What I’m proud of…
Happy Ever After is out now and available on Amazon. Hubby and I had a few drinks last night to celebrate. If I can get my act into gear it will also be available on print in a few weeks too.
What’s making me smile…
The song of the butcher birds – at both our house and along the beach walk. Although they may look similar to a magpie, their song is more of a choral than a warble – although that probably makes very little sense.
Dumplings…
There’s very little about Sydney that I miss, but dumplings are one of them – good dumplings, that is. I can get so-so dumplings but haven’t had great dumplings. Apparently, there’s a Chinese up at Sunshine Beach that is really good, but it’s priced accordingly and I firmly believe that dumplings are food for the people…so to speak. Having said that, I will try them sometime.
Anyways, I had good dumplings this week at Tang Dynasty in Mooloolaba, at New Shanghai in Brisbane City and King of Kings in Fortitude Valley. That should tide me over for at least a month or so.
Now to find good Chinese BBQ…
What I read…
Christmas at Claridges – which had nothing to do with either Christmas or Claridges, despite what the cover and the title might have implied. Aside from a couple of pages in the final chapter and a couple of pages earlier – that are actually in Claridges – the book is set mostly in Portobello and Portofino. As for Christmas? Again, just a single scene right at the end. And yes, this really did annoy me even though I enjoyed the read itself.
I suspect that one of her other books, Christmas at Tiffanys, also has little to do with Christmas or Tiffanys – there’s nothing about either in the back-cover blurb.
I also requested an advance copy for review (ARC) of Sulari Gentill’s latest Rowland Sinclair mystery, All The Tears In China. I’d been looking forward to this one from Batlow-based Gentill and it absolutely didn’t disappoint.
My review is up on Goodreads.
What I wrote…
Although I’ve been slack and haven’t been updating my word totals on the official nanowimo page, I’m currently at 33,206 words into my new manuscript It’s In The Stars. I’m also beginning to get an idea of where the story is going – and, as tends to be the case with me – where it’s going is somewhere different to where I thouh that it would go.
What I blogged…
I deliberated for quite a while this week about the direction I was going with the blogs and have done some segregation.
Going forward:
- all my travel and week/month in review posts and general blogginess will be here
- all my book-related posts – and any blogs about writing – will be on my author site
- although I might reproduce them here from time to time, all my recipes will be on Brookford Kitchen Diaries. Not a blog as such, it’s intended to be almost a virtual cookbook.
- the astro site is remaining unchanged – it will have posts and info about astrology and only astrology.
I hope that you join me on whichever of these sites is of interest to you.
I also posted something about Queenstown and the locations that inspired the scenes in Happy Ever After.
Where I weekended…
Brisbane. Yep, just an hour or so down the road.
I’ll be in Sydney in the first week of December so all the Christmas shopping for the family needs to be done before I go. We don’t have a David Jones on the coast and I wanted also to check out Riverside Markets, and hubby wanted to wander around the discount outlets at DFO (my idea of absolute hell) so Brissie it was. More on what we did and where we walked later in the week.
And that, my friends, was my week…how was yours?
And Anyways... 