Parties, High Teas, and more!

What a weekend! We celebrated my daughter's 21st birthday with a Halloween-themed party on Friday (we are still finding bits of arteficial spider webs in the garden), and on Saturday I attended a High Tea in the city that included lots of shopping (all to raise funds for breast cancer research). Sunday was the Sydney Living Museums Open Day where several heritage buildings not usually open to the public are available for tours. I volunteered as a guide at Sydney's Town Hall and spent the morning greeting visitors and quickly looking up answers to questions I had no clue on. Then on Monday, the family went out for lunch and another, much smaller, celebration of that 21st birthday.

Needless to say, by Monday night, we were all exhausted!

Not much writing going on, but a lot of thinking. Early last week, I decided to commit to write my first short story in many years. I'm planning on entering it into a competition (it's always good to have a set goal and deadline to aim for) and have been tweaking, adding, taking away, and coming up with new ideas ever since. I have a lot of research that probably won't make it into my next manuscript so thought using it for short story fodder wouldn't hurt, and might even help. Someone asked me a few weeks ago, how often do you sit and write. Not as often as I'd like, but I think about it constantly, and with this short story, I'm hoping to put some meaningful words down in short spurts of time and so trigger an avalanche when I have larger blocks of time to play with.

I've also been reading... lots, and have just finished reading a climate fiction novel, Clade by James Bradley. Interesting way of sharing a story and some beautiful passages about storms. An epic novel but without all the hefty baggage that usually comes with similar epics.

The next book on my pile is, The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. This is one of several I bought from Abby's Bookstore in Sydney when I raced in to escape a sudden and severe dumping of rain outside. I dripped all over their carpet but managed to avoid dripping on any books. They have a great bargain shelf, by the way. I bought four books.

Here's a link to a few of my photos from Town Hall on my Facebook page.