Many successes

My KSP buddy Sonia Helbig has won second prize in the fourth quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest. Huge congrats to Sonia. Another friend, Ian McHugh, has also won a prize in the third quarter of the same contest. Ian used to be a member of KSP, but now lives in Canberra. Great to see people's hard work start to pay off. Best wishes and many more successes to you both.

I'm also feeling chuffed as UWA has offered me a scholarship to do an MA in Creative Writing, which I'll most likely upgrade to a PhD at the end of 2008. All this means, of course, is that now I absolutely must finish my novel, so I'd better get writing.

Aurealis Award Nominations 2008

Aurealis Award Nominations 2008 have been announced over at the award website here. Big congratulations to all nominees. I've read and enjoyed a few of the works listed so it's good to see these people getting recognition.

The Novel Takes Over

Dear Blog,

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while. I've been working on my novel and now I have 10,000 words. That can only be a good thing. 90,000+ to go,

Will finish blogging Denmark Bibbulmum when I need time out.

Sir George the baby Brushtailed Phascogale

We found Sir George huddled up on the decking at the back of the house we were staying in. At first we thought he was a marsupial mouse (his body was about 5 cm long), maybe injured because he made no attempt to run away from us. Then we realised he was actually a very young baby of something much larger, maybe a possum: eyes closed, nuzzling blindly, barely able to crawl. Every now and then he'd make a chirping noise and something on the roof would chirp back. We decided to leave him alone in case his mother returned. But she didn't. The next morning we found him curled up in the BBQ cover we'd left on the ground, still chirping, still nuzzling. So we made him a little nest out of a Jatz box and tissues, hoping that his mother would come back while we were out walking. But she didn't. The next morning he was still in the box, still chirping and nuzzling, no sign of scat or mother, so we took him to the ranger. The ranger was quite pleased to receive him. "They're not common around here," he said. He then took it to a carer who would look after it until it was old enough to be set free.

Good luck Sir George.

Here's some info about Brush-tailed Phascogales

Bibbulmun Track: Light's Beach to William Bay Campsite

2nd October:

4.5 km (9km return)

We chose this walk because it promised views and not too many hills. The trouble was, the views were too good, the wildflowers too prolific. We kept stopping to just stand and look and take photos. Here we are on the first leg.



I knew walking around Denmark was going to be good, but I hadn't realised it was going to be this good. The track led us over a beach where we had to leap over a creek mouth. "What do we do if the tide comes in?" B asks. "Wade," we say. I didn't mind if I got my shoes wet, but as it turned out, they really are waterproof.



Sometimes we walked through trees:



And sometimes through sand. Some of us liked to stop for a close up look at the wildlife:



Some of us needed help up the hills:



We all liked sitting on rocks to admire the views:



More views:

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.

Online Alien Stories

No bushwalking today as we all baulked at getting wet. Though I don't mind the rain as I have a new rain jacket, guaranteed waterproof. But no one else was keen and, well, reading and writing is just as good.

Instead I messed around reading online fiction and was quite impressed with the stories I read on Strange Horizons. I like stories about aliens and thought two stories by a writer from Nova Scotia, Joanne Merriam, were excellent. Joanne is also a poet and some of her poems are up at her website and worth checking out. Two stories that I especially liked were Little Ambushes (about an alien who is visiting Earth in order to learn the basics of human art) and Harvest (an alien abduction story). Both are quite short and economical, a pleasure to read, and show a whole lot more than the sum of their parts.

I also liked The Girl From Another World by Leah Bobet which is more about alienation, but very nicely done.

Walking The Burbs

The suburbs are weird to walk in during the day. Imagine if suddenly all the cars disappeared. The streets would be deserted.

Three or four times a week I like to walk about 800 metres down to the local shops and pick up a few extra groceries to get me through till I’m desperate enough to drag myself to the generic supermarket. And the crazy thing is, you can walk all the way there and all the way back and not pass another walker. There’s plenty of cars going past and who knows where they’ve come from. Total strangers all of them. As are the owners of most of the houses I see. I’ve walked past them a thousand times and have no idea who lives in them. The doors are locked, windows opaqued with blinds or curtains. There’s room in the driveways for two or three cars. No kids playing outside, but there’s signs of them in the front yards with playground equipment and discarded toys. Crazy, though, I’m having much more luck getting to know which houses own cats. There’s the calico one that’s always on the veranda two blocks away. And a couple of houses after that, there’s a black one that likes to sit on the steps and blink at you as you pass. The dogs aren’t all that friendly, yapping as if I’m out to steal something. Last week I saw more people walking the Bibbulmun track than I see walking during the daytime in the burbs.

Six o’clock in the morning is a different story. The footpaths are so full of the usual crowd of joggers and walkers it’s like you’re walking on a conveyer belt, the same faces passing you everyday. I have no idea who they are though. We can’t stop and get to know each other because we’re all too busy keeping fit.

It’s the cars I blame for this. I wish we didn’t need them so much.

2007 KSP Science Fiction & Fantasy Award

Huge congratulations to my KSP buddies Helen Venn and Sonia Helbig for their successes in this year's KSP award, with Helen taking First Prize and a Highly Commended and Sonia a Commended. List of winners as posted at Helen's blog:

Shire of Mundaring National Young Writers' Awards

1st place Melissa Wellam (ACT) The Succubus
2nd place Monica Revy (WA) The Day of Reckoning

Commended
Stephanie Wong (WA) Unfolding Plots and Story Lines
(Gingerbread)

Open Section

1st place Helen Venn (WA) The Healing
2nd place Susan Wardle (NSW) The Chance

Highly Commended
Helen Venn (WA) Surrogate

Commended
B.J. Thomason Uptoun Wells
Sonia Helbig (WA) Trillion Dollar Baby
M. LeGuier (WA) Deathwatch
Monica Carroll (ACT) Dog Luck

Congratulations to everyone. I look forward to seeing your stories in print.

Bibbulmun Track: Hills Forest Discovery Centre to South Ledge (Return Trip)

Hills Forest to South Ledge: 4.25km (8.5km return)

Okay, so we’d planned to do 16km all up, but B forgot his raincoat and … well, as expected, it rained (excuses excuses :)

Today was the official beginning of our end to end walk of the Bibbulmun track, a long-distance walking track that is almost 1000km long and stretches from the hills town of Kalamunda to the southern town of Albany. Though, seeing as we only have one car, we should probably be calling it our *end to end to end* walk because, until we can work out a better system (ie, find a second car) most of our walks are going to be return trips. Our aim is to try to walk at least once every two weeks and we’re in no hurry to finish, so it may take us anything up to twenty years before we can call ourselves end to enders. Though if we’re brave enough, things could speed up a bit next year if we decide to do some two or three day walks, overnighting at shelters.

We joined the trail at the Hills Forest Discovery Centre and a short walk through a nice thick growth of jarrah, marri & wandoo trees to the Weir View Lookout. I’d forgotten how pretty the iron-stained dirt looked in winter, still damp from recent rain and edged with lush growth (well, lush by Australian standards, anyway). The air smelled of wattle and eucalyptus. Black cockatoos winged overhead and a couple of rabbits darted across the trail in front of us, so quick I was convinced that their fur was green, instead of brown. It was nice to see the dam looked nearly full – I’ve never seen so much water in it.

The trail continued to wind downhill, towards Mundaring Weir. Up here, the signs of civilization are never far away. Cars, motorbikes on the road nearby. Aeroplanes that may or may not be thunder. For a short while, we followed the water pipes that carry water to Kalgoorlie and stopped long enough to put our ears against them to find out if you can actually hear the water flowing through. You can. Or maybe it was the pumps we heard. Then past the Mundaring Hotel where a group of bikers lounged under the veranda, a couple of shiny BMWs and a Triumph parked out front. Brought back memories, but no, I prefer to be on foot these days. My new boots feel like they’re custom made and I want to walk all day.

After crossing the Mundaring Weir we headed uphill again towards South Ledge and the Golden View Lookout, past great views of the valley. Wildflowers are emerging already – wattle, little purple orchids (?Purple flags), lots of yellow buttercupy things (darn, I need to get myself a wildflower book). It started raining just as we reached the lookout. The Mundaring Weir is about one and half kilometres back the way we came and 120 metres below, but the view over it is worth walking to.

Then we had to turn around. “If it stops raining when we get back to the car, we can do a few kilometres towards Ball Creek Campsite,” they told me. But we didn’t. We went to the Lavender Tea house instead and ate Lavender Scones and Lavender Cheesecake and drank tea and hot chocolate and made plans to walk again next week, hopefully a tad further.

Let The Blogging Begin ... Again

Okay, so blogging's addictive.