Al Rambles

You will have to forgive me for a long rather rambling post.

We’ve had a quiet weekend. Yesterday Deb and I went hunting for a birthday present for our middle daughter Io.
She has her 21st birthday in a few weeks. We bought E our eldest a Tissot watch for her 21st. I had kind of thought we would do the same for Io but Deb pointed out Io doesn’t wear a watch so it is a case of decisions, decisions. How do you buy something that a 21yo will like but hopefully still treasure in years to come?

To day Deb and I were going to go for our traditional run (er that would be drive. I love walking, but I don’t run anywhere) out bush, at the last moment we both called off. The weather didn’t look at all promising.

So Deb sat and knitted in front of the TV while I have spent the day writing. Or to be more precise reading over (not editing) my WIP and adding more.

I mentioned a little while ago Valentina has been causing me problems. Well I have close to 30,000 words written on her story. She was meant to be a secondary character in a sub-plot!

With my first novel Veiled in Shadows I had a similar problem. One of my readers (of a late draft) suggested that trimming a whole sub-plot including several characters would benefit the novel. At first I didn’t like the idea. But after a little thought it worked and improved the book.

I am not at such a late stage, I haven’t yet completed a first draft. Yet, I am faced with 30,000 words that don’t quite fit. So I either re-jig the whole plan, give Valentina her marching orders, or try and cram her back into her original second rate role.

So today I have rewritten a couple of chapters that sit elsewhere. It means my main characters David and Svetlana (I did post just a tiny bit about David ages ago ) loose some of their story. Or rather it moves to back-story.

Interestingly I suspect this new approach may work, adding a little mystery to David and Svetlana’s sections.
The problem I still have to work out though is I will run the risk of creating two parallel stories rather than having sub-plots that contribute to a whole.

Thanks to an endorsement of Drop Box by Kathleen Jones I have been using this brilliant piece of software for synchronising between my two PCs. It also creates an online back up of my WIP.

I had heard of it before, but I’m always a bit nervous about online storage because I know a couple of hackers and I am pretty sure they’d not have too many problems bypassing the security of Drop Box. But then it occurred to me that I am not particularly likely to be targeted and the worse that could happen is someone could ‘steal’ copies of my uncompleted WIP, hardly the crime of the century.

So I am trialling Drop Box and I suspect that with it I am very unlikely to loose any more chapters like I did the other week.

Enough rambling.

Here is a little more of Valentina’s Story
It comes just after the last extract I posted on the 11th of February.
Valentina looks for Penelope again, at first she is disappointed but then she gets more than she bargained for…

Valentina Meshcova
Berlin 1948
I looked for Penelope the next time I took the little one to the beach.
I was more disappointed than I thought I should have been that she was not there.
The week after I didn't look for her, instead I played in the water with Natasha.
As we came out I saw her sitting on a blanket next to ours. This time she wore a broad brimmed hat and a light cotton blouse. 'I should have listened to you last time.'
'You got yourself burnt?'
'It was terrible, my shoulders and arms are peeling. No, shedding or shredding would be a better description.'
'Ah well, you are being more careful now.'
'Yes, no choice really.'
'You could stay out of the sun all together.'
'I could, but I was curious to see you again.'
'Curious?'
'A Russian soldier, a veteran by the look of you and a little German girl an odd mix. You must agree that is enough to spark anyone's curiosity.'
'Is it so strange?'
'It is. It is a lovely afternoon, would you like to take Natasha and go for a picnic.?'
'I am not misunderstanding you am I? My German is not the best, you mean a basket of food in a meadow somewhere?'
'That is exactly what I mean. Given rationing, it won't be anything very fancy but I thought Natasha might think it fun.'
'I haven't done anything like that since before the war.'
'All the more reason.'

Emma, India, and Dawn Starts

You are going to have to excuse me but I am in a rambling mood tonight.

One of the things that is nice about the work I do is that there are early starts. And no before you all say “is he mad?” I do not enjoy getting up at 5:00am any more than the next person (except of course this has the big plus that my commute time is less than half what it would be if I was going in at more normal hours).

The nice thing is the early finish and time in the afternoon and evening, this gives me the opportunity for all sorts of pursuits.

Often they are mundane, like hanging out a load of washing or mowing the lawn.
But as often as not I am able to use the time more creatively. Last week for example I went exploring with my youngest.

Yesterday, I worked on formatting my book before the house got busy in the evening.
Tonight I am in a culinary frame of mind. I am putting the time to cooking a decent curry. Oddly (or perhaps not oddly in this day and age) although I am an Aussie I also have a large chunk of Indian Heritage . My father’s family took a rather long (over 150 years) detour via India on the way to Australia.

As a total by-the-by, if you ever walk through Russell Chowk in Jabalpur a city in Madhya Pradesh India, you are close to some of my family history. If you do a Google you might discover that the Chowk (square) is named after Bertrand Russell, but in fact it isn’t. It was named for one of my ancestors considerably before Bertrand was famous. But that is another story, one I might put into a book… someday.

In the spirit of rambling I am going to jump to an entirely different topic. On Saturday as is our wont we went for a drive. This time we struck out along a road we haven’t used before though Arthur’s Creek. Up on a hill before you reach the village is an old cemetery.
I love cemeteries, they are such a vivid store of the culture of their time. Such a prompt for imagination.

This grave for example speaks of a tragedy, a young woman burying a much loved husband. Clearly at the time Emma, no doubt in love and grief stricken at the loss of her Harry could not imagine resting anywhere else. She has bought a double plot so one day she could sleep alongside her dear one.
Yet a hundred years later there is no sign that she was laid here. No headstone for Emma here.
What happened, the writer in me wonders. As her grief passed did she come to love another? Does she now rest alongside a second husband?
Who knows, but my mind races away across the valley below, thinking of other stories that perhaps one day I could write.Too many books not enough years.

Bless you Emma, I hope the rest of your years were joy filled.

A Slow Weekend

Well I had a boring weekend in comparison to usual. As you have gathered we spend a fair bit of our free time shooting around the back blocks and having a squiz at the local scenery.

This past weekend we didn’t. Unfortunately two things kept us relatively close to home:

• First looking for a new house. We are currently renting and our landlord has given us notice to vacate. So we went looking at houses to rent on Saturday. (We have owned before but are still tied up in knots with some property interstate and will not buy until we finally sell there).

• Also Deb has a conference in Canberra this week. She decided to drive (about 8 hours) rather than fly and so she left on Sunday. She could have flown but: you have to allow an hour and a half to get to the airport from here (it is in actual fact nothing like that time but traffic can be unpredictable); then the airlines insist you are there absurdly early to clear the new security hurdles (at least an hour before the flight); the flight takes an a bit over an hour; then you have to muck around getting a hire car at the other end; to clinch it all Deb hates flying; so she drove.
  

I could have poked around doing something, looking for something to photograph. But the weather was terrible so I stayed in and read:


I posted about buying Beevor’s book back in August but haven’t picked it up till now. So far I am enjoying it. Methinks I should post my first ever book review when I ever get round to finishing it.


On the subject of reviews I did finish Troop Leader a while ago, maybe I should review that?

Anyone interested in reviews of military history and military biography?

I know I would be. My current novel Veiled in Shadows, is set in WWII. The sequel (companion?) which I am working on begins in the war and extends into the early years of the cold war. I am quite pedantic about my research. I have to know everything I can about a historical situation in which my characters may find themselves. That includes trivialities down to what kind of footwear they might have had. So reviews of useful books like this would suit me, but what about anyone else?

The strange thing is almost none of this detail directly appears in the books. Yet I find it helps with colour if I can have my characters speak with confidence about things they would have known about, as a matter of course. I want them to step into scenes I know are as accurate as I can make them.

Hmm, I really am rambling today, just a moment more and I’ll let you go.

The final edit of Veiled in Shadows is almost complete. I have all but completed the changes to the manuscript that Cheryl suggested. Perhaps two hours work will see it completed.

Yay!

So, lest I ramble you to death, goodnight.

Fire, Snow and Rain.

On Sunday, after I posted about Greg and Fred, we went for a drive. Most of the photos in this post were taken from the front passenger seat of our moving car. As you will see from the photos it was wet most of the way.

We drove out through Healesville in the Yarra Valley up over the Black Spur.
The bush here was burnt in the fires following Black Saturday, 7th February 2009.
This first piccie shows the bush there; it is deceptively green. Unlike the fires on the 7th most of the fire up through this stretch was of low intensity. The tree trunks are blackened, but the crowns of the trees were not harmed and with the tree ferns sprouting in the understory it looks comparatively healthy.

Up over the Black Spur we turned off the Maroondah Highway and drove up towards Marysville. This second photo shows a stretch that was burnt on the Black Saturday. The crowns of the trees have been burnt bare and killed and the understory burnt away completely.
Virtually all these trees are Eucalyptus species (gum trees in daily usage) as Australian natives they are well adapted to fire and most of them are still alive, although badly damaged.
Marysville was one of the hardest hit places on Black Saturday, about one in five of the townspeople perished and the majority of buildings were destroyed. I didn’t take any photos there, it felt disrespectful.

Past Marysville we drove higher up past Lake Mountain towards Warburton in the Upper Yarra.
This photo shows how stark the landscape is up there now. The fires were truly intense, most of these trees are showing no sign of regeneration. To kill Eucalypts like this the fires were probably over 1000 degrees centigrade.
It was a bitterly cold day and in this higher country snow had been falling. Again most of the trees in these next few photos appear to have perished.
As we went father up the snow got deeper and the contrast between the blackened trees and the white of the snow is marked. The only green was from a few tree ferns that were just hanging on.

Then a sudden contrast we drove into a small pocket of bush that had avoided the worst of the fire. It’s not a great photo but it gives you an idea of what this bush would normally like at this time of year. Aussie bush is evergreen, so usually we have snow and leafy trees together.
Then back into burnt. This bush is burnt but with less ferocity. I think many of these trees will come back. I quite like these couple of photos, the black of the trunks, the white snow and the wet windscreen blurring it all together.
As you can see it began to lightly snow again.

Driving in snow is not something we have to do in most of the country.

Finally as we came back down the other side bush untouched by the fires. Also more rain. Glorious rain. Enough to cause some nuisance flooding and even lift Melbourne’s water supply by a few percent.

Madder Than a Cut Snake

Well I’ve officially gone mad.

“Whadda ya mean gone mad? You’ve always been madder than a cut snake!”

Uncle Harry, I hate to say it mate, but as a figment of my imagination you’ve probably proved the case.

I seem to have been doing almost anything to avoid finishing off the corrections to my manuscript suggested by Cheryl some weeks ago.
For a while I was fairly diligent, now I think I am only a few hours away from completing. My problem is I just seem to use any excuse to avoid those last few hours of work.

I don’t count blogging, although it is dangerously addictive. Some of my avoidance tactics have been fairly constructive such as: researching for the sequel; a little writing of the sequel; house work, mowing the lawn etc.

But most of them have been a sheer waste of time, like watching TV including: Aussie Rules Football (I don’t even barrack for a team) or Netball (ditto).

In short I have been procrastinating.

I thought I would share one of my procrastinations.
In a supreme effort to waste time I have designed a cover for my novel.

Mind you I haven’t the foggiest notion of why I think I need to design a cover.

Here are a few of the reasons I don’t need a cover:
- I haven’t got an agent yet, let alone a publisher.
- When I finally get a publisher they are not likely to be at all interested in my design.
- My artistic tendencies are in writing not graphic design.
- I don’t think I am likely to self publish.

But reason be damned, I was doing one anyway.
The creation of this piece has been a supreme effort of procrastination. Initially, a rough idea for the cover popped into my head: I thought it should feature a vivid blue eye because one of my leading characters features an impressive pair of peepers; then the working title is Veiled in Shadows so the obvious thing was a veiled face with a blue eye.

So armed with this nugget I went searching through stock photos.
I eventually found this image and bought a $5 limited licence.
I cropped it a bit and added some text and had a first draft, so to speak.
While this said “veiled” alright it kind of didn’t quite work for me.
So I had to add something but what?

Then quite by chance I happened to walk past a little militaria shop in Melbourne. In the window I saw among other things some Nazi documents.
I bought this one for $45 (as an aside is anyone’s German good enough for a translation? I have a minute amount of German and much of the officialese in this goes right over my head)

So after a fair bit of scanning and learning how to drive a photo editor to (do more than crop), coupled with a lot of hair tearing (my procrastination can be carried to absurd levels) I ended up with this.
To which I have added a spine and a back cover. The blurb probably deserves an apology; I really struggle at distilling 120,000 words and multiple sub-plots to half a page of text and at the same time trying to make it catchy. I hope I haven’t made the work sound trashy, I don’t think it is.

Now I have to go because I have procrastinated long enough.

Wildlife and Warrnambool

Well we pulled in to Warrnambool a couple of hours before sunset. The first thing we did was head up to Logan’s Beach to see what sort of show the whales were putting on.
That sounds casual doesn’t it? In our limited experience it really is that easy to see whales at Warrnambool. What is special here is that while Southern Right Whales come to many places all along the South Western Coast of Victoria to calve, there is a group of females who consistently return to Warrnambool every year.

On this afternoon there were a number of whales fairly close inshore. One calf in particular was especially frisky and put on a good show.He/she was breaching half way out of the water and splashing back down on his/her back.
From Logan’s Beach we went into town and checked into our hotel. Then as the sun began to set I went for a stroll to see what the evening light would reveal. The war memorial gardens in Warrnambool are high and look out over the lagoon, foreshore and harbour. I thought this photo was worth posting because it captures the evening light beautifully.
Then I spotted this little fellow.
A New Holland Honeyeater.

Named for the old Dutch name for Australia, they have the odd distinction of being the first Australian bird to be scientifically described. They are quite common, but are a bit hard to photograph because they are very active.
He was flitting all over the place, but with a little patience I got this rather nice shot.
I am not sure what the flower is, a Hebe maybe?

The following morning we headed back east along the Great Ocean Road, turning off to look at Childers Cove which we did not see last time we came this way.
The country here is covered with depressions, I suspect caused by small sinkholes in the underlying limestone.
Many of them fill with rainwater run-off to make little ponds. On this one a black swan was nesting. They collect vegetation to build a platform in the water, where they lay their eggs.

Initially not being very photogenic it popped its head up for a look after I made a bit of noise.

We came down to Childers Cove, which like so much of this coast, is worth a photo or two.
In this second photo there are a couple of Australian Shelducks.
I’ve blown them up for you here.Shelducks are quite large, about halfway between most other duck species and geese in size. Unusually for ducks these guys usually nest in holes in banks and cliffs.

Next: I get nearly as boring as Uncle Harry

Call Us Boring

Call us boring, but Deb and I seem to have developed a minor obsession with the Western Districts of Victoria, particularly with the Great Ocean Road.

Our excuse this time was that we liked it so much we should show our girls. So with two of our three sprogs in tow (number two daughter was away with her boyfriend), we set off after I finished the breakfast shift at work on Saturday.

The first hour of the outbound trip is quite boring, the free-way from Melbourne to Geelong, the only interesting thing on this stretch is the Westgate Bridge over the Yarra River. The Yarra isn’t a huge river but it is flat country here and the bridge has to be high to allow ships to get through into the Docklands.

Past the end of the freeway we turn off the main roads and are soon driving along typical Aussie country roads.Not at all typical of Oz are the dry-stone walls that line many of the roads in this region.Land in most areas in the early days was not valuable enough to justify the labour involved in clearing stone from the paddocks and building stone walls. I suspect a few things were at play here to make the effort worthwhile: this area has very rich volcanic soils that would give a return; Victoria grew very quickly with the 1850s gold rushes which meant labour became available; and a lot of the workforce coming off the goldfields probably came from rural areas in Europe and had the skills to build walls like these.

We took a slightly different route this time stopping for lunch in Camperdown instead of bypassing it. In the middle of the main street is an amazing clock-tower totally out of place in the Aussie Bush. Camperdown is a small place of about 3500 people, this clock tower looks like it has been ripped out of some English town and plonked down as an after thought.I find this piece of architecture a little disturbing. In its own little way this monument seems as grandiose as Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria.

Much more to my taste is the bluestone post office.
Driving west from Camperdown, and just out of town I happened to glance to the left and said “That’s got to be a crater-lake!”
I had mentioned vaguely to Deb a few days before that I knew there were some crater-lakes somewhere in Western Victoria, and we should try to find out where they were to visit them sometime. And there one was staring back at me.

I had seen the northern most of two massive craters just outside Camperdown.
The first is Lake Gnotuk.
The second is Lake Bullen-Merri
This image taken from Google Maps shows the sheer scale of the lakes.The surprising thing to me is there were no tourist oriented signs trumpeting the lakes existence that we saw in Camperdown. Surely a marketing oversight?

From the lakes we pushed on west, pausing briefly to take a shot to demonstrate how green the western district is at the moment. This colour is very alien to most of Australia most of the time.
Next: Wildlife at Warrnambool

A Few Thoughts

Deb and I stayed closer to home last weekend. We went out to Warburton a mere hour away.

I took a few photos down the main street.

Now these are not great photos, it was rotten weather, I was not thinking about composition and I quite simply snapped away.

They are nothing like the sort of picture Uncle Harry would want to show on one of his infamous slide nights.

“Wadda ya mean infamous?”

Oh go back to sleep!

The photos are nothing special

But then I had a closer look.

Warburton is in the upper Yarra Valley, with high mountains all around.

The mountain in the background is called Mount Little Joe, and it is as close to the town as it looks. Mount Donna Buang lies just to the north.

In short Warburton is surrounded by bush.

If you look closely at the second photo - I’ve enlarged a section for you here.You can see protruding from the forest canopy, up on the ridge line, the skeletons of many dead trees.

These are the remains of Mountain Ash trees that were killed by the heat of bushfires in the “Ash Wednesday Fires” in 1983 as the flames raced up Mount Little Joe.

By good fortune and a favourable wind Warburton was spared.

This past summer the fires of “Black Saturday” came to within five miles before the wind eased. Over the next few weeks fires approached Warburton from three sides to within a few miles.

Fortunately the weather conditions of “Black Saturday” did not return and fire crews were able to contain the fires using fire breaks and by conducting back-burning until they burnt out.

This sunset photo was taken during this period near Warburton.

What appears to be cloud is actually smoke from burning bushland.

Tuesday was the first day of spring and Victoria has been experiencing drought conditions for eleven years. In spite of a little rain during winter, the bush is tinder dry.

I look at charming little places like Warburton, and remember Marysville and Kinglake where dozens died last summer, and quite frankly I am anxious about what the warmer weather will bring.

“Stop whinging you useless bastard. We’re Aussies we’ll deal with it. Now I’m going to shoot through, probably head down the pub. You comin’?”

That’s my Uncle Harry, a bit rough, but not a bad old bugger.

And now, as Monty Python were so fond of saying, for something completely different.

Above are both sides of a promotional card I picked up while in Warburton on the weekend.

Apparently Tuesday was also “Equal Pay Day” designed to highlight pay disparity between men and women.

Oz is a great place, but it seems even after decades of supposed equality, there are very basic things we still just can’t get right.

“Fair crack of the whip, there you go again. Wadda ya want, that they make you an honorary feminist or something? You’re probably just pissed that your missus earns more than you do. ”

Uncle Harry? I thought you’d gone to the pub.

“Nah, heading down there now.”

(Just a little note on Australian English. Terms like Bastard and Bugger may be either terms of endearment or abusive. What is important is the context of their use and more critically the tone with which they are delivered. So you might call someone a "bit of a bastard" and have them either hug you or hit you depending on delivery.)