well but that’s the next few.

I have ordered book covers for The Prudential Light and Edward Huntington Esquire: Gentleman Magician so keep your eye out for those. I’m super excited about those.

While I have mucked about for two days, I actually did do some work this morning on The Prudential Light. It requires some additional structure so I had to write some new bits and one section needs a bit of research. The word count is now 53,000 word and I am not sure if this will reach 70,000 by the time I’m done.

I am in the ‘this is a mess, everyone will hate it, I can’t make it good’ stage. Or trending that way. I am still having fun with Jemima and Aunt Prudence.

Now as you can see I am writing a blog post. Is this procrastawriting? Or a heavy dose of writerly admin? I find it a bit of a diversion and I like blogging. Often I think of things I want to blog about and then don’t get around to it and then forget.

Have I told you I have started a TikTok? I am very much a Noob and the platform has amazing potential but being time poor I don’t have time to explore it and I’m also distracted by all those TikToks. My lastest talk about how hard I find revision. I love drafting novels. The hard work is shaping them into something you can read. Hence, my angst over is it good enough, can I make it better and so on.

I also owe the blog some posts from China, which I will get to.

Now it is time to get another cuppa.

PS my daughter just made me tea, put the heater on, brought me slippers, my hoodie and a cookie. I’m so spoilt.

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It’s a killer!

Posted in A writer's life, Ancient Edifices, Australian author, Promotion, Social media, tagged , , , on November 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Being a writer isn’t only about the writing of books and stories. There is this thing called “PROMOTION” which has to be done.  Except it’s not promotion per se, it is letting people know you exist and then maybe that you write as well. Sometimes that is fun and sometimes it’s hard work. Sometimes you don’t even know if it’s doing you any good.

I love Twitter! Thank God for that. It makes my promotion life easier, but I just like hanging and keeping up to date. I’m probably a wee bit, just a teeny eensy bit over stimulated, particularly for my age group. My grown up kids don’t use Twitter like I do and definitely don’t get it.

Facebook is cool too because it’s so useful to keep in touch with people and extended family and it has some fab tools, like pages. Of course, playing around on Facebook is time consuming too. I’m probably lucky that I can justify the time spent on their as promotion, when is just another form of procrastination.

Blog posts (like this one) take time to write. Not only do I need to maintain this blog, but I should do guest blogs and interviews to get my name out there. This are great but boy can they be hard work. Interviews are pretty easy really except where there are hard questions. The hard part of these is not letting on you’re an idiot. Okay, okay.  I mean sounding like an idiot. Also, you want to let some of your personality through, preferably not all of it. Not the I had ‘one margarita too many’ personality that only your dearest friends have seen and have refrained from putting the footage of such incidents on Youtube. Then there are topic based blog posts for other people’s blogs. I think I spend as much time staring at the screen thinking up what I will talk about as I do writing the post.

Then we come to what do I write on my blog to keep it active, so people know I’m alive and also I’m not writing posts that say ‘buy my book, buy  it now’ every day. To help with that I do interviews on various topics. Usually these are related to the craft of writing and it gives other authors an opportunity to promote their work as well as sharing their writing titbits. I suppose some smart and hyper-intelligent person is thinking, why are they doing this? In the good ol’ days writers didn’t do this. They just wrote.

I’m sure many a writer has thought the same and doesn’t bother. Unfortunately, these aren’t the good ol’ days anymore (that’s why the are called the good ol’ days). We are a very connected society. There’s the Internet and there’s Internet shopping. There is also fewer physical bookstores to put books in for people to buy by walking past it on the shelf. That does go on still, but not in a big way.

Then there’s ebooks! They aren’t on physical book shelves. They are on the Internet so the Internet is where you need to market those. Discoverability is the new challenge. It’s always been a challenge I believe, it’s just harder these days. There are a lot of writers out there. Writers are in competition with games, dvds, social media and other forms of entertainment.

Speaking of YouTube, I have not got very far with that. There could be live blogs, interviews, panel discussions, book trailers, pictures of me sunbathing and other things that I can’t think of right now. Working full time with my day job leaves me with plenty of imagination but little time to invest in putting ideas into action.

Now we come to the point of this blog post. You have probably been wondering that.

Doing this for two is a killer. I have two of me!

There’s me and there’s the other me. That’s two lots of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and guest blogging to maintain. It’s like having your brain ripped out through your nose. Okay that’s mummification! But you know it’s painful. I have to think stuff up twice! TWICE!

I shouldn’t complain. I mean I decided to have two of me, writing completely different stuff so I should have to wear it.

Why am I telling you this? If you think I’m not doing a good job keeping my blogs up to date, then this is my letter to the teacher.

PS I tell a lie. Rayessa and the Space Pirates also has a social media presence. That’s three.

The non-official photo of me

The non-official photo of me

Photo by Taamati Terata

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