A very quick post tonight.

It is still very wet down this way.

In the north of Victoria a number of towns have been flooded.

Further, north in NSW huge areas are cut off with SES (State Emergency Service) beginning to air drop relief supplies. In QLD there have been a few deaths, (mostly people trying to drive across flooded streams).

Here around Melbourne the flooding has just been at nuisance level.

So we are lucky.

Anyway the rain stopped long enough for me to get out and about and catch these piccies of floodwaters near Yarra Glen.

The flooded fences give idea of the depth of water.

I guess this farmer won't be selling too much produce for a little while
I thought the light behind this abandoned railway trestle bridge was worth a shot.

Thank all of you who left supportive comments about my extract from my WIP on Thursday.

Now, Deb and I are off to have dinner with friends in the city.

Swan Watch XII: Another Wet Weekend

The wet weather continues down this way. In fact it has poured on and off all weekend. Not to be deterred Deb and I went for drives on both days. Although I have to say with all the rain and mud there was no hiking this weekend.

On Saturday we headed up the Yarra valley. I had to pause near Yarra Glen to catch these piccies as the storm clouds swallowed up the distant mountains.Today we headed out again this time down to Port Phillip Bay.For a brief moment we had a glimpse of blue sky. But the muddy colour of the water is a direct result of all the runoff flowing into the bay with the continued rain.We attempted to go for a short walk but just a little way down the coast the sky got so dark again we beat a hasty retreat back in the direction of the car.
I was amazed by just how black the sea was below the clouds.

No wonder with all this rain local rivers like the Plenty River are threatening to break their banks.Now to the Swans.
On our way home we paused briefly to catch a couple of photos. And I mean a couple, it was raining again and my camera is simply not waterproof. When I have a spare $2500 I’ll buy a new one :-)
As you can see from these hastily snapped shots Mother and baby are still well.

Baby is starting to look a bit more handsome again as its scrappy down is covered by a fresh coat of feathers. He/She won’t get that glossy adult black until after a couple more moults.

Now a final word about Veiled in Shadows, thank you all for your kind words. Also thank you for those of you who have offered to review it for me.

For those of you who missed Friday’s post my book is available on Amazon and you can read an extract here .

I am thinking of posting additional extracts over coming weeks, what do you think?

News!! (and a Request)

As promised a little while ago I have some news of my book Veiled in Shadows.
Essentially my news is fairly straight forward.

Finally, after much hair tearing, endless delays caused but the intrusion of other aspects of my life, going back over my MS I don’t know how many times, I have all my files for the book ready for uploading to the printing company Lightning Source.

Notice I say “printing company” rather than “self-publishing company”. That is because Lightning Source is plain and simple a printer.

Unlike many vanity presses masquerading as “self-publishing” Lighting Source is a printer. They don’t try to sell you various “services” to “improve” your manuscript. They don’t sell you packages to market your book.

You have to do it all: editing; layout; cover; uploading the files for the cover and body; supplying an ISBN. Also, you set the retail price and decide on wholesale discount and returns policy. In short you are the publisher. (Some of you will remember I registered a business as a small publisher a while ago)

After that they list the book on Ingram (of which they are a subsidiary) so book stores can order it and they make it available to mobs like Amazon and The Book Depository (in Aussie English a mob is not a group of gangsters but any group).

So after tonight I have to wait for Lightning Source to send me a “proof” copy of the bound book to make a final check. Once I approve that (assuming I don’t need any last minute changes) I am in the market.

So that is my big news. I am on the way!!!!

This is such a relief after far too much time bogged down in the last few details.
I am really excited, in fact I should probably say ecstatic about having got this far.

I have a little fantasy that once this all happens I will be able to spend more time working on my WIP. In reality I guess that if I want Veiled in Shadows to work I am quite likely to have less time to spend on the WIP.
I am going to have to market my baby myself. And that is going to be a big job!

The trick over the coming months is to come up with clever ways to increase my visibility. In terms of efficiency that effort has to be mainly targeted on the web.
In comparison to markets overseas, in Oz the market is tiny (there are only 20 million of us in the whole country).

SO now for my request.
As I said I have to come up with ways of marketing my little piece.
Now last night I came up with a few words that I hope are punchy, brief and raise interest in the book.

But I am no marketing expert, so I was hoping to ask all my blogosphere friends to do me a big favour and have a look and comment.

Here we go:

In a world divided by conflict.
In a storm that consumes friend and foe alike.


In a war fought in the shadows…
those who live may do so at the cost of their humanity.


Two lovers united by passion
…and divided by hate.


As they fight for survival…
their most implacable foe might be one another.


What do you think?
Would that attract your interest?
What kind of book does it sound like?
And are there any improvements I could make?

Finally a couple of piccies I took yesterday arvo/evening.

A rainbow in the Yarra Valley
After so many years of drought it is a real luxury to see the decent rain continuing past the occasional downpour. A rainbow is just icing!

The Sunset over Yarra Glen

A Chrissie Brekky

As many of you know, I manage a charity service that provides breakfast (and other services) to people who are homeless.

Well Christmas is almost upon us. We have debated for some time what to do for “our guys” over the Chrissie period. We have come up with a couple of solutions.
There seem to be a profusion of Chrissie lunches, some in the days leading up to the 25th and some on the Holiday itself.

So breakfast being “our area of expertise”, we decided to put on a BBQ brekky. Well our brekky has happened and I am pleased to say it was a roaring success.
We provided lashings of steak, lamb chops, sausages, bacon, eggs along with bread rolls and assorted condiments (plus of course our more usual fare of toast, cereal, coffee and tea for those who wanted it). We had a generous donation from a local church to cover the cost so we went to town on the amounts.
By the time we opened we had a large grill full to overflowing of food ready to go.

It was a real pleasure to see the delight of many of our guys at the sight that greeted them as they came in.
One of our regulars for example, a guy who is old beyond his years and who wears an eye-patch and has massive facial scarring from the ravages of cancer treatment, chuckled with glee when he was told he could pick whatever he liked and could come back for as many servings as he wished. Another fellow said he loves eggs and hadn’t had one for over a year; he came back for at least half a dozen.

These guys have so little and live such desperate lives. Their joy at something so simple was really one of those moments that help make a tough job more than worthwhile.

The other thing we are managing to do for the guys is to keep our service open throughout the entire Christmas period. Christmas coincides with summer here. This leads to a great number of charities and other services not only closing for the holidays themselves but in some cases closing for weeks. Fortunately because we have a very dedicated team of volunteers we are going to be able to stay open right through Christmas and January.

Now a couple of piccies.
On our way home on the weekend we stopped a couple of times so I could grab the chance to capture some evening shots.

This first was captured near Yarra Glen.The silvery look is partly due to a combination of haze and cloud, but is also an artefact of a very narrow aperture because I was shooting almost straight into the afternoon sun.
The next is taken a little later from a point called Garden Hill.It is looking across miles of suburb to the distant Melbourne CBD.

Finally, again from Garden HillThe city with a 300mm telephoto as the Sun set behind.

A brief note about the self-publishing experiment. Formatting is almost complete. I have to chose a different name for my publishing venture. I am also working on layout and images for a couple of web pages. This last has not been going very well as I have not been at all happy with what I have put together so far.