Holidays

I'm on holidays this week and everything seems to be more real and exciting.

This time next week, I'll be halfway through the Byron Bay Writers Festival. I've given up deciding which sessions to attend. Suffice to say, I think I'll have to be packing myself lunch each morning, as I probably won't have time to line up and buy lunch, or walk back to the cabin and make it. I know by the end of next weekend, my head will be swarming with ideas and concepts, and then I'll be straight back to work on the Tuesday. C'est la vie!

Anyway, there'll be lots of photos and stuff from the festival posted when I get back. And I plan to do a bit of collage poetry while I'm there.

The Romance Writers of Australia conference is going to be another chock a block weekend in a month's time. I'm booked into a day long workshop with Margie Lawson on the Friday, followed by four other workshops over the weekend. Plus I'll have two free days in Melbourne to check out the sights, maybe head down to St Kilda, do some window shopping, and go see Wicked the musical. Also on the Sunday night after the conference, I intend to head down to ACMI for the 15 minutes of fame Simmone Howell reading as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival announced yesterday. More rubbing shoulders with the literati. Maybe one day I can be the one signing the books!

Then I'll be flying back to Newcastle and popping down to Sydney for a couple of days to meet my new nephew and catch up with other friends and family members.

For now, I need to edit some chapters to send to my (very patient) critique partners and cut out some words to take to Byron to have a bit of a collage poetry fest while we're there. I also need to start planning my Chickollage website. Not much point having the domain name if I'm not going to do anything with it.

I finished reading the first novel in the Dexter series the other night. It was a bit of a disappointment after seeing the TV show, as the TV show seemed to have a much more interesting character arc for all of the characters. I was about two chapters away from the end and was thinking, it can't be ending that quickly, not based on what I'd seen on TV. Shrug! I don't think I'll read the second in the series. Although I have read number 3 - yeah, I did ask my library why they had number 3 stocked but none of the others. Weird!

Lucky they are not so weird with Stephanie Meyer's series - I've just started reading Twilight and loving it so far. Of course, it leaped to the top of my TBR pile when I received the email from the library to say my reservation was waiting for me. I can't remember whether I've reserved all of the trilogy, but I might just go out and buy them anyway, I'm only a third of the way in and I'm already sure it's a keeper. And I'm sure the library wouldn't appreciate it if I kept their copy!