Farewell Sara Douglass - Australian Fantasy writer

I found out today that Sara Douglass - well known Australian fantasy writer has died from cancer. I've read and loved a number of her books starting with the Axis Trilogy.

I briefly spoke to her once at a world sf conference. Waiting for a panel to start and none of the other panelists had arrived.

I know which books are next in my read again pile now.

Her personal blog and her professional site.

Sometimes I am easily amused

I am perpetually amused by getting referrals to my blogs that are from a search engine where the query is ... the url of the blog they want. Oops, someone typed in the search bar and not the address bar. It's very obvious with a url like wowindianasam.blogspot.com - not exactly the world's most used search term.

I think I'm going to have to find a new food blog

I'm a follower of Health Cheap Good blog. It was quite a good blog, reasonable recipes, regularly articles.

However, the main blogger got married and is writing for something else now and there have only been a few posts in that blog for months.

So, I need to start looking for another regular food blog that has stuff I'd actually make and eat. I do follow a food blog from Tuscany but that's more for the information. I really don't think I want to try drying out meats for salami or some of the other projects she's done.

Twitter

I'm of two minds about Twitter. It can be entertaining - short interesting posts or links to neat stuff.

It also attempts to consume my soul. Both the sheer volume of stuff and sometimes feeling like a completely unwanted trespasser in that part of cyberspace.

So I'm taking a break from Twitter. And not a soul will ever notice.

Contradictions

I'm not into cars.

I loathe driving.

In spite of the above, I love Top Gear. Now that alone must qualify it as serious entertainment.

Back to gym

Ok, I've been slacking off. I let my gym membership lapse back in April. I hadn't been regular to gym for some time before that.

But I have to go for two reasons.

1. it's good for me 
2. I have a shoulder I seriously damaged a couple of years back and going to gym helps me keep it working well. It's been getting a bit stiff and sore lately, because I haven't been going much.

If I can keep up gym and stay off the junk food, I should start losing weight. Or at least not gain if I eat junk food.

This is only for the strong of mind and stomach

When clearing out things from my mother's house, we found a print copy of my first (and currently only) novel.

First novel == it's not going to be brilliant. But I've been typing it in lately, to get a feel for it, and with some work after the current copy is typed in, it might be ok. Maybe.

If you have a need to read something now and quality is something for lesser mortals, Here is Chapter one of Ted the Dragon.

Happiness is

Wearing my new serious kick-ass boots. I really love them.

Now I need someone to take a picture. Pictures taken

Discreet, just footwear with a skirt.

Kneehigh kick ass boots under that skirt.

More on Nanowrimo

So, I've actually signed up. No idea at this stage what I might actually write but I have a couple of months to think about it.


My profile is up though very uninformative at the moment. And I've discovered Scrivener, a Mac application that is specially for writing novels/screenplays. It has a lot of features that look potentially useful. Corkboard, auto outlines, notes, character sheets and more. I need to play with it now so in Nov, it's something I'm used to working with.

In November

November is Nanowrimo month. Nanowrimo is National Novel Writers Month. Basically, in 30 days you write a complete 50,000 word novel. You can plan it before hand, write up an outline, do character sketches. The novel must be started on the 1st of Nov and completed by the 30th.

I have decided to take part. The novel written in 30 days won't be perfect but it will be there and ready to be improved on. I even have a twitter friend who has decided to try as well.

30 days, one novel. It will be worth it.

Writing tip

I'd heard before that writing daily is good for your writing skills in general.

And I must say that it does seem to be working for me. Writing every day keeps the words flow much more easily. Whether it is part of a publish or just working on background stuff doesn't matter. Just write. Write often. Keep writing. etc. :)

I am evil

Just in case you haven't realised this yet.

What brought this on?

A recent Sustainability plan. There is something about this document that really really makes me want to print 50 totally useless documents, leave lights on, and celebrate driving my car back and forth to work as the sole occupant.

My favourite recommendation though is something along the lines of "Inform staff of the inconvenience and expense of air travel." Say what? Like anyone who has flown in the past decade hasn't noticed this on their own? Air travel is horrible. You tell me to reconsider if it's necessary and I may reply about shoving something where the sun don't shine.

The 30 day drawing challenge

Since I haven't drawn anything - even doodles for years now, I suck big time. Therefore these should be funny. :)

The challenge

Second anniversary

Of my mom's death. Still miss you. I should have called/skyped more often.

How about that, twitter can be useful

I'm not following that many, and they are kind of a random set. One of them is Tex Perkins - singer/songwriter  (or some facsimile thereof) who tweeted that there was a new album coming - order from JB hifi and get an autographed copy.

And I now have an autographed copy of said album. :)

Breaking bad sleep cycles

Unfortunately, not entirely breaking it but...

I tend to wake up at least once per night and was finding it hard to go back to sleep. Problem one - my dad did this for years and mentioned it most days. Which leads one to the fear that it's something you inherited. Problem two - brain switches on to hyperdrive and there are too many thoughts.

So the solution? Well, much like using a basic meditation technique. Take deep slow breaths and concentrate only on the breathing. That helps keep brain out of overdrive (or push it down out of that mode) and sleep comes within 5 to 10 minutes by my estimate. Tis good.

I can understand this

The world failed to change! Indeed.

Wow, that's very cool

I was just cruising through blogger options when I came across http://nicarra.blogspot.com/view/sidebar Some of the views can be very interesting http://wowindianasam.blogspot.com/view/timeslide Others won't work so well with the blogging that I do - snapshots - not recommended. Still, that's a very interesting feature.

Pointless policy

Apparently there is a policy that any incident involving a member of the workplace must be reported to the security office. If the incident is offcampus - the security office hasn't a clue of what to do, it's well out of their authority. But you still have to officially inform them, even when there is nothing that they can do. Bonus tip for Health and Safety officers - there are no policies or procedures that will stop people from being idiots. Just won't happen.

Hubby had good news

Yesterday, Ross went to his specialist surgeon for a one year check on his hip surgery. The surgeon was extremely pleased with the results and said the next check could wait for 5 years.

Chicken and dumplings

Someone recently mentioned this dish and it made me crave it a lot. Cheap to make too, I used chicken frames, onions, garlic and carrot to make the base stock. Added some frozen peas, beans and corn. The dumplings are flour, baking powder, salt, milk and a touch of oil. Should be relatively low cal, it's certainly very tasty.

The most useless stats

I decided randomly to use feedburner for the blogs. Random cause I have no idea if that good or bad, just sounded like a consistent service people can use. So that's what you get if you use the Subscribe by Email box on the blogs. Feedburner has 'subscriber' stats. Most useless things I've ever seen. Period. It might vaguely relate to how times the feeds are checked for new stuff. But it's not actual subscribers because I refuse to believe that real subscribers go from 30 to 3 to 32 in the space of 3 days.

You call that a Staff Function?

My place of work is having a staff function. For $65 per person, you can go hang out with other staff people. They offer a live band for entertainment and finger food. There is a cash bar. Someone is hoping to make one hell of a profit here. Or for $65, you could go to a nice restaurant in town, have a good dinner and some wine or beer. It's a no brainer which appeals more to me. Give me a nice restaurant and proper dinner, not finger food and lots of people I don't know and won't want to talk to.

Worst game dialogues - LOL

The dialogues here are bad. The guy doing the faces is hilarious!

Grrrr

Blogger is currently semi-busted. I had to switch to old editor mode to make a post. And stop using blogger in draft, that is failing even more.

Sigh, I hate it when my tools go bust.

The tribute to Elizabeth Sladen --- Sarah Jane Smith

Video in two parts The first part The second part. Be warned, this may cause sniffles or worse.

More Mimi and Eunice

I adore Mimi and Eunice.

April has been a good month for stats

Warning - this is very boring.

I finally had a really decent month for hits across the various story blogs. For the first time ever, one topped 1000 for the month, more like 1200 and still climbing. Several others are well over 500. All of the ones I actually update are being looked at far more often this month then previously.

Will it continue? I hope so but there is no way to tell. If it stays up for a couple of months, I'll be such a happy happy camper. In the meantime, I'm pleased that a few more people finally discovered them.

I've never really cared if this blog is read or not, this is the random blog. Two of the other blogs are short story types and I expect the stats to drop when there is no story running. But the other three, well, it's nice to see they are gathering an audience. And the two short story ones have also had an extremely good month.

Spam email - I doubt he read that blog...

I ran across your blog (insert one of the story telling blogs here) and thought that it might be a good match for us.

We pay bloggers to write blog postings on their blogs and link those blog postings to our clients' websites. This improves our clients' rankings in the search engines, so they are willing to pay for your services.

If you had actually read the contents of the blog in question, you might ask the question of yourself, how exactly would a paid for blog posting fit here? Perhaps we should be discussing banners or text ads instead?

But no, clearly they did not read the blog in question. Because it would be painfully obvious that any paid for blog posting is going to stand out for what it is. A sell out.

Sorry, you can't offer enough money for that. No way.

How to steal like an artist

Another interesting article from the files of LifeHacker - How to steal like an artist

Some very interesting things.