Welcome to Newsletter #5 - 18 July 2020
Current Projects
Hi everyone! Welcome to Newsletter #5. And a special welcome to new subscribers. Make sure you read your free short stories and check out the rest of my website. I hope you are all keeping safe in these difficult times. When Newsletter #4 came out, Melbourne, like the rest of Australia, was in lockdown due to COVID-19. The number of infections dropped and things briefly opened up again but now we have another spike in infections, so Melbourne is back into lockdown. (sigh)
But hey, being stuck at home gives me plenty of time to write, so what have I been up to?
My mysterious project with the working title of SOO is still sitting in random scenes on my computer and in a folder full of scribbled notes and pictures. But I do know more about the story because bits of it keep popping into my head. It means it should be easier to write when I do start and as a pantser, I need all the help I can get!
My lovely husband is using his lockdown time to turn The Emerald Serpent and Heart Hunter into print books for me, so I have spent a lot of time on the final careful edits of these books. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, Amazon US is not sending proof copies (the print copy I need to check for mistakes before the books are available) to Australia, so I am having to work with Amazon UK which, again due to COVID-19, is taking months. Many readers tell me they prefer print books to ebooks so all my books will eventually be available in paper form. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, I have been working on the poems I wrote on my 10 week, 15,000 kms (9,320 miles) camping trip into the Outback wilderness of Australia. In Newsletter #4, I revealed that I had pledged to write a poem a day and I did, and had intended to publish these 73 poems as a book. But as I have been working on these poems over the last few months, something else has emerged, and the poems have become part of something bigger; a story that uses excerpts from my novels too.
The poems made me wonder what we learn about ourselves when we journey deep into the wilderness and the book I have been writing to explore this question is just about to be launched. See Giveaways for more about this exciting project.
I only ever work on one book or project at the time because I get excited by the new ideas that jump into my head would probably never finish anything if I did not. But I do take little breaks to write other (short) things. I recently noticed that an anthology wanted short stories where two fairy stories are written in a third form. For example, Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella written as a horror story. It sounded fascinating so I wrote The Frog Prince and Snow White as a Deep Fantasy story. I really enjoyed the challenge and if the anthology folks do not like the story, it will join my other 99c short stories on Amazon KDP.
In Newsletter #4, I promised to reveal some exciting news about my novel: I Heard the Wolf Call my Name and my short story: Glass-Heart, both launched in 2019. Da-da. Both have been short-listed in the 2019 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards. Winners have yet to be announced but whatever the result, I am thrilled to be among the final six in each category. As a former judge, I know categories can have more than a 100 entries. So, fingers crossed!