have sore paw... can't type.

Had to go gadet shopping instead. Oh well.

Got a very nice email from Qantas this week with my flight details for Supanova Sydney and Perth, which reminded me that I'd better get ready for the World Building Master Classes.

The full details for the courses are here and the early-bird tickets are going fast, so if you want to get in at the lower rate, make sure you book in soon.

You can sign up at Supanova, but it's more expensive if you wait (to cover the cost of last minute running around to print additional workbooks - minions and colour laser printers don't come cheap, y'know...)

So... you can book through Ticketek here. Remember, because this comes with a free weekend pass to Supanova, you have to book that first, and then the workshop option will appear, with a choice between the workshop only, and the workshop with Manuscript assessment.

Messy, I know, but such are the vagaries of working a database as complex at Ticketek's.

Well, I finally got to see the new Indiana Jones movie. Not impressed, I have to say. There are many reasons for this. I've never been a Karen Allen fan (I liked Kate Capshaw better). And they messed with Roswell and the Crystal Skull something awful. Sonny Whitelaw wrote a thesis recently, on the right way to mess with mythology and make it plausible. It's called The Attraction of Sloppy Nonsense - Resolving Cognitivie Estrangement in Stargate Through the Technologising of Mythology. Spielberg should have read it.

There are some movies that are simply going to do well, regardless of what the reviews say. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is one of them, so read on, as you will, bearing in mind it makes little difference, in the general scheme of things, what reviewers think of it.

First up, the good. Indy is back, and Harrison Ford hasn’t aged too badly, all things considered, even if some of the stunts he performs would be a stretch for a man half his age. He hasn’t lost the smirk, still manages to make that damned hat look cool, and he’s still managing to get himself into scrapes that require miraculous feats of derring-do in order to escape. The film is funny in places, and the stunts are great. And there are bugs (ants, actually) and snakes. I mean, what’s Indy without a snake to panic over?

Spielberg hasn’t tried to pretend Indy is still a young man, leaving that feat to Mutt Williams (played by the can-do-no-wrong Shia Le Beouf), who enlists Indy’s help to rescue his mother (Karen Allen returning as Marion Ravenwood) and an old colleague, Professor Oxley (John Hurt), from the evil clutches of Soviet scientist, Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett with a dreadful haircut and a rather wobbly accent). This task is complicated more than once by the greedy 'Mac' George McHale (Ray Winstone), Indy’s sometime friend and former colleague.

Turns out, in the intervening years between Indy's last adventure and now, he’s become something of a war hero and a spy for the OSS. Which brings us to the bad. There’s an awful lot of exposition dialogue going on, particularly in the early part of the film, where Mutt is as much a reason for Indy to explain things, as he is an active participant in the action. Although I like Le Beouf, I’m not sure I buy him as the Fonz, which seemed to be what he was aiming for.

Although the formula is there (great stunts performed while trying to find/save/recover/steal fabulous mythological objects), the mixing of the Roswell incident along with the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull didn’t ring true with me. In fairness, this is probably because I’ve had reason to research them in some detail in the past couple of years, and have a level of knowledge about both that is far beyond your average audience, who needs a map to show that the Amazon is in South America. But here’s the thing — if you’re going to mess with the facts, you need to stick as closely as possible to them, to make the rest of the story plausible. This story doesn’t do that, which annoyed me, although, to be honest, I doubt this oversight had the slightest impact on the majority of the audience who wouldn’t know one crystal skull from another, and think Roswell is the name of a TV show.

So, is the movie fun? Of course it is. The acting is good, the direction is flawless, the stunts are absurdly implausible and there’s a ridiculously happy ending, but for me, it lacked something. It was almost as if they were trying too hard. I’m not sure what, and I’ll be the first to admit it may have a great deal with the inaccuracies about Roswell and the crystal skulls, but for me, at least, it felt a little contrived.

The Romantic Times has just posted their review of The Immortal Prince online and given it 4½ stars. I’m thrilled to bits that they like it. I mean, what’s not to like about a review that says “The story is fast paced and draws you in from page one. Snappy dialogue and intelligent characters will keep you riveted. The story gathers momentum, the witty and believable characters catch you up in the flow and you're left breathlessly awaiting the next installment.”

But I’m also a little nervous. Should I really be bragging about this? I mean, ego-tripping aside, there's a hidden trap in being feted by a genre you're not really writing for, even though your story has elements of a number of different genres, (as the majority of epic fantasy and sci-fi stories are wont to have).

There is a reason for my dilemma. I have a friend, you see, who is an award-winning author. She wrote a book a few years back that garnered heaps of praise and won, much to her astonishment, a romance award.  I was congratulating her on her many wins last year, and shared her amazement at winning the romance award, because it's the last thing I would have considered her to be up for. She let out a mournful sigh and lamented, “It was great to win it at the time, but God, if I had my time over again, I’d refuse the award.”

I was gobsmacked. “Why?”

“Because the day after my publisher sent out the press release announcing I’d won a romance award, booksellers all over the world took every book I’ve ever written, regardless of the genre or the subject matter, and plonked it in the romance section of their stores. It killed off half my audience overnight* and it doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t get it out of the heads of booksellers that I write anything other than romance. And worse, as I don’t write romance, the readers who shop in the romance section aren’t buying my stuff either, because it’s not what they’re looking for.”

That really made me think about how booksellers perceive the books on their shelves. I’ve been shortlisted for a couple of Aurealis Awards, but that’s fine because they’re awarded for sci-fi and fantasy and that’s exactly what I write. No shelf-shuffling is likely to arise from being shortlisted for that award.

But what if I was nominated for something else? The first line of Wolfblade is “It's always messy, cleaning up after a murder.” Suppose I somehow, (in some alternate reality) got nominated for a crime award? Would they move all my stuff to the crime section, taking it out of the sight of the spec-fic readers, where it would do nothing but irk a reader looking for a good whodunnit?

If I wrote a YA novel, would my backlist be moved or would my YA series languish in the adult spec-fic section, and never reach its intended audience? If I was nominated for an award celebrating feminist fiction, would I lose my male audience?

If you win a children’s or YA award, do you risk losing adult readers? Does a gay award endanger your heterosexual audience? (And vice versa for that matter)

Which reminds me, when I went looking for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, I found it in the crime section of the book store and had to point out to the staff that it was a fantasy. They were stunned. They’d read the blurb on the back and thought it was a murder mystery.

It’s an interesting dilemma. What is better, do you think? Would you knock back an award for a genre you didn’t necessarily want to be associated with? (By the way, I'm not talking about awards that attract large cash prizes, of which there are a few. No author in their right mind knocks back significant amounts of cash - not for any reason. LOL)

To be honest, I’ve no idea what I’d do in this situation. Fortunately, I’ve not been nominated for anything that’s likely to cause me to lose any sleep.

Maybe that’s the secret. Just don’t write anything that's going to be nominated for an award in the first place…hehehe

*as in, well, all men, who wouldn’t been seen dead holding a romance novel, let alone reading one:)

I did a Fire Warden Training Course today, which involved sitting in a room listening to a decidedly uninspiring lecturer tell us about fire emergency evacuation procedures, and all these other things I can't recall that had acronyms like RACE, and SAFE...

And then he says... "71 degrees Celcius is the ignition point for human skin."

Jenny's eyes light up. "Really? What else can you tell me about setting people alight?"

Now, you guys all know I'm a writer, right? You understand why I go all excited and started asking things like that, and questioning him on how long it takes a body to burn, and did bones need higher temperatures, and all that...

Of course, it didn't help matters much when I pointed out the instructions in the little pamphlet he gave us describing all the equipment which contained the following instructions for a fire blanket:

Use blanket to wrap around a human torch. Ensure you replace after every use.

I mean... after every use... are they serious? Are there so mnay places that have multiple incidents of people being set alight? So many that you need to remind people to buy a new $10 fire blanket after every time it happens?

And they think I'm a little odd?

Anyway, by now, everyone else in the room is giving me very strange looks. The instructor was looking a little panicked... so he suggested we go outside and learn how to use the extinguishers...

Guess what? First one I touched... I broke:)

Chaos and devastation in my wake... my work here is done:)

Muwahahahaha