I've been incredibly busy this last couple of months. I was engaged in a lot of reviewing for The Perth Festival, the Fringe Festival and the Writers Festival, and I also managed to fit in a weekend belly dance intensive!

The busy-ness is not over yet - I have two more shows to review in the next ten days. (You can read my reviews, BTW, over at Artshub.) Then of course, comes Swancon, the annual Perth SF convention. It is always held over the Easter weekend and attracts a lot of fans from interstate as well as local ones. I am particularly excited this time, because my short story 'La Belle Dame' has been shortlisted for the Best WA Professional Short Written Work section of the Tin Duck Awards. (OK, have a giggle - but the Tin Ducks are WA's state awards for SF and to be shortlisted is considered quite an achievement.) I'm pleased to see several of my friends and writing colleagues shortlisted, too, in various categories. Juliet Marillier has two books shortlisted in the Best WA Professional Long Written Work section, along with Joanna Fay, Adrian Bedford and Dane Richter. Joanna also has a short story up against mine, as does fellow Egoboo member Sarah Lee Parker. There are two other excellent contenders in this section - Martin Livings and Stephanie Gunn. It could be a close call -  may the best story win!

You can read 'La Belle Dame' in Mythic Resonance, now available as an e-book on Amazon for only $3.99. The print run is just about sold out, but I still have a few copies for sale. Leave a comment below or find me on Facebook if you're interested. Mythic Resonance contains 13 top-class stories, mostly derived from myths, legends or folk / fairy-tales.

I'm also on the list for best fan production for my work as Reviews Editor for The Specusphere. This is a nice bit of recognition for the eight years I've spent in this voluntary post, and is especially poignant because The Specusphere closed down just last week. We were all worn out, I think, and especially our webmistress, Amanda Greenslade, who now has a business to run, with two young children at her feet!

Vale Specusphere. It served a very useful place in the Aussie spec-fic scene and won a lot of respect for its reviews and articles. However, there are several other webzines that will, I am sure, close the gap left by 'The Spec'.

Hard on the heels of Swancon come the 6th IPEd National Editors Conference and the national SF convention, this year to be held at Conflux in Canberra. I shall be on panels at both these events, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with interstate colleagues in both editing and writing.

So the year doesn't look like getting any less busy! I'll try to keep you posted by blogging all these events.

Three of my friends have ebooks out, just dying to be read.

Reunion, the second book in Joanna Fay's Siaris Quartet is out from Musa.The baddest of horrible baddies, Xereth, is still reeling from the loss of his children. He has bided his time and waited years for the perfect time to exact revenge ...


This one is only available from Musa at present but it will no doubt soon be found on Amazon and the other usual outlets  And of course the first book in the series, Daughter of Hope, is still available, too.







And hot off the press, so to speak, is Rowan Hagen's Fearless. When Joss sets off down the south coast, she is fleeing both a miserable marriage and her lonely childhood. Fleeing from all her wasted years. At the same time she is pursuing the magnetic, free-living Karmi, who embodies everything Joss wants to be, even after their shared adventures come to an abrupt end. Finding her proves not so easy, and Joss finds herself thrust into town life in Mungabula, where she takes on Karmi's model of courage to absolve her past.

And not the least of her challenges is the laconic but disarming Fletch…
 





Lastly, here's an old favourite, now available as an ebook. The Chicken Thief, by Fiona Leonard, has to be one of the best reads of the last few years. It's funny, whimsical and touching, and you can buy it on Amazon. 



Do check these books  out - I'm sure you'll love at least one of them, no matter what your taste in reading material!

My reading intentions for 2012 grew faster than I could possibly work my way down the list. I now have a to-be-read shelf that holds over 90 books – and that’s not counting the ones lurking on my nice new Kindle, which family members bought for me for Christmas! So I have enough material to keep me going right through 2013 and well beyond!

I tried out Kindle for Desktop and Kindle for iPhone before taking the plunge and asking the family to chip in for a Kindle hand-held device. I decided on a Kindle because it is not backlit and is therefore pretty easy on the eyes. So far, I’m really pleased with it. The only thing that gave me any trouble was getting Kindle books not purchased from Amazon off my computer and onto the device, which was a frustrating exercise. I finally discovered a way of doing it that involved plugging the Kindle into the computer via a USB port, doing a search for the required title in Kindle for Desktop in Windows Explorer and then dragging and dropping the file from Explorer to the Kindle. I could not, for some reason, just drag the title from Kindle for Desktop to the plugged-in Kindle. Amazon, I suppose, would much prefer that I bought all books from them, so they weren’t going to make it easy for me!

I’ve read quite a bit of non-fiction, as usual, ranging from The Anne Boleyn Collection by Claire Ridgeway to a number of ‘how-to-write’ books, such as Marketing for Authors, by Anna Revel. One non-fiction book I especially liked was Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones by Bryan Cogman. I utterly adore the GRR Martin books and the HBO DVDs based on them, so fannish material relating to the series goes down well in my house! In addition to the non-fiction, I read no fewer than 172 short stories for the Aurealis Awards, and at least another eighty for the ASIM slush pile! And that's without even thinking of the books and theses I've critiqued or edited for clients! The list of novels, therefore, is a bit shorter than usual. Here it is, with a few comments:

 Daughter of Hope by Joanna Fay: A disclaimer here – Jo is a personal friend and I had the privilege of critiquing this book during its creation. Jo is one of the most imaginative people I’ve ever met and this book reflects that, in spades! You can buy the e-book from Musa. Be sure to watch out for the sequel, coming very soon!

 Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor - and its sequel, Days of Blood and Starlight. This series promises to be a winner in the trilogy realm. The story is truly original and the characters very different from the archetypal stock characters so often found in fantasy.  

Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger – a teenage romp with a nod in the direction of steampunk. A short, easy read and lots of fun. Watch out for others in the series, too.  

John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk – a somewhat ‘literary’ novel with speculative elements. It’s beautifully written, rather along the lines of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, but the story is somewhat slight.

Vengeance by Ian Irvine and its sequel, Rebellion - the beginnings of another promising trilogy, with lots of adventure and plot twists. Irvine is a master of the cliff hanger and I sat up far too late on some nights as a result!  

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie – this has got to be one of the best books of 2012. It’s definitely my top pick, being at least as good as Abercrombie's first book, The Blade Itself, which I don’t think he’s ever bettered until now.  

Shadowfell by Juliet Marillier , and also Flame of Sevenwaters from the same pen – that of another friend and one of my favourite authors. Like fans all over the world, I hang out for Juliet Marillier's next book every year! Fortunately, she is a prolific writer and this year we got not only another Sevenwaters book but the start of a brand-new series that could well rival its older sibling. I’m now hanging out for the sequel to Shadowfell!

Stormlord's Exile by Glenda Larke - still another friend from conventions and the blogosphere! (Perth is a small place and has produced more than its fair share of excellent writers.) I think this might even be Larke’s best book to date. She gets better with every tome to hit the shelves. However, she’s worth reading right from the start, with her debut novel Havenstar now available as an e-book on Smashwords.  

Sharp Shooter by Marianne Delacourt - if this book is any guide, this series constitutes a fun romp around the suburbs of Perth with an adventurous young woman who can read auras and therefore see when people are up to no good. An easy read and well worth a look.

The Aphrodite Inheritance by Michael J, Bird – this drama is a blast from the past, now available as an e-book. I absolutely adored the TV series written by Bird in the 1970s, and in fact I still have all of them, converted to DVD format. All Bird’s scripts were set in the Greek islands, and this alone is a good enough reason to make them keepers!  

The Gallows Thief by Bernard Cornwell. I also read several books in the Sharpe series by this author, but some volumes seem to have been lost in one of my many moves from one house-sit to another, and as I want to read them in chronological order the project has ground to a halt until I can find or replace the missing books. I love Cornwell’s work as his historical research is so thorough, but I like his first person books better than those written in the third person as he tends to use an omniscient viewpoint involving a good deal of head-hopping, which I find a tad irritating.  

The Missing Case (Hal Junior 2) by Simon Haynes, yet another friend. I had the privilege of editing the first of the Hal Junior Books, and it was a hoot! This one is just as good and highly recommended for the senior primary age group.  

To Spin a Darker Stair by Tehani Wessely (ed) – wow, this is one of the treasures of 2012. Two novellas, back to back, each one a gem. Again, I must confess to friendship with the editor. I think all Tehani’s colleagues would agree with me that she is one of the best editors of short fiction in this country. She has further consolidated her position with Epilogue - twelve solid, workmanlike stories from twelve of Australia’s best SF short story writers. Like its predecessor, After the Rain, the theme of this anthology centres on what might happen in a post-apocalyptic world. Unlike After the Rain, however, Epilogue presents a face of hope, with each story having an upbeat quality that makes us consider the indomitability of the human spirit.  

Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch takes us on another helter-skelter ride with DC Peter Grant, the cop-cum-apprentice magician who can see ghosts. If you haven’t discovered Aaronovitch yet, you’re missing a treat! You can find reviews of most of these books (and many more) over at The Specusphere.

Here’s to many happy hours of reading in 2013!

Every few years, it seems, circumstances conspire to create drastic changes in my life. This latest re-invention of Satima has brought me a huge change of lifestyle, from being an itinerant house-sitter to living in a tiny bedsit on the fourth floor of a large apartment block.

My new home is in Bentley, a suburb close to Perth. The bedsit, of course, only has one room where I must live and sleep, and that room measures just three metres by five metres. It has a sunny little balcony with a pleasant outlook, a perfectly acceptable kitchen and a neat bathroom with an excellent, large shower. It's in a secure building, maintenance is available on call and it's only 20 mins into Perth on the bus - as long as you don't travel in peak hours! What's more, it is very quiet, and having spent so much time in retreat houses, silence is something I treasure.

But oh dear, I have far too many books, CDs and DVDs for a bedsit! I also have a large number of casette tapes - old recordings that I haven't been able to replace digitally. I'm going to have to do as one of my sons suggested - just not allow myself to buy any more books or discs unless what I want is genuinely not available as a download. And having read a book, I must decide at once whether or not it's a 'keeper'. Of course, I have about a dozen favourite authors whose oeuvres I treasure, and I'll never willingly part with those in hard copy.

My family history research is another problem - I really need to keep the hard copies because this is work for future generations, and who knows these days what technology will be outmoded in ten years, let alone fifty or hundred! I have the family tree in a database, of course, but the original certificates, letters, copies of archival documents etc are all safely stored in archival quality materials. They take up a lot of space and I need to buy still another set of shelves...

Nearly two weeks in, and the place is still a mess I'd hoped to put pictures up to show you the chaos, but the pix are on the iPhone and iPhone and the computer, it seems, are no longer on speaking terms. (This too, will pass, I hope!)

I'm embarking on a whole new lifestyle, and it will take time to adjust, but I can see that once I get used to it, I am going to love living here. Already I'm enjoying sitting on the balcony for a while each day to eat a leisurely lunch, with the sun on my back and the spring winds gently stirring the trees that line the quiet street below. I'm looking forward to sharing the experience with visitors, so I hope friends who live in or visit Perth will 'come up and see me sometime'!

Ever since mid-2005, I’ve been on the move. It all started when the Boom hit Perth, and I learnt from the estate agent who managed the block of flats I lived in that the owner was going to kick everyone out at the end of the year so he could renovate the block (and, of course, re-let the flats at a grossly inflated price).

People were pouring into Perth from the eastern states, lured by the prospect of work in the booming mining industry, so rents were on the up and up. I couldn’t complain – my second husband and I had moved to Perth with our family in 1985 so he could take up a position as a Training Officer with the Argyle Diamond Mines. For the first time in our lives one of us was earning good money! I was able to go back to uni, first to do an Associate Diploma at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and later to do a BA in Religious Studies at Edith Cowan University.

But then the marriage broke down and I was forced into rental accommodation. In my late forties I found myself looking for a job – and couldn’t get one: Australian employers, by and large, do not like employing older people. By running a market stall at weekends and taking what casual work I could get in between, I was able to scrape by. But pretty soon the pathetic amount I got from the joint resources of the marriage almost ran out, and I decided to use the last of it to fulfil a life-long ambition to travel.

And travel I did, for three and half years. By living and working in religious institutions and hotels, I again scraped by and did a bit of research for a master degree that I hoped to undertake when I got back to Oz.

But when I did get back, three and half years later, I found the course had become one that required fees up front, so I couldn’t afford it. Once again I found myself running a market stall and doing casual work, and struggling to pay the ever-increasing rents in Perth. The last straw was having to leave the comfortable little flat I had in a cosy, leafy suburb only five minutes by train from Perth city so the owner could renovate. The Boom had arrived and rents were skyrocketing.

I undertook a three-month house-sit for friends of relatives in South Australia, then to my relief I was offered a flat back in Perth for only $120 per week. However, it was only temporary – the lady who owned the block did not really want to rent the flats, preferring to keep them for herself and her numerous goods and chattels. In 2006, accommodation in Perth being well beyond my means, I was obliged to move to Mount Gambier, South Australia. That was when I started this blog.

About then, I had a stroke of luck. Kind relatives in England and Germany paid for me to visit them, and I had a wonderful time exploring the old country and the Rhine Valley. (I covered this period in my early posts to this blog.) When I got back to Australia, I was offered several house-sits in Perth, and thus my peripatetic lifestyle of recent years began. If you follow the above link and keep clicking on 'Newer post' each time you can read about my travels in England and Germany.

I really preferred Perth to Mount Gambier (a pretty place, but very cold and wet for many months of the year) and I missed my friends and activities in the West. So every time I was offered a house-sit of any length I would head back to Perth. As luck would have it, I got a lot of house-sits, varying in length from ten days to three months. I was spending almost as much time in Perth as in Mount Gambier, and finally, early in 2011, I decided to cut loose and rid myself of my worldly goods, because I had a full year’s house sitting lined up in Perth.

It hardly seemed worthwhile to pay rent in one town while living in another, so I packed my bags and took to the road. The year stretched to eighteen months and included two six-month sits, so I wasn’t quite as unsettled as I might have been.

Actually, I’ve been lucky. Apparently some people in Perth are living in their cars because they can’t afford the crazily elevated rents of recent years. These days, a flat like the one I had in Daglish would set me back several hundred dollars a week!

I've come to realise, however, that I will not be able to continue this lifestyle for much longer. With one hip dicky enough for the doctors to be mumbling about a replacement, walking dogs and looking after gardens are not nearly as much fun as they used to be. I put my name down at two retirement villages, but was told I would probably have to wait up to two years to get rental accommodation.

But now the house-sits have run out, and to be honest, I am tired of being on the road. Last week, I rang one of the retirement villages and begged them to find me somewhere to live, since within the fortnight I would be homeless! And I don’t even have a car to sleep in. I was starting to have bad dreams about having to sleep in shop doorways.

Miraculously, the village had a bed-sitter vacant. I went to see it and was pleasantly surprised to find it was self-contained with a nice kitchen and bathroom, and in a clean and neat apartment block.

So I am packing for what I hope will be last move for some time! I move in on Saturday and will let you know how things pan out. Believe me, I shall be so happy to put my feet up in a place to call home I will not mind that it is barely big enough to swing a cat!