meredith_shayne

How it got to be almost April already, I have no idea. I tell myself I'm going to blog regularly, and then life happens, and I just don't.

2015 is turning out to be a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I have a very intense and mentally draining day job, which tends to ebb and flow in terms of workload, but I can safely say that we are the busiest that we have been in years, with no sign of it slowing down. Add to that some serious health issues being dealt with by people close to me, and all I can say is thank God it's Easter next week because I am so tired I can hardly bear it.

Having said that, I have been writing - my current WIP is around 53,000 words at the moment, so not insignificant. Given that I never plan things I'm not sure how long it'll end up being, but at least 80,000 I'd imagine. So a while to go yet, but it's getting there.

I hope you're all well, and getting much more sleep than I am!

This time next week, I will be getting ready to go back to Australia for my birthday. I didn't go back last year at all, mainly because the universe tried to kill me, and it turns out that spending a few weeks with your body trying to eat itself from the inside out takes a while to recover from, surprise, surprise.

Anyway.

I am starting to think about what I am looking forward to most about the trip. I guess some people would say family? Friends? The duty-free fags and grog at the airport? Not being at work for 10 days? Missing out on the positively disgusting NZ weather we've been having lately for the same amount of time?

Those people are not me. What I am looking forward to most are these three things:

Strawberry Freddos

Caramello Koalas

Cheese Twisties

Seriously, Strawberry Freddos are delicious and I miss them terribly. I brought Caramello Koalas back for the Kiwis once and they almost died at how good they were. There are chips here called Twisties but they pale in comparison to the real thing so much that it's not even funny. I'm pretty much going to procure all three things as soon as I get there. And if I can fit two 72-piece boxes of chocolate into my suitcase on the way home I might just do it.

This of course begs the question: what chocolate/lolly/biscuit do you absolutely LOVE that you can't get where you live? Tim Tams? Junior Mints (nom)? Jaffa Cakes? Fuzzy Peaches? Something that you've spent an outrageous amount on ordering online, or that you buy every time you go to the country that sells them. Or that you force your relatives to buy for you, or friends to send you whenever they can. Something that bloody good that you don't want to live without it.

I'm not sure how it gets to be 3 weeks without a post, but there you go. I don't know where the time goes.

Apropos of nothing, I bought a new bed. They delivered it today, and I was very much looking forward to it, because the bed I've been sleeping on I've been sleeping on for 19 years, and mattress technology has changed a lot in that time. And also I am old now, and I ache a lot. They have mattresses for achy people these days.

I bought a slat bed, which I've never had before, but putting it together was easy and I was preparing myself for a nice nap on my fancy new mattress (pillow top!) when I laid the first slat down...and it didn't reach the other side of the frame. By about 5 cm. Now, I don't know that much about slat beds, but I am reasonably sure that they are supposed to slot into both sides of the frame. Common sense tells me this.

Sad face.

So I called them and told them this, and they said they'd look into it and sort it out today. I am trying not to read too much into the fact that they'd said they'd call me back by 20 minutes ago.

So anyway. It was Australia Day a couple of days ago, but not living in Australia means that I don't get a day off for that, alas. What I do get is email from the other Australians I know here. This one I thought was particularly amusing - some of these are so true it hurts to admit it!

You know you're Australian if:

* You believe that stubbies can be either drunk or worn.

* You've made a bong out of your garden hose rather than use it for something illegal such as watering the garden

* You understand that the phrase 'a group of women wearing black thongs' refers to footwear and may be less alluring than it sounds.

* You pronounce Melbourne as 'Mel-bin'.

* You believe the 'l' in the word 'Australia' is optional.

* You can translate: 'Dazza and Shazza played Acca Dacca on the way to Maccas'.

* You believe it makes perfect sense for a nation to decorate its highways with large fibreglass bananas, prawns and sheep.

* You think 'Woolloomooloo' is a perfectly reasonable name for a place.

* You're secretly proud of our killer wildlife.

( Read more... )

Christmas is here! Santa has been to my house, which means that we're sitting around in our pyjamas amid our piles of swag contemplating food, because that's how we roll in my family. Soon I'll have to get up and do stuff, but for now I'll just wish you all a merry Christmas if that's your holiday, and a happy holidays if it's not. Here's to a nice, relaxing holiday period and a great 2012 for us all.

At the end of this week I'm going to have quite a lot of work to do, because I've got publisher edits on a novella due and I'm also trying to write something new in time for a deadline of September 1st. So of course I'm procrastinating like my life depends on it. I do have a cover art questionnaire open even as I speak, but I keep getting distracted by pictures of the West Australian outback and lovely panoramic photos of Perth. But if I don't write down anything about these photos I'm looking at one the questionnaire, then I won't get them on my cover, will I? No. No, I will not.

But mostly I'm thinking about getting a puppy. An opportunity has presented itself, and while it's the absolute worst time for me to be getting a pet I am seriously considering it. Because I am the least practical person in the world when it comes to tiny, supercute little puppies. And I haven't had a dog in a long time and I'm finally starting to miss it.

Anyway. I'll make that tomorrow's problem.

Today's problem, which is not a problem at all, is that Equilibrium has gotten a lovely review on Amazon. Greek Reader gave it 5 stars and said:

I liked this one a lot. Both main characters and those surrounding them are described in well-rounded and lively detail. Michael has flaws and issues, some of which he'll always struggle against, but he tries not to wallow and ultimately won't be defined by them. Ryan has led an easier and more charmed life, but he has a streak of realism that allows him to understand Michael and to stand by him.

It's a rather quiet and tender love affair, as they often are in real life, but never boring. Highly recommended.

So that's got me all warm and fuzzy today! Puppies and a good review = a pretty good day, really.

2010 was quite a good year for me, particularly professionally, but also personally. I wasn't under as much stress as I was in 2009 and 2008 (2008 was the Year of the Huge and Stressful Project(s), and 2009 was the Year of Ridiculous and Chronic Insomnia), and it really made a difference. Long may that continue.

I'm quite looking forward to 2011 - soon I'll move into the house I bought, which I'm looking forward to so much I can't even say. I think living in a house that's mine will really make a difference to my outlook; maybe that's silly, but I think it will. I'm really having to stop myself buying all new furniture for the place, haha! Those furniture places are so seductive with their rows and rows of bookcases and chests of drawers. I need another bookcase, too.

My goals for the upcoming year are relatively simple: write more (and hopefully publish more) and blog more. That seems achievable now while I'm still on holidays, of course; mind you, I have managed to fritter away the day and haven't done a scrap of the editing I was meaning to do, so it's not like being at work will make my procrastination any worse. I haven't started packing either, but never mind. I'm not moving for 2 weeks, there's still plenty of time! (Famous last words if I ever heard them.)

I really haven't been writing very much lately, for several reasons, the main one being that in two weeks I move to the US to work for three months. It turns out that agreeing to go and work in another country, no matter how temporarily, is incredibly disruptive to one's equilibrium - surprise, surprise! However, everything's mostly organised now, and I am definitely on the downward slide to packing my life into a couple of bags and hauling it to another hemisphere for a while. So, typically, the universe had to throw something else at me just to remind me that I was alive: yesterday, through a series of very stupid occurrences, my user profile on this computer got corrupted, and for the space of a couple of hours, I thought I'd lost access to all of my files.

This was very bad, but not as bad as it could have been. It was bad because I had a backup on an external hard drive, but it was from almost a month ago. It was bad because I have 35Gb of music on this machine, and since that backup I'd bought more music which - obviously - I hadn't yet backed up. It wasn't as bad as it could have been because although I also have all my writing on this computer, I've been using other backup methods aside from the trusty-yet-fraught-with-issues-because-of-user-laziness external hard drive. So, even though for two hours I thought I'd lost a lot of stuff, I knew that I hadn't lost a single word of any work in progress, of which I have several.

Using those alternative backup methods definitely paid off for me yesterday, and it occurred to me that there are probably other people who could benefit from them, but might not know of them, so here I am to tell you about them. I'm nice like that!

As far as I know, both these things are available for both Windows and Mac, and both are free for a certain amount of disk space. Both require that you download a small program to your hard drive, but downloading and installation was very easy and I've not detected that they came with any spyware or malware as of yet, so I think they're fine.

The first is Windows Live Sync, which you sign into using a Windows Live ID, which you have automatically if you have a Hotmail or Messenger account. If you don't, it's still easy to sign up - I signed up using a Gmail address with no problem. Windows Live Sync is more something you'd use if you were in the habit of using multiple computers, like a desktop for home use and a laptop for travelling/times when you're out and about - it doesn't actually store any information online, but it ensures that the designated folders get synced between the machines that have Live Sync loaded on them, so that no matter what machine you're using, the document you're working on is always the current one, as long as it's in that folder. I can tell you that the syncing is almost instantaneous - I can save the file on one machine, shut the document down and walk into the other room to my other computer in less than two minutes and access the updated file straight away.

The second thing I’ve been using is called Dropbox, which is free for up to 2 Gb of files. Now, this one is an online backup tool, and well as a synchronisation tool – once you’ve downloaded the programme to the computers that you want to use it on, all you have to do is drop the files into the Dropbox folder, and you have a copy on all your “Dropbox’d” machines and also online, so even if you don’t have access to your computers, you can still access a copy of your docs by logging into the webpage. This one does require that you actually update the file within the Dropbox folder, but if you only work on files within the Dropbox folder, then everything would sync automatically; it would only not sync if you were working on a file from another location, and then didn’t save a copy to the Dropbox folder. It also doesn't sync on computers that are turned off, obviously, but does update from the webpage straight away when those computers are powered up again.

Both of these methods are similar, but different – I use both, because I’m massively paranoid like that, and also I travel a lot, so I use multiple machines and also computers that aren’t necessarily mine, so having things stored on a webpage is an additional safeguard against being caught without access to files I might need, without having to remember to save everything to a USB drive and keep track of that. If I was to choose to use only one, it would be Dropbox, but your mileage may vary.

Hopefully this is news to some of you, and hopefully one of these things will save you from panic just like they saved me yesterday. As someone who has also had to build their profile again from scratch, installing all programs as if they were completely new, I’d also recommend the Firefox extension Xmarks bookmarks and passwords sync, but that’s a story for another day...


Edited to fix links, because I am a muppet

I was going to write tonight, and I haven't. So in the absence of one type of writing, I'll do another.

I've been in a very Australian mood lately, so much so that I've been really noticing it. I mean, I'm downloading Australian Crawl, Icehouse and Cold Chisel songs off iTunes, for God's sake. That is really taking it quite far in the scheme of things, I reckon, to have Khe Sanh in my iTunes library. I was wondering why I was in such a mood, but today it occurred to me that what it actually is is shared experience, or rather, the lack of shared experience that exists for someone who doesn't live in the place where they grew up.

A friend of mine is Scottish, but has been in NZ for ten years. He was telling me today that he met a couple of people from Glasgow over the weekend, and he had a great time talking with them about places in Glasgow where they all used to go, pubs and clubs and cafes, etc. My friend and these people didn't grow up together, but the experiences of their youth and early adulthood were very similar, and he said he was struck by how much he enjoyed talking about all these old haunts. It doesn't really surprise me though, because I find that too. There aren't many Australians here, and I often find myself explaining things to people here that I wouldn't have to explain if I was in Australia. I've even stopped using certain expressions, because if I say them then I have to explain what they mean, and getting blank looks about things you say gets old after a while. Obviously when I go back to Australia this doesn't happen to me, and I do notice the difference. So I completely understand the relief that comes with being able to say anything you like and be instantly understood, or to talk about a place without needing to describe what it's like.

What's compounding these issues for me at the moment is that I'm reading a fantastically entertaining book set in Australia (Sean Kennedy's Tigers and Devils, and it is so good I can't even find the words to express it), and I'm really noticing that the characters are Australian, and not in a bad way - I said to another friend when I was telling her about how much I liked the book that "they speak how I speak", and that's true, and it's something that you don't often see, or I don't anyway, not in the stories I read. And since I don't get that in real life either, there's an almost continuous 'shock of recognition' feeling associated with it.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, and I don't mean to imply that this lack of 'Australian-ness' upsets me in any way - I love living in NZ, and I have no plans to move back to Australia any time soon, if ever. Most of the time Australia doesn't even feel like home anymore, to be honest. I don't even really notice the lack of shared experience in NZ for the most part, except when something reminds me, like the book, or stories of Scottish lads and their old hangouts. It's just funny that these things have conspired all at once to make me think about it.