Writers getting it “right.”



Not Qld but western New South Wales
paddocks of Paterson's Curse weeds.
Click on photo to see enlarged.


So, here I am, back trying to finish that half-finished manuscript I started a few years ago before I received a contract for Return to Baragula. I stopped writing this one to concentrate on writing the next two books in the Baragula series.

And have I been busy rewriting and editing that first draft, including trying to get the setting of fictitious Lomond Downs right!

When I wrote Outback from Baragula, I set Davidson Downs in a part of New South Wales I had actually never visited before. Thankfully I had a good friend who did know the general area, even had photos she shared with me.

This time I am setting most of the story of Her Outback Cowboy on a property south-west of Longreach in Central Queensland. This is another part of Australia I have never been able to visit. I have always understood this area is called the Channel Country where many small rivers and creeks are really nothing more than just that, channels rather than rivers. I mentioned to a couple of people this manuscript was set in the “Channel Country” only to be told they both individually thought the area called this was set in northern Queensland. So, back to doing research again in an effort “to get it right!”

I am wondering what other writers find about their unfinished manuscripts. Have I really changed myself so much that I now see unbelievable flaws and editing needed, including those weasel words? Yes, including that word “that”!

Oh, and both men were wrong about where the Channel country is.

Or are they? Would love to hear from anyone who has driven down the road from Longreach on the map called Thompson Developement Road! Do leave a comment here with your email so I can ask you heaps of questions. Or email me at mary@mary-hawkins.com

Writers helping each other

Over all the more than thirty years since that first writer’s correspondence assignment was returned to me with comments from a published author, I have been the recipient of help and fellowship from many, many other writers. In those early years the tutors for that Famous Writers School course were the only direct contacts I had for far too long with other writers. That was in the days before personal computers and the wonderful support now possible for all of us through amazing internet support groups.

I owe so much to that first small group I ever became a member of Australian Christian Writers Fellowship but again that was only minimal because of distance to travel to meetings and a young family as well as ministry responsibilities. Then Romance Writers of Australia commenced but again still in the days before the internet! However, we were able to commence a local group of writers in our town and so my love of face to face fellowship with other writers began in earnest.

Then as well as a writer's email loop, great annual RWA conferences began and over the last 20 years I have only missed a few. There have been other great avenues of learning opportunities I have enjoyed, including being a member of Romance Writers America and their Faith Hope Love chapter and the privilege of attending one of their conferences in the USA. In more recent years there has been American Christian Fiction Writers and their wonderful, inspiring conference we went to in Denver, 2009. 

And so my “learning” journey still continues with regular face to face monthly meetings with The Society Women Writers Tasmania and also sharing in other groups via the internet and especially email loops. But I have discovered that with publication success also comes the desire to help other writers along the way as I have been helped by so many other published authors. Over more recent years there have been several opportunities to present writing workshops, share one on one with beginner writers through the RWAustralia Isolated Writers Scheme and such things as judging unpublished writer’s contests. Through all of these efforts I believe I have been blessed more, at times even perhaps learnt more than those I’ve tried to help!

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog in December, last November I was so privileged to be a tutor for three writers at a five day live-in mentorship programme in Queensland, organised by Omega Writers. I had their finished manuscripts to read before that week and then tried to help those lovely women strengthen their great stories. It was a busy time but so very rewarding for the tutor! Once again, the teacher also was taught! Here are a few of the writers and helpers who fed us! Sorry if you saw the same photos on that other blog!

One thing I simply cannot do is write poetry and I am in awe of poets. I’d like to share with you this fun poem one of those clever ladies wrote that last day. (Jo is the writer leaning on her elbow in this photo of my husband with two of the writers I mentored.) How she found time to shoot this off I do not know. I am in awe – and also very humbled she even went to the effort to do so!

They left the green isle on the ferry

Ray and his awesome wife Mary

Car filled with books

They farewelled the docks

We met them at Brissy’s Word Fair.

The notes on our books didn’t vary:

Girls! Your POV is just scary

Show! Don’t tell

Show, don’t tell

Pleaded our amazing mentor, Mary.

We sat at our keyboards more wary

Every page we now read was hairy.

Change this, change that

No! Delete that word ‘that”.

“Ah! That’s getting better,” sighed Mary.

Our books need so much work it is scary

Our confidence, now extraordinary

We’ve learned so much

Thanks a bunch

To our amazing mentor, Mary!

© Jo Wanmer 2010

It was an awesome time with plenty of hard work but fun and fellowship too. We all owe so much to Omega Writers, the sponsor, Even Before Publishing and Rochelle Manners and Anne Hamilton - also in the first photo. At this relatively early stage after the programmes, since then two writers have had their manuscripts accepted.
Omega Writers are again organising more mentorship programmes, including hopefully here in Tasmania as well as other states. Do check out the EBP website by clicking on their name above and the details about future mentorship events across Australia on the Omega site HERE to be informed about this kind of opportunity.
If there are any writers in Tasmania targeting the Christian publishing market (especially fiction), or if you know of any who may be interested, we really do need you to contact either myself or Omega Writers as soon as possible.

Proud to be a Queenslander

The past two days I have been riveted to the media coverage of the havoc being wrecked on my home state and especially my beautiful home town, Toowoomba.
Only a couple of weeks ago I was hearing reports of floods sweeping through central Queensland towns like Rockhampton, Emerald. Back in the 70's we ministered at a church in the city of Gladstone just 80 miles south of Rockie so quite familiar with that larger city. Then since christmas and especially last week, the heavy rains spread south down the eastern coast and many other towns were flooded and are still isolated. I have a niece and nephew with their four month old baby who were on holidays at Hervey Bay and are still marooned there until the flooded highways are open again. They live in Brisbane but could only watch from a distance like myself as that city of well over 2 million people became inundated. Fortunately their home is not in a danger zone of the floods.

This is the town of Dalby 50 miles west of Toowoomba which is on the eastern ridge of the Great Dividing Range and over 2,000 feet above sea level. The Darling Downs slopes away from the rolling hills of Toowoomba to the black soil plains out past towns like Dalby, Chinchilla, Condamine - all badly affected by the floods.

Until I was nine, I lived on our Dad's farm near a small community called Bongeen before we moved to live in a house in Toowoomba twenty miles away. Many members of my extended Pedler family are still farming large areas on the plains that are now affected by floods. I still haven't heard all the details of losses yet, but only yesterday my brother Stan told me the cotton crops and summer grain grops are ruined, but I am so thankful they are all safe.
After living for many years on Thursday Island at the tip of Qld just south of New Guinea, Stan moved south a few months ago and is now living in a farmhouse only a few miles from family and where he has been helping out from time to time. After christmas, the water came to within a couple of inches of the floor in the two front rooms of his house and only yesterday he told me the water was again creeping back up through the trees near the house. Dalby and other towns are now flooded for the second time in a couple of weeks.

I have scheduled a post on the International Christian Fiction Writers blog which will be published just after 7pm Australian Eastern time today and 12.05 am US Pacific time. I will not repeat it all here, but do have a look at it and especially the You Tube a writer friend sent me to use of just one horrific scene in Toowoomba. In a few brief moments a small drainage area becomes a raging torrent tossing cars around. I believe it was this East Creek responsible for sweeping away the woman and her son to their death from the street just at the top of the screen.

This morning the scenes of suburb after suburb in Brisbane and Ipswich inundated is simply unbelievable. Latest news is 12 dead, 74 missing and grave fears for two whole families - 11 people. 25 helicopters are again in the air this morning but do not believe many now still to be rescued, just found.
But because of that continuing drama there, the media focus has been taken away from so many other areas facing their own flooding problems. These are spread over vast areas of Qld and also northern New South Wales and parts of Victoria.
The drama can only increase as these volumes of water out in the west make their way down the inland river systems into the Darling, then the great Murray river before they plunge into the southern Ocean many, many hundreds of miles away from the Darling Downs.

And now I have to try and get my thoughts back to other things I should be doing - besides watching the TV coverage! While it has been raining steadily here in Tasmania so many hundreds of miles from Queensland, we can only watch and pray.
I am so proud to be still a Queenslander at heart and been reared in my favourite city, Toowoomba.

CATCHING UP - Part Two

Well, I did promise to write about more on those days and 4,500 kilometres we travelled in November. Now I do really doubt if I ever will “catch up” and that simply leaves me to stop and then try and start again!  Before I do “stop” here are a few more thoughts about our time in Queensland, travelling through New South Wales back to Melbourne.

After church on Sunday in Brisbane we enjoyed seeing family we have not seen since my mother’s funeral two years ago. 

Then it was time to head off to the Sunshine Coast to be a tutor at a live-in mentorship programme organised by the Omega Writers and sponsored by Rochelle Manners, the publisher of Wombat Books and even Before Publishing. This was also a learning experience for myself.

 

During the weeks before leaving for our trip, I had been very busy reading through the Christian fiction manuscripts the three unpublished writers had sent me. It was a very busy time trying to spend equal time as much as each writer needed during those five days, so I was very glad I had spent those many, many hours editing and writing comments throughout their manuscripts for them to consider. I believe it was a very worthwhile time for all concerned and the writers themselves thought it blissful to have those days free to write and write.

Ray also managed to get some writing done, minded Rochelle’s couple of delightful little children as well as talking to her about his two devotional books she is publishing next year. Hopefully it wont be long before we will be able to show you the beautiful covers she was working on – in between her own writing and preparing our meals!

Ray and I enjoyed the drive from Noosaville through beautiful scenery to Toowoomba ready for our next appointments. We were so privileged to be able to stay with old friends Gillian and David for three nights.

Speaking at the Toowoomba library was another new experience and learning curve for me.  Here chatting with a reader and two Toowoomba Librarians who helped organise this with Friends of the Library.
As Ray and I have experienced so many times over the years, God sure does organise our diary for us! this time it just “happened” that I discovered through a fellow ex-nurse that the Toowoomba Base Hospital nurses’ reunion luncheon was that same Saturday in Toowoomba.

There were only a few there from the graduation class of 1961 as well as an old school friend, Margaret, who also graduated that year.

I had a special chat with our tutor sister, Joan Bell (nee Neale) who had also been a member of our Australian Nurses Christian Fellowship in Toowoomba in those days.  A very special person

And so, after fellowship with more old friends at my home church, now Humeridge Church of Christ, we headed south down the New England highway this time through New South Wales and to Melbourne to stay with our daughter.

We enjoyed spending far too brief a time there with her and other writers, Amanda Deed (CALEB fiction winner), her mother and also Dorothy Adamek not long returned from the American Christian Fiction Writers great conference in Indianapolis.

And now we are home and with Christmas looming ever closer, the Christmas tree is out but not decorated yet...so, more next time.

Music and Song Blessings

Last weekend our little church fellowship was challenged, refreshed and blessed by Stephen Atkins . Do click on his name to go to his website and have a taste - mind you it is only a "taste" - of his great voice and songs.
His songs are played on local radio stations at different times and his goes on tour, speaking and singing messages in song with accompanying Power Point images to churches big -and small like us - as well as many other venues. He presents the news of our Christ of the Cross so very, very well.


For some reason, over the years songs have always ministered to me personally in very special ways. Okay, perhaps it is my creative nature that God uses to create stories, perhaps it is the fact when we were growing up we had a piano in our house. The piano had belonged to my grandparents but neither Mum nor Dad could play it. Living on a farm a long way from music teachers in the city, the only way I could learn to play was work out for myself what the notes on the music meant. The first music I ever played was the old hymn, "Throw out the lifeline across the dark sea..." I only realised years later that it sounded "right" when my one finger played it because it had neither sharps nor flats and was all played on those beautiful white ivory keys. But the words of many, many old songs and hymns from those days are still deep within me.

What a feast of music and song we enjoyed first of all at a dinner concert on the Friday evening, then a concert Saturday and a "musical" service with challenging talks on Sunday.

All the songs Stephen Atkins has written himself brought me to praise and prayer. We joined Stephen in singing Amazing Grace - the extra "My chains fell off" version. Perhaps the song that challenged and blessed me the most was the song he sings on his on his Mercy CD, "He Raised Me Up." They both reminded me of all God has done for me in Jesus, and all He continues to do in my life today with my writing efforts. Only HE could have given me this wonderful, wonderful life of joy and love I enjoy. Only HE could have opened the doors for my books to be published - to even be a finalist in the CALEB awards!

I've been so busy these last weeks preparing for speaking appointments at the Word Writers Fair next Saturday in Queensland, reading manuscripts ready to tutor writers of them at a mentorship programme organised by Omega Writers . Then of course, there is my talk too at the Toowoomba Library at 10am on Saturday, November 13th.
This is going to be very much a "working holiday." When my first book was published, little did I dream how God would open doors as He has these past years. With all my "busyness" lately, I really needed to be reminded that God IS in control, and what He has done and continues to do in my life! How thankful I am that from a very young age I started to get to know the God and Father who loves me, who continues to "raise me up, set me on mountains."
Do go to Stephen Atkins website. One of his songs starts playing straight away. He is also on Facebook and I have just become one of his "friends" there.
If you too can share incidents when God blesses you through praise and worship songs, do tell us about it by commenting here.

BACK HOME but PREPARING TO BE OFF AGAIN!

This week I thought I’d tell you a few things that have been happening here to my husband and I. As well of course, there are those other plans for another trip to the Australian mainland in November.

But first of all, I received a lovely photo sent to me by a lovely fellow writer – and a clever photographer – from the RWA Conference at Coogee beach in Sydney. Had to share this one with you!
Remember, if you click on a photo on my blog posts, it will enlarge and be clearer.

The two writers on the top of the left cube are Cathleen Ross   and Kandy Shepherd who organised the RWA conference this year. The writer beneath them is Kylie Griffin, this year’s Golden Heart winner. Also on that cube are Kerri Lane with Sandra Allan. The photos on the cube on the right include Barbara Hannay and Anne Gracie next to me, and underneath us are Kandy Shepherd, Nalini Singh and Christine Stinson. The other side of the cube is from the “Goal, Motivation, Conflict” Friday session  with Debra Dixon of America. Many thanks to clever Robyn Aldridge! She has called this RWA Sunrise Cubes

And so, RWA conference and the other speaking engagements in New South Wales in September are behind me. Now we are planning for more speaking appointments in Queensland in November! I will be on a panel about “Reaching out for God through fiction” and doing a seminar workshop session on writing romance at the Word Writers Fair in Brisbane area. The award dinner for the CALEB book contest organised by the Omega Writers is on that same Saturday evening, November 6th.
And I have been thrilled today to learn that my Return to Baragula and Outback From Baragula have been short-listed in the Fiction category! Whoopee! There are also encouraging reviews of the books on the CALEB page.

Do click on the Word Writers Fair, Omega Writers and CALEB and you should go to the websites to read all about these events, including the full list of other great books that have also been short-listed in all the categories.

Don’t forget to make sure you let folk know about the Word Writer Fair so they can register ASAP. I believe places are filling already so register NOW! I am so looking forward to sharing with writers at the seminar and then being a tutor for the Omega mentorship live-in programme the following week.

And if all this isn’t enough excitement for one trip, arrangements are being made for me to share with writers as well as readers of Christian fiction at the Toowoomba library. Will post more information about that event later.

And how are we travelling to Qld this trip? We studied the plane and car hire fares carefully, compared them and other expenses with the only other way to leave our beautiful island. We also need to take books with us and have space to bring books back too! So we are now booked on the Spirit of Tasmania, the ferry that sails overnight across Bass Strait to Melbourne. We will be taking our time driving –and I’ll try and remember to take photos to share with you.

Would love to hear if there is any chance I will be able to meet any readers of my blog – somewhere between Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland!