My Top Three

Satima has been blogging about her all time favourite books, so I thought I'd join in for fun.

My favourite sf book would have to be Jules Verne's Journey To the Centre of the Earth because this is the first sf book I read at around the age of ten. I loved it then because, wow, what an adventure! I wanted to take up caving just to feel what it would be like and fifteen years later I did, getting myself into water-filled sink holes down at Mt Gambier as well as dry caves that had me squeezing through underground tunnels for hours. And yes I did find a deep cave with a giant lake in it, but no dinosaurs. One of the things I really like about Journey to the Centre of the Earth is that, at the time of writing, some of the science was wrong. Neptunism was already discredited. Even so, the story has endured because it's a good story.

Another favourite would have to be Jeanette Winterson's The Passion. Yep it's about passion and a woman from Venice with webbed feet who cross dresses and works in a casino and falls in love and cooks for Napoleon. Beautiful imagery and a touch of history and fantasy. It's a book I read every couple of years because it's such wonderful writing.

And as for the classics, well, I just can't make up my mind over those: Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy. Too hard to choose. So maybe, Twelfth Night, Great Expectations and Tess of the D'Urbervilles or maybe Far from the Madding Crowd.

Can't choose. Sorry.

A story finished

It feels good to finish a story. This latest one I've been working on for nearly a year. I write it, put it away for a few weeks, rewrite some, put it away again. This week, after sending it to my writers' group for a crit, I played with it some more and at last it feels finished. And I'm proud of it.

Thanks Helen and Satima for your input. It really really helped. The story is on the first leg of doing it's rounds, so I'm hoping.