Would you wear these?

I watched a movie on TV last night, and because I like to do stuff while I'm watching TV, I tried making some paper earrings out of my book covers. Each one only takes a few minutes. They're a miniature version of the paper decorations I made for Christmas one year.

 I thought they might be fun to give away at the ARRA convention I'm attending in a couple of weeks time.

Can you identify the books they're from?

 #1

#2

#3

#4

Here they all are together, hanging off a coffee mug.

What do you think? Should I take them to ARRA? Is it a dumb idea? 

Would you ever wear something like this?

Leave a comment or match the earrings with the books, and I'll pick someone to receive a pair of earrings made of whatever cover you want.

Post script: After Trish Morey's comment,  I made these from her book covers and some for another author friend. I gave my earrings away at ARRA and they were such a hit I might make some to take to New York in June.

A Quick Interview

I've had a slew of emails recently, asking me about this or that, but since I'm on deadline and have not a lot of time to write detailed emails,  I'm recycling a quick interview I did for a magazine. It covers some of the basics.

Why romance?

Originally I thought it would be a way to fund my literary ambitions, but the more I learned and the more widely I read, the more I grew to love the genre. It’s character driven storytelling with a feel-good ending – what’s not to love? And there’s such variety within the genre -- unlike the urban myths about romance, I have complete freedom to write the stories I want. Plus there’s a vast international market for it — I have translations in 16 languages so far, including Japanese print and manga editions.

There are hundreds of romance novels on the market at the moment. How do you come up with an original story?

It’s easy. Original characters make for an original story, and there is an endless variety of settings and situations and problems to overcome. It’s like music – there might be only eight notes, but the combinations are endless.

What was your big break into publishing?

When my first novel was shortlisted for a RITA in the USA – that’s the romance equivalent of an Oscar nomination. My books got a lot of buzz as a result and were published in the USA.

Tell us something we don’t know about being published.

I’ll tell you three things:

1)  that romance writers are the best, most supportive mates you will find anywhere in the writing world.

2) that when you get published, it’s just the beginning of a whole new learning curve.

And 3)  that writing doesn’t get easier; each book is a fresh new challenge. In fact sometimes it’s harder because you’re more aware of the market.

What are three reasons why romance manuscripts get rejected by publishers?

1) The writer has assumed romance novels don’t have the same features as all good fiction.

2) Clichéd, unbelievable or unsympathetic characters

3) Lack of emotional punch – people often confuse emotion with sex.

How has having deadlines from publishers changed the way you write and the way you think about writing? Does it ever get to be a drag?

It used to be something I did for fun, and now it’s my job, so that changes things. It can be difficult sometimes, usually when the book isn’t working, but then you’ll come at the story from a different angle and suddenly it’s all flowing again and it’s the best job in the world.

Other people dream of being a full-time writer. What does a full-time writer dream of being?

In a clean, tidy, well-run house.  ;)

A quick Tasmanian escape

Last week I took the opportunity to get away to Tasmania for a few days. For part of it I holed up in a hotel on the east coast, and wrote without interruption. It was a wonderful experience, and I wish I hadn't had to come home so soon.
I hired this little car. Cute, eh? It made me smile. I named it Cedric, after the car in the David Parker/Nadia Tass film, The Big Steal. (If you haven't seen this lovely movie, rent it out - it's fab!)

As Cedric and I wound through the hills, we drove through this... Cool, temperate rainforest. 

I stopped for lunch and wandered down this path...

...and walked along this beach. I shared the entire stretch with one woman and two little girls.

I drove on and found a hotel for the night. This was the view from my room.

And this, in the other direction, taken on a misty, moisty, drizzly day.

I ended up staying there several nights, writing and walking and writing some more. Got loads done.

Every morning and every night I walked along the beach, scrambling over rocks (which I love) or  sinking my toes in sand and small waves. This beach was right across the road from the hotel.

At night I sat quietly on the rocks and watched tiny fairy penguins, so sweet and shy and dauntless as they clambered and waddled over rocks and up the hill to their burrows, where we could hear hungry chicks cheeping imperiously.  I didn't take theses photos; I didn't want to disturb them with a flash, and I didn't have a good enough camera to take pics without.

On the last day, I continued down the east coast. I ate my lunch  on this beach and collected broken shells for a jewellery idea. I always collect shells and stones and bits of driftwood from the beach. Can't help myself, even when I know I'm flying home with only walk-on baggage.

I stopped here just to stare at the view...

And had a coffee here... 

This old cowshed must have the best view in the world, I think — cowshed-wise.

I came home with a firm resolve to organize a writers' retreat here one day.

Happy New Year

A Happy New Year to you all.  I'm hoping 2011 will be better for me than 2010. It's started in a promisingly magic way, with a garden full of rainbow lorikeets.

Rainbow lorikeets are brilliantly colored Australian native parrots, and I feel lucky whenever they visit. A few months ago they visited my flowering gum (eucalyptus) until the flowers were finished, and at the moment the attraction is my plum tree laden with ripe red plums, so my day starts with the sound of noisy chirruping and squawkling as they feast happily on the plums.

You don't think squawkling is a word? Listen to this, which is a recording of rainbow lorikeets, and tell me these birds don't squawkle. It's part squawk part chortle and full of joy.

It's been a bit tricky to get a photo of them -- the moment I open the back door, a bunch of them take to the air in a flurry of bright colors, and only one or two little pirates remain right at the top of the tree, feasting boldly. You can just make out one here:

I'll try and get a clearer shot to show off their brilliant colors but in the meantime, here's one from the Wikipedia entry about them. Magic little birds, I think, and with real personality. 

May 2011 bring you joy, peace, health and happiness. And a touch of magic.

food as gifts

Every month or so I lunch with a bunch of authors in the city. They come from all around Melbourne, countryside included, and we've been doing it for years. When I was a newbie author, and just joined the group, there were five of us. Now there are sixteen.

The only time all sixteen of us come, however, is the end of year Xmas lunch, so it's always an event, with lots of talking as we catch up on everyone's news.  We have a Kris Kringle, too, and the rule is a gift costing about $10. We used to make it something edible and home made, but now it's expanded to include something writing related or edible —home made or bought.

I like to try out different things each year, and this year decided on beautifully decorated gingerbread cookies. (Have you spotted the flaw in my plan yet? No? Read on.) This is the kind of thing I had in mind.

I searched out a recipe that looked promising, mixed it up, chilled it, rolled it out and cut out dozens of beautiful little cookies in the shapes of different kinds of stars, hearts and also gingerbread people.  The house smelled magical as they were baking and they came out perfectly.

Next step, decorating them. The first problem came when I found that my old piping bag had disappeared. All the other pieces were there, not the bag. So I tried using a plastic bag and a piping nozzle. Splat. Giant icing blobs attack gingerbread man.

No problem, I thought. I'll make my own icing bag from cut out circles of baking paper. I've seen TV chefs use them all the time. So I cut out a circle of baking paper, formed it into a cone, filled it with the icing mixture and snipped off the tip.
Splat! Dribble! Blob! Squelch!

I tried half a dozen and decided there was no way I could give this as a gift. Yes, they'd taste lovely -- if you like gingerbread and some people don't -- but they looked terrible.

So... thinking cap back on. Some years back my local organic greengrocer used to sell cocoa dusted almonds that were simply delicious. The grocer moved away and the shop is now an art gallery, but maybe I could make the almonds myself. I prowled through various recipes on the internet and found spice dusted recipes, but no cocoa. But the principle would be the same, I thought, so I tried it.

Dead easy. Whip up an egg-white, and mix in spices, some sugar  and cocoa, then coat the nuts in the mix and roast them. Again the house was redolent with the scent of roasting nuts and spices — I decided on spiced cocoa nuts. I have to say,  they turned out beautifully. They were delicious -- not too spicy, and not too cocoa-ey (mainly because I'd only had a little cocoa left in the packet and couldn't be bothered driving to the 24 hour supermarket - it was getting pretty late.)

But then the more I looked at them, the more I thought it was a pretty average KK gift -- a jar of nuts. So I fell back on my last year's KK  and made mendiants. These are so simple, yet yummy. A blob of melted chocolate, and on it a collection of nuts and dried fruit. I used spiced cocoa almonds, macadamia nuts, pistachios, candied ginger and dried figs, and the chocolate was Lindt dark chocolate. This is the label I made to go with them - because traditional French confections with monkish connections are so much better than a blob of chocolate with nuts and dried fruit on it, aren't they?

Mendiants are traditional French confections composed of  chocolate disks studded with nuts and died fruits. Traditionally, the nuts and dried fruits used refer to the color of monastic robes — raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnut for the Augustins, dried fig for Franciscans and almond for Carmelites. Now a Christmas tradition,  recipes for this confection have embraced other combinations of toppings.

So that was my KK — a jar of spiced nuts and a box of mendiants.  I'd make both of them again, too, in fact I'm planning on making some more of the nuts a bit closer to Christmas. I've already given the first batch away.

And on my list for Xmas? A piping bag. And maybe some lessons in how to use it. :)

Quick, fun Halloween craft

We don't really do Halloween downunder. My first ever sight of a carved pumpkin Jack O'Lantern was in Scotland when we lived there for a year when I was a kid. I loved them, longed for one, even butchered a hapless pumpkin in my 8 year old fervour for one. A desperate failure, I suspect and I've never had one since.

The country where they really go all out for Halloween activities is the USA. And influenced by US TV,  the kids here are starting to pick it up. What's not to like about dressing up, scaring people and the legalized taking of sweets from strangers? The only problem is that when the local kids go trick-or-treating and knock on doors, they often get blank looks. Or a diatribe about it not being our tradition and watching too much American TV.

A couple of years ago I was heading off to the supermarket and I saw a small gang of kidlets down the end of my street dressed as ghosts and ghouls and pumpkins, clearly going trick-or-treating, and though I kind of agree with the "not-our-tradition" folks, it's a bit of fun for kids, and these kids had gone to a lot of trouble and looked really cute,  so I bought some chocolates and lollies for when they got to my house.

I was only gone half an hour, and it was still light when I got home, but my door got nary a knock.
So there I was with a small pile of the sort of stuff I try not to buy or bring into the house. What to do with it all? Oh, the dilemma!

Anyway, since I enjoy crafts, and in my neck of the woods we're in for a long, wet weekend, I thought I'd share a few easy, kid-friendly halloween crafts. They're all in paper, so cheap, fun and easy is the theme.

 If you have any littlies who want masks, there are some good, simple ones here.

You might want to make a lovely Halloween decoration — collect a bunch of interesting twigs, spray paint them black and hang the paper decorations below from them. Easy, gorgeous and cheap.

The decorations below are printable and downloadable free from the craft ideas site. There are lots more good ideas on this site.

Here's a downloadable paper origami cat that comes in black or marmalade — just print it off, cut fold and glue — dead easy. (pun intended, heh heh) I've made these and I really like them. Tammy Yee, the designer, has other animals that are print and cut out, too, including bats, and some really beautiful owls.

The hanging paper pumpkins below are both elegant and amazingly easy. All you need is orange and green paper, scissors and glue or a stapler and some cotton to hang them. They're a variation on some Christmas deco designs I've made before, and it's all about strips of paper that are different lengths.
A different, just as easy and elegant design is here.

So whether you celebrate Halloween or not, enjoy the evening and don't scare the kids too much. 

Farewell Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson— one of my favorite writers in all the world — died on Wednesday and I'm feeling very sad. 


Many people know and love her children's books — Which Witch, The Secret of Platform 13, The Journey to the River Sea and many more, but I first came to Eva Ibbotson through her adult romances. They were well out of print when I discovered them, but I hunted them down on the internet until I had a full collection. I didn't care that I'd paid quite a bit of money for battered old library editions; the contents were gold.

However last year they were reissued— as YA books for some odd reason — and it was great because the books found a whole new audience, and also because I was able to press her books on friends without risking their non-return.  I did a Word Wench interview with Eva last year, when she was 84.


She left behind her a brilliant legacy — these are books that will live on, as Georgette Heyer's books have lived on, but one of  her stories that might not live on is a small piece she wrote in support of public libraries, and it's one of my favorites. 
It starts:

I was eight years old when I came to Britain as a refugee - and was not particularly grateful. Mostly this was because after years and years of being a sheep coming to the manger, or a grazing cow, I had at last landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play at my convent school in Vienna.

And then ... Hitler.      read the rest here.

You can listen to a podcast interview with Eva here.


Eva said once in an interview  that she thought of her books as a present for readers.
They are indeed a gift she has left to the world.
Vale Eva Ibbotson.