Wrapped and knitted

Arvo Job: done and dusted and filed and forgotten – holidays (writing and reading) here I come. Last minute present buying: done. Grocery shopping: done. Ris a' l’amande: done, and tasting rather yummy too, if I may say so myself. Present wrapping: almost done.

To anyone who happens to drop by: have a Merry and Safe Christmas.

I’ll leave you with this, because nothing quite captures the essence of Christmas like a knitted Nativity scene in the front window of a country craft shop (double click to enlarge it so you can enjoy the fine handiwork).

On Course for Christmas

Today was the last, endlessly long, end-of-the-year slog day at the Arvo Job. I still have to go in for a couple of arvos of mopping up, but I can now turn my attention towards getting the last Christmas shopping done and starting on the ris a' l'amande.

Ah, family traditions. Believe me, a Danish Christmas is not for the faint-hearted. To cope with the preparations, my brothers and sister and I split the cooking tasks. Initially, we renegotiated who was to do what every year – the pork, the red cabbage, the caramel potatoes - but over time, we’ve settled into a routine. I’m the ris a' l'amande maker. It’s not an easy job, and it is not a job you can rush, but when I get it just right, and everyone is scoffing til they burst, aaaah, the triumph.

Alas, however, there is also the possibility of getting it wrong and ruining everyone’s meal...

Cygnets of Respite

I took a break this morning to eat breakfast in the park. I sat by the lake and was treated to this before I headed off for another rushy day at the Arvo Job:

Cygnet. I just love that word. Anyway, after tomorrow, things should start returning to normal. I just hope the story-writing part of my brain is still working. It pretty much feels like fudge at the moment.

Prezzies!

I woke up this morning with Arvo Job stuff going around and around inside in my head - a sure sign that I'm spending way way too much time in the Real World. This week at the All-Day and All-Night Arvo Job was absolutely nutso. I'm also getting seriously grumpy. Too much mundane stuff pushing the writing stuff from my brain for too many weeks on end tends to make me crotchety.

Fortunately I got an early Chrissie present today, which cheered me up immensely - a swing chair with a canopy from my brothers and sister, upon which I can sit or lie in the back garden and write, read, daydream and nap. I've already done a test run with the daydreaming and napping. It went well on both counts - the gentle swinging was incredibly calming. I'm looking forward to doing a lot of reading out there during the upcoming Xmas break, and taking Rover out the back for the occasional session of alfresco writing . Aaaaaah - holidays. So close now that I can smell 'em.

Of course, I may have a fight on my hands claiming ownership of such a fabulous piece of snoozing equipment:

Salvation

I'm not at the Arvo Job - this doesn't feel right. And why not? Because there's a man with a mower (hurrah!!!) clearing the jungle out front, so soon I'll be able to hold my head high as I come and go. As soon as he's done, it's back to the rush, rush, rush of pre-Xmas arvojobbing with the thought of the holidays up ahead fixed firmly in my mind.

In other news, my vamp story was pretty swiftly sent back with a big, electronic no-thanks stamp on it. That's okay - the time period I set it in makes it suitable for another anthology, so I'll polish it over the next 4-5 days and send it off again.

You have to bounce back and work hard on remaining optimistic in this business.

Drats

Whilst internetting around to look for new markets, I just discovered that I could have worked on my Aussie vamp story for another 7 days. Poo! I thought Dec 1 was the deadline, and I hurriedly sent it off at midnight after a feverish edit on the train on the way home, but it turns out that it was in fact Dec 8. Double damn. When I think what I could have done with that submission, how I could have fleshed it out and pared it back and played around with the dialogue for seven whole more days, well ... curses and oaths galore!!!!

Ah well, serves me right for jotting down the wrong date. Moving on. Next up, I must commit to one of the three versions of the story I want to send to the Anywhere But Earth anthology and then polish it to perfection. The core of the tale is the same - alien society, traumatic event, repercusions - but I've written the first drafts of three different structural approaches. But which version should I go with? The one with the very alien and poetic beginning that I love despite the fact that that alien and poetic beginning was thoroughly bagged by 7 out of 9 participants at a workshop last year? The one that is in danger of becoming a travelogue through an alien society? The one with the main character's older self as the POV? Or a combination of these three?

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

A week of blah

It started with a traffic fine, segued into long, long, long, long days of Arvo Jobbing at a hasty, Xmas pace and lots of snoozing on the trains, and finished off with a series of major Arvo Job stuff ups. On the home front, the grass out the front is knee-high (I want to put up a sign saying 'Coming soon to this lawn: a man with a mower' just so that people know I'm on it) the rose trellis is coming off the front porch after the storms of the past few weeks, a bathroom sink is blocked, and my vacuum cleaner is dying.

I did, however, manage to pare back the loser submission that was rejected on Sunday. Being tired is good when hacking superfluous words from an indulgent piece - one has no patience with one's own misunderstood "genius", and annihilating fun-to-write but unnecessary prose is suddenly easy.

Nicked

You’d think I’d have an easy time of it staying on the right side of the law, what with me not being a driver, a financial consultant or drug dealer, but no, this morning I managed to get a fine. After travelling all the way to the city to get in some extra hours at the Arvo Job (we're busy, busy, busy up to Xmas), after getting off the train and battling my way across Spencer Street, I saw my tram coming down Collins St and anticipated the changing light a little too early and ...

Oh, all right, I crossed the pedestrian crossing while the little man was still red.

Still, I contend that stupid city planning makes for stupid behaviour. A major train station on one side of a major intersection, with 2-6 lanes and 1-2 sets of traffic lights to cross before you can connect with the city trams that many rail passengers will be trying to catch does not make for a safe environment. If you knew for sure that there was another tram coming along in a few minutes, it also wouldn’t be a problem, but to watch an empty tram whizz by and possibly wait another 20 minutes for the next and the little man is about to turn green but isn't quite yet ...

But the fact remains that I done wrong. If only I had stayed home this morning like I really wanted to, I could have saved some money. And if only my fine were going towards the construction of underground tunnels that allowed Southern Cross Railway Station patrons to swiftly and safely emerge at the tram stop of their choice, I wouldn’t mind so much either.

Leaping logs & a longtime loser

I’m just back from a day of horse riding through the Wombat Forest in Daylesford. There was more rainy riding when a storm, complete with thunder and lightening, hit and thoroughly soaked us. Mind you, after the Snowy River ride, this was a piece of (soggy) cake. Fortunately the skies cleared, and post lunch we, a small group of experienced riders, headed off again for an afternoon of bush bashing and lots of log leaping. It was a higgledy-piggledy, but most fun day.

And now Foalwatch brings you these cute pics:
This still nameless, and strangely marked colt was one of the two born foals a couple of months ago (after, if you recall, Butch the stallion jumped the fence one night). In the second picture, he shares the frame with his doting mum.

My only writing news is that I came home to a rejection. It’s a funny old thing the rejected story – on its very first outing, it made it to the final round of an American anthology, and when they finally rejected it, they did so with much praise. I, of course, had high hopes for its future, but ever since then, it’s been all downhill for this poor tale. I’ll cut it right back to the barest of bones, I think (the consensus seems to be, among other things, that it's too long) and give it one or two more goes, then I’ll have to admit defeat and bin it.

More Monsters

Everything that Skyline wasn't, thank goodness.