Just in case you wanted to know what sea cucumbers look like – live ones. (They were lifted out of the water briefly for the photo shoot).

And these things are delicacies?? They look like over-sized well-fed leeches…

About 15 cm (6″), but they can stretch themselves into a slim 30 cm too.

Especially when I am sitting in a Kuala Lumpur traffic jam.
Or being blasted via a loud speaker at any time of day or night.
Or when I realise I haven’t seen a stunning dawn or sunset in weeks…
or walked a deserted beach.

Banggi Island, Sabah.

My Christmas was great. My family might not have been around, except for my husband, but friends were and we had two very pleasant days of eating and drinking far too much and talking a lot.
You can’t beat good company and good food.

I have so much to be grateful for.
Photo (October ’07) : a shop and house on Banggi Island, Sabah. We stopped to buy a couple of cans of drink…

LIFE ON BANGGI ISLAND (Sabah).
Festival fare – a sticky cake called dodol.

The first thing you have to do is start grating the fresh coconuts with the aid of a small motor and a grater mounted in the middle of a basin. And be careful not to grate your fingers. (See the bare chested young man in the first photo, seated in front of the basin and holding up a half coconut.)

The ingredients are coconut milk, coconut palm sugar or cane sugar, flavouring supplied by leaves of screw pine (pandan), and glutinous rice flour – all of which has to be stirred over an open fire for eight hours or so. As the mixture cooks, the mixture gets harder and harder to stir…
Note the pit dug for the fire and the large wok placed on banana stems.

Makes baking a Christmas cake look simple.

This is a sort of follow on from the previous post – which has some very interesting comments, by the way.

I am in the midst of this fascinating process of getting feedback from first readers, some of them writers themselves, some not. And truly marvellous they are, with an eye for the ridiculous, the grammatical error, the typo, the rough spot, the plot hole, and so on. I can read something twenty times and still not see something under my nose, or I just simply don’t see an illogically in the story at all.
Here’s one that was spotted: there’s one scene in my book where a man, camped on the outskirts of a village, has to clandestinely visit a village child whom he knows is alone in his hut just outside the village. He also has to carry a rather large basket of stuff. I had no problem with that…but a beta reader did.

In effect:
How come he is able – in broad daylight – to walk around the outskirts of the village without a) someone spotting him, especially when he is hampered by the basket, and b) why aren’t there a myriad of village children following him everywhere??

Oh, lord, so true. (Thanks Phill!)

The photographs taken by me are of my husband on Banggi Island, and of Hamid, from the University Malaysia Sabah, on the island of Mabul, Sabah….

Ah, seems I don’t have time to get to the bit of what I wanted to say that refers to the blog title. I will continue tomorrow.

Ah, we progress. I have gone from error 678 “couldn’t find the remote computer” – that is, the computer of my Internet Provider, yes, the IP that I pay money to for the privilege of a connection supposedly whenever I want it – to error 718 “the remote computer did not reply in a timely manner”.

You know what? I wouldn’t mind even if it replied in an untimely manner. If only it would reply.

In the meantime, I go on paying double what I should, and TMnet laughs all the way to the bank as they scam another trapped customer in a land that has only one IP.

Tonight is my last night in Sabah. It is raining. I am surrounded by boxes and packing mayhem. Maybe when we are back on the mainland my computer will slip under their radar and be able to make a connection. I’m a hopeful sort of person.

The pix is dawn from our room on Pulau Banggi last week. See what you miss when you don’t get up with the sun?

Sometimes an email comes along that makes everything worthwhile. And I have had one such from a man who just made my day.

He begins:

“I have read Havenstar now for the 20th time. This book still manages to surprise me, even shock me and I still cheer for the characters even though I know what will happen. It is by far my favourite book of all time. I only wish it would have been a trilogy, with each book having more than 800 pages. “

How cool is that?

Thank you, Daniel.

He then asks an interesting question, which I thought I would answer here. He was wondering what prompted me to make the heroine rather plain in looks.

And here’s my answer.

For a start, not being pretty myself, I have a natural dislike of the idea that someone has to look good in order to be heroine. I don’t think it was a coincidence that my favourite novel when I was about thirteen was Jane Eyre.

Beauty is something we are granted if we happen to be lucky; it’s not something we earn. I wanted to say that other things are much more important: courage, standing up for what you believe is right, loving wholeheartedly and being prepared to make sacrifices for those we love, never giving up even when things look bleak, working hard to achieve a better world, and so on.

Those are the things that made the main character in Havenstar heroic, and in the end, the other characters forgot all about the fact that she was rather mousy and insignificant in appearance – and in fact, I rather think than when Davron Storre looked at Keris, he thought she was beautiful.

And speaking of beauty, here is a sunrise this time, as seen from our accommodation on the island of Banggi, Sabah.