ISLAND ADVENTURE

There was a moment during a recent ferry trip across Backstairs Passage to Kangaroo Island when I was whisked back to childhood. What is it about the blurry outline of an island on the other side of a stretch of water that evokes adventure, mystery and discoveries? I blame it on Enid Blyton and the Famous Five!

How I loved those books. They seduced me into believing I could do anything, be anything I wanted. Every child needs to know that before they grow up. I was each of the characters in turn, fell in and out of love with Julian and eventually recognised I was in no way – could never be - like George, except in my imagination. I moved on to other authors and different fantasies, but I was forever enriched by those books. 

JUST A LITTLE BIT SCHIZOPHRENIC!

Feeling a bit schizophrenic tonight. On one hand I’m a bit glum. It started with me thinking of ways I might alter my blog page to link to my new book when it is released in April. I read through a dozen examples of other blogs to get ideas. Some weren’t as well written or witty as mine (please note, I employed only level-headed, unbiased observation here!); many used lots of interesting photos, illustrations and layouts (a strategy I should develop, ASAP). But the biggest difference I noted was in the number of readers and comments. I have only two followers and they never comment.

            From time to time I forward post onto my Face Book timeline and occasionally someone 'likes' it. Many others register as having ‘seen’ it, but comments, negative or positive, are rare. Why is this? Are the posts boring? (surely not!) Are they too controversial? (but wouldn't that mean I'd get incensed replies?) Are they not ‘spiritual’ enough for the faith-based groups I mostly relate to? Is the content too religious for everyone else? Am I trying to be all things to all men? Should I specialise, and for whom?

        
           On the other hand, I’m feeling a little glow of creative pleasure. During the Christmas to New Year down-time I’ve been experimenting with designing a brochure and a poster to use as advertising material for both my new book and the creative writing workshops I have been running since the middle of 2013. Learning the techniques is frustrating (it involves computer technology, of course it’s frustrating!), but it is also curiously satisfying. I could play for hours with colours and varieties of fonts, and then there’s all those illustrations to find and insert!  And because I had to make do with a male in the cartoon above, I’m now dreaming of picking up the sketch pad I haven’t used in years and drawing my own. 

            Oh my goodness! It’s only New Year’s Day! I have enough projects to keep me busy until Easter!!

GO INTO THE NIGHT SINGING

Oh Holy Night is one of my favourite carols. The soaring musical finale is full of triumph.

            Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices!

            Oh night divine, the night when Christ was born.

But for many people, Christmas is anything but holy. It is a painful memory or an all-too-present horror, as broken and dysfunctional families tear themselves apart. Such Christmas experiences are as different as night from day from the triumphant carol.

            As I meditated on this I found myself writing a hymn to the hope that even the darkest of nights and the most painful memories may be redeemed by the Light of The World, Jesus Christ.

            Go into the night singing!

            For pow’rless hell no longer preens

            The shadowy spectres of ghosts once seen

            In those darkened minds of sorrow-bringing.

            Go into the night singing!

            Out of the mind and into the bliss

            Of brightest rivers of light which kiss

            The dawn of grace redeeming.

            Go into the night singing!

            With heavenly legions of glorious sound

            Bright clad with holy light all ‘round

            ‘Tis all divine and gleaming,

            Both night and day now holy, past and present blessed,

            Go singing out from night as Light’s most honoured guest.

           

May your Christmas be triumphant with peace and light.

Born To Live

The pandorea jasminoides climber that was planted long before our time had become the enemy - a creeping, scaling, climbing pest in pink. It had overtaken the fence-both sides- and was now invading the inside of the garden shed, writhing through bicycle spokes and coiling round the legs of folding chairs. No amount of cutting back had succeeded in quenching its appetite for greater territory. As with the Amalekites, Hivites, Jebusites et al, the only solution was total defiance and annihilation.

            It took several weeks - and numerous wheelie bin loads - to whittle away the upper foliage to the point where only stumps remained. We cut those off as close to the ground as possible, congratulated ourselves on a job well done, and made plans to put the shed back in place the following weekend. Or the one after that - we’d fought the good fight and were ready for R & R.

            It was with disbelief we viewed the tiny green shoots now forcing their way through what appeared to be dead, dry stumps. How truly glorious is the power of the Creator in the plant world. What is created to grow, blossom and reproduce continues to do so regardless of opposition. There have been such times in my life when I thought I’d given all I had to give and now please can I just lie down and die, but the dreams and hopes embedded in me by creator God, my beginning and my end, were always too strong for such defeatism. I was born to realise an identity and destiny designed by Him, and fulfil it I would.
           There is another analogy for the persistent pink pest in my garden. Unfortunately, pandorea jasminoides was totally wrong for our confined garden space. The only solution was to poison the stump and roots. Brutal but effective. In a similar way, there are times when we insist on trying to grow the gift that is in us in a way and a place it was never meant to be. The result is always ugliness and frustration. Not only is the gift God-given, there is also a God-given arena.  Find it and flourish.

Requiem For A Friend

Is there anything more delicious to the senses

Than stroking that face against mine?

The fine, miniature feel of bone-shape

 Finishing in softness of silken ear.

 His head under my hand

 He sleeps quietly on, until

 Seduced by my stroke

 He purrs.

While conceding I have loved every one of the cats I’ve owned over the years, my children insist I’ve never been as besotted as I was with Sergeant Milo, a Devon Rex with a coat of chocolate-smoke. It’s true he was allowed to sleep in our bed after breakfast on cold mornings (he hated the cold). And we did make special concessions to his habit of prowling over bench tops (was it fair to enforce new rules when an indulgent first owner had entirely failed to instill kitchen manners in the two years before he was ours?).

            His morning routine after making a toilet stop was a dive across the garden for the door to avoid the Murray Magpie - who just might be poised for a Spitfire swoop, all guns blazing - then, a manic dash for a sunny windowsill, slithering across ceramic tiles before gaining purchase on carpet and leaping from sofa, chair and coffee table to land, blinking, with a veil of terylene over his hindquarters. He would turn his head to make sure I was watching and blink twice as if to say, ‘You couldn’t do that in a fit.’

            At about 9pm he would leave whatever he was doing at the time to jump onto my lap and snuggle up with his nose hidden in the crook of my arm, or under the curl of his tail, and go to sleep. It was his signal for me to carry him to his bed in the laundry before nocturnal habits kicked in, in which case I was reduced to playing hide and seek and chasing him ‘round and ‘round the house until he deigned to be caught.

            Seven days ago Milo was hit by a car.  The damage was severe and my husband and I held him as the vet administered the chemical that stilled his generous little heart and turned his amber eyes to glass. It's hard to accept I will never again hear his soft morning meow, or stroke his velvety, chocolate-timtam face. It's hard to avoid the fresh spread of earth under the nectarine tree.      
RIP  Sergeant Milo.

A WRITER’S GOTTA DO WHAT A WRITER’S …

This morning I spotted an article entitled, “Do Authors really need to blog?” I tried to ignore it, truly I did, but it bared its teeth and barked at me until I rolled over and submitted. Even whimpering about being too busy didn’t work. I read it.

When I began blogging more than a year ago I was inspired. I wrote every other day. I couldn’t wait to do it again. And again. So I really identified with the first point in the article: ‘Some people try to blog daily, and many of them are eventually carried off in white vans with padded interiors.’  The thing was, I could kid myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t getting on with my novel, or the story for next week’s writing group, because I was still writing wasn’t I? But blogging was so much fun and so quickly achieved in comparison with my other writing that I simply wasn’t doing anything else. And the longer I left my other writing, the harder it was to return to it. Pretty soon I was ready for that white van through sheer frustration and guilt.  

But now I’m being told all the reasons why I should, indeed must blog (I feel rather like a sugar addict being told that one cream biscuit won’t hurt me). Those reasons, of course, are all to do with building a platform to promote my name and get my books published. The name thing is important. Apparently, the first thing a publisher does when presented with a query letter from an unknown author is google his/her name. That presented a problem for me because my blog goes out under the pen name of Arrowhead.  It seems I really need a blog under my own name. There’s even an exercise to find out how my name presently appears (or not) on the web.

So, I must zip, to quote the words of a recently retired Australian politician. I’m about to search for my name on http://google.com/ncr.

RESEARCH IS A WONDERFUL THING

The name, ‘Fyshwick’, intrigues me and submitting it as a prompt topic for my writing group was, I confess, a piece of whimsy on my part. I thought it would be great as part of a title for a short story. Having read some Graham Greene recently, I decided ‘Our Man in Fyshwick’ had a certain ring to it.

            I sat down with a coffee and googled ‘Fyshwick’ expecting to ramble through any number of bonny references to The Auld Country. To my dismay, there were no references to the British Isles whatsoever. There were no quaint villages so named, no colourful fish markets carrying its moniker and no character, male or female, rejoicing in its eccentricity. Fyshwick is entirely about a commercial suburb of Canberra notorious for the highest percentage of burglaries in the ACT and the only place in the Territory where prostitution may be conducted legally. I felt like a balloon five days after a kid’s birthday party.

            The name is a contrivance; a combination of ‘Fysh’, after Sir Philip Fysh, a Tasmanian politician who contributed to the establishment of Australian Federation, and ‘wick’, an Old English term for a dwelling place or village. I had no idea how I was going to make a story out of that, but a story I had to have. I had chosen the topic; I was determined to make it work.

            So I rambled some more with Google and found myself reading about the history of Fyshwick.  The land was originally cleared and developed as the site of Molonglo Internment Camp, built in 1918 to accommodate German and Austrian nationals who had been expelled from China.  Due to diplomatic intervention, these internees never arrived in Molonglo but were deported to Germany.  Several German families living in Australia were finally interned at the facility, but numbering only a couple of hundred, they rattled around in premises built for three and a half thousand souls.

            From 1942 to 1946 Molonglo was used as a naval auxiliary wireless station. Managed  by fourteen WRANs, it operated receivers for strategic radio links between Australia and Whitehall. Petty Officer Marion Stevens, who was in charge for all but the first year of operation, was famed for being the only woman appointed to run a transmitting station during the War. I couldn’t hope to do this material justice in a short story, but I found myself day dreaming about a TV mini series built around it. 

            In the meantime, I still have to come up with a story about someone’s man in Fyshwick.  At the moment I’m playing with some ideas based on its reputation as the burglary capital of the ACT.

            I have just three weeks to get my act together.