This is for all my Twitter and Spooks friends:
As I work this week, music seems to be striking chords with me. If I was seriously intent on sinking myself in my fantasy world, I suspect a cross between Celtic, Gregorian and melodic instrumental should be accompanying me.
Really short post today and with thanks to Louise Saunders on Mornings ABC 936 for reminding me of this song from Billy Thorpe in 1975 and which shall be my anthem! For all those people heading into winter . . . summer in Oz hasn’t changed in 35 years! Except for the SPF’s.
Things that are amusing:
Joining Twitter. Fun in 140 characters, that is assuming one is prepared to leave one’s real persona behind. @Lucas_North’s,
@Lucas_North
@MalcolmWJ’s, @Dimitri_MI5’s and @SirHJPierce’s behaviour on Twitter. Making macaroons without learning how to use a piping bag first. Looking at self in mirror after cane blind has fallen and hit the bridge of the nose. Having funny shared thoughts with MG. The younger dog showing off by having a giant swim at the beach. Watching the parking-meter man trying to book me when I had beaten him to the meter by a sucked in half-breath. The lambs . . . cheeky and very cocky because they have made it!
Lambing is finished . . .
Things that aren’t:
The loss of privacy at university. The sick humour of the internet and You-Tube. The loss of a life.
Looking at self in the mirror after the blind fell on my nose and seeing the blood. The loss of a ewe birthing triplets . . . mother and babies died. The northwest wind: who was it on Twitter who said ‘the wuthering wind is snapping at the corners of the house.’ Rudeness . . . of parking-meter men. Saint Kilda losing the Grand Final. SSAE in the mail. The chance that I will have to pull out of the Dogs’ Home until hand and ankle fully repair. I have only been back two weeks.
On this first week of October, we can be hopeful. Winter is over in this far-flung little outpost of the Southern hemisphere called Tasmania. The lambing has finished. My garden rewards me.
My garden rewards me . . .
The boatshed is being framed up. The manuscript has attention from a major editorial agency O/S . . . free of charge. I shopped for clothes today and bought capri jeans, shorts and two polo-shirts in less than 10 minutes. Such things rarely happen. It’s time to think about the myriad family birthdays. To enjoy a major book launch on Thursday night. To wish my son and his partner safe-travelling as they leave for three weeks holiday in Samoa.
It’s heartwarming that sixty dogs were adopted from the Dog’s Home in the month of September. It has been a week of enjoying the generosity of overseas friends and of realising that even though an SSAE arrived in the mail, better things await. And that the world has joined together to condemn those students at Rutgers University.
I hated our time in Rouen.
'I hated our time in Rouen . . . '
My mare cast a shoe a league before the town and I was forced to lead her and thus we arrived, both of us, footsore and tired. Guy offered me his gelding, but I would not ride. Khazia had carried me unstintingly, it was the least I could do to walk beside her as she suffered a bruised sole. Guy dismounted and led his horse, and we barely spoke, but each time his arm rubbed against mine butterflies danced in my belly.
I’ve discovered Twitter.
Lest you think I’ve been in an oubliette for the last however long, let me say I knew Twitter was there, it’s just that I have been slow on the uptake. I had to learn about FB and blogging first, and then about Wattpad. And now finally Twitter.
To be frank, whilst I have a rollicking great time with each tweet, I am not sure I am really the right kind of person for it. For a start I am a writer given to long sentences. One of the editors who works with me takes sabres to my sentences. If Richard Armitage were reading one of my books for Naxos Audiobooks, I swear he would have to practice free-diving to stretch his lung capacity before beginning. 140 characters is seriously like putting me in a chocolate shop and saying pick two!
I’m not sure what sent me to Twitter last week, but when I arrived, I found the cast of Spooks were tweeting. 
Supposedly. I opted to follow them. Imagine my surprise when an email popped up saying Lucas_North was following me. What else could I say but ‘Unnerved. Are you *following* me or following me?’ Then SirHJPierce followed me, talking about my roast lamb, then RosMyers and she told me to ask SirHJPierce where he put her jeans and leather jackets because I asked her what it took to earn a black leather jacket on the Grid. And finally, my hero, MalcolmWJ, the techno-whizz, so calm and gentle and who appears to be having hell’s own trouble with his Welsh mum, Mullered Melia, who has attacked Lucas and left lovebites or similar on SirHJ’s neck to which RuthEvershed is reacting badly. A lot of alcohol is consumed on the Grid (well, they are saving the UK after all) and Lucas and Dimitri and John Porter (Strikeback not Spooks) spend ages worrying about the pub, bollards and CCTV cameras.
It would be wonderful to think that it was the stars of that most superb TV series having some fun. 
http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2010/09/spooks-characters-on-twitter/
But I am noticing a pattern, a tone. They all sound similar. I found Guy of Gisborne on Twitter too, although I am not following him, but his tweets read just like Lucas_North’s. Well, I suppose it could be Richard Armitage, but wouldn’t he be too busy doing all the things he does and particularly rushing round shooting Captain America just now?
Whatever the case, it’s all highly amusing. I have tried feeding them lines in the hope that they’ll take up a story and run with it in 140 characters, thereby building a flash-fiction of sorts, but so far they have their own agenda. Fair enough too!
All this prompted me to take note of Twitter and the writer. How serendipitous then that this week, I find a few blogs talking about just that.
http://jamigold.com/2010/09/twitter-is-a-writers-bff/
http://jamigold.com/2010/09/twitter-love-story/ This second a guest post from Mercedes Yardley of http://abrokenlaptop.com/
Now if all this fun could lead to agents and to publishers and to an increased readership if our writing is already out there, it makes all the delicious time- wasting worthwhile. Like sneaking the third chocolate from the chocolate shop while no one is looking.
(Please note: this writer in no way advocates shoplifting by the use of that last sentence.)
This came to me via email overnight and I love it because I still wear an apron. As soon as I walk into the house, the apron comes off the kitchen door-handle and is tied at my back. My mum wears an apron, my memories of my grandmother were floral aprons.
Things that make a memorable end of week . . .
The football Grand Final. Sun and mild weather. The garden unfolding more. Hints of beauty giving way to full-blown glamour. 
Planting vegetables for summer. Walking the dogs on the beach each day. Wading in the chill water, allowing it to reach up to the calf. Hearing bees working in the garden. Watching my cousin play great football. Grooming the horse. The boatshed build beginning. Planning a menu for my son’s twenty sixth birthday.
When I began writing the fan-fiction The Sheriff’s Collector, it was all a bit of fun. It meant nothing, it was just a tale of a tale and had no plot, no real characters that I empathised with, no setting, nothing that means anything to a writer taking their craft seriously.
The other day, I was driving along the stock lane at the farm and I heard a tune I quite liked, with an unpretentious English voice talking to me over the melody. I pricked up my ears when I heard: ‘ Did you know that Dickens invented 13,000 characters in his lifetime?’
Guy was such a strange man. Secretive? Without doubt.
I could have talked on my mother for the whole journey. To talk would have been to honour her. But Guy would not talk of his own mother at all. At one point I had chatted so much to him about Moncrieff and my memories of the place, it was many leagues before I realized he had said nothing – just sat quietly allowing my words to surround him, possibly even drown him. When I thought on it, I was surprised he hadn’t ordered me to desist in that cool, authoritative way of his. Already during our travels I had seen flashes of his temper.
