PRE- ORDER Fleur's newest novel 'Into the Night'
Poor Jo! She’s been waiting for me to put this blog up for nearly two weeks and I’ve been rather slack! Jo has her short story in Australian Literature: A Snapshot in 10 Short Stories and that was how we hooked up, as mine is in there too. Here she talks about her story, daily…
Going to Perth, for us, is mostly a big adventure. We don’t go often – the eight hour drive puts a ‘quick trip’ out of the question. We left very early last week – 4am. My daughter needed to be in Perth for an appointment at 3:30pm – nothing like a deadline and an unfamiliar…
I’ve loved all of Enid Blyton’s books, since I’ve been able to read them. I still enjoy going back and spending time in amongst the pages now. I love the fact I can read them in about half an hour and still get as much enjoyment out of them, as I did when I was…
This is our dog Law – he understand English – especially farm dog instructions like ‘Go back, get up, up the front and most used of all, F*** off.’ Have you ever thought about animals speaking other languages? When you do think about it, it seems perfectly logical. After all if the only words that…
… is great when it works! And it’s even better for farmers who are a fair way out of town and need something as soon as they can get it. We’ve borrowed a scarifier from a friend and we need to get some points for it – points are the bits that dig into the…
For the last two weeks, our calves and lambs have started to arrive – it’s always a beautiful time of the year. The calves, in particular are gorgeous, as they play, tail in the air and canter around the paddock, chasing each other. When they’re first born, they are very much like human babies (or…
April marks the start of Aussie Author Month. It’s the brain child of my web guru, Nyssa and two of her fellow book lovers, Kat from Book Thingo and Ali and Rosie at Fangtastic It’s a pretty exciting thing to be involved in. After reading Helene Young’s blog about Snugglepot and Cuddle Pie and Bronwyn…
Karly Lane has been on my radar since Red Dust was published. She popped up on my Facebook page periodically and I’ve watched as she’s sold her books to E-publishers. It was obviously only a matter of time before she was picked up by a mainstream publisher… Which she now has! Allen and Unwin are…
There have been interesting happenings at the McDonald farm recently… it seems flying ‘things’ are falling out of the sky, over us. When Skylab came down over Esperance, parts of it were found by Anthony, as a child and we often watch jets zoom across the top of us (we also know that we can…
I have always been fascinated by radio, especially the voices that have kept me company on the long hours of driving tractors at night or lengthy car trips between the farm and the ‘civilised’ world! I don’t get to hear Kate on the radio, very often – she used be down in my ‘neck of…
I can’t believe we’ve hit March already – I’m not sure where the year has disappeared to! Our weather has been slightly murky for the last few weeks, with a real autumn feel about it. I sometimes can’t believe that Perth can be around the 40 degree mark and we haven’t hit 25 degrees! It…
It’s a long, muddy, foggy road… the writing of a novel! While I’ve been writing Purple Road, I’ve been trying to ‘better’ myself at the writing game. I’m not sure if you know my history, but I wrote Red Dust on a whim. I had an idea and I wrote it down. I didn’t and…
The weather that Australia, in particular Queensland, has been having, is incredible. I’ve cringed at, not only the destruction that Mother Nature has brought, but the grief and pain caused to humans and animals alike. The TV news seems to be full of detailed reports, shocking images, crying, homless people and animals moved from their…
Happy New Year! I’m completely amazed at how quickly this year has been and gone. As a child, my Mum would always tell me, not to wish my life away, which was pretty hard, when I was ten, and thinking I was much older and knew better than she did, or sixteen and badly wanting…
Our front door is always cluttered with boots. If it’s summer, it’s usually just of the rossi kind – normal slip on work boots, but if it’s winter they’re of the muddy, rubber variety. This door way is the bane of my life – it’s forever covered with mud, sand, grain, hay or anything that…
Meet Pippa Masson; she works for Curtis Brown literary agents. Here she tells us what goes on behind the scenes in the attempt to get a book published. It’s not an easy job, filled with exciting highs and desperate lows. Thanks for joining us Pippa! Pippa: What is the life of an agent like? Well,…
I haven’t been captivated by a book for a long time, but as soon as I picked up Wildflower Hill, by Kimberley Freeman, I was completely lost amongst its pages. Kimberley Freeman, is actually, Kim Wilkins, who writes fantasy/speculative fiction. These books, as well as her lecturing, are legendary in the writing world. She has…
We haven’t been suffering nearly as badly, as our counterparts in NSW or Victoria, where the rain has been coming down in inches, wreaking crops and washing away roads, fences and hope, leaving nothing but maintenance work, in its wake. The cruelest thing about the rain is it’s come after suffering years of drought. WA’s…
We were so ready to start harvest today. Yep, we were. Yesterday the boss said that he’d be swathing the oats and then start harvesting standing barley… depending on what the moisture was. (Can’t harvest if the moisture inside the grain is too high – it doesn’t store well.) So, even though we knew there…
It’s nearly harvest – in fact some of the farmers to the north of us, have already started. Harvest indicates, to me, that summer is here. Long hot days, snakes, flies, strong seas breezes (if we’re lucky!) in the afternoons, the rumbling of trucks and headers at any time of the day or night… and…
These cattle don’t really look like calves, do they? But they are – they were born in April and are a far cry from the really cute, little 30 or 40kg babies they were, when they were born! (For all the mums out there, aren’t you pleased your baby wasn’t that big?!) At the moment,…