This time next week, I shall be in Adelaide. That will bring its own pleasures because I hope to catch up with good friends such as David and Annalouise and maybe some of my children as well. Then before the end of the month I'll be back in Mount Gambier for the summer.

Mount Gambier is lovely in summertime. It seldom goes above 35 degrees and is usually in the mid-twenties to low thirties. What's more, it is dry - of recent years, Perth, which used to enjoy a classic Mediterranean climate, has become very humid for much of the summer, which makes the often over-40 temperatures (that's well over the century to my Stateside friends) well-nigh unbearable. We will not talk about the winter in Mount Gambier. Let's just say it's awful. But summer is lovely, and if I can go on having my winters in Perth and my summers in Mount Gambier I will be a very happy little fat gypsy indeed. Of course, it all depends on the house-sitting calendar filling up, and I'll just have to wait and see what happens on that front. However, the plan is to return on 5 March for the first housesit, which will quickly be followed by Swancon, Perth's Speculative Fiction convention.

But a return presupposes a departure, and I've already started to say goodbye to my friends. Yesterday there was a meeting of the Perth Shakespeare Club, with a reading of ActsIV and V of The Merry Wives of Windsor organised by Diana Day. Di asked me to fill in by reading Mistress Quickly, which was great fun. If there's one thing I love it's a good bawdy joke and this play abounds in them. There's one line where Evans, the schoolmaster, is instructing a boy in Latin declensions and he mentions "caret", which cues Mistress Quickly for the comment "And that's a good root!" It's nice to see some slang terms have not changed in 400 years!

Sadly there was a trilogy of last good-byes in the Club this year, as three of our dear members passed on, one of them very unexpectedly. The average age of members must be in the late sixties at least, and it's sad that a club with a history going back to the 1930s is gradually dwindling due to deaths, with no younger enthusiasts presenting themselves to keep the Bard's fan club alive.

Today we had a meeting of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre SpecFic group, which this month took the form of a workshop under the tutelage of Juliet Marillier. She spoke on voice, with particular reference to the close third POV and how it entails having not one narrative "voice", but one for each POV character. She drew on the works of Joe Abercrombie, Orson Scott Card, Angela Carter and Jacqueline Carey to illustrate her points and then gave us an exercise that involved writing two similar scenes in different voices. I did one in my own version of close third (I say "my own version" because it's not close enough yet!) and another in first person. Like many writers, I find first person much easier, although I don't actually use it often. It's easier because it's rather like acting in the Stanislavsky method - you start with "the magic 'if'". If I were such-and-such a kind of person in such-and-such a kind of situation, how would I feel? What would I do? Starting from that premise makes it much easier to portray different characters. Now, to translate that same feeling of closeness to the third person...A tall order, but I'll keep working on it.

After a very pleasant lunch in Guildford, I headed for home, caught up on emails, rang my sister Anne to remind her that I'll be there in ten days and wound up having a nice long chat, played lots of Scrabble on Facebook and now I'm just starting to think about bed. But I'm also thinking in happy anticipation of several meetings coming up this week, mostly involving my favourite activity: coffee with friends:-)