I have finished my edit of Dave's new book! And, boy, do I feel sorry for the rest of you that have to wait a while for it to come out in print. Actually, in real life, I have read the first draft, which will still have input from 2 other authors, never mind the changes Dave will make on his next run through it. But I did really enjoy it.
And I finished it, with not much help from our friends. We had 3 different visitors today, and I was so glad to see all of them, and did not in any way want to hurry them away, but I did want to find out how he was going to end the book, after the end he gave us to the 'Dragon' one!! Still my input to the whole writing process is now done for another couple of months, so I can get back to all my usual activities, and some new ones.
Tomorrow I am off to experience the real outback life, or more out of town than we are here, anyway. I am going to housesit 2 dogs, 1 cat and 1 horse for a friend, just for one night. She lives far from town, and gets her power from solar and a generator, her water from the roof etc. You can see no other houses from hers, and I doubt any other lights at night. So it is far more the lifestyle we moved here for, than our 'close to town, on the electricity grid' current house. But I am not sure how I will feel about the isolation, while I am actually there.
Let me quickly say that I am so grateful to our landlord for letting us rent this house, it has made our life here so much easier than the yert or a caravan would have been. And I am sure has saved my sanity thus far. Also we have been able to meet, and I hope make friends with him and his extended family, which has been wonderful, and he has shown and taught us so much about life on this island.
But our ultimate dream is to get further away from civilization, but now I also want to be close enough for friends to drop in. I am so enjoying the novel experience of having someone come to the gate to see if we are home. In our last house we were 25 mins down a really bad gravel road, so no one came on the off chance we may be home, they all called well in advance!
Good news, I'm reading TRM so that I can start in on MFB. That means there won't be such a long wait.
ReplyDeleteJust don't rush, it will take a while to get through the system. But enjoy them both!
ReplyDeleteJust to let you know, Flinders Island is not the outback.
ReplyDeleteTo qualify for the outback you need more flies than trees.
You need more beer than water.
And you need more bulldust from the locals than from the cows.
You're welcome :-)
MFB was great. MOAR!
ReplyDelete:D
I wish I were close enough to come drop by and see if you're in and pet the animalia! Ah. One day I'll win the lottery and come knocking on gate.
ReplyDeleteI just read Much Fall of Blood, which was delightful. Looking forward very much to the sequel.
ReplyDeleteI am baffled by how you all do it. An ordinary book written by a single author is remarkable to me -- "how does she keep it all straight?", I think. But these 80+ chapter giants with the Byzantine (yes, in all senses) plots, and THREE authors -- how DO you keep it straight?
Re the isolated living - surely you can find a middle ground - with the foraging lifestyle, you certainly have to have reliable power for the freezer. Yes, the pioneers got by with drying and smoking and canning, but it took far more time than wrapping it up and popping in the freezer. And didn't always work, either. My mother, in her memoirs of a remote ranch childhood in the twenties, recorded the disappointment of finding that a preserved joint of pork had gone bad.
Can't be messing with that -- we need Dave to be spending his time giving us WORDS, and you have lots more to do than be a pioneer wife!