Nicole R. Murphy's Blog, page 13

First con guest appearance–Swancon, here I come!

I'm really humbled and still a little stunned to be able to announce that I'll be attending Swancon 2011 (which will be the 50th Australian Natcon) as an invited guest. The official announcement is here: http://2011.swancon.com.au/2010/12/special-announcement/

That's quite a line-up to add to the already stellar guest list of Ellen Datlow, Justina Robson, Sean Williams and Sarah Xu. I mean, Glenda and Jonathan are worth the entry money alone! Juliet is amazing, Lyn's achievements speak for themselves and Bevan is fascinating.

Which of course leads to the question – why the hell did they want me? But I'm not letting myself think that for too long and instead am focussing on the great honour that's been bestowed upon me and psyching myself up to be fabulous.

So thanks to Alisa and the team at Swancon 36/Natcon 50 and I promise that I'm going to be a dream guest (and in a good way, not in a 'had the most awful nightmare about Nicole Murphy then realised it wasn't a nightmare' way).

Thanks also to my wonderful husband, who the moment I told him about it said 'Of course you have to go' even though it means he'll only see me for one week in the whole of April. What an awesome hubby!

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Conversations we should have

I've spent the weekend thinking about taboos, and how even when we think we've broken something down and we acknowledge it or talk about it, really we aren't.

This was brought about by the fact that after around six months of things being relatively normal, my hormones have gone bat-shit crazy again. This kinda proves what the doctor and I were thinking earlier this year – the down-hill slide to menopause has begun. Not a lot that can be done at this moment – some months everything will work like clockwork, some months it won't. When it's not working more often than it is, then we can discuss ways to deal with it.

I had a whinge on Twitter and a few women whinged back, but still it didn't stop the sense of aloneness and isolation. Saturday night, it occurred to me how ridiculous it is that we still don't talk openly about menstruation.

It's not like none of us know it's going on. There's a massive amount of shelf-space in both supermarkets and chemists dedicated to it. Some of the most awful advertising in the world is devoted to it.

However, it's still something that there seems to be a sense of shame in discussing, particularly in mixed-company. To my mind, that's the wrong way to approach things. Hiding it leaves it open for the sort of narrow-minded ridicule that you get – men thinking they can ignore a woman's anger cause it's just 'that-time-of-the-month' or women not getting promotions cause they're 'emotionally-unstable'. Not to mention it's a prime reason behind all those bouncing women on commercials, cause we have to make the uncomfortable thing look nice. Heaven forbid we talk about the smell, or the cramps, or the breast tenderness, or the weight fluctuations or the fear of staining (although there is that ad with the woman with the white skirt and let me tell you, even with the staining issue solved, she wouldn't be bouncing around the office like that – and where is her swollen stomach?). And that's just for the lucky women who pretty much sail through menstruation – for some it's like hell arriving every four weeks.

And in not talking about menstruation, we then don't talk about menopause. So for women like myself, who have luckily pretty much sailed through my nearly 30 years of menstruation and suddenly find themselves under attack from their hormones, it all comes as quite a shock. Sure, I knew about the hot flushes, but I didn't know that for days on end I'd just want to cry all the fricken' time. Or that I'd get so bloody tired – not from lack of sleep, but just so lacking in energy that sitting and watching tv requires too much effort.

And let's face it, menstruation is just one of the taboos that we might think we're open about but we aren't. Sexuality is another biggie. We believe we've gone through this revolution and that women can be as open about their sexuality as men can, but we can't. We can only be open about sexuality that matches a man's, and that only in certain situations. And because there's this limit on the type of sexuality we can talk about or the way it can be discussed, sexual needs that don't fit can't be talked about. So we have all this uncomfortableness over same-sex attraction, or people who require specific things in order to be aroused (not porn – porn is relatively accepted, but what about sado-masochism, for example? Or swinging?)

Because we're uncomfortable, we deal with this things by blocking them out, or ridiculing them, or judging and then punishing those who have that different life.

Death is the big one. To my mind there's just three things that are guaranteed in anyone's human existence – that you're born, that you'll fall in love and that you'll die. It's one of the most natural things that we'll do. So why are we so scared of it? Why won't we let people who no longer have quality of life choose the manner and time of their own death? Why when someone has died is the conversation with their loved ones, the time afterward, so friggin' awkward? We should know what to do, know what to say. We shouldn't be scared of death but acknowledge it as natural. I think that maybe if we did, we'd actually find living a more fruitful thing, cause we'd be all determined to do what we could in whatever the time we have and not pretend death isn't coming by not worrying about what we do when alive.

This is one of the most important aspects of being a creative person – opening up these conversations. I'm not sure I've got anything particularly insightful to say and I don't want to be some sort of expert, but the conversation simply can't be had unless someone says the first words.

I truly do believe that this world would be a happier, more accepting place if we could just have these conversations, and be upfront and honest about things that are an unavoidable part of being human.

So, what do you think?

Power Unbound trailer + what I’m doing now

To celebrate one month until the official release of Power Unbound, I present to you the Power Unbound trailer.

[image error] Power Unbound–Book two of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy

I had lotsa fun making it, hope you enjoy watching it.

So, what now? Well, after finishing copyedits last week, I spent a few days doing things like writing blogs and getting pages set up to go live when the book is released, leaving me free to work on The Free Ones trilogy.

This is the sequel trilogy to Dream of Asarlai. I started work on it a few weeks ago, but  stopped when the copyedits for Rogue Gadda arrive. Now, I'm back to it again. So far this week, I've done around 6,000 words and the book is currently at 18,000 words. My aim is to do a minimum 15,000 words a week. That means it should take just over seven weeks to draft each book. I figure that should see me finishing the draft of book one by the middle of January, the draft of book two by the first week of March and book three by the third week of April.

That's a minimum. What I'd really like to do is have the whole trilogy drafted before I go to America on April One. If I push myself, I should be able to do it sooner than that and I will but I want to set goals right now that allow for life to stick it to me, which hopefully it won't but you've gotta be prepared. This way, I've got wriggle room and I won't have to deal with feeling like crap if I fall too far behind cause barring major catastrophe, that won't happen.

I want to draft the entire trilogy before I start polishing book one for submission, so I know the entire thing is knitting together properly and should I sell this trilogy, getting the other books up to speed for publication won't be as difficult.

So, that's my plan for the next four months. Wish me luck [image error]

We have winners!

Thank you to everyone who entered the competition – I was overwhelmed by the response. So much so, that I decided to blow the budget a bit and give away TWO copies.

To let you know – I put everyone's name in a spreadsheet, so each person had a number, then ran the number spread through random.org to choose two people. Very fair, I think.

The winners were – Tarran Jones and Stephanie Gunn. Both Aussies, I know, but that's how the numbers came out.

There will be other giveaways – in fact I'm at Darksiders Downunder this Thursday giving away a copy of both Secret Ones and Power Unbound, so you can have another go there.

Thanks again for the enthusiastic participation – astounded.

Another momentous day and a giveaway

Yesterday, something fabulous happened (if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you already know) however I wanted to give the blog series on writing and publishing the trilogy a chance to sit and be read before I blogged about this.

This being – the arrival of my author copies of Power Unbound.

I'd gone for a walk and pulled up at home in time to see the Australia Post guy getting out of his van. He's gotten to know me quite well over the past few months – lotsa deliveries.

'I've got this' he said and I squeed cause there in his arms was a box from HarperCollins. I got it from him, raced inside, controlled myself long enough to get most of the groceries out of the car (left behind toilet paper – it will survive) and then with a deep breath, I opened the box and found these:

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Ain't they purty?

The white circles next to my name aren't on the cover – I put little stickers on the copy that I use, marked AC for author copy, in case I put it down at a convention or bookshop or something and it gets lost.

See all those books sitting next to the author's copy? They're for giveaways. I've got various places lined up that they're going to, but one of them is -

Right here and NOW!!!!!!!

That's right. Let me know you want one in a response to this blog and you could be one of the first people IN THE WORLD! to read a copy of Power Unbound. I'll even sign it to you. I'll choose a winner in 48 hours – that's 6pm Sunday (AEDT).

Come celebrate with me!

The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy-part three, Rogue Gadda.

If you've only just come back, you can read the first two parts here: Secret Ones and Power Unbound.

Technically, Rogue Gadda hasn't finished the publication process. There's still the proofs to be done. There could also be a cover change – I guess it depends how people react to the cover of Power Unbound (if you've got Secret Ones, you've got the original cover of Power Unbound at the back of the book).

However, you can't make massive changes at the proofing stage. The book has been typeset, and anything that upsets the page set-up will mean having the book re-typeset, something that the author has to pay for. Fair enough, I think – I've heard stories of authors wanting to re-write entire sections at this point and pushing publication back and causing all sorts of issues. So realistically, there might be changes to words and sentence structure, but Rogue Gadda now exists as it will appear in published form. So, onto how that all came to be.

Book three – Rogue Gadda.

This book (originally titled Chance and Reward) had a whole new set of challenges – for the first time in my life, I had to satisfactorily wind up a trilogy.

I started work on it in November 2009, while my beta readers had Power Unbound. It was the longest at this point – 70,000 words – and I figured I'd be able to keep most of those. That ended up not being true, but there's more of the original in this book than in Power Unbound (Secret Ones contains most of the original book).

I plotted it out on the spreadsheet and then began revising. I wrote like a mad woman until early December, when I'd gotten to a point where I felt I knew how it would end well enough to go back and work on book two. At this point, it was around 85,000 words.

I picked it up again on February 15 2010. I read it and decided I needed to do some planning on the overall trilogy plot (particularly what Asarlai was doing) before I continued.

At the beginning of March, I'd finished the draft of the new Rogue Gadda. I did the screen structure outline and the spreadsheet and then started to consider the weaknesses these showed.

Work then had to stop on Rogue Gadda, while I did the new editorial changes for Power Unbound and the proofs of Secret Ones. It was early April before I could pick the book up again.

By now I was getting worried – the deadline for this was July 1 and it wasn't anywhere near being ready. I let Stephanie know that I was concerned about making deadline, then put my head down ploughed ahead.

I had the revisions done by the beginning of May, worked over them and sent the book to the beta readers. I had it all planned out – how I could get it done within two months (while planning for the copyedits of Power Unbound, due in June). Even with time to give it to readers for their feedback.

Then, in late June, while at a writer's conference here in Canberra, I had a blinding flash of horror – in my panic to be done, I hadn't realised that there was a major plot point in Rogue Gadda that I couldn't use cause I'd done the same thing in Secret Ones!

Cap in hand, back to Stephanie, I asked for an extension. Luckily, Rogue Gadda had the longest-lead in to publication of all the books, so it was doable. New deadline – August 9.

Once copyedits of Power Unbound were done, my attention was then taken with the launch of Secret Ones, so it was the second week of July before I went back to Rogue Gadda to cut the offending scenes and work my way around this new plot-point.

I delivered Rogue Gadda on August 2 – a week ahead of deadline. I met with Stephanie at Worldcon in early September and thankfully, there wasn't much I needed to do. Make a character's motivation clearer, and I came up with a new ending for the heroine so she got to have her heroic moment, and it was done. Overall, she was really happy with it and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

It was sent to her September 16 and accepted, going into the editing pool.

Kate 2 had a freelance editor do the copy-edits of Rogue Gadda, and it was the cleanest of them all. It seemed the extra time on the deadline was well worth it. I've only written 16 extra documents and of those, most are just a couple of paragraphs. Barely a thousand extra words, I think.

So, things will be pretty quiet for a while now. I don't expect to see the proofs of Rogue Gadda until February/March next year. In the meantime, it's just a few weeks before Power Unbound hits the shelves. And I've got new novels to write [image error]

Book three – Rogue Gadda

Resumed working on it November 2009. Wrote another four drafts before submission August 2010 Had to get deadline extension in order to complete satisfactorily Only required small amount of editing, done in just over a week. Wrote 16 extra documents in copy-edit

Book One – Secret Ones

Resumed working on it late 2006. Wrote another seven drafts before ready for submission Added a further 50,000 words and Asarlai storyline Only required nine days and minimal re-writing in publisher's editing pass Total of 38 new documents required for copy-edit

Book two – Power Unbound

Resumed working on it July 2009. Wrote another five drafts before submission on February 1 2010 Pretty-much re-wrote the entire book – very little remains from where I started Developed my meta-documents to help with editing Required two editing passes over two months to get past publisher Wrote an extra 33 documents during copy-edit

So, what are my overall thoughts? Well, I spent the most time on Secret Ones and it required the most work at the copy-editing stage but it was also the first novel and while I've written quite a few novels, I was still learning (particularly about plotting).

Power Unbound had the least amount of writing time, was actually the easiest of the books to write, and ended up requiring the most editing work because while I was getting better at writing novels, it was the first time I'd written a second novel in a trilogy and there were aspects of that I hadn't considered.

Rogue Gadda, thanks to the deadline extension, had a good amount of work done on it prior. I'd also learnt a lot from the editing process with the first two books, and was able to put that knowledge into this book. Hence the fact it required the least amount of work out of all of them.

So, what does this tell me? It would seem that six months is a bit too tight a turn around, but then I was working two jobs as well. Now that I'm just writing full time – maybe not so bad. I will try for a bit longer – eight months, if possible – to give myself that extra polish time.

Thanks to the massive workload involved here, I am a much better writer and novelist than I was in July last year. Nothing like a bit of pressure to forge a person. I look forward to putting my new knowledge and skills to work in future projects, and challenging myself to improve still further.

The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy–part two, Power Unbound

So yesterday, I took you through the process that took Secret Ones from idea to published book. Today, I'll tell you about Power Unbound.

At the moment, I'm assuming that Power Unbound now exists as a physical book. I'm on tenterhooks, waiting for my copies to arrive – shouldn't be too much longer. Every car that drives past, I wait to see if they'll stop in the driveway and will there be a knock at the door? Yeah, there are times working from home ain't such a great idea [image error]

Again, two things to note – a) this was originally written in 2003 and went through a couple of drafts that year, ending as a 60,000 word novel and b) this is just my experience. Every publisher does things differently, every author has a different experience with a publisher cause, at the end of the day, we're all individuals (I'm not*)

Book two – Power Unbound

As stated in the post on Secret Ones, I chose not to work on this book until book one was sold. When in July 2009 it became clear that the series was going to be acquired by HarperVoyager, I pulled Freedom to Be (as it was then known) out of hibernation and started working on it.

I had a whole hell of a lot of work to do. Not only did it only have 60,000 of the needed 110,000, but a lot of that 60,000 would have to go because I either stole ideas from it for Secret Ones or things had changed so much that they weren't viable any more.

I worked out a timetable to have it ready for submission by the end of January 2010 and then ploughed ahead. A friend had bought me Valerie Parv's book on writing romance, and there was a terrific romance plotting diagram in there, so I used that for Ione and Stephen.

I was exceedingly dedicated – every day I wasn't working, I was writing. Days I had late shifts, I wrote in the morning. By the end of August, the new story existed.

I left it alone for a month and then in early September, started revisions. I found another document to use – Cat Sparks had shown me a great online diagram from a screenwriter about the structure of a movie. It works brilliantly in terms of checking the growth of plot in a novel. I filled that in, as well as re-doing the romance plot chart.

Then from Scott Westerfeld, I learnt about charting the plot in spreadsheets, using colours to clearly see what type of scene is happening where. It gives you a clear picture of where the story is lagging, where you're going too fast and not giving people breathing space and so on. Finally, I had all the tools in place to nail plotting.

Doing edits on book one interrupted work in October, but finally at the end of the month it was ready for the readers. At the end of November, I got the feedback but I didn't work on it straight away. I'd started working on book three and I decided that I wanted to get as much of it done as I could, so that I could make sure I had things right in the earlier books.

December 9, started thinking about and working on book two again. This lasted until December 22, when the copyedits of book one arrived. I wasn't able to return to book two until January 8 2010 – only three weeks before the book was due for submission.

I did the spreadsheet again, did the plot structure for book book two and the entire trilogy, made some changes and polished and it was sent to Stephanie two days before deadline.

Her feedback came via a phone call in early March 2010 and it was long. I had a HELL of a lot of work to do. She wanted to see more of Maggie and Lucas. She also felt that a character I'd put in to create tension needed to have more a place in the story than just to create tension.

I sent the new version to her April 5. Better, was the response, but still not working. In particular, there was a concern that the beginning wasn't working – there was a lack of emotional connection which was something that was coming through in feedback about Secret Ones (advanced reader copies were out). I adjusted Ione's opening scene and then tinkered with the very first scene, written from Asarlai's POV. It was a very harsh scene and I wondered if maybe it could be softened if told from another's POV. So hence the beginning of Power Unbound, which features the only scene in the entire series told from the POV of someone other than Asarlai or the romantic leads. That was delivered May 13, and was declared satisfactory to go into the editing cycle.

It was hard, having to edit twice at this point – I really was questioning whether I could write, whether this was some terrible joke at my expense. However, I'm really proud of the work that was done and hopefully everyone who loved Secret Ones will love Power Unbound just as much.

The copy-edits arrived June 21, once again with Kate 1 at the helm. Once again, Kate had some thoughts about things that weren't quite ringing true with her – there were some things she thought weren't necessary and after some thought, I agreed. There was also a problem with the motivation for two of the male characters.

I have to admit, I'm still delighted with myself at my solution to that – I came up with something that solved the problem for both characters with one thing. Love it!

I wrote 33 new documents for this copy edit, and it was returned to Kate July 2. This was just in time – Kate left just a few weeks later and the management of Power Unbound and Rogue Gadda was passed onto Kate 2.

Kate 2 does things a little differently to Kate 1 and the proofs for Power Unbound happened differently. The pages came to me August 6 without proofreaders queries – that hadn't happened yet. So I sat down and proofed the pages myself, then waited. The queries arrived August 25 and were needed back by September 8 (so I was working over Worldcon). There wasn't much in the way of queries, so it was relatively easy to do.

I sent the proofs back, expecting not to see the book again until the physical copies arrived but Kate 2 wanted us both to have one more go over it, to make sure all the corrections had been made before it was sent to the printer. I admit I was glad about that – there had been a couple of scenes missing in the proof copy that came to me and I was happy to have a chance to check that it had been fixed before the book went to print.

October 21 the final pages came to me, October 27 Kate came to me with some final questions (all of which I approved) and it was done.

Book two – Power Unbound

Resumed working on it July 2009. Wrote another five drafts before submission on February 1 2010 Pretty-much re-wrote the entire book – very little remains from where I started Developed my meta-documents to help with editing Required two editing passes over two months to get past publisher Wrote an extra 33 documents during copy-edit

As a reminder, this is how Secret Ones went

Resumed working on it late 2006. Wrote another seven drafts before ready for submission Added a further 50,000 words and Asarlai storyline Only required nine days and minimal re-writing in publisher's editing pass Total of 38 new documents required for copy-edit

* This week's Monty Python quote.

The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy–part one, Secret Ones

The copy-edits of Rogue Gadda are done and with that comes the real end of the creation of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy. Sure, I still have proofing to do, but you don't get to make massive changes there. So really, this means the story now exists, in its entirety, as it will be published.

So I thought I'd take you through the entire process, step by step, of how the three books went from a dream I had (literally, the original inspiration was a dream) to three physical objects. I'll compare and contrast each of the books, so you can see how different each book can be and also (hopefully) how much better I've gotten at this novel thing over the past couple of years.

Some things to note before I begin.

a) I'm going to start this recount in 2006, however you need to be aware that the books were first drafted in 2003. Over that year, I wrote the three then 60,000 word novels and they went through two separate editing passes each, meaning that by the end of the year, I had three drafts of each.

b) When I get onto talking about the publishing process, I'm talking about how it worked for me. Every publishing house is different. Every author's experience in a publishing house is different. There are some generalities to be learnt from, but also note that this is my experience.

Book one – Secret Ones

It was late 2006 – my fiction writing had pretty much dried up. All my work was going into journalism and I'd been editing fiction and I doubted my ability to write a good story. The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG) ran a monthly short story crit group and it was decided to try a novel crit group as well. I decided to take part in it, to try and kick things along and decided of all the novels I had lying around, the one with the best commercial possibility was my fantasy romance (then called Love in Control).

At the first crit group meeting in November, we went through everyone's opening pages. Based on that feedback, I went through and revised the story, adding another 20,000 words to it and re-drafting twice before it was read in full by the group and critiqued in March 2007 (so now we're up to draft five).

As the year went on, and we worked on each other's novels, I learnt a lot about the process. By the end of the year, the work situation had gone south and I'd realised my journalism career was coming to an end. It fired me up and so in December, I picked up Love in Control and committed myself to working it into a publishable state.

It took nearly twelve months. I wrote another five drafts. I had it re-read again. I added the overarching storyline of Asarlai and her plans and the word count went up to 110,000 (or thereabouts). In November 2008 it was finally spat on and polished so much that I decided it was time and so I started submitting to publishers.

In the meantime, I started a whole new book, with no connection to the gadda world at all. I couldn't see the point in spending time working on book two if I couldn't sell book one.

As history now shows, I sold the trilogy to HarperVoyager Australia in July, 2009. Because of the contract and so on, work didn't begin on Love in Control until October.

I met with the publisher, Stephanie Smith, during the Conflux convention on the October long weekend. Before the meeting, I'd been playing the proposed conversation over in my head (as I do with lotsa things) and I had a couple of insights myself about the book. Stephanie and I chatted. She shared her idea of weakpoints in the book or ideas that I hadn't explored fully enough. I shared my thoughts and she completely agreed with them.

I sat down and over the course of the next nine days, re-wrote some scenes and added some new ones. I sent it back to Stephanie, who was very happy with it and so it got passed to the editor.

I went through two steps in the editorial process – copy-edits and proofs. A note here – the in-house editors are both editors and project managers. Your editor in house may not actually do the copy-edits. In my case, she did.

The copy-edit letter for Secret Ones was both an exciting and deflating experience. Kate 1 (I've worked with two Kates at HC) was very generous in her praise but also very clear in the things that weren't working. She said it was a light edit, but when I looked at the scrawl over the page I had to wonder what she meant by that. I've now come to realise that in terms of traditional copy-editing (editing for sentence structure, spelling and punctuation) my stuff is pretty clean and doesn't require a lot of work.

However, Kate also did a more overall edit and that's where the work came in. All through the manuscript were scrawled things such as 'This doesn't make sense?' and 'How can he do that?' There were a couple of quite major things that Kate had me thinking about.

Here's how it works at HC (in my experience anyway) – you get a print out of the manuscript on which the editor has scrawled away in pencil. You get a letter, explaining the good, the bad and the ugly and a style sheet. The author is directed to make changes on the manuscript with pen. Small changes, write onto the page. Big changes – do a new document for each one, write on the paper where it's to be inserted and email the documents to the editor.

I wrote a total of 38 new documents for Secret Ones. Some were only a couple of paragraphs long – some several pages. We're talking thousands of extra words to make up for huge slabs of text that were cut. The copy-edits arrived December 22 and I sent them back January 9 and 11 (there were some internet issues). The pages get mailed back (you get given an Express Post bag to do so).

Kate gave them a quick polish, showed me what she'd done and I said sure. Then I didn't see Secret Ones again until March 7, when the proofs arrived. The proofs come printed out, as they'll look in book form. This is a truly strange experience – my thought was 'There aren't many words to a page!'. Yeah, it looks like that when a paperback page is printed on an A4 piece of paper.

The book had already been proofread by a few other people – the editor and some others. Kate had collated all their comments and passed them on to me. Apart from spelling and punctuation, proofreaders will comment on words that get used to much, repetitions that are too close together and words that don't seem to make sense.

I went through those comments, then through the document and made changes where I saw fit. Then I read through it myself – backwards, to focus on the pages. This whole process took a couple of weeks, and it was done.

Book One – Secret Ones

Resumed working on it late 2006. Wrote another seven drafts before ready for submission Added a further 50,000 words and Asarlai storyline Only required nine days and minimal re-writing in publisher's editing pass Total of 38 new documents required for copy-edit

Tomorrow – book two, Power Unbound.

My almost-perfect weekend part two

I was prepared to sleep in Sunday – ordered room service breakkie for 9am – but didn't. So got online and did a few things, did some reading, ate my very yummy poached eggs with mushrooms and tomato and while doing it, thought – I don't need to rush home. Why not take my time, do something? A bit of investigating and I decided on stopping Berrima.

Berrima is a tiny town that used to be on the main road to Sydney until the bypass was built in the 80s. I used to love driving through it, even as a little girl – something about sandstone buildings does something to me. I pretty much haven't seen it since then, so was interested to see what it would look like.

Parked near the park we always stopped at and went first to the museum. I was surprised to learn of the manufacturing industries around the area – Australia's first iron smelter was there (the first iron ore discovered in Mittagong). I'm used to thinking of iron ore in terms of the Pilbara region in WA – history really is cool.

Walked across to a small stand of shops, hoping to find a battery for my camera (remembered SD card, forgot batteries). None to be found, although there was an alpaca wool shop with some stunning items. I bought a couple of balls of wool and are currently knitting some hand warmers – Donna's been really crafty lately and I'm inspired.

Decided to walk around town – it was a glorious day, sun was shining and just warm enough to be get a sheen on the cheeks without being uncomfortable. There's a book binder there and some gorgeous paper items – pencil caddies, note holders, binders. Would love to go back with lotsa money to spend. Went then to the wine tasting and bought some Berrima Nip – blackberry flavoured port. Really, it's nice.

Past the jail and up to the courthouse. What an incredible building – here's this tiny little town (population in hundreds) and it's got this huge courthouse with this impressive sandstone portico (boy, was I cursing the lack of a battery at this point). The tour inside the courthouse cost $7 and is I think well worth it. You start with a film on the history of Berrima, then trail around the building before you end up in the courtroom, where mannequins and a light show tell the story of one of the more outrageous cases tried there – the trial of Beech and Dunkley. This is of interest to me cause I am a Dunkley (maiden name).

Lucretia Dunkley, along with her lover Martin Beech, murdered her husband Henry (they were both heavily into the drinking – very Dunkley behaviour). They were considered so black in character that after their hanging, their heads were removed and sent to Sydney for study (apparently the skulls are in the Australian Museum) and they were buried upright, so they could never rest in peace. Seems to me I might need to point out to my husband the violence that's inherent in my family [image error]

Went to more shops for the battery hunt – nothing. So, I went to the Surveyor General Inn for lunch. Opened in 1835, it's allegedly Australia's oldest continually licensed inn. I figured if I was going to eat in Berrima, I might as well go for a bit of history. Luckily, the food wasn't that old – quite nice, in fact.

Wandered back up to the car and then drove out to Berkelouw's book barn. I only recall stopping there a couple of times when I was little, but the idea of a whole barn of books? Heaven.

In fact, it ended up being a pretty good book weekend, cause I also got some books cheap at Freecon (and made a donation to the cause at the same time). At Freecon I scored an Anita Blake (Blue Moon), The Stepford Wives, The Bride Stripped Bare, Alan Moore's Magic Words and a DVD – Star Trek The Wrath of Kahn!

At Berkelouw, I bought a collection of Plays on Classic Themes by Franz Grillparzer, Letter's from a Faint-hearted Feminist and The Female Experience (to improve my feminist education). In preparation for next  year's plan to only read work written by women, I bought Ellen Kushner's Swordpoint, Beauty by Sherri S Tepper and The Eagle and The Nightingale by Mercedes Lacky.

Started home and decided not to follow the freeway but to deviate off it at Collector. And lo, less than 100ks from the nations capital, I found myself on a winding bush gravel road. Couldn't wipe the grin from my face.

So, there it is – my fabulous weekend. I had a truly wonderful time and can't wait for the next inspiration to strike me.

My almost-perfect weekend–part one

I've just had two fabulous days – been a long time since I've finished a weekend so happy. The only thing that stopped it from being perfect was that hubby wasn't there.

So, firstly – Saturday. Left home at 6am and had a lovely drive up to Bankstown to attend the Freecon. Managed to get lost because I bumped the GPS and then accidently reprogrammed it. Managed to get there on time, which was great.

Sat with Joanne Anderton, and was joined by Laura Goodin, Alan Baxter, Gillian Polack and Richard Harland – a nice little writer's gathering.

The first panel was on sf film and tv in 2010. I would have liked more analysis, particularly as I hadn't seen most of the shows they mentioned. One woman talked specifically about film and after saying not to waste money on Skyline, proceded to give Bollywood sci fi film 'Robot' a negative review. Not that Laura and I cared. We looked at each other and said 'Bollywood? Sci fi? I'm SOOOOO getting that!'

The next panel was reviewing Aussiecon. Of course there was the typical 'why is is always in Melbourne' 'who's going to organise the next one' questions. Ah, I must laugh at the folks who want to enjoy cons without having anything to do with organising them. I must. Or I'd cry.

Next four of us writers read. Pamela Freeman read from her follow-up to her Castings trilogy and it was great. Don't wanna spoil it but I'm really intrigued. Alan read from Magesign and it was mega cool. I read from Secret Ones and think it got a good reception.

Then Richard read. He started by saying it was a quiet piece. When he did the sound effects for the first rocket, he stopped and said, 'okay, maybe a bit dramatic'. The piece came from Liberator, the follow-up to Worldshaker and it sounds fantastic!

Twas now lunch time, and so Joanne and I went over to Centro to grab a meal. It was fabulous to sit and have a chat to her – haven't done that before and Jo's going to be attending the retreat in January, so nice to get to know her better.

Joanne went home, I went back to Freecon. First there was the Ghost of Honour presentation, and then we heard some fascinating stuff about the late Kevin Dillon and the discovery of one of his apparently infamous garages of books. They ended up with Rotary, who have been selling them to raise money for their charity work. So far, they've raised $20,000 (their usual annual result) and that's just from the comics! There's an estimated 14,000 magazines and no one's worked out how many paperbacks but it fills a squash court.

There was another reader's panel – Jenny and Russell Blackford had arrived, and they read with Crisetta Macleod. This was followed by a fabulous panel with Gillian, Van Ikin and Bill Congreve on science fiction in Australia.

That was the end of the Freecon for Saturday. Jenny and Russell and I went and had coffee and a fabulous chat together before I went and booked into the hotel room, then headed up the mountains.

My cousin and her family are moving to Perth. I don't see her as much as I'd like, and wanted to take this chance before she goes even further away. Good wine, good Chinese, joking and laughing and then we watched The Simpson's Movie. Was a very nice evening.

Was in bed just after 10pm and very happy.

Will post about day two tomorrow.