Tin Ducks time!

It’s Tin Ducks nominating time – any person active in fandom can nominate, although you’ll have to be a member of Swancon to vote, come the time 🙂

FableCroft and me are eligible for the following categories, should you have enjoyed our work in 2010! 

BEST PROFESSIONAL SHORT WORK
"Through the Break" by Jen Banyard (Worlds Next Door)
"Old Saint Nick" by Leith Daniel (Worlds Next Door)
"Little Arkham" by Martin Livings (Worlds Next Door)
"Disobedience" by Dave Luckett

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTWORK
Sandy Wilson, internal art in Australis Imaginarium

BEST PROFESSIONAL PRODUCTION
Worlds Next Door (FableCroft)
Australis Imaginarium (FableCroft)

BEST FAN WRITTEN WORK
Tehani Wessely, body of work, reviews at Asif

BEST FAN PRODUCTION
Snapshot 2010 (Tehani Wessely, Alisa Krasnostein, Kathryn Linge et al)
Asif Reviews website (Alisa Krasnostein, Tehani Wessely et al)

There’s heaps of other great WA work eligible for nomination too – nominate lots! And while you’re at it, don’t forget the Chronos Awards for Victorian works!

So that was our holiday…

We are camped up in a lovely motel in Brisbane, right near the airport. Sadly our plan to spend a couple of days at the Gold Coast with my best friend from high school and her kids fell through. We were worried about road and weather conditions (naturally, both would have been fine, but ah well!) and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. If I’d been smarter, I would have booked a motel near Dreamworld and spent a few hours there with the kids in the morning, but in one way, this is probably better (more relaxing!). We got here about lunch time, and haven’t left the room yet! Will head down for a swim soon though. Kids would love it if I let them swim again tomorrow too, so we’ll see how we go. Flight isn’t til nearly 3pm, so we could also drop luggage and check in, then pop back out to DFO for a look… Have a very big handbag I got for Christmas that is currently EMPTY! I’m kind of half thinking we really need to come for a quick visit to the Gold Coast during the year with hubby, just for a theme park hit 🙂

The past couple of weeks have been lovely. We mostly spent the time with Mum and Dad, although we managed to catch up with my good friend Sharryn & her kids at the pool a lot, and various others with quick chats down the street and at the pool. With the flooding, we were fairly restricted in where we could go for most of our time there, which precluded a few of the plans we had to catch up with other friends. Probably didn’t see as much of my nephews & their mum as we should have (my brother was working mostly, and I wasn’t too stressed about seeing him anyway!) but we did try. Got some nice pics of the five kids together on our last day, which made Mum happy! 

We popped up to Roma last Tuesday for an afternoon shopping. Combined that with a catchup with a friend and her sons for lunch, which was nice. Enjoyed the sale at Toyworld and Target (kids stuff pretty much!) and picked up all the stuff for Bub’s first birthday! Yep, he turned ONE on Saturday, which I guess means he now gets referred to as Master One here! His party was the best catchup time of all probably – had a heap of adult friends and lots of kids and it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. Master Eight and Grandpop came back from their fishing trip at Poona just after the party started, which was great. Party went from 10am to 5.30 pm with various visitors and was just great. Master One enjoyed his friends, the food and his presents, so a success all round!

All in all, I wish we’d had the extra week at the start we were supposed to. And the floods interfered fairly significantly with our plans, but we were all safe and fairly dry, so it’s a small complaint to have, particularly when we drove through the devastated area down the range from Toowoomba today and saw how badly the people there are affected. We did have a lovely time but I’m also looking forward to getting home and not living out of suitcases! And seeing hubby 🙂

On holidays so far I…

1. Overnighted in Toowoomba.
2. Waited on roads for water/damage.
3. Watched hours and hours of news coverage on the Queensland floods.
4. Worked on After the Rain.
5. Pulled a limited edition version of After the Rain together (thanks to the generosity of the contributors) and made it available for donation as an ebook – we’re up over $1500 already.
6. Spent a lot of time on Facebook & Twitter watching people deal with the floods.
7. Spent time with family & friends, particularly at the pool.
8. Met stranded travellers and truckies (the town closest to us is the main highway east to Brisbane, north to Rockhampton, south to Goondiwindi & west to Charleville – mostly closed for almost a week in almost all directions).
9. Admired the "massive" fish caught in the dam by Master Eight.
10. Read some Aurealis entries.
11. Had some good nights’ sleep.
12. Had some shocking nights’ sleep.
13. Enjoyed having dinner cooked for me every night (thanks Dad!).

We’re enjoying being with the family and catching up with some friends. We’re a little disappointed we can’t see some people due to floods, but that’s the least of our worries. 

Queensland Floods – fundraising

I’m currently visiting in Queensland. We’re about 200 km from Toowoomba, where the "inland tsunami" hit with so little warning and with such devastating effect. Condamine, a tiny town which used to (and possibly still does!) put on an excellent rodeo and which has just been evacuated for the second time in 10 days, is 30 km down the road. Chinchilla, where I used to work and live, is almost 50 km east of us, and has gone underwater again as well. And now, after the events in the north held us riveted (I lived in Rockhampton for three years, and at Hervey Bay for a while too), we’re glued to our social media of choice watching Brisbane slowly disappear under water.

We are lucky here. We may be pretty much cut off from almost all directions, but we are relatively dry and certainly safe from floodwaters. But being so closely linked to the horrible events happening across Queensland makes me feel sad and helpless. I was working on After the Rain earlier in the week, which is due out in April this year, and making comments on Twitter about how things were really a bit too close to home. And then the Toowoomba disaster happened, and I couldn’t comprehend the event. That was the catalyst for deciding to do a fundraiser for the Queensland Flood Relief Appeal.

I can’t do much to help, but I can do books, and with the gracious permission of the authors I could contact on such short notice, and a few added bonuses from Brisbane writerly types, I’ve managed to pull together an ebook version (and it will change before the final print copy) of After the Rain. It’s a limited edition, available for donation, all proceeds of which will go directly to the Appeal. More details can be found here <http://fablecroft.com.au/books/after-the-rain/after-the-rain-after-the-floods-limited-ebook-edition&gt;, and I want to again offer my thanks to those who helped get this happening in such a short time frame. I hope people both enjoy the book, and keep supporting the flood victims, in whatever ways they can.

Mini-Reviews #22

Just clearing off the 2010 spreadsheet, so only listing books read in the last days of the year.

Scary Kisses, edited by Liz Grzyb (judging book – presented without comment)

Beautiful Darkness, Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl – This was overlong and just not compelling enough for the story being told. I also found the narrative point of view dull. A disappointing sequel.

Slave to Sensation and Visions of Heat (books 1 and 2 of the Psy-Changeling series), Nalini Singh – Really engaging world building and characterisation – highly recommended paranormal romance that’s got plenty of action and plot to go with it.
A Local Habitation, Seanan McGuire – A bit slow and quite obvious in places, but I love these characters and the world-building a lot!

And now the reading year has begun again! Looking to break some records in 2011 🙂