Tuesday 10 December 2013

Give and Ye Shall Receive

Joining the New Zealand Romance Writers online community has opened a new window of opportunity for me - there are some wonderfully helpful people there like Shirley Wine, who writes Rural Romances as breathtaking and unique as the land that inspires them. Shirley has been generous with her advice and has hosted my first guest blog on her website-linked blog:  http://www.shirleywine.com
I hope one day I can help others in the group as much as Shirley has helped me. I've often been told that being generous with your help to other writers can reap its own rewards later on. If this is the case, Shirley deserves payback big-time. 

This is what I wrote on her blog, which can be found at: http://www.shirleywine.com/2013/12/felicity-price-guest-post/:



Why I simply had to write “In Her Mothers’ Shoes”

Like many Baby Boomers, I was born to an unmarried mother in the 1950s and adopted at birth. My mother never even got to hold me or say goodbye. I was simply taken from her while her stitches were being sewn up and she never saw me again.
My adoptive parents told me from an early age that I’d been adopted. It never seemed a big deal until I was a teenager, a time when many of us question our parents and wish we’d been born to someone more glamorous and lenient! From then on, I keenly wanted to know who my “real” mother was (I wasn’t so fussed about my birth father) but it wasn’t until the New Zealand adoption laws changed in 1986-7 that I was able to do anything about it.
I finally got to meet her in the late 1980s but it wasn’t for another twenty-two years that I met up with my new brothers and sister.
The more people I spoke to about finding me new family, the more I realised just how common my story is. It seemed almost everyone had a half brother or sister, or cousin, or some close relative who’d suddenly popped up out of the blue. It was a story waiting to be told, and for some time I thought about writing it.
Until then, my books had been a bit like Marian Keyes’ books – a mix of light-hearted humour with some serious issues, but essentially entertaining. The title of one of them – “A Sandwich Short of a Picnic” – says it all.
This new novel (yes, it is fictional, but obviously based on my story) about finding my birth family, had to be different to allow for the heart-wrenching time my birth mother had and the heart-warming feeling of finally meeting someone who looks like you. Not to mention, realising that at last you can have a sense of belonging, of fitting in.
So I started working part-time and spent a year attending the “Bill Manhire” Victoria University Creative Writing course. It was the most wonderful experience. I learned how to stop over-writing, over-explaining, how to internalise better; I learned so many things that helped me write a better book.
When it was finished, my usual publisher, Random House, told me it wasn’t commercial enough – which it wasn’t. Especially compared with my earlier books. So I published it myself – in print and online – and documented some of the fun and games on my blog. I’m still learning how to do it, how to sell more books online, and how to write even better next time. Because, of course, I’m writing another book this year. It’s quite different. Who knows if it will be commercial?!
 




Sunday 1 December 2013

It's been raining men - but where's the benefit?

When everyone raves about ultra-fast fibre broadband, it's a no-brainer to sign up for it right? 
Now that we've done so, I'm not so sure.
The fibre cable arrived at our gate, along with all the other gates in our street, about two months ago, followed by a flyer from Snap! Did we want to sign up for some incredibly cheap rate, including landlines, that was significantly less per month than our existing supplier? Of course. So, after decades with Telecom, we switched everything - phones and internet provider - to Snap! 
Men came to make diagrams where the cable would go up our long drive. Men came to have another look at where it would go into the house. More men came back a month or so later to burrow up the garden border at the side of the drive, like big hairy rabbits burrowing holes every few meters and magically drilling horizontally in between to stretch the cable. Another bunch of men came to drill through the wall and connect up the phones and the Fritz-box that holds the key to the ultra-fast broadband. But they couldn't find where the copper cable comes in so they couldn't disconnect it. Several phone calls later, another bunch of men came to disconnect it. Meanwhile, my laptop wouldn't get emails and neither would my non-Telecom phone. More phone calls to reconnect. Apparently there was a new code that had to be entered into the laptop and phone, but nobody had bothered to tell us. 
It became something of a trial, really, waiting for endless people at call centres to fix each problem and get everything going again. But three weeks later, we're all connected and looking forward to enjoying the benefits of ultra-fast fibre broadband. I say "looking forward" because neither the cable provider nor the ISP has bothered to explain to us what the benefits actually are and how to access them. Such as movies. My laptop, being an older one, doesn't like playing movies unless they're on DVD - which don't need fibre broadband to be delivered to my lap. 
Next step: upgrading the laptop software to play movies and finding out what else the fibre wizardry can do.
It would be a pain to think that all those men laboured in vain.