The Long Road to Reading and Arithmetic

Pyjama Angels...changing young people's lives.

Hello, I'm a Pyjama Angel. I want to tell you about The Pyjama Foundation and the fabulous work it does with foster children.

This is an official poster of The Pyjama Foundation. The purpose is to raise awareness of the difficulties experienced by foster children and how this impacts their learning. This Sunday, 24th March, The Pyjama Foundation is conducting its major fund raising event for the year in Queensland with The Long Road event. This event involves non-competitive walk events throughout Queensland and Sydney. If you want to be part of this worthwhile event register here today: http://thepyjamafoundation.com/downloads/reg-long-road-home.pdf

It's going to be a fun event. I'll be attending the Gold Coast event bright and early on Sunday morning walking and chatting with other participants.

The Pyjama Foundation assists children in foster/statutory care. These children often come from traumatic backgrounds and have a hard time trying to understand and where they fit in the world. The Pyjama Foundation has started a literacy and numeracy program for the children. For one hour per week, a Pyjama Angel visits the child to help them with reading and/or their arithmetic. Apart from being a mother, it is one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Every week I sit with my special child and I help them with their reading. There is much sharing about our day and what we are interested in, and then we read and play games or make up our own wacky stories. To share with a young mind is beneficial to their and my own creativity and it's my way of giving back to my community. These children desperately need to be able to read and understand basic numeracy, like every other child, but it is their circumstances that make this road more diffcult for them.

If you don't have the time to walk this Sunday, perhaps you would like to help this organisation achieve their financial goals by giving a donation. Thank you. These children need these basic skills to ensure they have a future.

Summer 2013

Burleigh Heads, Gold Coast

I thought I'd share some photos of my favourite place where I walk regularly: Burleigh Heads. The weather has been rough this summer, so much that I haven't been in the surf. Not only have the wild storms washed a lot of the beach away, but the water is now brown from the silt that has filtered down from the Nerang and Tweed Rivers. At first glance the eroded beaches are devastating, and the rough seas make surfing and swimming conditions dangerous. This photo taken from the headland near Burleigh Hill was the most tranquil I'd seen all summer. The photo was taken just before the sun set. You can see the gold sunlight touching the tips of the waves. It was a great place to meditate.

Burleigh Heads, Gold Coast

 This photo shows some of the erosion of the beach at Burleigh Heads. Because of the protective Burleigh Hill this area wasn't as badly affected by the recent rough seas, however Surfers Paradise and other parts of the Gold Coast experienced major beach erosion with up to three metres and more washed away. The beaches are slowly recovering and the council is working hard to repair the devastation so that we have lots of sand again for our Easter tourists.

The cyclones wreak havoc along our coastline during the summer, however within a few months of normal conditions our beaches will return to their former beauty. There are a lot of similarities between how nature repairs the land and how people's hearts and minds are repaired after they have been through a storm. In time peace will come again. The important thing to remember is that there are lessons to be learned from the difficulties we experience. We often come back stronger and better equipped than before for the new challenges that are ahead of us.

How about you, are you battling a storm at the moment? I'm encouraging you to accept the storm and work with it, for in time it too will pass.

For You...

Readers are awesome!!!

Thank you for buying my books.

Readers are special

Without readers I have no one to write for, and that prompts me to ask,'what am I writing for?'; and 'for whom am I writing?'

I write to entertain and to encourage my readers they aren't alone with their thoughts and ideas, that life gets in the way and the journey can sometimes feel insurmountable. At the end of a story, I hope my readers feel satisfied they have had a good read and are entertained for the few hours they've spent between the pages in my imaginary world.

I'd like to know if I'm achieving this for you, and what you would like to see in my books in the future. So don't be shy! I look forward to hearing from you.

Good Writing Habits

Book signing...Web of lies

I've often been asked by many aspiring writers about my writing habits. It's as if by finding out about my daily writing routine they will be validated in some way regarding their own habits. If they're not yet published it's as if they try my routine then they will surely be published.

Every author has a different routine. Some write in the early hours of the morning before they go to their day job. Some work into the long dark hours after a full eight hour day or more. Another snatches bits of time when the baby is asleep (this was me when my son was young). Others write during their lunch hour, while waiting in the doctor's surgery, or sitting on the bus or train on their daily commute. I know of one successful author who only wrote on the weekends because she was a busy teacher all week.

It's the flexibility and freedom of writing that attracted me to this work. I am definitely not a nine to five worker. When I was in the workforce in my other life, working that nine to five shift, I felt I was in gaol for the whole eight hours. For most of that time I was stuck in a work area where I couldn't see the outside world. When I started writing full time I made sure there was light and the natural world around me. For variety, I go to the beach or a park or outdoor coffee shop to write. It's good for my health and it fills my creative well; double benefit.

As to my current routine, I write every day without fail. Week days, eight hours or more, while weekends for only a couple of hours per day. I believe it's important to keep the writing habit moving. I have this fear that if I miss a day, I may never get back to it. However, every year, I stop writing mid-December and don't come back until about mid-January. I may make some random notes, but that's all. This is my down time. Summer makes me come alive. It's my time to bask in the hot sun for a few minutes then take a cool refreshing swim in the surf. It's time to absorb the world around me into my heart and spirit and let nature take hold of me for those weeks. It's also a time to meet new people and make new friends whom I like to connect with in the year ahead.

Writing is my life, and  the more I write I'm finding out more about myself and how I relate to this wonderful planet we live on. Ideas are limitless, they are everywhere I go. As to that writing habit: I just do what feels right for me. I expect you will do what works for you.

Happy writing!

How about you? Do you have regular writing habits or do you have to squeeze time to write out of your busy day?

Ouch...Rejection Hurts

In the beginning of my fiction writing career, I wrote five novels and had them all rejected. My motivation dived and I though I would never pick up a pen again. So how did I keep my motivation going to write that next novel and win that publishing contract?

Motivation helps us to achieve our dreams.

I knew I wanted to be a writer. Ever since I started reading in year one at school, words had captured my heart and I had to read every day. I loved writing stories and I would get carried away in my own little world. My teachers said I had a vivid imagination and encouraged me to keep writing stories.

The journey to publication has been one of the most difficult adventures of my life. My first five novels were rejected. It hurt and with each subsequent novel I wrote after each rejection, the writing became harder. Once I realised my first five novels were my apprenticeship and that  I had to learn how to write scenes that had a beginning, a middle and an ending; and the ending of the scene, had to hook my reader so that she had to keep reading the next scene and the one after that, until she finished the book, I was on my way to achieving my dream.

I learned how to create characters and how to develop them throughout the story so that they had grown by the end of the story. I learned how to structure my story of where the crucial high and low points of the story occurred. In this apprenticeship there was a lot for me to learn.

So how did I deal with the rejection letters? I gave myself permission to be disappointed and to shed a few tears. Life is about rolling with the good and bad times and being emotionally honest during those times. In the privacy of my own home, the next step was getting mad at the editor for rejecting me, and then mad at myself for being so naiive thinking all I had to do was write a couple of drafts of a book and send it off to a publisher. I was on a steep learning curve. After I nursed the hurt, I asked myself why I was writing and was I prepared to put the extra hard yards into the work?

I write because I feel compelled to write. A day without writing is like cutting off my right hand. I'm useless. I wander around lost and confused. There is nothing else I'd rather be doing than writing. I also write to entertain and to encourage people in their own life's journey. So, that left me with no alternative than to learn all I could about the writing craft and keep practising until I became published. I am a determined person and I don't accept defeat easily. I read every book I could get my hands on to learn my craft.

Because of my perseverance I was rewarded with a contract for African Hearts. What a thrill that was, but success came twenty long years after I started writing. I knew I wanted to succeed but I had to get over the pain of rejection first, develop a thick skin and believe that I could do the job. The most important lesson I learned was to keep writing, every spare minute I had every day.

Do you believe you have the perseverance to be a published writer? How have you handled your rejection letters? What motivated you? I'd like to hear your story.