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 fiction from history and fantasy.
Her eighth novel, Tobias, was short-listed as a semi-finalist in the 2016 M. M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction and won a gold medal from the coveted Book Readers Appreciation Group Awards (USA) for 2016.
Her historical fantasy novel, A Thousand Glass Flowers, won a silver medal in the 2012 Readers’ Favorite Awards (USA) in the fantasy genre. Her historical fantasy quartet, The Chronicles of Eirie, has ranked in Amazon.co.uk’s e-book Top 100 in varying categories for over six years and continues to do so.
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, gardener, embroiderer, swimmer and kayaker and claims that her major fault is that she likes wine, chocolate and cooking sweet things for the family far too much.
Reading back over early posts written sometime between 2010 and 2014, I was struck by the way I used to be able to write about writing, about writers AND also write books. All at the same time.
These days, I can barely keep one ball in the air, let alone three and I wondered what the difference might be. What has happened since 2014 that makes me so much less of an acrobat?
Once upon a different place in time, the town of Triabunna lived and breathed an industry that clear-felled our native forests. The highways would thrum from before dawn till dusk with semi-trailers and B-doubles bringing their loads of huge specimens to be processed into woodchips and shipped to Japan and the island became split apart by those who supported the industry and those who wanted are more sustainable future. Aggression ran high in many towns across the state. In fact, the creation of the world’s first environmental political party began in Tasmania at this time and the Greens were born.
Japanese ships would arrive and pump their bilge into our bays and from them, we acquired unwanted marine pests like sea stars, weed and a voracious sea urchin. And yet the government paid no attention because the woodchips floated Tasmania.
But then a hole exploded in the market and places like Brazil began to market trees far more cheaply to the pulp industry and Tasmania’s market collapsed.
This post came out of a discussion on Facebook about Harry Wales ‘apparently’ (according to the media), avoiding a further discussion with his grandmother, the Queen, before delivering his statement on his family’s future.
Ah, that time of sparkle and glitter.
But do I mean summer or Christmas?
Truth?
It’s summer for me because here in Australia, summer means family, friends and fun for 3 or 4 months. Christmas is just another day in our summer as mentioned in a previous blog post on why I love summer more than Christmas.
This year of course, we celebrate with our little 17 month old grandson who, whilst still not understanding what it’s all about, will certainly understand presents and toys.
Last Christmas, I gave my husband a gift voucher for a helicopter flight over some of Tasmania’s iconic coastline. Digging around in the letter holder last week, I found the voucher and was horrified to find that the quite expensive tickets were expiring on 27th December, so it became rather urgent to use the voucher if we didn’t want the money to go down the gurgler.
And of course, husband being the wonderful man he is, wanted me to join him.
‘Great,’ I sighed. ‘Triffic…’
