Booing Miss Universe - what is the world coming to?

For reasons too banal to go into I've got the Miss Universe competition prattling away on the TV.

No.

I can't just leave it like that.

I realise I need a rock solid reason for having Miss Universe on the TV during the day. I'm writing you see, and Oprah was about children with Autism, which is a heartbreaking subject, and is distracting me from my M&B heroine enjoying her Cinderella moment. I can ignore Miss Universe (its mostly ads) and keep an eye out for possible heroines. It's a romance writer thing, looking for beautiful faces that match the ones in your imagination and can be labelled heroine. It makes a book so much easier to write if you can stare at a photo and think, "what would you do if..."

So, I'm typing away and on the TV they've got to the point where the final five models answer random questions from the judges - possibly to avoid five declarations of wanting to bring about world peace! The questions are nothing special...
"Is it better to follow your heart or your head?" stuff like that.
But when it came to the turn of Miss USA and the crowd erupts into screaming and booing. I mean its a beauty contest for chrissake. Who heckles Miss Universe? And believe me, I am no fan of beauty pagents.

The girl handled it beautifully, not for a second would you think that thousands of people were jeering at her. I mean what is the world coming to? Next they'll be putting shows on TV where terminally ill people get to pick who get their organs after they die. Now that'd be classy.

Miss Japan won, by the way!

Don't Know What to Blog

Tired, very tired. Eight days, fourteen thousand words on my new MS. I can't keep it up. I haven't spoken to my husband in days, my children are suffering from neglect, the dog isn't speaking to me due to lack of walks, I need to connect with my family and stop hiding behind my laptop!

Have still managed to emerge to watch Big Brother though.

Best Intention - its going to be a book!

I'm rather chuffed to announce that I have signed a contract for Best Intention. It will be coming out both as an e-book and in print, and will be published by Samhain Publishing. The wonderful people who published Running Scared. I haven't had any dates confirmed yet, but I would expect Best Intention to be out as an e-book around May 2008 and in print about Christmas 2008 - yup this publishing thing is sloooow!

I'm excited to be jumping on the publishing-a-book merry-go-round again, relieved that I've signed a contract, Best Intention was A LOT of work, and coming to terms with being a multi-published author. I just never thought I'd be an author at all, and now here I am, with TWO books. I suppose, thinking about it, this is a theme in my life. I never thought I'd be a mother either and now here I am with TWO children. Hey, I never thought I'd be a millionaire and now her I am with... Okay so it doesn't work with everything.

I have eaten a celebrationary Twix, but that's pretty much it so far. Too busy writing At The Diplomat's Bidding. 10,000 words in five days - now if I can just keep it up I'll be done in a couple of weeks!

Taking on waaaay too much...

I promised myself I'd never do this. I'm a Capricorn you see, I set a goal and I work until it is done, this is what makes me happy. I need to achieve A, so I achieve A, then move on to B. As you can see from my word counter on the right, I've written 33,000 words of High Speed and its going well, really well.

But...

But I decided that regardless of financial constraints, I will be attending the Romance Writers conference this year. Up to this point it had been a bit iffy, especially when the (bloody sodding stupid) car died and cost more than a years-worth of nappies to fix. But now I am going for sure. Okay, so, part of the conference is the opportunity to meet and pitch to a Mills and Boon Editor, all the way from their London office. This is a huge opportunity, particularly as I've been cooking an idea for a M&B for the last few months. However, I put it aside and started High Speed. Now I need a completed M&B manuscript for the conference in August.

55,000 words.

And if its going to be worth reading I'm going to have to finish it by mid-July so I have a month or so to edit.

So, I hate it, I utterly hate it, but I'm going to have to abandon A (High Speed), and start B.

Its called At the Diplomat's Bidding, watch how I go on my word counter, and don't expect coherent blogging until late July!

Happy Now...

From my blog entry of the other day, a few of you may have noticed that I was just a touch miffed at the way Mother's Day turned out.

I'm sure you'll all be relieved to hear that hubby has gone above and beyond to redress the balance.

At 5am this morning I was startled awake by the sound of our car reversing out the drive. Ye Gods! Someone is stealing the car. It then occured to me that hubby was nowhere to be seen.

Fine, he couldn't sleep so he went to work early. Not the way I'd deal with insommnia, but whatever floats his boat!

However, twenty minutes later, the car returned. Just as he tried to sneak in the door I appeared demanding to know exactly what he thought he was doing.
"Buying flowers."
"What?"
"Flowers, for our anniversary."

He woke up at 4.30am, realised he didn't have anything for our anniversary, decided to sneak out to the twenty-four hour petrol station, found some white chrysanthmums, saw the newsagent fellow was sorting out his delivery run and talked him in to selling him an anniversary card, then tiptoed back home!

He's the best! I love him so much!

Its not that I'm ungrateful...

I suppose, in hindsight, my expectations were far too high. I mean I'd put in my requests; slippers and a dvd, a trip to the Mall had been made by hubby. Everything seemed to be in place.

The day began badly, at 5am, with all children present, accounted for, demanding porridge, and having howling tantrums when it didn't arrive pronto. There went my lie in with a cup of tea.

Checked my emails, didn't even get a digest from a chat loop - proving that I am completely unloved in cyberspace, and returned to be presented with two cards. Pink in pink envelopes. Very pretty. Duly signed by children in hubby's writing. Lovely.

But no presents.

Apparantly if I want slippers I can go to the Mall and buy them myself.

Exhausted and not in the prettiest of moods I retreated to the spare room (still no tea) where I lay for an hour listening to the kids screaming at each other. Marvellous.

Re-emerge, finally tea. Spend rest of morning dealing with shattered children who got up too early.

Wander outside. Neighbours yappy rat things immediatly starts yapping. Loudly tell neighbour exactly what I think of her yappy rat thing after three years of being polite about it.

Mother arrives for her lunch to find house in chaos and Hubby and I still in pyjamas.

Get dressed. Provide excellent lunch - all of which I bought the day before.

Hubby slopes off for four hour nap.

Spend quality time with mother and children - which is good, no really, I'm not being sarcastic, it was good. I do quite like them.

Hubby gets up in time to watch me cook dinner. Not the standing rib roast with all the trimming, no. Baked beans, scrambled egg and toast. mmmm.

Oh well. Maybe I'll be appreciated next year.

What I really want for Mother's Day is...

Okay, annoyed now. Its the ads, on telly. Mother's Day is upon us and so they're flogging their little hearts out. So far, according to the evil advertisers what we mother's simply cannot do without includes...

1. Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits
2. Crappy gold plated jewellery
3. Doris Day singing. I mean I thought Mother's Day was for thanking your mother not torturing her.
4. Red Rooster family feast - including Sara Lee Cholocate Bavarian - Oh be still my beating heart. Actually it probably would be with all that crap in my arteries.
5. Bunnings - yes just what every mother needs... power tools.
6. Myer - for those of us after up-market slippers and foot-spas, and
7. Target - for those of us after down-market slippers and foot-spas, nylon underwear and worrying home accessories

Marvellous... Can't wait to see what I get!

MINE. MINE. MINE.

I've got a confession to make. Yes, another one. I've been hiding in the pantry eating meringues. Nervously keeping an eye out for my children, and if one appears, swallowing quickly, dusting crumbs and pretending to be hunting for a can of apricots. "Now I knew I had one in here somewhere."

You see this is another of those things about motherhood that they don't tell you. Your ability to sit down and eat something, anything, in peace is gone. Possibly forever. Even carrot and celery sticks.

Highly tuned ears can hear the fridge door even over a screaming match about who cuddles teddy. Little beady eyes zoom in on food within milliseconds of it being unwrapped from cling wrap, or slid sneakily out of a paper bag. Then the pestering begins. Fine, you give them some too, but they gobble it, nothing is savored. So before you've even finished your second mouthful the little starlings are back for more, and more and... well you get the picture.

But not today.

Oh no.

I, with my dignity, was hiding in the pantry. They'd already eaten a gingerbread man each (the big ones with THREE Smarties for buttons), and I was damned if they were going to scoff my meringue as well. Especially as I hadn't got to eat it with my cup of (now cold) tea because they'd had an insatiable desire for vegemite toast which then got fed to the dog. Who, incidentally, got shouted at and sent outside. Poor Ella! Though she did get a schmakos and a cuddle to make up for it!

I love parenthood.

Ten Reasons My Mum's Ace!

My Mum's birthday is the 8 May. Cunningly timed to coincide with Mother's Day, so we don't have to buy two presents. That's how Ace my mum is!

As a Happy Birthday to her I've come up with ten reasons she's wonderful. (No not in place of a real present, I promise!)

1. I'm sick, kids sick, mum's there. AND she has the energy to sit through a three hour Opera after a day of fractious children (including me).
   
2. She likes, no enjoys, lengthy descriptions of situations involving substances her grandchildren produced all by themselves (and I'm not talking playdough here).
3. She totally understands that if I am disagreeing with my husband, then I am completely in the right and he has no idea what I am talking about.
4. She loves me more that either of my sisters. Not that she's ever actually told me that, but I just know its true. I mean how could she possibly not?
   
5. She is totally and utterly 100% behind whatever scheme I've come up with this time.
6. She never ever says "I told you so."
7. So does a convincing job of liking all my husbands/boyfriends. Well so far anyway.
   
8. She whole-heartedly believes I can be anything I want to be, including, model, ballerina, astronaut, mother of three, Nobel prize winner, train driver... Actually, I've always had a bit of a hankering to be a truck driver, even though I need assistance from passers-by to reverse park the 4-wheel drive.
   
9. She can drive a truck, and a tractor, and a ride on lawn-mower, and a Quad-bike...
10. She isn't scared of anything. Well except for spiders. But I mean, who can blame her for that. All those hairy legs, all those staring eyes, eeeew.
    

Samhain Spring Showers Contest

A copy of Running Scared is up for grabs over a Coffee Time Romance. Just follow the link, http://www.coffeetimeromance.com/board/showthread.php?t=1165, read the excerpt, leave a comment and you'll be in the running for a swag of goodies.

Further to Men's Fashion

I would like to point out to all of those who were reduced to helpless laughter over the thought of my rather tall husband wearing a pale lemon jacket with matching shorts and carrying a yellow skateboard when venturing out of the house in search of ladies (long long before he met me), that it could have been a lot lot worse.He could have been wearing yellow lego on his head. This is from fashion week I might add.

WHAM

My High Speed hero is wandering around in his underpants, and he's the sort of guy who can wander around in his underpants. So I was musing as to what outfits he possibly couldn't carry off.

I spent a fairly painful ten minutes going back over outfits that we wore in the 80s. A train of thought that may have been triggered by hubby's admission that he was very into looking like Depeche Mode at that stage.

But what really popped out of my past was the WHAM/Choose Life t-shirt phase. Oh shudder. I must have been fifteen or maybe a bit younger (or a lot younger, ahem!), and had just discovered trends. Never doing anything by halves, I somehow managed to talk my mother into procuring enormous Choose Life t-shirt (my sister got the WHAM one), and I proceeded to live in it for the next six months. Being of poor quality, it went see-through and parted at the seams after all that washing and one day dissapeared (ie, Mum tossed it in the bin when I wasn't looking).

How I loved that t-shirt. How it made me feel trendy, hip, with-it. A groovy gal, if you will. How it makes me shudder now. How I want to break into my parents home, scour the photo albums and remove the evidence. How embarrassing!

sigh!