Travelling, writing, reading, talking

The last month has been a time of three worlds: time in the city with travelling to and fro’ for book events in Perth, gardening days to plant and weed now the rain has returned, and being a writing hermit again whenever I can catch a day to shut myself away and work on my manuscript.

June: gardening days at home

 Talking with Edwina Davies-Ward at Kings Park, Perth WA for the Friends of KP  and Boffins Books

The best times of all are still the conversations with readers, and the messages they send me, that make the most personal rewards of writing a book continue long after the writing is finished. There have been more interviews, too, and if I ever expected to be asked the same questions again and again, I was quite wrong. Every interview seems to have its own tone and mood – sometimes we talk about the sad times in Georgiana Molloy’s life, sometimes we focus on her botany and sometimes the discussion leans more towards her family situation but there are always new questions that make me think for the first time about some aspect of her world.

  Margaret River Readers & Writers festival with William Yeoman

AT the RWAHS with the Robert Burns poetry anthology that Georgiana brought with her to WA. it gave me the first mystery and the sub-title for my book, ‘The Mind That Shines’.

The last week has been the busiest, with the Margaret River Readers & Writers Festival, a talk for the Friends of Kings Park and Boffins Bookshop in Perth, a talk at the Royal Western Australian Historical Society and a botanical expedition to Augusta, all within five days. If you followed the story of the ‘little blue flowers’ on my Facebook page, this latest visit to Augusta was another follow-up, again in the expert company of eminent WA botanist, Dr Alex George. Georgiana collected flowers to place in her baby’s coffin in 1830 and we went back to the area on June 6, the same date but 186 years later, to check our previous findings from a few weeks ago and work out which species she collected in those first few days. It was a moving, fruitful day and you can read more about it on my Georgiana Molloy website here.

 Botanical adventures in Augusta WA on 6 June, 2016

Way back in January, when I realised how slowly I was writing my current manuscript, I set myself a deadline and that seems to be working. Writing fiction is such a new area but I’m loving every minute. I get those times (that I now know most other writers get) when I believe I’m writing rubbish but I’ve found a few ways of dealing with that negativity. I flip open a book that I think is wonderfully written and remind myself what good writing feels like, looks like, sounds like. At the moment, that book is ‘Salt Creek’ by Lucy Treloar. I also hook up with other writers and talk, often using social media because I live in the rural southwest. Recently I met up with other authors at a social get-together in Perth, organised by the Australian Society of Authors and that was fantastic. Those connections are always reassuring and motivating. It’s easy to lock yourself away to write, and to think you have to struggle alone. If you’re a writer too, having a dark moment or an ideas block or a time of self-doubt, talk it through with someone who’ll know exactly what you’re going through. You might both solve some writerly problems together.