Writing Retreat

The excavation has been a success, so I can bring you some pictures from the Writing Retreat:

Excavating

Back from a fabulous weekend with my writing buddies with my head spinning full of ideas. Chickollage will be much more than first envisioned.

And we have settled into the new house - well almost! There are still quite a few boxes to be unpacked, my scanner to be excavated, my USB cable for the digital camera to be discovered. I guess it is like being on an archaeological dig, sifting through centuries of time for hidden treasure.

We picked the right day to move. It has rained almost constantly since...hence the boxes that remain untouched in the shed. And I’m working more hours in response to the cyclone that ravaged the north end of our country. Home is not quite home yet. To date it is still just a place to eat and sleep. Oh but what sleep! It is of different quality to the suburban slumber interrupted by the sounds of trucks and cars at all hours. Here we converse with the crickets and the birds greet us with squawks and laughs but the deep long hours of the night are peaceful and dark.

The time it takes me to travel to or from work now is full of wonder. This morning, the hills were smothered in fog, tonight I watched a glorious sunset and lamented that I did not have my camera with me. The countryside is so beautiful, I’d rather travel the curving backroad than the exhaust choked highway any day.

A weekend of writing and moving

Big weekend coming up. I'm going on a writing retreat with my writing group buddies, staying at a lighthouse - meanwhile the significant other will be moving our stuff from noisy suburbia to Paradise. And I mean Paradise! I saw the house last weekend and I will have my own writing room - a sunroom - and I can already picture how it will look. The room gets the morning sun which I think will be really nice for a leisurely Saturday or Sunday morning writing, while the s.o. snores away.

The backyard has a lemon tree, an orange tree, a mandarin tree and a quince tree. We have big wide verandahs and it looks so inviting, especially after a hard week's work. Once we are settled in, I can't imagine I will be coming into town much on the weekend.

So how did I manage to get out of the physical labour of moving for the second time in a year? All in the timing. I need to book my time off around 6 weeks in advance, so I had booked a day off last week. Closer to the time when I realised we hadn’t found anywhere to live, I changed it to next Monday. But my s.o. doesn’t want to do the moving on Monday, he’s decided to do it on Sunday while I am at the retreat. What can I say? I’m not complaining!

But on Monday I will be cleaning the vacated house, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

The Chick Collage Poetry is coming along well, and I’ve got a lovely cover – just need to collate some more poems to fill it. There's always Friday night at the retreat. Here’s a preview of the cover.

And I've printed out the first draft of the film festival novel, ready to edit in my brand new writing room. Me? Excited? Never.

Competition for Blog Explosion Members:
In a general spellcheck/grammar edit of my manuscript, I found the following error:

Travis is still in the lounge room. He probably doesn't want to come into the bedroom to cop another dose of my fury. I'm not going to have a whowhere. I don't want to spend another moment here longer than I have to.


20 blog explosion credits to the first person who can tell me what the hell I meant by 'whowhere'!!

Sex and the Single Girl: a collage poem

Sex and the Single Girl

365 days of men
Oh my Lord!
Serious Fun
Throw caution to the wind and Shop Yourself Stupid
Sussing out the Bad Boys Wise Guys Smooth Talkers Heartbreakers
Mr Muscle Mr Right Now Mr Totally Wrong
Too much mindless sex?
Too much is never enough
Guys with fear of commitment, inner demons, anxiety, Paranoia
Why Worry?
Just Blow them away...
Laugh it off
Move On

Blogger is a poetry snob

Here is a collage poem: LOVE RAT

Actually - no collage poem as Blogger won't cooperate. Let's try another picture: - I think something will happen this time because the lines around the triangle are flashing.

So Blogger obviously likes Moving Pics but not my collage poetry!

This picture came from an Oz rock magazine which I purchased on ebay.

It begs the question: is this the best photo taken by the photographer? Did he only take one? Alex has his eyes closed in the shot - not the best look. I've taken better pictures of the band, and I'm sure I wasn't using the same equipment that the photographer would have had.

Okay, so now I'm convinced that Blogger doesn't like my collage poetry although I've only tried to upload the one called LOVE RAT!

I'll try another: The FAME GAME

Still doesn't want to work!

I guess the files are too big, and blogger doesn't like that. Or blogger is a poetry snob and thinks it should be written only in text form and not include scanned fonts from magazines. I'll work out the technical issues. But I don't see the problem: the Moving Pics photo I just uploaded was scanned from an A4 size of paper, the collage poems are collated on A4 paper. There should be no difference. So my conclusion still rests with Blogger being a poetry snob!

Moving Pics Pic

I found my flash drive - it had fallen behind a cupboard, doing its best to hide from me. So I'm happy again - and hopefully now able to bring you some pictures.

I've been buying more Moving Pictures items from ebay - here's a fabulous pic of Alex from a Japanese mag.

I have tried to upload a collage poem, but it didn't work - I'll try again tomorrow!

Try not to panic

Aagh, I can't find my flash drive. I'm sure I had it on Monday night when I loaded my complete collated first draft of the film festival story on to it, and some collage poetry (yes I was going to load a preview of the poetry on my blog) and now I can't find it.

Because we've started the packing process (or the man of the house has!), it could be anywhere - in any number of boxes.

I will not panic - I will use other backup methods in the meantime until I find the elusive little beast.

Not much writing going on at the moment, although I have started the process of spell checking/grammar checking the film festival story. I'm probably going to have to make two versions - the US one with double quotation marks (!!!) and lots of 'z's' (Today's episode of Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter Z' and the Aussie/English version with the single quotation marks and spelling with the letter 's'.

So much packing to do. So much work to do at the day job (although it's rapidly turning into day/night job as I spend more time there then at home). I think perhaps my brain might explode. But maybe not. If it does, I'll write a story about it.

March is the month to....

So much to do, so little time.

Moving House: Yesterday morning we got the okay for a new rental property. We're going back to Paradise. Back to the sticks, far enough from town to feel like sanctuary but close enough to travel to work, supermarkets and all the regional centre necessities. Not sure if we'll be quite back to kangaroos in the backyard as we were with the last property, but it sure beats having beer bottles lunged over the fence at your car, sharing driveways, and constant traffic noise all night.

We'd stopped packing. We'd been looking at houses and not finding anything that even approximated value for money, and this one came to us as a gift, a sequence of events that shows that this house was meant to be.

Writing Contest: I received my results from the Chick Lit Stiletto contest for my film festival manuscript (first 3 chapters and synopsis), and I am very encouraged by the comments from the judges. I now know that I'm definitely Write on Track. So March is the month to edit and rewrite this manuscript, working title: Making the Cut, as well as declutter, pack and move. Might have to rethink that - April may be the month to edit. March - I will write what I can.

New Car: And I've got wheels again. After months of being chauffeured, I have my own car. The little old lady one owner cliche, it's a beauty and a bargain and it's great to be driving again, especially down the highway. I didn't realise how much I'd missed driving.

Writers' Retreat: I'm also going on a retreat with my Writers' Group. We'll be staying in the lightkeepers cottages so I''m sure we will have a lot of fun, laughter and creativity over that weekend.

So March if full on: Please excuse me if I don't blog too often. I'll miss it but there is so much to do!