I have a new interview up at The Romance Studio this month featuring my latest release Wanderlust.
What’s next for me? My next release is called Lovers at Last, and it’s a friends to lovers story, which is one of my favorite plots. Read an excerpt here. Lovers at Last is out on 4 June from Ellora’s Cave.
June 10 is also the release date for Midnight Treat anthology, featuring my story Curse of Brandon Lupinus. It’s already available for pre-order from Amazon and other online bookstores, including Fishpond (for NZ and Australian readers).
I’ll leave you with a video of The Feelers and their song Stand Up. The Feelers are a New Zealand band and their song is currently playing on my ipod. The video was shot in Downtown Auckland.
I have two interesting news items from New Zealand for you today. I know there’s lots of talk on the Internet re authors complaining about reviews and reviewers complaining about authors comments about reviews. It seems we’re quite well-behaved as a group compared to the restaurant owners in Auckland. Several top Auckland restaurants were given bad grades in a recent review by Metro. They struck back in an ad with a recipe for “Preparation of Metro Food Critic Testicles”.
Readers were encouraged to take a “very sharp knife, slice through the sort of skinnie muscley stuff that you find surrounding each of the Metro Food Critic Testicles (there should be two testicles, they can be hard to find)”.
And the Metro Food Critic’s comment - The testicles should be served with a side of “Sour Grapes”. You can read the full article here.
The other item of interest, or at least I found it fascinating, was the thawing out of the 490 kg squid at TePapa museum in Wellington. The colossal squid was caught in the Antarctic waters of the Ross Sea in 2007 and was frozen to preserve it. There’s been all sorts of discussion about defrosting the squid, since it’s not as easy as thawing out a packet of sausages. Here’s the photo gallery showing shots of the squid and you can also check out the webcam showing live action of the defrosting.
Here are a couple of ads from New Zealand. The first one from Toyota offended quite a few people, but it’s typical New Zealand humor. It makes me laugh.
This second one is from Speights, a company that makes beer. If you’ve read my books you’ve probably noticed me mention Speights beer a time or two.
This story hit the news in New Zealand yesterday. An Auckland primary school has decided to adhere strictly to the new national healthy eating guidelines and will ban birthday cakes from the school.
My initial reaction was WHAT???? How can they take this polictical correctness and adherence to stupid rules so far? What harm does a slice of birthday cake do to a kid? Frankly, I was horrified.
I happened to catch an interview with the school principal on the news last night. Yes, it’s true. They are banning birthday cakes from the school and part of the reason is because they believe in the healthy eating guidelines. However, the main reason is the entire birthday cake thing has turned into an expensive competition between parents. Evidently the kids prefer expensive cakes purchased from a bakery and when the cake needs to be big enough to feed 30 children, that means serious money. Some parents couldn’t afford to pay for a cake and others, with busy lives, didn’t have time to bake a cake. The school took the decision to ban all cakes and remove the extra expensive from the parents’ budget, because after all, educating a child these days is expensive enough without adding extras.
The owner of the local bakery was also interviewed. Won’t it cut into profits? the reporter asked. No, not really. Parents still purchased cakes from her bakery but the cakes were shared after school with close friends and family. Wasn’t that what birthdays were about? No, the bakery owner wasn’t concerned in the slightest.
After hearing all this, I was much happier, but I notice that most of the media still chose to highlight the healthy food guidelines rather than the commonsense rationale behind the decision.
A kakapo is a New Zealand flightless parrot. It’s an endangered species because of its vulnerability to predators and of course, the inroads made by man into the parrots’ natural habitat. Until this week there were only 86 living kakapo but after a bumper breeding season five chicks have hatched on Codfish Island (a sanctuary for the birds). Kakapo need special conditions to breed and plentiful food, which means that not every year is great for breeding. The last good year was 2005. Here’s the story here plus a photo of a kakapo.
In a small promo, I included the kakapo in my very first book, Aislyn. The baddies were conducting a scavenger hunt and one of the items they needed to collect was a rare kakapo egg.
In writing news I wrote the last words on my first draft of another Middlemarch story. It’s tentatively called Cat Burglar. I’m going to let it sit for a couple of weeks and start yet another Middlemarch tale - this time it’s Leticia’s story, a character from Stray Cat Strut. I’m really thrilled with my progress, because after stopping the Sven challenge and taking almost a week off writing, I’ve still managed to write 50,000 words.
Tomorrow Christina Phillips is my guest blogger and we’re giving away a prize. I hope you’ll pop back to say hello.
There’s a really good documentary playing on our TV at the moment about the life of James Cook. It’s fascinating and these are some of the things I’ve learned during the last two weeks of viewing.
1. 1728: Born at Marton (near modern Middlesbrough), Yorkshire, Britain. He was the son of a farmer.
2. 1736: Family moves a few miles to Great Ayton, Yorkshire. He attends the village school and shows great promise.
3. 1744: He moves several miles to the coastal village of Staithes and is apprenticed to a shop keeper.
4. 1746: He moves south to Whitby, where he works for Captain John Walker on his ships. They’re not allowed to drink, gamble or associate with loose women!
5. 1755: Joins the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman.
6. 1759: Takes part in surveying the St. Lawrence River in Canada. He’s fascinated by a new method of surveying and is excited by the possibilities.
7. 1760-67: Surveys the islands of Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon off the east coast of Canada. His map was so accurate it was still being used over 200 years later.
8. In 1762, James Cook married Elizabeth Batts at Barking, just to the east of London. They were married for sixteen years and had six children. They spent only four years of their marriage together. Elizabeth Cook died in 1835 while in her nineties, living longer than all her children. Elizabeth burned all James’ papers and letters shortly before she died.
9. 1768-71: First Voyage round the world in the ship Endeavour. 1772-75: Second Voyage round the world in the ships Resolution and Adventure. 1776-80: Third Voyage round the world in the ships Resolution and Discovery, completed without him.
10. As a result of his experiences of astronomical observation and obvious skill in navigation and cartography, Cook was appointed leader of an expedition to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti organised by the Royal Society, in association with the Navy Board and funded by King George III. The Admiralty were less interested in astronomical observation than in the opportunity such a voyage offered for the secret exploration of the south-west of the South Sea (Pacific) for the Great South Land—Terra Australis Incognita. When the expedition returned in July 1771, the transit of Venus had been observed, an unprecedented number of botanical and zoological specimens collected, and though no Great South Land had been found, New Zealand and the east coast of New Holland (Australia) had been charted and claimed for King George III.
11. On 7 March 1776 Cook was admitted to the Royal Society for his success in defeating scurvy amongst his crew during his voyages and his paper on nutrition aboard the Resolution was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal, judged to be the best experimental research of the year. Elizabeth accepted the award however, as Cook had left on a third voyage in 1776 to search for a Pacific entrance to the legendary Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, believed to lie north of Canada.
12. Following Cook’s death in 1779, the Endeavour journal of James Cook is thought to have been held by his wife Elizabeth. There is no record of the journal’s movements following Elizabeth Cook’s death in 1835 until its appearance in 1923 when it was offered at auction by its owners the Bolckow family of Yorkshire. The family were unable to explain how they came to hold the journal. It had apparently been in the family’s library ‘for upward of fifty years, having been purchased by the late Bolckow’s uncle, but from whom and in what circumstances is unknown’.
On 21 March 1923 the Australian government purchased the Endeavour journal for £5000 for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library.
13. James Cook died in 1779. His last voyage was characterised by violence. Cook meted out increasingly severe punishments to indigenous peoples following the theft of various articles whilst at the Friendly Islands (Tonga), St George’s Island (Tahiti) and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). And on 14 February 1779 Cook and four marines were killed on the beach at Kealakekua Bay while seeking the return of the Discovery’s large cutter.
James Cook was a great leader of men and his skills in navigation led him to rise from ordinary seaman to a position of rank. Many of his charts were in use until recent times and were very close to satellite images of the land masses.
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I’ve been thinking about women and politics recently - for two reasons. One, Hillary Clinton is currently campaigning and two, New Zealand has elections this year. Our current prime minister is Helen Clark. Ms. Clark is New Zealand’s second female prime minister.
New Zealand’s ten-dollar note bears a picture of Kate Sheppard. To be honest, I don’t ever remember learning about her in history at school, and I actually liked history so I’m sure I didn’t forget. But Kate Sheppard is an important New Zealand figure and her efforts were far reaching.
Kate Sheppard was the driving force behind obtaining the vote for women in New Zealand. For a little country we’re very progressive. We were the first country in the world to award women the legal right to vote. Before 1893 only men over the age of 21 could vote.
Kate Sheppard was born in Liverpool, England and came to New Zealand in 1869 with her mother and other family members. When she was 24 years old she married Walter Allen Sheppard, a storekeeper in Christchurch.
In 1885 she joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. (An organisation of women formed to work towards moderation or restraint in things, especially drinking alcohol.) Kate became the leader of the fight to win the right for women to vote in elections. She organised petitions to Parliament asking for the right to vote for women and persuaded Sir John Hall, a leading member of Parliament, to support them. She wrote a pamphlet called Ten reasons why the women of New Zealand should vote to support the campaign. The suffrage bills were defeated in Parliament in 1888, 1891 and 1892, but despite this Kate continued the campaign for the vote. She used public meetings and letters to the newspapers to gather support, and her last petition to Parliament had nearly 32, 000 signatures on it.
Finally, on 19 September 1893 women were finally given the right to vote in elections. When the next general election was held ten weeks later, 65% of New Zealand women over 21 voted. New Zealand had become the first country in which all women had the right to vote.
Kate Sheppard later travelled overseas to England and America to help the campaigns there. She died in July 1934.
I think Kate Sheppard was an amazing woman. She believed women should take part in society and politics, rather than stay in the home and she believed that woman could not make any of the changes needed in society without first winning the right to vote.
So next time there’s an election, no matter how big or small, think of Kate Sheppard and her friends who helped women world-wide obtain the right to vote. Exercise your right. Vote and have your say.
During our recent trip to Wellington we visited the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. As the name suggests, it’s a special sanctuary for some of our endangered native birds. The 225 hectare site includes two dams that used to supply the city of Wellington with water. It was decided that the dams might break during an earthquake and a decision was made to lower the dams and use the area as an inland island. The first step was to fence the area with pest free fences.
These fences stop possums, stoats, weasels, ferrets, rats and mice from entering the sanctuary. Once the fences were installed a pest-control plan was put in place. A year later all 13 major pests in the area were fully eradicated. Thousands of native trees were planted (the area was previously all in pine) and this planting continues. The long-term vision for the project is to return the area to its original undisturbed state and this will take around 500 years.
Some of New Zealand’s endangered wildlife has been released in the pest-free area including brown teal ducks, the little spotted kiwi, giant wetas, tuatara, stitchbird, North Island saddleback, weka, North Island robin and bellbirds to name a few.
On entry to the sanctuary staff checked my bag for mice, cats, rats and other pests. Thankfully, my bag was found pest-free! I know I would have been more shocked than anyone if a mouse had jumped out. We explored some of the many paths, pausing to peer through the treetops searching for birds.
We sighted saddlebacks and bellbirds, lots of tuis and fantails as well as some kaka (NZ variety of parrot). I’d never seen kaka up close so was fascinated to see them at the feeding stations.
This photo shows two kaka. They’re a green parrot and blend in quite well with the trees, although they’re easy enough to spot because they make an awful screechy noise.
I would have loved to see a tuatara but since it was overcast they were all in their burrows, but we saw native fish and green geckos along with lots of our songbirds.
They also do a nocturnal tour where you can hear the evening song before the birds go to sleep and then go out hunting for the nocturnal kiwi. Maybe we’ll do this during another time. I’d highly recommend a visit to this sanctuary, if you’re ever down this end of the world.
