I’ve been busy!

I haven’t posted here for over two months, I feel a little bit bad about that, but in my defence, I’ve been doing things in the real world, so I guess there’s that.

Ever since January 2020 my world has been topsy turvy – I was in a car accident and then we had the dreaded Rona. I lived through two years in and out of heavy lockdowns, and in 2023 I started to feel brave enough to go out and do the things I used to do before.

Travel

In June I was able to travel to Vietnam for leisure – it was the first time I’ve been overseas since late 2019 and it was terrifying, but I was also getting very restless of not having a good break from the grind of day to day.

I did some things I wouldn’t do at home – got on the back of motorcycles, went to cooking classes and met a broader spectrum of people than I would have otherwise. Joining a tour can have that effect, though I think I won’t use that company again. Instead of having a group that travels all together for the duration, I had a different group each day, and days where there was no set agenda there was no group. I don’t mind travelling on my own and meeting people along the way, but this was much more alone than I’ve been before.

I had to learn to balance my new health issues with the demands of travel, so there was a lot more hanging out in the hotel, but that’s okay – my main goal was to eat pho and relax. Here are a couple of travel pics:

Conference

Last year I didn’t make it to the Romance Writers of Australia conference, it was held the same weekend as a family wedding in another state and I had to prioritise that. This year, I headed up to Sydney for the annual conference. It was exhilarating, inspiring, and exhausting in almost equal measures. My brain is brimming with ideas, and renewed enthusiasm to get into my writing, but I also really need a nap.

I was able to make a few new friends, having name tags on does really help with that, and hang out with some of my Melbourne romance writer friends. I learned a bunch of stuff and too lots of notes that I can only hope will still make sense when I go back to read them later.

It’s a good time to remember why we need to find and surround ourselves with our people. That group of other weirdos who like to nerd out about the same stuff. On Friday evening I caught up with a couple of friends who live in Sydney and one of them was asking all kinds of questions about romance writing, such as ‘What exactly is happens in a reverse harem wolf-shifter book?’ It’s not the genre I write, but I tried to answer as best as I could with the knowledge I had. I’m sure I sounded knowledgeable! Please don’t fact check me, Steve.

I have a few little writing projects that I’m plugging away on. Unfortunately, my pain and other stuff has been getting in the way of writing recently, but I hope to have something to publish in the first half of next year, as well as an anthology I said I would go into.

It feels like the world has largely gone back to the way it was before 2020, though there are definitely some hang overs – both on a global/national scale and on a personal one. I’m doing my best to navigate the new landscape and not get too overwhelmed. It mostly works. Here are some photos of the conference:

I hope you’re all doing well, and whatever you had to put on hold for the stupid pandemic can be reactivated in some way.