I am a bad, bad girl...

...and I can't be trusted at a book sale.

This weekend is the annual, much anticipated Dunedin Public Library Book Sale. I'm a Friend of the Library, and one of the perks of being a Friend is you get to go to the sale preview before the general public gets let lose on the books.

I thought to myself, there are a couple of books I'm trying to track down, maybe I'll find them there. I'll just pop in for ten minutes, buy a couple of books, a book each for the kids, pop straight out.

Ahem.

Bad Vanda.

Confession time:


For Me:

Fiction:

Janet Evanovich, High Five, Twelve Sharp and Lean, Mean Thirteen.
Tess Gerritsen, The Bone Garden.
Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead.
Jeffery Deaver, The Sleeping Doll.
Michael Collins, Death of a Writer,
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964 with a cool cover)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
2001 the Best American Mystery Stories
Stevan Eldred-Grigg Blue Blood (One of the characters in this novel is Ngaio Marsh!)

Non-Fiction:

A Shopping list for Murder, Robyn Beveridge
Catching Serial Killers, Earl James
He'll be OK: Growing gorgeous boys into good men, Celia Lashlie.

For the kids:

4 Asterix books,
1 Roald Dahl
2 Harry Potter
1 Geronimo Stilton,
Philip Pullman Northern Lights
Quidditch through the ages.
Everything you need to know about the world by Simon Eliot.
Collins Pocket English Dictionary.


What can I say.

I can't help myself.

A little something...

... I sent off to my publisher today.

Exercise is a deadly weapon

In a great example of truth being stranger than fiction, this article came to my attention (via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, thanks Sarah)

For millenia women have found intriguing ways to knock off a no longer desired spouse, and this lady found a swimmingly good way of doing it.

Ohio Woman pleads guilty in over-exercising death.

I would never have come up with that idea, and its my job to dream up novel ways to knock people off. I can't be as evil as I think I am!

It also goes to show exercise can kill you, so I'm not going to risk it.

A dilemma

Bedtime storytime is one of those lovely things I share with the boys where I get to make a myriad of goofy voices and also get to reread lots of my childhood favourites and dust off my old books. The boys get a real buzz when I tell them these were the very books I was reading at their age. My inability to cull my personal library has proven once again to be indispensable.

We have finished Joy Cowley's The Silent One, the story of twelve year-old Jonasi, an outcast boy, when he finds a magical white turtle. It tells of superstition, and ghosts and spirits and how fear will drive people to do stupid things. The boys loved it.

Choosing the next book has been a little more problematic. We have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S.Lewis, and the boys want to read the next in the series, and there in lies the dilemma, as the Chronicles of Narnia have an order of publication, but there is also a reading order.

The order of publication is:

The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.
Prince Caspian.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The Silver Chair.
The Horse and His Boy.
The Magicians Nephew.
The Last Battle.

The reading order is:

The Magicians Nephew.
The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.
The Horse and his Boy.
Prince Caspian.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The Silver Chair.
The Last Battle.

It is interesting to note the reading order was decided by Harper Collins when they took over publication on the advice of Lewis' stepson Douglas Gresham. It follows the chronological series of events in Narnia.

My childhood books have half of them with the reading order numbers printed on them (Fontana Lions), and the rest without (Puffin)


We were already wrongfooted on the reading order as we read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first. Anyway, I always like to read a series in order of publication, and Hollywood has chosen the publication order. (We got a buzz out of watching TLTWATW on DVD, as part of it was filmed at Elephant rocks, one of our favourite haunts out the back of Duntroon)


So the decision is finally made, and we will go with the order of publication; bring on Prince Caspian.

Valentines vixens

So it's Valentines day.

Flowers?

No.

Chocolates?

Not likely.

Do I expect them?

No way!

Don't get me wrong, I'm a hopeless romantic, but when it comes to Valentines day, my idea of a perfect evening involves the kids in bed, hubby & I relaxed on the sofa with an ice-cream in a cone watching something exciting on telly, like Grand Designs.

My thoughts on a Valentines day post involved a couple of things: a book, and a book title.

The book title gets my vote as the best title for a love story:


You Suck: A love story by Christopher Moore.

As you can guess from the title, it's a Vampire story, and no, I haven't read it as Vampire fiction isn't my thing (although my friends assure me it's great) But as a title, brilliant.

The other is a book of short crime stories given to me by my publisher, with the wonderful title Tart Noir. The back blurb states "Twenty shocking stories starring twenty edgy outrageous and badly behaved heroines."

And they were! Some were truly shocking.

These were the kind of women who if someone gave them chocolates for Valentines Day, they'd hunt them down and turn them into a Flake.

So there's my warped idea of romantic reading.

Brain fade

It's been a day.

The Bloddy cat woke me up at 5.30am this morning, and I couldn't get back to sleep, so that was not good. (She is to be banished to the kitchen tonight)

Today was radio show day. The advantage of the cat waking me up at such an unsociable hour was I got to write out my interview questions and get it all sorted before breakfast.

Deadline day is next Friday, which in reality means Thursday, so the manuscript is with the publisher on Friday so I've been in panic, I mean polish mode for a few weeks now. I've been aiming on editing ten chapters a day (I know) and have been meeting that target, until today, because it was a busy day with other things and I am TIRED. Today I did three chapters, and a radio show, and a heck of a lot of Mummy/ domestic things and had guests for dinner (the fabulous variety that come for dinner, but bring dinner, oh yes.) And the host-guest (who cooks) brought me the gift of a book (darn) because she raved about it and thought I'd like it. come again anytime, Laura.

So it's been a full, writery, and social day, and I am replete on good food and wine, and have the pleasure of adding David Eggers' What is the What to my bedside reading table.

Sigh.

Good night all.

Write On Radio Show day

Tomorrow is Write On Radio show day, the show I produce and host for our Otago Southland branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors on Toroa Radio 1575 kHz AM.

For our February show I’ll be talking with David Howard of The Otago University Press, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. Well talk about the humble beginnings of the press and how it has built into a notable publishing house which publishes around twenty books each year. We’ll talk about the kinds of books they publish and also about life in the publishing industry, particularly in these uncertain economic times, and with the effects of the digital age.


The second guest will be Kath Beattie, a Dunedin writer who has recently had her book published by Scholastic, titled My Story: Poor Man’s Gold: The diary of Reuben Radcliffe, Northland, 1899-1900. Kath was a guest on Write On Last year when we talked about a book she had self-published, titled Walking backwards into the future: coping with grief through continuing bonds. We’ll be talking about her new book which is about a boy working on the Kauri Gum swamps of Northland, and also we’ll talk about how the process of self publishing went for her, whether she thought it was worthwhile doing it and what advice she would offer to other people considering self-publishing their books.

For those not in Dunedin who are interested you can listen to the live stream broadcast from your computer via the Toroa Radio Website