A Fair Trader

A Fair Trader is yet to be released but it already has its first review at Simply Romance Reviews

Shari thought:
SRR GRADE: A-
The last night of a cruise is suppose to be the most memorable; or so Ruth is told. Being escorted to dinner by the Chief Engineer, Matthew, might be just the thing to make the night memorable. Ruth is ready to throw caution to the wind and go forward with the one night, no strings attached, cruise affair and she thinks that Matthew is too. But duty calls and Matthew has to work into the night and neither have the chance to say goodbye. They both leave letters for the other but the letters never find their way to their final destination. One night of promised passion turns into five years of "What happened?"
Ruth is in town for a conference when a group of men enter the bar as she is reviewing her notes. One voice takes her back to a time five years ago when she knew who and what she wanted. Would Matthew recognize her? Would they pick up where they left off? And what happened to the letter that he left for her and she gave to a friend of his? Will that night of passion that was interrupted finally conclude?

A Fair Trader by Amy Gallow was entrancing. Ms. Gallow's attention to detail made you feel as if you were an invisible bystander witnessing everything unfold right in front of you. You felt Ruth's fear, love, doubt, and anger like it was your own. It was a really enjoyable read.

I've decided to add Shari to my Xmas card list.

Amy (?)

Realization

The encouraging response from Allen & Unwin had a strange effect. Its measured praise for my writing told me I'd reached the end of the beginning after ten years of effort and must step up a level and realize my cast of characters and story concept as I've never managed before.

I'm back into the creative stage of the story, re-examining every step of its journey, pondering the motivations and testing their truths. Later, I'll look at the storytelling itself, ratcheting up its excitement, pruning the indulgences.

Oddly, there's no impatience. I know what I have to do and it will be finished when it's finished--and not before.

It's a great life!

Amy (for the moment)

Onwards & Upwards

A friend suggested "onwards and upwards" as my motto for 2008 and it took an encouraging response from Allen & Unwin (after two days of minding energetic grandchildren) to make it seem right. I'd read the material submitted to them only the day before and was appalled at its faults (telling rather than showing, jumping POVs and inserting information the character had no way of knowing--all proof that submissions should be carefully planned rather than impromptu, as this one was).

A friend, a very gracious lady, appears to be losing her sixteen year battle against cancer with the recent appearance of a new strain, both aggressive and invasive. We can do little except stand on the sidelines and applaud her courage in this new battle. Her passing will be a loss to all.

Other than that, we are deep in house maintenance, installing a pressure pump and watering system from our rain water tanks and a recycling system for some of our "grey" water to the ornamental garden. Add some baby-sitting commitments while our children settle into the new working year, and our bed is quite inviting at the end of the day.


For all that --- "Onwards and Upwards!!"

Seventy is just a number, and battles can be won as well as lost.

Amy (?)

On turning Seventy

This morning I exercised my newly acquired privilege under the current water restrictions of watering two hours later than those younger than seventy, standng in full view in the front garden hand watering with a hose, hoping for the dramatic arival of authority to interrupt the task.

Sadly, I was left to water in peace.

Other than that, turning seventy has been a non-event. I don't feel any different. I still face the future with excitement, certain it holds many more challenges to be faced and overcome. My move to popular fiction still holds a delicious sense of uncertainty (my Friday Pitch to Allen & Unwin expires on January 18th. If I've not had a response by then, it has failed and Plan "B" comes into operation).

The Fair Trader, at Shadowrose Publications, is still in limbo because the publisher is back in hospital again (she spent most of September there). When she wrote apologising for the delay, my response was "Bugger the book, get well first." I hope she took it to heart.

The Widowmaker, at Whiskey Creek Press, is still on schedule for a May, 2008, release and I'm looking forward to the edits when they arrive. They will decide whether Whiskey Creek form part of Plan "B" or not.

I really enjoy edits. They're concentrated learning...and I have so much to learn.

It's a great life (still)

Amy(?)

I'm having a ball!

Rewriting the opening story of the Marrak family saga as is pure bliss. I'm back in the world I knew intimately for fifty years and was the background of my life almost since birth. My father loved it, returning whenever possible.

I'm talking about the Sea.

I've enjoyed writing romance, there are still four books to be released under Amy Gallow's name, and my future books will all carry a strong romantic theme, but it's great to live the story as well.

Back to work.

It's a great life.

Amy(?)

A Fair Trader

This is my preferred cover mock-up for the Shadowrose release of A Fair Trader. I like it because it refers to the opening words when Ruth, the heroine, is watching the sun sink into the western horizon and hoping to see the fabled green flash as the last rays of the sun is refracted through the water.

In forty years seagoing, I watched the sun disappear below a watery horizon in every kind of weather and have a very healthy scepticism about the "flash", but I sailed with people who would swear they'd seen it and were quite offended when I laughed.

Ruth didn't get to see it either, but I don't suppose it mattered to her at the time.

It's a great life.

Amy

Rejection Blues - I think not!

This year I had six books accepted and two released so the first rejection of the year didn't loom as large as it might have done.

It was very courteous, praising my writing style for smoothness and readability, but regretting that the story just didn't draw her in.

She was right! The romance was almost an afterthought.

In 1997, I grasped the chance to retire and try my hand as a full time writer and chose to write romance. My first contract came in 1999 and the publisher required a female pseudonym for marketing and Amy Gallow was born. Since then she had done quite well, publishing four print books in Australia and having seven books accepted in America, with three already released.

I will miss her, but my stories have shifted incrementally from simple romances to the complexity I enjoy and I fear she has written her last book.

The pirate series will come out under my own name and I will return to the First Family stories and rewrite them as the science fiction/fantasy they really are.

It's a great life.

Amy(?)

Inside this writer's mind

A writer friend asked the question in her blog, "What's it like inside your mind?" and it started me thinking.

She spoke of characters from her stories, as did some of the comments, roaming around, falling out of bed, using items from her other stories, but none of this rang true for me.

The creative process fascinates me. An idea is triggered by some stimulus and my thoughts become restless, probing for connections, testing their strength, discarding weakness, in a logical progression...until, often quite abruptly, it will leap back to an earlier connection and follow an entirely new path to a totally unexpected result.

The closest physical analogy I can draw of the process comes from a description by Edward de Bono (I think he was writing of Water Logic). He postulated a beach full of octopi, dumped in a random order, their tentacles seeking connections and forming synapse-like patterns in a blind, gestalt-driven search. Thinking of any one octopus stimulates it, driving it to a more frenzied search, individual tentacles lashing, it's primitive mind cataloguing each contact and remembering their nature. This produces a ripple effect among the other octopi and soon they're all thrashing about until they reach a result that produces a feedback surge to the original octopus and a path is formed between the original idea and this new outcome.

Like all analogies, it fits only where it touches, but it gives me a good working model, and that's enough.

It's a great life.

Amy

Coffee break over. Back on your heads

The above is the punch line for a very old joke-one I first heard in secondary school-but it's very appropriate.

We came back from our trip to visit our latest grandson and found ourselves baby-sitting two other grandchildren whilst our eldest child, a daughter, celebrated her anniversary with a game of golf, a meal and the theatre. Today was spent cleaning the house of its two weeks accumulation of dust, catching up with friends, mail, etc., and reformatting a manuscript at the request of a publisher.

Tomorrow, all things being equal, I will open up my current work in progress and start reading it, immersing myself afresh in the situation, worming my way into the characters.

It's a great life.

Amy

A sobering thought

We visited a 94-year-old uncle yesterday. An ex-seaman who sailed on the Murmansk and Malta convoys, he was on the Queen Mary when she sank the cruiser Curacao in mid Atlantic whilst carrying American troops to the UK in preparation for the Invasion.

His mind is alert and sharp, but his body is failing, leaving him bed-ridden and practically blind.

We talked of old times, Jack Dempsey's bar in New York, ships we knew, etc, but the effort soon exhausted him and we had to leave. Time and distance will soon separate us again and this may have been our last meeting.

I will regret his passing. He is the last survivor of his generation of my family, but I couldn't wish him to stay, locked in partial darkness with only his memories to exercise his mind.

It's a great life (Sometimes)

Amy

A lesson learned

My second review of Feodar's World and my royalty statement from New Concepts came yesterday and each reinforced the other in suggesting the series started with New Blood should have been a single book directed at another market entirely.

I'll suspend work on books four and five until I've used the lessons learned in writing a series on the Marrack Family series about pirates/privateers and the contemporary romances with Whiskey Creek Press and Shadowrose have appeared. (Hopefully The Countess and the Privateers will establish me in another genre in the meantime)

At some time in the future, I'll withdraw New Blood, Feodar's World and Rachael's Return and then rewrite the whole story of Peter and his creation in a single volume, probably 300,000 words plus.

In the meantime, our visit with the latest grandson is going great. We had a great trip up from Melbourne, spent two days at Binalong(Where "Flash" Johnny Gilbert is buried and near the family home of "Banjo" Paterson, of "The man from Snowy River" fame)

It's a great life

Amy

Some memories never die

A blog entry of a writer friend brought back a memory I thought I'd safely buried and the bitterness of it was as bright and new as the day it happened.
It was the at the height of the anti-Vietnam rallies and I was caught in the traffic jam outside Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, my car stopped alongside a tram stop. Standing, waiting for a tram, was a senior ranker, a sergeant I think, and the medal ribbons on his breast included three for personal bravery. I didn't know him personally, but his unit badges proclaimed him a fighting soldier from a battalion that had covered itself in honor in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The demonstration was proceeding noisily down the other side of the street, one of the major Melbourne thoroughfares, and a group broke away from the main stream and, evading the police cordon, approached the soldier. One young woman, grubby in her frenzied support for a cause she may have barely understood, spat in his face.

Anonymous in my civilian clothing, I eased the car door open, prepared to go to his support, but he dealt with it magnificently, regarding the young woman with quiet contempt while the spittle dribbled down his face. The police intervened at that moment and led the group back into the stream of people.

"Can I give you a lift, Digger?" I asked, shamed by my inaction.

"No, thank you. I'm just going to the station." He waved aside my apologies for the incident. "Some of my friends died to give her the right to do that. I honor their memory."

The tram came and he got on and stood wiping the spittle from his face with a handkerchief as it pulled away.

The next day, the Army issued an order restricting the wearing of uniform to within the precincts of the Barracks.

For myself, and the rest of us with personal experience of Vietnam, we understood the protesters better than they thought and the young woman was just an unfortunate side effect of their frenzy, but turning the Australian uniform into something to be hidden from sight hurt.

Even after all these years, it still does.

Amy

A guest has arrived

Our younger daughter's garage is being dismantled and replaced because the structure had become dangerous and this left a gaping hole in their fence so their border collie has come to stay with us until the fence is replaced.
Indigo has spent at least half her life with us, for our daughter and her husband lived here until they could afford their own home, so the house and yard are familiar. She's a typical Border Collie, excitable, full of energy and hasn't an enemy in the world. For ninety percent of the time, she can be controlled by voice, but the other ten percent ranges from embarrassing to hilarious and her daily walks are exciting. She'll run till she drops chasing a thrown stick (she has no interest in balls)

Fortunately, there's lots of bike track, ovals, parks and gardens nearby and at six a.m. (her preferred walk time) not too many people around.

I'm not sure whether I'll be glad or sorry to see her go home next week. Walking a dog like her is much more strenuous than simply walking and we come home afterwards and both collapse for a time.

Life without Indigo will certainly be different.

Amy

The Sneezing Season

It's a worse than usual year for hay fever and I am a woeful sight, subsisting on antihistamines and still miserable.

It is only the last ten years when it has affected me and I'm not sure whether conditions have worsened or I have deteriorated, but I suspect the latter. (The increasing concoction of medication that comes with age is possibly a factor as well.) I'm quite certain that if I took a family pet to the vet in the state I'm in, they'd take a look at my age and suggest it might be kinder to put me down now rather than let me suffer. We're kinder to our pets than to ourselves. (I am joking...I think)

Oh, to be at sea again, hundreds of miles from the nearest land, in mid Atlantic, like my heroine from The Countess and the Privateers. She's not suffering from sore eyes, running nose and sneezing so often her ears ache.

The progress has picked up a little since I realized I had to involve Talleyrand and Fouche` to justify the efforts made by the villain to capture the ship. I am continuously amazed at how neatly historical facts suit this story. It is almost as if my subconscious had been storing specific knowledge to trigger my imagination.

It's a great life, hay fever or no.

Amy

The best laid plans

Mid October is approaching and the WIP, The Countess and the Privateers, another slight name change, is languishing at thirty thousand words, its wordage creeping rather than growing.

There's nothing wrong with the story, I'm still as excited as I was in the beginning, and the plot is developing very nicely. The problem lies outside it, in a family trauma not affecting me directly, but still very distressing to those I care for. Like everything else, it will pass and, hopefully, leave no lasting scars, but my concern for them keeps tugging away at my concentration and I find myself staring into space rather than writing.

Worse than that, the normal uncertainties and delays of a writer's life seem suddenly mountainous and I find myself seeking reassurance wherever I can. Intellectually, I know this is merely a knock-on effect of the other, but the needy brat, who still populates a distant corner of my mind, is screaming for comfort and won't be hushed.

It's a selfish reaction in giving comfort to others for a part of you to call, "Me too!"

It's back to 1802 for me, where the privateers are gathering,

Amy

A Soldier's Woman has a new home

Shadowrose Publications have accepted the Americanized version of A Soldier's Woman and are looking at Snow Drifter, which would bring the last of my Australian published books to the US.

Mitchell's Run made it as Mitchell's Valley. A Fair Trade will be released this month as A Fair Trader and The Widowmaker will come out at Whiskey Creek Press in May 2008. It will be great to see them tread a broader stage, because I enjoyed writing every one of them.

It's a great life!

Amy

Rachael's Return is out

I emerged briefly from my troglodyte writing cave to find New Concepts had released Rachael's Return and this banner will appear on The Romance Studio website.

I spent a few moments happy dancing around the cave and now it's back to 1802 and an exciting voyage to Jamaica, battling privateers turned pirates and treachery on board.

It's a great life

Amy

Time to Focus

The edits are done for Rachael's Return and A Fair Trader and the former is due for release this month with A Fair Trader to follow within the next thirty days. I've submitted a partial of The Countess and the Pirates to Samhain and have four weeks (on past experience) to complete the manuscript.

That means Focus, Focus, Focus.

All the time-wasting habits must go to the wall. Yahoo groups will get a single glance during the morning hour of administrative duties, as will my fellow author's blogs and nothing more. I hope the world doesn't end in the next four weeks, because I mightn't even notice.

See you sometime mid-October.

Amy

The number of the Beast and other things

Mitchell David, our second grandson, joined the clan on Wednesday evening around 6.15 pm. He weighed in at 6 lbs 6.6 ounces and Shelley, our daughter-in-law, noticed the conjunction of sixes into 666 and wondered if it was an augury of some kind, then she looked at Mitchell David's paternal line and wondered no more. Both are doing well and are home already.

Rachael's Return has cover art now and it is the first example I've approved unconditionally since my days with Rocky River Romance and I can tick off another family name from my list with our first granddaughter satisfied. (The family is growing faster than I can write)

A Fair Trader has reached the edits stage with the accolade of "the cleanest manuscript the editor has ever worked on". This is the very nice lady who called me a "Wordsmith", so she's definitely on my Xmas card list.

It's a great life.

Amy

Coming Soon

Rachael's Return, the third book of the First Family series has made it to the "Coming Soon" page of New Concepts Publishing. There's no artwork yet and no indication of when, but it's good to see movement.

Feodar's World, the second book received a mixed review at Romance Reader at Heart. The reviewer, Julie, chose it because she'd read Mitchell's Valley and loved it enough to want to read what she thought was my first sci-fi story. It is neither my first, nor is it predominantly sci-fi, although the setting is a space ship initially.

I always knew making each book of the series stand alone was going to be difficult because the concept of a world created by a dying veteran of WWI, the French Foreign Legion, WWII and Korea where he and the family he creates there, become telepathic immortals with the ability to translocate physically is not quickly explainable and the plot is complex.

Julie found it confusing from page one, but she was generous enough to recommend it to anyone who'd already read New Blood.

Whiskey Creek Press are still releasing The Widowmaker in May 2008 and Shadowrose publications are anxious to release A Fair Trader soon and are looking at the other books of my backlist.

My work in progress has gone through a couple of name changes as the story develops, but seems to have settled down to The Countess and the Pirates. It's going well and I hope to have the first three chapters to accompany a query letter soon.