SoS in the garden: 5/9
Spring has honestly sprung.
Which is always exciting in any garden, bringing with it promises of beauty and excellence.
ABOUT PRUE
A former journalist from Australia who graduated with majors in history and politics, Prue has worked as a hotel cleaner, a cosmetician in a major department store, a tour guide and a bookseller. But most properly, she has been a journalist/researcher for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She is now a cross genre writer who enjoys creating escapist fiction for her readers.
Her eighth novel, Tobias, was short-listed as a semi-finalist in the prestigious 2016 M. M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction and has won other awards since its publication, as have Michael and Guillaume from the same trilogy, The Triptych Chronicle.
Her historical fantasy novel, A Thousand Glass Flowers, won a silver medal early in Prue’s writing career which gave her the impetus to write on. The quartet of which it is part, The Chronicles of Eirie, ranked in Amazon.co.uk’s Kindle Top 100 in varying categories for over six years.
Her 2019 foray into contemporary fiction, Passage, has been honoured, not just with a finalist’s award from Chanticleer, but with an endorsement from the great Cathy Kelly.
She is regularly commissioned to write short stories for a miniature book press in the United States, where the narratives are bespoke-bound and illustrated, to be purchased by miniature book collectors across the globe.
She is also a farming partner, dog owner, swimmer and kayaker and claims her major faults are embroidery and gardening and that she’s always looking for new creative ideas while eating way too much chocolate!
BOOKS
From the Blog
Blow me down…
Unless one has crawled under a stone this year and stayed there for the last 8 months, it would be almost impossible to be unaware of a total global shakeup.
In the beginning of 2020 in my own case, an epidemic (at the time) was something happening far away. I remember sitting on the beach and between swims with friends, we chatted about what we would do if Covid-19 arrived in our own little state of Tasmania (Australia). We decided we’d retreat to exactly the place we were at, for however long it took.
Clean Air…
As the rest of the world faces ongoing battles with Covid 19, it’s easy to feel a degree of guilt that we are enjoying a certain amount of freedom and no reported cases in my little island state of Tasmania. That said, we also feel a profound sense of gratitude that we have clear air – in so many ways.
The state’s Cape Grim is reputed to have the cleanest air in the world…
And of course, we’re one of the southern bases servicing Antarctica, so we get a puff of clear air from the south very often! This week, after a week where we thought spring had arrived early, with blossoms and bulbs popping out everywhere, the snow is falling on Kunyani/Mt.Wellington and the Met forecasts snow down to 100 metres which just about puts it in the farmyard, certainly in the higher hills. Everyone’s very excited because we don’t get low-lying snow often and even tomorrow, they say the snowline will melt back swiftly to higher elevations.
So we wait impatiently for that brief blanket of white.
Do I have a story?
At some point, maybe in the first chapter even, a writer will wonder if he or she has a story.
For me, I write to roughly the half way mark or even just the first 50,000 words and then I send it to my trusted editor for an opinion.
These last couple of weeks, I have held back from continuing with the manuscript of Reliquary until I had a definitive answer on whether the story had legs.
SoS 11/7/20
I’ve been a bit busy lately getting a new book ‘out there’ and dealing with the oddness of publishing something so far outside my usual genre. A pillowbook, for heaven’s sake!
And in amongst that, taking time to push on with the next in a hist.fict series – this one entitled Reliquary. Such things serve to remove one somewhat from the garden and gardening. Then again, it’s been so damned cold that one could barely pick up secateurs, let alone open them.