DALEK 1: I’ve lost my friend. Where’d he go? I’m lonely.

ENTER DALEK 2.

DALEK 2: Hello! I robot. Play ring a posie?

[DALEKS DANCE IN A CIRCLE]

[DALEKS KISS]

ENTER DOCTOR

DOCTOR: Let’s go skating!

[ALL SKATE, SINGING LA LA LA]

[DALEK AND DOCTOR HUG]

DALEK 1: Cuddle, cuddle!

DOCTOR: Off you go now! Bye!

EXIT DALEKS

Two Daleks embrace as the Eleventh Doctor looks on

Not surprising that the first answer that came to mind was a digital replacement for index cards. I’m doing some additional research and outlining for Last Ride (yes, it’s still going) and keeping the index cards straight was driving me nuts. I was researching categories for Religion, Magic, Culture & Society, People, Places, Language and Mythological Creatures – I didn’t have enough coloured index cards for all my categories plus they were getting mixed up with my scene cards. I wondered how hard it would be to learn how to develop an app… but of course I realised that someone else must have had this idea first.

Enter Index Card. Inspired by Scrivener (and yes, it syncs with Scrivener), this app gives you a corkboard with index cards. You can manage information by projects, stacks and index cards; there are 14 background colours to choose from; you can write on the front and virtual ‘back’ of the cards. Simple to use and beautifully laid out, I am sending my index cards digital.

I sent a message to the developer suggesting that they include support for Text Expander, another useful little app for those of us who do a lot of writing on the iPad. I was delighted to receive a response within 24 hours, with information on future plans for the app that addresses the need for typing shortcuts.

If you haven’t heard of the book, The Happiness Project is the story of Gretchen’s year long journey to increase her happiness. It’s a good read for a lazy mother like me, because it’s full of bite-sized pieces of happiness wisdom. Easy to put down and pick back up again.

Most of what I read went in one eye and out the other, but some of it has stayed with me. Her ‘four stages of happiness model’ – anticipation, savouring, expression and recall – resonated with me, particularly the last one. Gretchen says that recalling a happy event – through talking about it, reading about it, looking at the photographs – brings feelings of happiness associated with the event. Seems straightforward, I know. My daughter and I often fire up the laptop while I’m trying to get her to eat breakfast and browse through photos and videos of trips to the zoo and the pool. She loves it… her breakfast words are ‘Bubba! Pitch!’ (pictures)

But then I applied the concept to journalling. I have many journals, but I rarely re-read them. Even if I did, it would not be an uplifting experience. I tend to write the most when I’m sad, or frightened, or anxious; when I have big problems I need to work out. Revisit those moments? No thanks.

My five year diary tells a different story. A five year diary has five spaces under each date – one for each year. So for February 23rd, I have entries for 2008, 2009 and 2010. There’s not a lot of room – maybe half a dozen lines in an A5 book – so the entries are short, usually factual and a pretty good balance of positive and negative. Every day, when I open it to make my daily entry, I scan the entries for previous years. What was I doing last year (my first year of motherhood)? The previous year (pregnancy)? And Gretchen is right. I love reading over the happy moments – a funny thing that happened at work, a touching moment with my daughter, a romantic gesture from my husband.

At least I can console myself that even if I ‘miss’ the moment because I’m too busy photographing it, I can still reap the happiness benefit for years to come!

The bones are the dry dates of birth, death and marriage, the so and so begat such and such. The flesh for the bones might be occupations listed in the census, unexpected marriages, newspaper articles or – in my case – an ancestor kidnapped by Moorish pirates in the eighteenth century and was a slave for the Sultan of Morocco for twenty years before escaping and returning to Cornwall (he even wrote a book about his experiences – a great find for a family historian!)

It is far easier to put faces and stories to more recent ancestors. Through my family history research online, I’ve met a whole new family of cousins. After living so far away from my family roots in Scotland, it’s been wonderful to reconnect with familiar family members and discover new ones.

Sometimes, my research has turned up information that was unexpected and saddening. The family story was that my great grandfather, who served in the First World War, had died of Spanish Influenza shortly afterwards, leaving his wife and two young children. However, his death certificate – and records of a Board of Inquiry into his death – revealed that he had killed himself only weeks after the end of the war.

My great grandfather’s name was Moore Harvey – pretty unusual name. Due to an Unfortunate Incident, we have no photographs, letters or other mementoes from that part of our family, and I’ve been unable to trace other living descendants – although based on the story of the Unfortunate Incident, it’s likely that no such photographs remain in any branch of the family. But I know that photographs get traded, and that some photographs were taken of units before they went to war – so I’m taking a very slim chance that someone might have a photographs of Royal Engineers CC Cable Section taken in 1914 or 1915 – or even after – or a photograph with the name Moore Harvey on the back – and might decide to google the name or the Section and read this post.

Believe me, stranger things have happened.

For me, the last week or two has been the perfect end to a very nearly perfect year. All my stars must have been in alignment in 2010; here’s hoping they stay that way for a bit longer.

Every New Year, I make resolutions. One of my resolutions is appearing on my New Year list for roughly the fifteenth time, as I’ve yet to achieve it; another has been on my list for at least ten years.

It doesn’t bother me that some of my resolutions are recurring. ‘Quit smoking’ was on my list for a good ten years before I finally quit – but I did. ‘Write’ was on my list for more than two decades – and last year, I did. Buying my own house, finding a new job starting my own business were all re-run resolutions – goals I set but didn’t achieve in the first year I set them.

Some things just take more than a twelve month timeframe, and I’m okay with that. I keep making the resolutions, because if I didn’t, it would feel like I was giving up on those goals.

I’ve got a list of seven or eight goals for 2011. One of them is to write MORE, and to finish the first draft of my novel. I wrote over sixty thousand words of first draft this year, so I think I can manage another sixty this year.

Good luck with your New Year Resolutions and your goals for 2011!

I wish. Sorry, but it turns out Gen Y needs to eat just like the rest of us. Most employers have continued on offering the same benefits menu, tweaked slightly to brand themselves as family friendly employers. A little bit of paid maternity leave here, flexitime there, and hey presto! We support work life balance.

The city I call home has an employment rate sitting about 3%. Pretty low in anyone’s estimation. But the number of positions advertised that are truly flexible – in that they can accommodate part time hours, non-traditional working hours or working from home – are few and far between. So here’s me, a highly qualified and experienced HR professional, thinking about returning to the workforce. But I know there’s little hope of finding a salaried job that will accommodate my family responsibilities, so at first I resigned myself to waiting until Little Pearl starts school before I try and hack my way back into the professional jungle.

On the one hand, I understand some of the reasons why working from home is not a popular choice for employers. Not every job can be done on that basis – in fact, many jobs are not suitable. Not every employee works well without supervision. I’m a supporter of flexible work options – offered part time work and flexible hours – but even I baulked at allowing more than the occasional day of telecommuting. The secret of managing a telecommuting workforce is selecting the right people – easier said than done.

On the other hand, my solution to the problem was to set up my own business (hence my extended absence from blogging, writing critique groups and pretty much every other social outlet over the last month).

People who would never have considered employing someone working from home are quite happy to contract with me – to say, this is the final product I want, and how you deliver it is up to you. As an independent contractor, the risk moves from the employer to me – if I don’t perform, I don’t get paid, and I don’t get contracted again. But – and it’s a big but – I can choose when and where I perform the work, as long as it’s done by deadline.

Sounds pretty good to me.

The mountains were shrouded in cloud, but it was beautiful to see the trees emerging from the mist and rain, especially after the 2003 bushfires.

The wind was pretty fierce up there though.

Although the road was closed, Little Pearl didn’t miss much. She zonked out about ten minutes in to the drive.

Uriarra Crossing was flooded, and the Cotter Dam was overflowing. It’s beautiful to see after so many year of drought. This year, water restrictions have been relaxed and I can look forward to planting our vege garden. Here’s a ‘before’ shot of where we hope to put the vege beds:

There’s a lemon tree (very small) and a Valencia orange tree (bigger) at the back. We’ll leave the orange tree alone – we got about 60 oranges from it this year – but the lemon tree will have to do better against the frost if it’s to earn it’s keep.

The timber retaining wall is going to be removed and replaced with a two tier dry-stack stone wall, and the ground between the wall and garage will be paved (Little Pearl will have somewhere to put the sand pit she’s getting for Christmas). I’ve already begun raising seedlings for the herb garden (parsley, nasturtiums and thyme) and vegetables for the raised bed (parsnip, onion and peas – it’s too cold to plant the chilli seeds yet!) I also have four blueberry bushes waiting to go in the front. Mmmm, fresh blueberries. They’re $7 a punnet in the shops at the moment – too expensive, no matter how much I love them.

I’m posting a couple of links to work from two emerging Australian authors.

The first, Diane J Cornwell, has a free (and very entertaining) short story available to read on Smashwords, as well as an excerpt from her new sf novel, Broken Faith. Go to Diane’s website and follow the links.

The second, Wendy Palmer, has an excerpt from her fantasy novel Bastard’s Grace. I bought the print copy and couldn’t put it down. Check it out here.

It’s a photo of the view from her living room.

Tanja loves the view from her living room, and I can understand why. But I think we probably love it for different reasons. To me, living in Australia, the view is exotic and ‘other’ – the buildings shoulder to shoulder, the white framed many-paned windows, the spires, turrets and domes of the background, the green moss-tint on the black slate roofs… nearly everything in her view is unfamiliar and interesting to me.

The other thing that speaks to me about this picture is the sense of a secret place. I love the spaces between and behind buildings. The spaces beneath cities, the places you might not even know about it even if you’d lived in the city for fifty years. I love the whole concept of urban exploration.

The view from my living room is both familiar and other. I lived in Perth, Western Australia, for most of my life. Ten years ago I moved to Canberra, from a coastal plain to an inland mountain region. I miss the ocean, but I wouldn’t give up the mountains to have it back.

You can just see the dark line of the mountains in the distance. No snow on them this year though

Every now and again, I google some of my blog posts to see where they’ve been reposted. I’ve had one on the Nike site, and another on Scrivener’s Facebook & Twitter. But recently I’ve been coming across parallel versions of my blog posts that appear to have been translated into a foreign language and back again.

At one site, this opening paragraph:

I stopped writing my narrative to concentrate on character development for a secondary character (Z). In the novel, Z was to play a mentoring role to my main character. It was so difficult to write her scenes…

became:

I chock-full autograph my anecdotal to apply on appearance development for a accessory appearance . In the novel, Z was to comedy a mentoring role to my main character. It was so difficult to address her scenes, and I realised I didn’t …

Worse still, this post (where I whine about feedback on my grammar) became reposted on another wordpress site (called ‘what i see’) as:

In my other (laboring) life, I was a human resources manager. One small part of my piece of work was to give people feedback on their job applications and interview performance, usually when they hadn’t got the job or advancement.

Receiving feedback is a skill. I got a pointed reminder of this today in my penmanship life.

I’m participating in an online workshop, and I’ve posted short excerpts of my work in the forum. The tutor illustrious that I’d made several grammatical errors that I ought to neat up before I submitted the work.

My mental state went from individual stage to the next:

Denial. No, there are no grammatical corrigenda. My grammar is perfect. The tutor must have mixed up my station with someone else’s. I hate bad grammar almost as abundant as I hate poor spelling.

Anger. This is not a laws workshop, so why is the tutor commenting on my grammar? Nothing more valuable to do? I’m not posting any more in this forum! Screw that stupid workshop!

Resignation. I’m crap. I’m not at all writing anything again.

Acceptance. Hmm, I wonder what grammatical mistakes the instruct noticed? Perhaps I could post and ask for some further government?

This is my mantra: FEEDBACK IS A GIFT.

If someone takes the time and attempt to give you constructive feedback, thank them. They didn’t get to put themselves out to help you out. If you asked despite the feedback (eg a critique), thank them twice. Thank them nay matter what they said, whether you think it’s credible or not.

Once you’ve had a come to pass to think about it – once you’re at the accepted bill stage – you’ll generally find there is at least some truth in what’s been said. This is especially true suppose that you respect the person giving the feedback, or if they receive some professional credibility.

The tutor responded to my follow-up courier with an edited version of my original excerpt showing how I’d used unresisting voice throughout the entire piece of writing. The tutor is a published maker, and painfully accurate in their assessment of my work. And allowing that I hadn’t accepted the feedback, and asked for more, I might not have picked up the problem myself. Now I know I consider a problem with my WIP, and I can work on improving it. Identifying the consequence is half the journey.

Giving good feedback, or good critiques, is a address. It takes time and no small amount of energy. If someone has offered to critical notice your work (and they have no axe to grind…) and does a well qualified job, they are worth their weight in gold. This is why it’s important to reciprocate – a good critique is worthless.

I’m not ready for critiques on my WIP yet. It’s excessively, very rough first draft, and I want to go over it at minutest once with my Inner Editor in full flight. But when I effect, I look forward to the feedback. And I look forward to putting in the sort level of time and energy to critiquing the work of other writers, and fabric my own critiquing skills.

Oh, the postmodern irony of it all.

These sites tend to have names like degreesonline or adviser401k. Now, I can understand some sort of spam scam, where the google links take you to a page advertising some rubbish. I see it all the time on my referrer links. But these pages don’t advertise anything other than a list of blog post links, all in the same ‘engrish’.

I haven’t included hot links, as I can’t rule out there being some malicious code embedded in the pages. Doesn’t stop me – I have a Mac, so heavily firewalled I can barely access the Internet at all thanks to my works-in-IT-Security partner, plus I’m a scary combination of fearless, curious and ignorant. But if anyone does know the background behind this phenomenon – or has a theory – I’d love to know.