Well I spent two days in Newdegate for the field days…and boy was it cold. I was lucky to be invited to attend as this year they had set up a Women in Agriculture tent. It was a brilliant idea and I got to meet so many wonerful people. Victoria Brown was one of them. www.victoriabrownpoet.com.au A wonderful lady and a born entertainer. I had the pleasure of listening to her perform a few poems and my favourite was The Local Elders Man. She hails from Esperance way, a friend of Fleur’s. Even though Fleur couldn’t make it, Esperance was represented well.
We also got to hear from the Rural Woman of the Year, Sue Middleton. Some great topics were discussed! Also the tent had poems, short stories and photo’s of women in agriculture. A large map sat on a table for everyone to pin a flag on where they had come from…very interesting.
In our special tent was a chef who was cooking some marvoulous things, the aroma certainly set my tummy off. Wednesday arvo we had a local Hyden farmer cook some steaks to go with the beer tasting. My husband brought the kids over and they got their faces painted, show bags, special balloons and their fair share of fun. Your wallet is sooo much lighter when you leave. I finally managed to dodge the rain to get my bacon spud from the van and a bag full of donughts. Yep, I was in heaven lol.
Well I’m at that stage where the manuscript is going through the final edits and the book cover is being designed. Oh how I wish I could be there to watch them do it. This picture is the first concept for The Family Farm, which we all didn’t think the model suited. So they went back and found Danielle, who is now on the cover of The Family Farm, and is so much more suited to be Izzy. Her hair wasn’t the perfect colour to the character in the book, but she had the spunk we were after.
I have just had an email with some pictures of a model for the next book…Heart of Gold (I think is the name we are going with). I was so excited to be included and gave my opinions! I’m not too fussed, as long as the overall end product is appealing. For example, I was over the moon with the cover of The Family Farm. After all it had my name all over it…what’s not to like!! I loved the wheat on the front too. So hopefully for the second book we will have a great shearing picture of some sort with the model in the shearing clothes I sent over.
If anyone has any questions or want to know more about this, please feel free to email me.
I feel very lucky to have Amanda Hampson guest blog for my website…my very first guest too. Huge thanks! Amanda has been writing professionally for more than 20 years she has had numerous articles and two non-fiction books published along with two novels published by Penguin… and we share the same publisher too. I only found this out by reading the acknowledgements in one of her books ‘Two for the Road’. I love reading the acknowledgements, as it’s an insight into the author. Amanda also wrote ‘The Olive Sisters’ which is on my TBR pile. She is doing some exciting work with this book and I can’t wait to sink my eyes into it.
You can subscribe to her newsletter at The Write Workshops. I hope you enjoy her blog as much as I did…the whole option for a movie part is very interesting and something I guess some authors only dream about. (That’s me…dreaming.)
Warm welcome to Amanda…
I’ve had an interesting journey since my first novel ‘The Olive Sisters’ was published in 2004, it was an immediate hit and every couple of weeks I’d get a letter from Penguin to say they were reprinting – that was fun. I ploughed into my next novel ‘Two for the Road’ and found it a way more enjoyable experience simply because I had more confidence that readers were enjoying my work.
While that was underway I was contacted by a movie producer from the US who wanted to take an option on ‘The Olive Sisters’ and, to cut an extremely long story short, I have ended up writing the screenplay adaptation. The whole process has taken three years and I’m now doing the 15th rewrite! The Hollywood screenplay has to meet a very specific formula and it has taken me all this time (including going to LA to do a screenwriting course) to educate myself in this particular genre.
When people hear my story they invariably say how exciting it must be. The idea is exciting but the reality is really very hard work. Plus screenplay is a director’s medium and the process is collaborative so you don’t have the autonomy you have in a novel. To put my new-found skills to good use I have also written another screenplay called ‘Last Days of the Empire Hotel’ which is set in a boarding-house in London in 1966. My next project will be to write the novel of this story – can’t wait to start.
You might be imagining that, having had that level of success, I can lounge about connecting with my creative side. Not so – I’m a single parent with two teens and all the same pressures you have; time and money! I make my living through freelance corporate writing and running writing workshops and work all hours to make ends meet. The key to my productivity is habit and routine.
Routine is the creative person’s best friend – without it you’ll always be frustrated that so many relatively worthless things eat up your time. My routine involves dropping my son at the bus at 7am and then driving to ’my office’ and writing for an hour or two – as much as I can manage. Everyday I get to do something I love and gradually, it moves forward.
Did I mention my office is my car? But check out the view.
If you would like your book to be signed, then please email me with your name and address and I will send you a signed bookplate to stick inside your book.
Make sure to include whom you would like it made out, too. Then after a week (or more….mail is slow from the bush) is should arrive. You can find my email address on the right side of the website.
Here is book two. Still unnamed, but I’ve been calling it Clean Cut for want of a better name. I have just finished putting all these changes onto the computer! Easier said than done. But it’s a huge weight off my mind now its done. I then had a house cleaning frenzy…believe me it was well overdue!!
I went off to Lake Grace on Friday to do a talk for the Volunteers at the Visitors Centre. Beautiful spot there, if you’re ever in Lake Grace you must drop in and have a look around! Next week I will be off to Newdegate to catch up with the local bookclubs at the library for a chat. Not looking forward to the night time driving along the back gravel roads, will have to take the ute and watch for roo’s.
Next on my list of things to do is collect pictures on shearing for the website and start making the book trailer! (Hopefully we will pick a name for the book soon lol)
Congrats to the winners of our Treasure Hunt Giveaway.
Here’s the announcement from Bron Parry’s website:
‘So, looking up the list of entrants, the 22nd entrant, and the winner of a signed book from each of the four authors involved is:
A man entering as a surprise for his wife, so I won’t put the name here, but Mr Thoughtful, you’ll be getting an email very soon! (And isn’t it great that the random number generator genuinely and randomly picked you!)
And our first runner up is entrant number 2: Hannah McDonald. Hannah, you’ve won your choice of one book from the selection of four.
Our second runner-up – who wins their choice of book from the remaining three books, is entrant number 4: Fiona De Lai.
Hannah and Fiona, you’ll be receiving an email soon. Thank you to everyone for entering, and congratulations to Mr Thoughtful, Hannah and Fiona!’
Another great night out with the girls at bookclub.
This months book was The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. We picked this book because it had won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and ABIA book of the year.It is about the outcome after an adult slaps a nearly four year old at a BBQ.
So we thought we were on a winner right?….wrong. Our collected out come…crude! No one liked it, and quite a few never finished it. We couldn’t believe it won all these awards when we thought it was over the top in foul language, sex, drugs etc (We did wonder that maybe we were all a bit sheltered)
But still it should come with a warning, don’t let your kids read it. I don’t see why a book needs to be so vulgar but maybe thats what the writer wanted, and maybe the world is like that in some places but out here, beyond the black stump, it isn’t and we do try to protect our family from such things. (I like my blasé life in my little bubble LOL)
Anyway it caused a lot of discussion (usually it’s a quick talk on a book and then catching up with each other). I love going to bookclub, we have a great group, although a few were missing last night and sometimes it’s the only time we have to catch up.
If anyone is thinking about joining one, you should, they are great, even if you’re not much of a reader. It’s made me read books I never would have picked up and you find some surprises.
For those of you wondering what the ‘tree’ looks like, that I talk about or wrote about in The Family Farm, here is a picture.
I did this up for a special friend leaving the district and I wanted her to take something of Pingaring with her. Everything in this photo frame came from the ‘tree’, the bark; bottle tops, stubby holder, gumleaves and even the dirt and rocks, and a picture of her send off night. It mightn’t look like much but it’s still a magical place.
If you’re near Kulin on Thursday 11th March from 1pm to 7pm, come to the Kulin Freebairn Recreation Centre for the Womens Expo and see whats on offer. Plenty of guest speakers (me included) and stalls galore. Bring your mum and your girlfriends!
Tickets available at the Rec Centre on 9880 1000.
I wanted to share these couple of cartoons from the Connelly Cartoons book I have. Brett Connelly has done a great job drawing moments from the bush and these two I particularly like.
I can tell you how weird it is to be harvesting in the dry heat only for it to begin raining to the point headers are getting bogged. Its a real scratch your head moment.
And the other cartoon is at the sampling hut, which I write about in The Family Farm. Now days they use automatic spears to get the sample but when I was a sampler, at the age of 17, I used to have to manually spear a truck, which meant climbing into the back trailer into the grain. At the start of the year you can bet many farmers have a bit of trouble getting a sample through because of high moisture, due to green grains or the other time will be after rain and the grain is wet.
Hope you get a laugh.
