Taste of Kiwi: Blog of Author Shelley Munro

I know many of you live in the Northern hemisphere and are shivering with the cold, but it’s summer here in New Zealand. I like summer, so my list today is about things that typify summer for me.

Thirteen Things That Indicate Summer

1. Hunting out suntan lotion or buying a new bottle.
2. The pohutukawa trees start flowering. (Pohutukawas are a native New Zealand tree. In December they flower. Our street is lined with trees bearing scarlet pom-pom sized flowers)
3. The Christmas lilies bloom (large white flowers – I’m not sure of their correct name but I’ve always thought of them as Christmas lilies)
4. Shorts and T-shirts
5. Bare feet
6. Long walks after dinner
7. Eating alfresco
8. Barbeques
9. Daylight saving (Our clocks go forward an hour at the beginning of October and back an hour at the beginning of April)
10. Picking fresh strawberries in the garden
11. Passionfruit start forming on the vines
12. Salads – all the ingredients picked straight from the garden
13. Christmas, which brings me straight to my freebie story Turning Point. It’s a Christmas themed story and is a prequel of sorts to my upcoming Samhain Publishing release, The Bottom Line. Download your free copy today.

What things characterize summer for you? Or winter, if you prefer?

I like to keep up with the news, to hear what’s happening in different parts of the world. Keeping up with current events is one of the things I miss while I’m traveling. From experience, it’s difficult to keep abreast of current affairs in parts of Australia. Their news tends to mostly relate to whatever state you’re in. They don’t think New Zealand news is important. In America, it’s impossible. I’m convinced that the news people don’t know there is a New Zealand or Australia. The only way to learn what’s happening in the world is to tap into the Internet, or at least that’s what we do when we’re visiting the US.

In New Zealand our news coverage is broad in all medias—television, radio and newspaper. I generally know what’s going on in different parts of the world.

Just recently, I’ve noticed a trend, particularly with our television news. They sensationalize everything, in some cases making mountains out of things that are mere hills. Two cases in point.

Like the rest of the world, swine fever has been a big story down here. We had several groups of Auckland students who spent their school holidays in Mexico. They developed symptoms, were isolated fairly quickly on their return to NZ and given treatment. I thought our health ministry handled everything pretty well, the students, their families and others who were showing symptoms were put in isolation and monitored closely.

We’ve been lucky in New Zealand since we haven’t had any deaths and everyone has recovered. Anyone listening to the news coverage after the story broke would have thought all the students were a gasp away from death and the pandemic would be halfway across Auckland by the next day. Despite officials coming out with strong statements, telling of their progress and what they intended to do, the news coverage was scaremongering, plain and simple. I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

The second thing that happened was a shooting. A policeman was killed and others injured by a gunman who holed up in his house. The armed defenders were out, neighbors were evacuated and the press went overboard. Yes, it was a serious situation, but several of the things the press reported during the day were incorrect. I can see that news is big business these days. It’s a race to see who can get stories out to the public first, but it would make me happier if the gloom and doom reports were reserved for matters where the world really was going to end.

Lately I’ve been watching the headlines and leaving it at that. I don’t need to listen to the scaremongering from our reporters.

How do you keep up with the news? If you live in Australia or the US, am I being unfair about your parochial news coverage? Do you think, like me, that sometimes the news coverage is heavy on the scaremongering? What say you about news?

Look for the blog participation winner announcement later today. Oh, my newsletter contest winner announcement as well. I ran out of time today, but on the plus side, my website is looking more up to date. Check out my new covers for Make That Man Mine and Lynx to the Pharaoh plus details and an excerpt for CatNap, the next story in my Middlemarch series. I also have a new free short story for you to download.

My special guest today is fellow Romance Diva Jennifer Colgan. She writes for Amber Quill and Amber Heat and has a new release called Strange New World coming in Feb 2009 from Samhain Publishing. Jennifer also writes under the name of Bernadette Gardner for Ellora’s Cave. Today Jennifer is talking about the measuring up and taking stock we all do at the start of a new year. Over to Jennifer…

First off, I’d like to thank Shelley for inviting me to be her guest. I’ve been reading all the wonderful posts by her previous guests and wondering how I can measure up.

The question of measuring up – of taking stock of who and what we are, is one that usually plagues me during this time of year. Though I strive to see the year as a circle with no real beginning and I subscribe to the idea that it’s never too late to start something, when the end of December rolls around, I invariably find myself contemplating how the year that’s coming to a close measures up to the one before, and how it will impact the one after.

This past year was a whirlwind for me. It seemed to fly by in a blur while I tried to keep all my plates spinning at once. In addition to writing for three publishers and editing for two, I still hold a part time job outside of writing and of course care for my home and family, which includes a husband, two children and an ever-expanding collection of pets. While I wish I could say this was a year of unprecedented accomplishment, to be honest, it was more a year of unflagging dedication to getting the job done. I measured each day in how many pages I wrote [and usually how many loads of laundry I washed]. I became quota girl so to speak, stuck on the DO MORE treadmill. “Get it done” was my motto.

While that might seem like it worked fairly well from the standpoint of an outside observer – I wrote five stories, sold seven, and edited twenty – not to mention finding time to read forty other books, most for my own enjoyment, I did lose track of something I’m hoping to regain in 2009. While striving to accomplish, to GET IT DONE, I began to lose some of the wonder of my craft and that’s where I’ve decided to concentrate my efforts to see that 2009 measures beyond 2008.

I don’t plan to exceed my word count this year, or to read 41 books instead of 40. My goal for 2009 is a bit more elusive. I want to love what I’m doing again. I want to get back to the way it was when I started out, writing for the joy of seeing a story unfold before me on the page, letting my characters surprise me by doing something I hadn’t planned for them, rather than vex me by stalling my progress for the day.

It may seem like a small detail in the overall scheme of things, but to me it’s huge and will mark for me whether or not 2009 is a success. If I can fall in love with writing all over again, I will be able to say the New Year not only measured up but surpassed the old one.

Happy Holidays everyone and may you not only meet but exceed all your goals in the coming months!

Question from Shelley: How do you approach the new year? Do you take stock like Jennifer? Decide to do things differently?

Don’t forget to check out Jennifer’s story, Fresh Blood, available on her website for free! Here’s the link.