Not really procrastination

I did say I was back into Chasing Silver but... In July I decided to take one of our online courses - Publishing eBooks with the intent to get River Crossing  into Amazon Kindle. On Friday I completed the course with my book up, tax organised - and of course I forgot about the part where you set up bank account details for payment! Next lesson. Doing the course was great fun, learning to format for epub and re-posting  several times as the process showed up design or text errors, but I finally made it. I wanted to get River Crossing  up as it has been out of print for some years and I had the rights back. A good book to experiment with.
I also completed a couple of small writing jobs that have been niggling in the background. I've been pulling buttercup out of my vege garden and covering the spare ground with silage compost for next year. The strawberries are in, the rasberries and fruit trees all mulched and sprayed and my passion-fruit and tamarillos in the hot house are covered in fruit - well not really, more like miniature fruit starting to fill out. Growing them in the hothouse is a new experiment as the frosts kill them off outside - we don't live in the 'winterless north' but in a small valley in the Far North that has it's own micro climate - frosts in winter and if the frost don't kill off the tamarillos then the cyclonic winds tear the fruit off just before it's ripe.
So now it's a weekend in the garden - weather permitting, after all it is spring here and that means lots of showers turning to rain - and then on Monday back to serious work - writing.

Three Years Gone

I find it hard to believe that it has been three years and four months since I last posted a blog, it seems not long ago. My life has been a crazy mix of achievements that are only just settling down to a normal existence - writing, my garden and a little bit of work.

What happened in the last three years that derailed my good intentions to post a regular blog? The first was an invitation from Scholastic NZ to write one of their Kiwis at War Series. With a tight deadline and a massive amount of research to complete before I could start writing everything but work got pushed aside. I was a month late in getting the manuscript to the publishers in March 2014 and after that the editing process started. This was my first experience of working with a publisher’s editor to hone a story. Both my previous novels were polished before I submitted them but they had been five years in the making.

I’ve always enjoyed working with Lesley Marshall my close friend and editor, sometimes challenging her to find any errors (she always did no matter how hard I worked at getting the script right) and other time relying on her totally when there has been insufficient time to do a second draft before a deadline. Lesley did the initial edit of 1915 Wounds of War  before I sent it off. 

Working with Penny Scown was great fun. It was a different sort of editing - arguing over whether to use the word life jacket, life preserver, life belt; taking out the bits of writing that would only appeal to girls, cutting back on some of the detail… 1915 Wounds of War is a much tighter book as a result - it is also longer because at the same time my daughter Nyrene was reading the script and she demanded I add to scenes that needed more - scenes that I’d chickened back from, thinking I could skip over them because they were too hard to write. Nyrene was right, but I did pay her back with the description of a frog being cut up in the date scene she insisted I write. The book finally went off to the printers in October 2014 and was launched in April 2015 as part of the war display at Kiwi North Museum in Whangarei timed with the ANZAC commemorations. The book sat on the Children’s & YA bestseller list for six weeks. I’m allowed to skite -it will probably never happen again. This was followed by a fantastic tour of South Taranaki.

The other major happening, linked to my role as programme coordinator of the online applied writing diplomas at NorthTec, was the completion of the Writing Mandatory Review of Qualifications. Levels 4, 5 & 6 Certificate and Diplomas all had to be rewritten as New Zealand qualifications. I chaired the governance group and a team of us from Whitireia, Waiariki, Manukau, Nelson/Marlborogh and NorthTec worked for several years on this with the help of some wonderful associates from all over the writing industry. The process was fraught with rejections and lack of guidance, but in the end thanks to some clear suggestions from our evaluator Eman Alzaanin the qualifications were finally approved and upload onto the NZ Qualifications Framework in June this year.

I have recently cut my Northtec hours down to one day a week to allow more writing time and am now back to working on Chasing Silver. I plan to get it completed this year.