A good year. Saw younger daughter a couple of times and had a great holiday with her. Saw my sister and had a great camping holiday with her. Saw elder daughter, son-in-law and grandson (now aged 4) for an extended time and went camping with them. Caught up with other family members in Oz whom I love dearly.
Everyone healthy and doing well.

A good year for me, truly. I saw so many of my overseas friends…
The best of the best had to be something that Karen Miller did for me, completely out of the blue. That lady rocks. Never in all my life did I ever expect that anyone would dedicate a book to me. Yet there it was, the dedication for The Riven Kingdom:

It blew me away. Still does. Got to be one of the highlights of the year.
Great to share a room with Donna at Denvention. Donna is another one of those people I wish I lived just down the street from…
I had a friend here in Malaysia who has emerged on the other side of breast cancer in sound health. If ever I have the rotten luck to be in that position, I will try to emulate the strength and pragmatism and good sense of this woman. I have rarely admired someone so much as her during this time.
Hrugaar visited me from his rock and we went to Taman Negara, I met up with an old friend in Lake Como and had some more good times…
My wonderful sister-in-law still smiles even though life deals her a tough hand.
Another couple of friends here had a fiftieth wedding anniversary.
And then there’s all of you: the people who read this blog.
So many good friends in so many different countries – I am blessed.

I was the National Guest of Honour at Swancon. I shall not forget that in a long time – I revelled in the honour of being asked when the National Convention was in my home state, hope I did all that was expected of me, had a ball, made new friends and saw a lot of old ones. Davina, Satima, Dave (both of them), Karen, Trudi & Paul, Theresa, Helen, Simon, Stephanie, Zara, Ju, Juliet, Joel, Bevan, Sean, Jonathan, Ian, Marianne, Dianne, Cat, Annaliese…the list goes on and on.
Thanks, everyone on the Swancon Committee. Thanks a million, really.

And then there was Denvention, my second Worldcon. Another great convention. Wonderful to meet people like Kate Elliott and David Coe and Cheryl Morgan and Willandra for the first time. To meet up with Orbit US publishers. To talk books and fantasy and sf and…to enjoy the feast when I am more used to a famine.

And possibly, best of all, to vote for the 2010 Convention, AussiCon4, to be in Melbourne. I am now officially a participant. I was incredibly impressed by the people who worked to make this happen. And today’s the last day to pay up at the old price – quick, get over to the webpage and buy a membership!!!

Virtual Conflux. Where I was on a one-person “panel” with lots of virtual observers/questioners. Great fun. Love these, and kudos to the organizers.

This has been a bad year financially. I haven’t had any “real” work since the beginning of March and my husband has not been paid (although he works fulltime) since end of July*. So that leaves his pension and my writing to live on.

And yet…I travelled. A lot. The fare to Australia was courtesy of Swancon. The children chipped in for the far to USA. The Lake Como trip was my big expense of the year (husband on duty, so his fare/hotel got paid). But worth every bit – great friends old and new, gorgeous scenery, perfect weather, delicious food. Wish I could do that more often.

And what a lot of wonderful places I went to: Yosemite, the Goldfields and the southern coast of Western Australia, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Virginia Beach, Como Italy, Pulau Kapas In Malaysia….

Travel doesn’t come without sacrifice. We don’t have a TV. We share a not-fancy car. I don’t buy much in the line of clothes. The roof leaks. We don’t go out much. When I travel, I often do it cheap. Red-eye flights. Overnight in airports. Camping, smelly motel rooms, etc. But oh, what a store of good times and memories!

Sometime tomorrow I will finish yet another rewrite of Rogue Rainlord (or whatever the final title is!).

And this is absolutely the last draft.*

*{Er, well, sort of the last – there’s still an editor’s suggestions to be incorporated (if I ever sell the thing) and then the copy editor’s corrections and then the final proofs after that… Maybe I had better say this is the last of the writer’s drafts.}

I sometimes get asked: How do you know when it’s ready? After two re-writes? Ten? Thirty?

The answer for me is none of the above. I know it is ready when I get bored.

It’s been put away and allowed to jell several times, then re-read and found wanting. It has been rewritten and fixed and cut and added to and rearranged. It has been tightened and polished and read and corrected yet again. How many drafts? I haven’t the faintest clue. Numbers mean nothing; what counts is getting it right. And until I get it right, I can’t leave the darn thing alone. Some time back I got it structurally right and breathed a sigh of relief; now I have the polish right as well.

And I know that I have it about as right as it will ever be, short of having professional editorial input. How do I know? Because I am bored. Why am I bored? Because finally I can’t find much to fix. This is the way it is meant to be. This is my story and it is good. I love it. And I now find myself reading it as a reader, not as a writer – but it is a book I have read so many times over the past few months that it has no surprises any more. I have reached the stage where I have to let go, move on. I’ve no idea how other writers arrive at this decision, but for me, boredom means success. The first goal has been reached…

{Of course, when I have editorial input, I shall get itchy fingers again and there will be lots more polishing…}

And the good news is my agent has now read it (the version before this one) and has said that she thoroughly enjoyed it, thinks it is great stuff, and still finds a certain scene shocking, even though she read it before in a still earlier version.

Yay! She has no hesitation in sending the MS off.

Pix:
How’s this for style? A public chess set in a cow paddock, just outside of Esperance. Love it.

Is the fence to keep the bovines from trampling the pawns or to make sure they don’t dribble on the players?

I have distinct memories from my childhood of a cow called Corrie who hated kids, and me racing down the driveway with her lowered horns just inches from my behind. Pamplona and running with the bulls? Yep, been there, done that, and I was only five. I dived through the neighbour’s barbed wire fence.

Read something in the US news about a mother leaving her teenage kids home alone. Now she’s facing legal action. And her oldest was 17.

Hmmm.

I remember going off to Morocco with my husband – he was on duty travel – in 1988. For 8 or 9 days. The girls were just turned 13, and the older 16, four months short of 17. Yep, left them alone for 9 days.

We were living in Vienna (the one in Austria, that is.) The kids were at school, so could not come with us. We lived in a row of adjoining houses and the German/Finnish couple next door promised to keep a eye on things – but they weren’t actively involved in their care. For heaven’s sake, the girls could look after themselves. My husband’s secretary kept in touch with them as well.

And you know what? I wasn’t particularly worried about them and I don’t think we did anything particularly terrible.

My own mother at age 11, back in 1914, was cooking for the family, caring for a chronically sick mother, looking after her two sisters aged 10 and 4, and schooling as well.
Here’s what I wrote to her after we got back to Vienna: “Home again and all well that I can see. N managed to remove the skin from her upper lip and chin in a fall which does nothing for her looks, and they dropped a knife onto the element of the dishwasher where the handle melted, but no other disasters…”

Of course, Vienna was a safe city. People didn’t walk around taking pot-shots at school kids, and crime where we lived was rare. In our six years there I don’t remember that we were robbed once. (Wish I could say the same about Malaysia today.) Drugs were rare in the school environment. And there were so many friends – both theirs and ours – that the kids could turn to in a fix. In addition, European children tend to be an independent lot, used to fending for themselves and even travelling to other countries on their own.

Elder daughter and her girlfriend once went by train for a weekend to Venice. I think they were 16. They found their own accommodation and meals, and fended off amorous Italians all by themselves. That’s Europeans for you.

When the older daughter was off at Oxford, we left the younger one at home again, when we went to Albania for five or six days. She was 15.

I rang her from one of the two public telephones in the capital city of Tirana, just to check how she was. The year was I think 1990. And you had to use a real live telephonist in the hotel to connect you before you could speak…

Anyway, no sooner was daughter on the phone, and before I could get a word out, than she was desperately asking after OUR safety. Were we all right? There was a revolution in Tirana!
I said, ‘Huh? You sure you’ve got the right place?’ We hadn’t had any access to the news, although the Albanians did seem upset. Italy had just been defeated in the semi-finals of the World Cup Soccer, after all…
To which she replied with a scathing: ‘Muuu-uuum!’ You know the tone.
‘Oh,’ I said, the penny dropping, ‘So that’s what all those people we saw climbing over the embassy walls was about!” And that was why the Government Minister we’d had dinner with the night before had a decidedly harrassed look, especially when he was buttonholed by a Western reporter in the hotel lobby.

We were in the middle of a revolution and hadn’t even known it.

I listened to the entire “Sorry” speech by Prime Minister Rudd of Australia over on Justine Larbalestier’s blog and shed a tear. So many bad things are done in the name of governments – even in the name of doing good, that every now and then it is great to hear an apology for one of these policies. No one can make it right for anyone, even if they are still alive. But saying sorry is the correct thing to do. It’s a start.

Back in 1964 while all this was still going on — that is, forcibly taking children away from their indigenous parents and communities, literally dragging them out of their mother’s arms in some cases, simply on the racist basis of them having some white blood, then carting them off to mission schools where the level of care and education was patchy and their religious denomination was decided by chance — back then, I was in university taking a course in elementary anthropology. The course included a unit on the culture of the indigenous peoples of Australia. It was all pretty basic.

I knew children were being taken, even then, to mission schools for education. In my humungous naivety, I assumed their parents had consented and that the children returned home for holidays. I assumed they could write letters to their families. I assumed that this was the best way for them to get an education and therefore to have a choice in their future lives. What did I know – I assumed all this, because the people who surrounded me in my youth were reasonable rational and kind and would never have treated me in any other way.

It never occurred to me that not only was permission not granted, but that these children were quite literally being stolen, and that the paper trail was obscured by name changes or obliterated, or perhaps never existed in the first place, so that when children and parents tried to find one another as adults, it was never easy and sometimes impossible.

To this day I wonder about those professors and tutors I had at university – they must have known. They did field research, after all. Why did they not tell us just how iniquitous the system was?

When I found out, I was outraged, but by then I was already living in Malaysia. And that was when I started to wonder what I could do to say sorry. Not much, really. When the previous Australian government refused to say sorry, I was furious.

And of that outrage, of that fury, one of the elements in Heart of the Mirage was born – and I wrote a fantasy novel about a woman stolen from her people and raised to despise her own culture.

The acknowledgments in the book say, in part:

Many years ago, when my own children were very young, I heard for the first time two stories, from opposite sides of the globe. One told the tragedy of (…) how several generations of children were forcibly taken from their loving, caring families to be raised by strangers. They were told to forget who they had been and where they had come from, to forget their language, their culture and their people; indeed to denigrate their very origins.

Ligea’s story is my way of saying sorry to all those mothers and their children; my way of paying homage to (…) the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australia. As a mother, I have wept for you.

After the book was published, the best fanmail I have ever had came from a Koori woman living in Western Australia, to say thank you. I cried then too.

There is so little one can do to repair the past.

That list somewhere below of “things I have done which you probably haven’t” has got me thinking back to days gone by.

And for some reason, embarrassing “moments I’d rather forget” seem to head the list of memories. Why on earth do we tend to remember the awful bits with such crystal clarity and not the good ones?? Anyway, here’s one I remembered.

My husband often used to invite his overseas work-related visitors to dinner at our house, together with some of his colleagues. On this particular occasion, everything conspired to ruin the event…

Firstly, we had a new live-in maid. (Yeah, yeah, I know…) She was fairly young and very shy, straight out of a Javanese-speaking village down in Johor. At the time my two girls were three and a baby of a couple of a couple months. I cooked most of the dinner, but was running late. My husband had to leave to pick up the visitors from their hotel. The locals were coming by themselves, of course.

And just to complete the scenario: our lounge room had concertina doors, which were pushed completely open to the side that night, but also a wrought iron grille – which was locked. So anyone arriving at the door could see in, and of course, hear everything. The main bedroom gave off the lounge room.

I left the baby with the maid, and dashed into the shower with about 15 minutes to spare (this is the tropics, remember – having been slaving away in the kitchen, I wasn’t about to appear before the guests dripping in sweat.) I came out of the shower, and was still quite naked, when my three-year-old comes running into the bedroom, saying “They’re here! They’re here!” – meaning the contingent of (early) local guests.

“Close the door!” I hiss at her, not wanted to be on display to the guests in my state of undress.

A number of things then happen more or less simultaneously. I reach out to grab up the roll-on deodorant from the dressing table, and the whole roll-on top comes flying off, dousing me in sticky deodorant from hair all the way to feet. And three-year-old slams the door on her hand and sets off a bawl that could have been heard in the next suburb.

So there I am, with visitors at the front door for a fancy dinner party, a daughter screaming blue murder, her sticky, naked mother panicking wondering whether her child’s broken her fingers, husband not back, and a maid to shy too come out of her room and let the visitors in.

Moments like that, there really ain’t much you can do.

I comfort daughter, check out all the fingers, run water into the basin and get her to soak her hand (she’s still yelling), ignore the doorbell and puzzled snatches of conversation (“Well, someone’s home, I can hear a child screaming” and “Are you sure we have the right house?”).

I then get back under the shower and wash off the goo and shampoo my hair. I try to persuade daughter – whose sobs have faded by this time – to go and let the guests in while I get dressed. She’s not budging.

And so it was my husband arrives back to find the house grille locked and puzzled guests milling around the front driveway…

This is a meme of sorts, started by John Scalzi over at Whatever.

So, 10 things I’ve done that you (probably) have not, if you had any sense…

1. Administered a correspondence course for GP doctors when I know nothing whatsoever about medicine.
2. Worn a T-shirt that was (while I was wearing it) admired by Queen Noor of Jordan.
3. Walked 20 – 30 kms up the Headhunter’s Trail in Sarawak wearing a shoe which had the sole held on only by elastic bands.
4. Killed a cobra with a broomstick.
5. Survived 30-40 wasp stings (all at the same time, in the middle of a mangrove swamp).
6. Slept in a thoroughly decadent baroque bedroom with chandeliers and a mirrored ceiling overhead, quite unconscious of the fact that a revolution had just started in the country I was in…
7. Took my daughter’s in-laws to a Balinese brothel in the middle of the night thinking it was a karaoke bar
8. Got (thoroughly) beaten to the top of a 13,455′ (4101m) high mountain by the youngest person to have ever climbed it independently (my daughter, aged 8 at the time) .
9. Swum with wild penguins (and no wet suit either).
10. Had a Vice-President of Iran to dinner in my house, for which I did the cooking…

…when I hated shoes. (This post is apropos of nothing, so don’t look for deep meaning here.)

It was just that I was bought up on a farm, and whenever I could, I went barefoot. The soles of my feet were as thick and as good as leather. Even in winter, I often ran about without shoes until my feet turned blue with cold.

I dutifully went off to school wearing shoes – leather sandals (without socks) in summer, and proper shoes in winter – but usually took them off to play on the unsurfaced playground at school. [Things changed at highschool – these are my primary school days I am talking about.]

I was a good sprinter and often represented my school at interschool meets – and always ran barefoot. School ovals were always grassed back then, none of these cinder tracks.

As a result, my feet never welcomed being crammed into shoes. They were broad and the toes spread, so it was hard to find shoes that fit. One of the aids we had to buying shoes back then was an x-ray machine (I kid you not) in all the major shoe stores. The shop assistant would turn it on and you put your foot inside the machine where you could see your foot skeleton and how well it fitted into the fuzzy outline of the shoe… Try on half a dozen pairs, and you could do it half a dozen times in a row. For both feet. If ever I get cancer of the foot, I’ll know why, won’t I?

A British immigrant family came to live in the area and the wife remarked at how shocked she was to realise how poor the community was. When asked what made her think that, she remarked, “Well they can’t even afford to buy the children shoes…”

Believe me, parents all tried to put us kids into shoes, but we just whipped them off first opportunity we got. A glance around the classroom would reveal that at least half of us – especially in summer – were sitting there with our feet bare, our soles black from the combination of residue from the oiled jarrah wood floors and the dust of the playground.

I guess this could be why I have never been enamoured of wobbling along on high heels or platform soles. I still wonder why we women do it. Sure, high heels make for a sexy walk and taut long-looking legs – but at what price? Twisted ankles and broken bones, back problems, bunions, pain – the list is endless.

I do have one pair of heels and wear them on occasion. They even make me feel elegant. And I wonder why we emancipated women do it. I marvel why, at my age, I still feel compelled to wear heels – and I wonder even more why I feel good doing it.

I want to be back in the Kelmscott School playground, under those huge Norfolk Pines, in the heat of a summer day, drawing patterns in the dust with a bare toe and not feeling the least bit self-conscious about it…

Yesterday was the festival of Eid Al-Adha. For my husband’s family, this year was more special than usual, as one of his sisters was off performing the Hajj.

Next week is Christmas – yet another Xmas which I don’t spend with any of my own family. The last time we were all together at Christmas? I can’t remember the year; certainly more than five years ago. In Scotland, it was, and it snowed.

Yesterday, we went to the old family home in the Malacca village where my husband grew up, the very house where I first met all his sisters and his parents and his brother, so very long ago. It was late at night, the year was 1968 and a coconut tree had fallen across the power lines. So I met them all for the first time by lamplight. It was Eid Al Fitr and Christmas, both, and I was sick with apprehension. So, I suppose, were they, although that never occurred to me at the time.

This time, when our car pulls into the yard, my husband looks anguished. The garden – once so lovingly tended by his mother – is all dead. All her beautiful orchids are gone and the orchid shade-house pulled down. The rambutan tree my father-in-law used to sit under in the evenings is no more, and the earth is hard and bare, the grass dead.

My parents-in-law have both gone now, and their eldest daughter- so kind in heart and generous of spirit – gone as well. No one lives in the house. One of my Malaysian sisters opens up the house for the festival, and those of us who remain go back. We eat, and talk, and exchange news. There are gaps at the table, not just for those who are gone, for there are divisions in the family now, when once they were strong and united.

Time has moved on. We have moved on. Yet, so suddenly yesterday, we discovered happy memories have the power to hurt.

The tiger story was the lie.

The Libyan minister was caught in the trap with the rest of his countrymen when air flights were banned in and out of his country for many years. He had to drive from Libya to Tunisia to catch a plane whenever he wanted to travel, so each time he left his car in our garage in Tunis until he came back. And I really didn’t want to drive his state-of-the-art programmed car.

And I did spend a couple of months hitchhiking around New Zealand with a girl friend when I was twenty. Had a wonderful time and not a single bad experience. Bunking down on the floor of the tourist info booth in the middle of the pavement was odd though – people talk about the darnedest things when they think no one else is around to hear them…