How To Neglect a Blog Part Two: Have a book to finish and edit

And that's not perfectly true. Having a book to finish and edit has been a major reason for the sheer neglect of this blog in recent weeks, but not not the only one. Desperately needing to get out of the house and breathe fresh air, enjoy sunshine, birds, flowers ... all of this was at least as, uh, inspirational when it came to setting blogging onto the back burner.

The good news is that Dark Is the Valley is actually done, and I'm currently performing the final line edits. Anything that changes in the book from here on will be at the behest of a publisher, and after I've signed a contract -- which I realize is an enormous thing to say, given that the world is still unraveling with the pandemic, a situation which is unlikely to change anytime soon.

How will the pandemic affect publishing? I honestly have no idea, but I suspect the business all begins at grassroots, with readers, many of whom will be saving their money for leaner times ahead. Will they be buying books in great numbers? Possibly not -- and not when you can read a friend's copy, borrow it from the library, or pick up good books for $2 at the Op Shop. What will this do to the publishing industry? I suspect publishers won't be eager to take major chances on unknown writers, while literary agents will be charged with the gate-keeper's role, made responsible for holding the wannabe professional writers out of the picture. I understand this; I see how it works, and why this must be so.

But dang, it's a bitter pill to swallow. If I were twenty years younger, and had near-limitless time to spend just waiting for the global economy to shore itself back up and return to normal, it wouldn't be so difficult to deal with that's happened, and what's going to happen in the world. 

Back in 2008, I had a career coming together nicely, and it was sunk without trace by the GFC. It never recovered. Fast forward 12 years, and just as I'm ready to go to market with a number of pretty darned good books (Dark Is the Valley, The Hesperides, The Sea Witch, Petshop Dragons...), suddenly there isn't a market to be addressed. It's as if ... I'm not actually supposed to succeed as a writer: Dame Fortune has something else in store for me. 

That's fine, too, but Dame Fortune is going to have to hurry up with whatever she intends, LOL, because time is no longer on my side. So...

...so I'll do what I can, and write the books; but what happens next is an enormous question mark. In the meantime, South Australia remains covid-free, and people are back at work, traveling within the state, enjoying cafes and restaurants. This state, in and of itself, is a peaceful, safe microcosm, and I'm sure there are places in the world that look upon us with a touch of envy. I remind myself, I have nothing to complain about, and that impossible things happen every day. If I can produce something unusual enough, something with the potential, I might still be able to get out there and be read.

That's my goal, and two things make it iffy. The first is that I'm not as young as I used to be, and success in this business is a long, hard road even if one is. The second is that my healthy is bloody awful. I'm living with far too much pain, which is slowing down the creative process. How are you supposed to concentrate on writing and editing, when you're full of pills, with blurry vision, and you still have a headache? When your spine is shrieking, and your feet don't want to be walked on. Every day is a challenge. So far I've met the challenge, but I also admit to myself, I'm extremely tired. Fatigue is a constant companion, which is another reason this blog has been neglected.

There's only so much energy I have to budget with in a day, and when it's gone, it's gone. I have to prioritize things. Writing and editing would come first if I were on a contract, but since I'm not keeping a clean, tidy, happy house comes first. Then writing and editing. Then keeping myself moving with walks, photography, excursions, all the healthy things that keep you same. Then blogging. If there's any energy and brain cells left.

If I were the praying kind of person, I'd pray to be out of pain, because when one is more or less crippled, one is perilously close to being a passenger. On bad days, this is exactly what I am -- and I've had four consecutive bad days ("passenger days"), which tends to change the way one looks at the world, and the future. If being out of pain is impossible, then I must find some way to deal with pain, transcend pain. This is where we cross over into a realm of magic and miracle. The fact is, though I write fantasy fiction, I've never seen any evidence of magic and miracle actually happening. Yet.

Of course, I'm entirely ready to be convinced otherwise! Dame Fortune -- over to you, darling!

Vacation Week 2020!

For a week when we has to dodge showers and dress for winter, we did an amazing amount. The forecast had been for rain and unseasonable cold, and this didn't tell the half of it ... snow fell in South Australia on Friday, -- it was lucky we'd done our day trip into the Flinders Ranges on Thursday, because the storm which brought the snow was coming in just as we drove south! We might have been lucky once or twice ... in retrospect, if the heavy weather had arrived even 12 hours earlier, we could have been caught out in the wilderness when the "floodways" started to run, unable to get back to civilization! I guess Dave's guardian angel was looking out for us, because we didn't get caught, and we did have a fantastic time...

I wouldn't have believed you could do this in a day ... Flinders Ranges, out and back, between 6:00am and 9:30pm, including a storm?! It had to be a joke. But no -- it turned out to be perfectly doable, and this was Thursday! Previously, we'd stayed in our own neck of the woods, getting as far afield as the Laratinga Wetlands on the other side of Mount Barker, and Mannum (it rained), via Mount Pleasant (so cold, I had to drink hot chocolate to get back to life); and on Saturday -- I traded Dave for Friday: he did his bike ride a day early, and we hit the road again on Saturday instead -- we headed south and stumbled over the Ferries McDonald Conservation Park, where the wildflowers and orchids are in full bloom. That was a tremendous pleasure, but I'll post those photos -- also the Fairy Wren pictures from Laratinga -- another time.

So ... Flinders Ranges in a day! Breakfast at Locheal, with its pink lake, north of Port Wakefield, and then lunch at Quorn, followed by three hours of tarryhooting on wilderness roads where the views are beyond amazing, before we turned for home at 4:00, with a four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us, returning by a different rout ... Willmington, Gladstone, Laura, Clare, Gawler, at which point you connect with the northern expressway and you'll be home in less than an hour. 

The trip had one last amazement in store for us:

As I mentioned before, the weather was due to change, big time, though we hadn't realized quite how violently it would change. In fact, in about twelve hours this storm front would be dumping snow on the Flinders Ranges! We drove right into it, at a time when it was all about torrential trail. The kind of rain where your wipers can barely keep pace. Spectacular -- also a wake-up call, to be a little more careful and plan a bit more assiduously next time! Because we'll definitely be going back; the only questions are when and how! 

How to Neglect a Blog, Part One: have something better to do...

The first thing you need, if you're going to blog assiduously, is plenty of time to devote to it ... and not much else to do. Or, perhaps, nothing better to do with the time. As soon as you get busy, though there's a lot more to blog about, you don't have the time to put into it -- and you lose the urge to sit in front of the computer for hours on end!

Still, I want to keep up with this blog, because if nothing else it's a kind of journal. In ten years I'll be able to touch down here and see what I was doing at this point in my life. 

So ... what have I been doing for the last month and a half, if I haven't been blogging? To begin with -- writing and editing. Dark is the Valley is now finished and edited. All I have to do is lop about 700 words out of the manuscript to bring it down under 150k, to fall into line with publishers' requirements; and this is the work of a few days. Then we can put this one on the shelf and say, "Another one done!" 

This is enough work to bump blogging onto the back burner, even before I mention photography. 

And the truth is, in these last months, since I got my hands on the Lumix (in February), life has been about photography. It's given me a reason to be out and doing, hiking, being active, getting the fresh air and exercise one needs to hang onto sanity, if not vitality. And that's one thing you can't say for sitting behind a computer, working six hours a day! Photography has put the zest back into life...

We've visited many places that lie within "accessible South Australia," and I've had more fun than I'd have believed possible with this tiny little camera. Next week is our "vacation week," Dave booked the time off work months ago. The weather is going to be awful, unfortunately; and even more unfortunately, I've thrown my back out, right on cue. 

I have a full-blown case of lumbago, so how much hiking around I'll be able to do, I don't know. Certainly, the weather won't be conducive to "pitching camp" in the woods all afternoon at Belair; it's going to be cool here, which means cold in the national park; it's going to rain more or less all week, which means dull conditions, not so good for photography; and if you add in the lumbago, right now I don't know what we'll be able to make out of next week! But we'll try. 

The plan had originally been to take off for the Clare Valley for the week, but the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic made us cautious. It would have been a very expensive trip, with accommodation to be booked long in advance, involving a 50% deposit, all of which was forfeit in the event travel restrictions were reimposed. We got burned that way in March and lost a few hundred bucks ... didn't want to run the risk again, so we decided on day trips.

So the next plan was -- orchid hunting at Belair on Monday ... well, not with this spine! Then Cleland on Tuesday ... in the rain?! And so on. And on. We will play it by ear and see what's possible on the day. Right now, I'm nursing a back that feels like it was caught in a car crusher, while the covid-delayed TDF plays out, due to end on Sunday, and I chisel away at the novel to get the length down under one of the major publishers' benchmarks. 

This, and photography, are life at the moment. So -- if I were to turn this blog into a photo blog? Hmm. That's not a bad idea... 

Playing by the rules

Rules are rules ... and the idea is that if everyone plays by them, the pandemic can be controlled to the point where we can have COVID-free communities. It's sensible, yet for over seven months it's also been a vague kind of idea, lurking out there in the shadowed corners one one's mind. Till Thursday.

What a time to come down sick with all the symptoms of 'flu -- with Victoria under a Stage Four lockdown, with a State of Disaster declared there; and, at the same time, South Australia quarantining and isolating over a thousand people, to contain a cluster of our very own. And with anything up from 25% of travelers returning from interstate and overseas showing themselves to be complete idiots who somehow can't understand what the words "GO home, stay there" mean. 

And one of those quarantine jumpers was in Christies Beach, which is altogether too close for comfort. Sooo ... when I felt unwell on Wednesday night I was watching for the symptoms; and sure enough, I woke up feeling weird, with the scratchy throat, the cough, the exhaustion, the headache --

Yep, time to get tested. 

Luckily, our own surgery ("clinic," for family and friends in the US) has a testing station working every afternoon in the car park behind their building, and Dave took me there for a 3:40pm appointment on Thursday. Which of course effectively isolates the whole house, pending getting results. No problem there. Dave has plenty of sick leave, and the whole thing was arranged with phone calls.

But we're up to four in the afternoon on Saturday, and there's still no results, which probably indicates the backlog, the sheer volume of tests being performed in SA, where most people are doing the right thing. All we can do is sit tight and be patient ... watch the news from interstate and overseas, and wonder how and why people are doing what they're doing...

How to put this? There is a great deal of "silliness" going on in the world (and you may substitute any more caustic word of your choosing there), which is most odd, when one remembers that of of today 278 people have perished in Australia, at one end of the scale, and way over 161,000 in America, at the other end of the scale. SA is still one of the safest places, with just 4 fatalities, all of whom were so dangerously ill before the arrived home here, nothing could be done to stave off the inevitable. 

So -- we wait, (patience, Grasshopper), and we try to be calm and think peaceful thoughts. Hence the images accompanying this post: dawn, about ten days ago, at Bayards Wetlands. 

The worst aspect of this at the moment (three days into the lurgy) is the bloody headache, which only quits for a short time if I take pills by the handful. Ach. It's not migraine, but close to it ... such fun. Not.