Every year, publishers put out a Publishing Program which is a very pretty book distributed to Booksellers to let them know what's coming and when, and hopefully get them all excited and order lots of books that they never send back to the warehouse.

Anyway, those nice people at HarperCollins Australia sent me the 2007 edition, and naturally, I went looking to make sure I was in there. Sure enough, The Immortal Prince was there, along with Gods of Amyrantha, and the blurb they'd done for it, which I hadn't seen until now...


Neat... couldn't have put it better myself... Well, maybe... you see, I think they should have used the phrase suicidal immortal, but I lost that argument long ago.

Just how resoundingly I'd lost that argument was driven home to me when I spotted the big sell pitch line for the series, which totally cracked me up...

"From the bestselling author of Medalon and Wolfblade comes a compelling epic fantasy quartet about the desire for eternal life"

And here I was, all this time, thinking I was writing a compelling epic fantasy quartet about an immortal fed up to the back teeth with eternal life...

- Publicists... god bless 'em

ROFL

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Palace of Impossible Dreams word count

118,069 / 165,000 (71.6%)

Had to move a heap of stuff out of my storage shed today, because I finally got around to cleaning my shed out at home to make room for it. So I hired a truck and a couple of nice, burly boys to shift in 1 hour, what would have taken me days, had I done it on my own.

Anyway, we get to the shed and the big burly boys go all girly over the spiders. I tried to reassure them that nobody has died from a redback bite in Australia for over 50 years, and that if they did get bitten at the very least it was a few days off work on compo... to no avail.

Now, admittedly, they were very large spiders, and of course, this is Alice Springs, so they were venomous redback spiders, into the bargain, but I mean really... big boys with steel-cap boots going all ga-ga over some little black and red creatures with eight legs? What's the world coming to?.

I like spiders. Partly because it's fun to be the only grown-up in the room sometimes, who can deal with the little daddy long legs in the corner freaking the rest of the grown-ups out. But mostly because spiders eat bugs and I hate bugs. Anything that eats bugs, therefore, is cool by me.

Why do I hate bugs? Well, bugs run fast and fly into your ears, for one thing, while spiders are content to sit in the corner and wait for you  to come to them.

Spiders are predictable. You can see where they live because they have houses everyone can see. Bugs, on the other hand, are sneaky, lurking in your cupboards in the darkness and running away when you turn on the light. Spiders are quiet. They don't fly around the room all night buzzing, keeping you awake, or waiting until you go to sleep so they can drain your blood and give you things like malaria, encephalitis and Ross River fever.

Spiders will just sit in the corner and be cool.

So you see, my enemy's enemy is my friend:)

Go spidey!

115,742 / 165,000 (70.1%)

Evil Ella just emailed me this news item that appeared in this morning's Melbourne newspaper, The Age. Apparently,  Australia spends more on pets annually than on foreign aid.


This is insane! Who does this sort of thing? Doggie jewellery, indeed! No dog of mine wears a diamond collar. (Well, all right, the cat does. But they're fake. Really.)

But designer clothes! I mean... my dogs don't have a wardrobe full of clothes. OK, I'll admit Fluffy the Maltese has a cute little purple hooded  jacket, and a little pink t-shirt that says "Diva" and another one that says "You! Me! Carpark! Now!". But Oscar, the other Maltese, only has one quilted, hooded jacket, and a t-shirt that says "Security". And Mount Bruce, well, he only has one jacket, too, although it's more in the region of a horse blanket than a dog coat...

And just because the little dogs have matching leads... or we have to buy Bruce a new collar every couple of months because he breaks them, well, that's not really extravagant, is it?

Now, I will admit, somewhat begrudgingly, that the new pussy palace we have on order for the cats, which is costing more than my first car, might be viewed by some as excessive, although we prefer to think of it as a security measure, as it lessens the likelihood of Bruce having Stevie for a snack if she's got somewhere high to escape to.

Oh dear... having read through that list.... I've just realised I'm as guilty as sin! I'm going to have to ring the guys at Rebalance the World and offer them something more than a few signed books. *sigh* I feel so guilty and shallow, now...

Mind you, note who brought this article to my attention...

This is why we call her Evil Ella ...

You know how it is... you start out looking for front door locks, next thing you know you're on a site describing basic bondage terminology, and before you know it, you've sailed right past the sexy grammar rules (seriously, I found a site that explains where not to put your commas during sex, um, scenes) and find yourself starting at a thesaurus for writers wanting to write "purple prose".

This helpful little guide is for romance writers, apparently, searching for that perfect word to describe their hero's (or heroine's) rapacious (avaricious, ferocious, furious, greedy, predatory, ravening, ravenous, savage, voracious) moment of rapture (bliss, ecstasy, elation, exaltation, glory, gratification, passion, pleasure...)in their writing.

I'm not going to add a link to this other thesaurus. There are some questionable links on the site, that I'd really rather not promote, even indirectly. A bit like watching reruns of The Brady Bunch, that you know it's out there should be enough for you. There's no need to go looking for it, too. :)

But I have learned a lesson today. Sometimes, you just shouldn't follow strange links when you're supposed to be working.

Was talking to the guy who lives next door over the fence earlier today, where we had an interesting discussion about locks. My new front door goes in next week, you see, and I still haven't decided how to secure it.

Thing is, we quickly went from discussing deadlocks to thumb-print scanners, remote controlled locks and whether or not to hookup motion activated cameras around the perimeter of our properties.

Welcome to the 21st century, I thought.

This set me to thinking about how much life has changed in the last few years, which inevitably led me to create yet another wretched list.

Look away now, if you can't bear the thought of it...hehehe

Top10 indicators that I am living in the 21st century

1. I have to surf through 300 channels with the remote before deciding there's nothing to watch on TV.
2. The quality of a TV show is now determined by how long it takes a network to ax it. One season means good. Less means it was probably brilliant.
3. Movies now come in threes
4. Threequel is a word
5. You're nobody until you've got your own reality show, launched your own perfume or been on Dancing with the Stars.
6. More people think HP stands for Harry Potter, than Hewlett Packard
7. Water costs more than petrol
8. "Phone a friend" doesn't mean you want to phone a friend, it means "I don't know".
9. We call global warming "climate change" now, because that way it doesn't sound like it's anybody's fault
10. They've found a use for botulism

And, to top it all off, if you don't like the life you have, you can make up another one in Second Life...

Wonder what the 22nd century's gonna be like...

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Palace of Impossible Dreams word count

111,532 / 165,000 (67.6%)