As I slog my way through the Reluctant Mage rewrite, news in that's a worry.

My cousin's facing a pretty serious operation in the next few weeks and for reasons I won't go into, there could be significant complications. So if you lovely folk could spare a moment to send a positive thought out into the ether, that would be greatly appreciated.

AKA "Dear Lord, please help me out." We have three readers right now. We are most comfortable at five readers.

This is one of the things I do as a submissions editor for the Apex Magazine. I read a lot of stories. I can tell that it has helped my own writing immensely. You will also gain the respect and adoration of your peers. :)

---
From Jason:

We are in need of a talented submissions (aka ’slush’) editor.

Job duties include: Reading and responding to a couple dozen short story submissions a week
Knowledge of the type of fiction we prefer is a must. Interested parties with experience will be given priority. This is a voluntary position, though you will receive copious amounts of free books from Apex (and these I consider to be as valuable as gold bullion) as a token of my appreciation.

If you’d like to be considered, send an email to jason@apexbookcompany.com.

http://www.apexbookcompany.com/news/2009/12/apex-magazine-looking-for-a-submissions-editor

Moi and the car are home again, after picking it up from the shop, had lunch with my sister at Burgerville, then over to Haggens to get my sunday paper and a loaf of bread.

The fabulous Yunyu has given us a gift for xmas. Go here to check out the song and don't forget to read the lyrics.

I'll be humming it on my way to my Burleigh Heads signing today.

Brain firing on all cylinders at 5am every morning is getting most annoying. It could at least stay in sync with body. Body prefers 7.30am.

going to pick up the car, they had problems bleeding the excess air out of the brakes, so it took 3 tries...

yeah wheels!

Today on twitter:

• 19:59 Dexter S4 finale. Holy crap. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter and my twitter page.

Today I took dreamer_elyse down to look at the remains of her childhood home. This time we walked through the paddock, and into the back yard, which wasn't even touched, the fire in next door's back yard rand right along the fence line, but didn't cross into the back yard. So tonight's post is about the odd things that the fire was within touching distance of, that weren't even singed. In the front yard, the rose bush she'd been given for her first Holy Communion is vibrantly green. and has buds all over it. Five short steps from the front of the house, where two days prior there had been 30 foot flames. The paddock is completely blackened. It seems even the dust is singed. But the sleepers in the side vegetable garden, that we placed there 12 years ago, when they replaced the old sleepers on the railway line, are still solid. The cubby house my ex had made for the children when Elyse was just four months old didn't even have heat bubbles on the paint. This was only three steps from the inferno that was the neighbour's back yard. In the back shed, there is one timber post that needs replacing, and maybe four joists. This had an open face onto the paddock, and is only corrugated iron and wooden tree trunks we built eleven years ago. The slide Santa brought the kids in the early 90s, stored in the back laneway, and right up against the fence where the neighbours behind us lost their very large shed, is not even the slightest bit warped. The swing my favourite Uncle built is entirely intact. And on top of everything else, the insurance have very quickly assured my ex they will be replacing the house, to the specifications that were already there, but if any no longer met current building codes, they'd upgrade that at their cost.

He was disappointed it only had 12 verses: ( The rest... )

So Grants Pass made the front cover of the Daily Courier. And I can cheer for me since I made the cover....:::cheers::: But Kudos go to the editors, the lovely and adorable amandapillar and her cohort Jennifer Brozek.

There's also a mention of Nathan Fillion on the cover so hell, we share space. Life is goooooood. :::Grins::::

It will also be available on Amazon soon.... so cheers!

PDF behind Link :::grins:::.

I'm scatterbrained today. This post is going to go in all sorts of directions. I thought you might want to be warned.

Tessa is doing a series of ten minute reviews before she heads off into Patagonia. She has reviewed Illuminations. If I had to choose an effect I wanted to have on a reader, with that book, this would be it.

What's interesting* is how far removed her view of Illuminations is from my view of her writing. She takes no hostages in her fiction. The word that best describes it is 'kick-ass.' If you want to see how few hostages she takes, you will have to wait until Baggage is released, next year. Or you could read her Halo piece, co-written with Jeff VanderMeer. I need to get hold of that. Tessa Kum and Jeff VanderMeer, together - it's got to be special. It can't be anything but.

Canberra a few years ago had a little group of writers to watch. Kaaron Warren was one of them, and has just reached the international gaze. Tessa is another. There are more, too, writing wonders, quietly. How a tiny city can produce so many writers who are so very special is a happy mystery.

Most Canberra spec fic writers know each other. There's no getting round that. Tessa no longer lives in Canberra, but she's still a friend. But if Tessa hadn't liked my writing, she would tell me, privately. She's not the sort of person who writes nice things because she knows someone. That's why this review means so much. And instead of telling me "I read your book", she has written that lovely review, out of the blue. A difficult day suddenly glows (and not from those idiot bushfires, for a change).

Illuminations didn't get many reviews when it came out. Small press, new writer, off-beat work. It was reviewed in the oddest of places (my favourite will always be the major scholarly Arthurian journal). Most people I know bought it to support me or my publisher or small press. They read it later and discover they liked it for itself. This is why I am so dead-set against sales practises that assume a book has to prove itself within six months. Some books can and some books are going to grow into their audience. Or their audience is going to grow into them.

I don't have any clever ending today. I just want to stop and think for a bit.

*Yep, that word again

PS I just reread what I wrote. I'm not saying I'm one of the special writers. I'm the person who watches them emerge. Every special writer needs someone to celebrate when they are finally seen by the bigger world. If I were a different person, I would write their biographies, but it's far more likely, in this universe, that I feed them chocolate.

As is customary at this time of the year, the newspaper is full of messages of a reflective nature. Invariably, that includes questions of people's beliefs. Today, there was an article about what percentage of the population believed in various things. You know, the divine, heaven, hell, the devil, miracles, witches, stuff like that. But it took one single item to make me realise how coloured the results of this questionnaire could be because of the way the questions were phrased.

Apparently, 34% of the population believes in UFOs.

Er. Right.

To me, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and it's not something you can disbelieve. I mean, a UFO is something unidentified in the sky spotted by people. It may or may not become identified at a later stage. People have taken pictures of strange phenomena they've seen. They could be meteors, satellites re-entering the atmosphere, weather balloons, lightning strikes, the result of air turbulence or whatever, as long as no one has identified what cause the phenomenon, it's a UFO.

I'm guessing they meant to ask: do you believe in UFOs carrying intelligent life from outer space?

Maybe they should have asked whether people believe in other intelligent life in the universe, because 'Do you believe in UFOs?' is NOT a question without further elaboration.

Similarly, one could believe that there are people calling themselves witches without believing said witches can perform magic. So the question 'Do you believe in witches?' should have been: do you believe there is magic?

And what about miracles? Do they mean the word 'miracle' to mean a miracle caused by divine intervention, or a freak stroke of luck?

And then I started thinking about all the other things people could believe or disbelieve, and figured the results of this supposed research were highly rubbery.

There was some other interesting stuff, though.
Apparently 24% of people believe their version of the holy text (any religion) is the literal truth.
About 30% of people do not believe in a god, but 11% of those define themselves as Christians anyway (now there's an interesting dilemma)

... it's the end of a decade, it's the end of the first decade of a brand-new century. And now that I look back over it - look back THAT far over it - the decade that was takes my breath away. I've been on a rollercoaster ride, and then some.

In 2000, I got married. That was huge, and it was quite a note to begin the decade and the century and the new millennium on. But that wasn't the end of it - I moved yet again to a different country and a different continent to do this thing.

In 2001 and 2002, my fat fantasy duology (the "Changer of Days" books) was published in New Zealand. During 2002, I started writing a brand new book - the book that would become "The Secrets of Jin Shei". Mid-2002, I signed with a New York agent, who sold that book (over the next five to six years) into more than a dozen languages worldwide. She also sold my second novel in the Jin Shei world, also in multiple languages, as well as a YA trilogy - since 2001 I've literally had a book a year, often more than one if you count the concurrent foreign editions, coming out almost like clockwork. To give you a run-down -

2001/2002: NZ/Aus editions of "Changer of Days" (non-agented)
2003: signed with agent
2004: USA edition of "Secrets of Jin Shei", hardcover; book also sold in Italy, Holland, Germany, Lithuania. Also, in this year, the USA editions of the "Changer of Days" books are released by Harper COllins Eos.
2005: USA PB edition of "Secrets of Jin Shei", plus several foreign edition - Czech, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese (in Portuguese and Brazilian editions), Turkish, Hebrew
2006; "Embers of heaven" comes out in the UK and Australia and then, over the next couple of years, in Dutch, Lithuanian, Spanish, Portuguese
2007: Worldweavers 1: Gift of the Unmage comes out in Hardcover
2008: Worldweavers 1 out in PB; Worldweavers #2: Spellspam comes out in HC. "Secrets of Jin Shei" sold into a Russian edition.
2009: Worldweavers 2 out in PB; Worldweavers #3: Cybermage out in HC. "Embers of Heaven" translated and published in my own mother tongue, Serbian, in the land of my birth - letting my non-English-speaking relatives read a novel of mine for the first time.

That's a busy couple of years. Looking back over it, a little overwhelming, too. I'm sure I've missed a language somewhere. My head is still spinning from it all.

In 2008 and 2009, I've written two whole new novels - and THEY start on their journeys next year, kicking off the next decade. Wish me luck.

But that wasn't all.

When I moved to the States and got married, it was to join my new husband in FLorida, where he was living at the time. He'd already hated it for far longer than he cared to admit; it took me less than two years to start pleading for a move. So we did move, lock stock and barrel, in February 2003 - all the way to the Pacific Northwest.

In June of that year, rdeck had the stroke from which he has been recovering slowly ever since. For a while, it was bad - but we've made do and even conquered, and he's even been on an extended overseas trip-combined-with-a-Worldcon in 2005.

As for myself, in this period I have attended and been part of the programming at five Worldcons, three (or is it four?) World Fantasy Conventions, and any number of lesser regional cons - and have chalked up my very first Guest of Honor appearance at one, Radcon, in February of this year.

We're looking forward to our ninth Christmas together in a couple of days, and getting a full decade of marriage under our belts next July.

It's been a helluva ten years.

Bring on the next decade.

Even though Grants Pass wasn't the focal point of the Grants Pass Daily Courier's front page article, there is a rather lovely picture of the anthology on display. Take a lookee here.

they just called about the car, its the rear brakes that failed, so of course, they got the parts for the front brakes... *sigh* ... tomorrow, first thing. yeah.

Going to pick the sister creature up from work since I have her car, we going to hit Borders since we got coupons, then probably Cypress for dinner.

http://www.jenniferfallon.com.au/blog/index.cfm/2009/12/19/Support-your-local-poet

Time for a bit of karmic restitution, me thinks, and a plug for a talented young writer.
Ashley Capes, whom I've mentored as a fantasy writer for a number of years now, has just had a book of poetry published (by a real publisher with royalties and ...

I’m off to my Pacific Fair signing today. Would love to catch up with any Gold Coast readers.

Other than that, it’s wrapping presents, buying food, all the usual. I’m compiling my year’s big thank-you list which I will post next week.

Anyone who tells you that writing is a totally solitary occupation is not being entirely accurate – most writers don’t function without a legion of support staff: family, trusted readers, stalwart fans and then there are the professionals; editors, publishers, sales people, marketing etc etc. AND THEN there are the random people that happen to pick the day you need it most, to email you to say how much they liked your book, or your characters. They are the ones that save you from yourself; from taking you bat and ball and going home. Them, and all the others who have invested in your creativity.

Writing is a team game, in my mind.

Friday's fire was pushed by a horrendous wind storm. We got the tail end of it up here. and it ripped half the roof off our shed, and flattened the side fence at the front, but it decimated the future son-in-law's work, and many other places both sides of the border. When my old house caught fire, it went so quickly they didn't have time to get the gas bottles disconnected and away, so they backed over the neighbours fence to direct water on to the bottles and thankfully prevented them exploding. Most of those fighting the fire were local volunteers. They give up their spare time to train, and keep the trucks ready to go. They attend car accidents, for clean-up, see to local burn offs, making sure they don't escape, Recently the volunteer fire fighters have gotten some bad press, with the pyromaniac arsonists from last year having their day in court. But for every one of that type, there are thousands of the type in these pictures; ordinary farmers, factory workers, parents, teenagers, council workers, storekeepers & publicans. The local community, who put their own lives at risk to make sure everyone is safe, and do their damndest to save everyone's homes. In a touch of irony, the neighbour's back yard, shedding and back verandah burnt, but the house is livable. but over the fence: the house, built in the 1880s, and the the old garage, are no more than a pile burnt and warped metal sheets, the fire fighters were still dousing hot spots when I was there. The laundry block was gutted, but the pool, back shed and the cubby house my ex built for our kids is completely untouched.

They have had the car now for 2 hours and havent called me yet, I dont think they have even gotten to look at it.. so much for "be here at 8" ...

I am thinking about getting myself a bread machine since I am having so many issues with the ingrediants anymore, now, if it just came with an automatic slicer....