Try imagining a city chopped in half by a bloody great wall, where everyone on the other side never got to cross over to your side, except under the strictest control and paranoia.  They lived with restricted personal freedoms that we take so much for granted we barely recognize them as freedoms.  They just are.

It’s difficult to get your head around the fact of the Berlin Wall, and communism in general, but it was a fact.  And today, back in 1990, the Berlin Wall was torn down.

I remember watching it on television in stunned amazement.  I grew up with communism.  The end of the Berlin Wall was simply amazing.

A year or so later, I got to see Pink Floyd live in Perth, Western Australia, when they did their The Wall world live tour to celebrate both the tenth anniversary of their landmark album, and the falling of the wall.

Two years ago, my death metal freak son gave me a Pink Floyd The Wall belt buckle.  Normally I don’t go for the big cowboy style belt buckles, but I made an exception for that one.  I’ve been wearing it ever since, every time I wear jeans.  Some of you may have seen it at conventions.  The leather on the belt wears out every now and again, but I replace it and the buckle goes on.

I do love Pink Floyd, especially The Wall.  But the album has a double meaning for me, and the belt buckle has a triple meaning.

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I’m almost scared to start blogging again.  There’s a small mountain of news, tasks, and dust to blow off the site.

Not to mention about 800 photos we took in Australia that I should really comb through to share the best of with you, that I never really had time to upload while I was on the road.

But I have to start somewhere, so I’m just diving in.  I figure it’ll all sort itself out as I go along and if I don’t start now, I’ll never start, y’know?

So, let’s start with good news.  From my in-box while I was away:

Blood Knot, my erotic paranormal MMF romance, was selected for Coffeetime Romance’s Reviewer Recommended Award.  The award recognizes outstanding writing styles in all book types and genres. The reviewer who nominated Blood Knot told me:  “Your book has received this award because I feel it is above and beyond a 5 Cup Rating. I was simply amazed at your writing talent!”

To check out the award nomination, click here.  The original 5 cup review is here.

______

Fatal Wild Child also received a very nice 4-star review from Coffee Time Romance, that included the magic words: “This is one of the best romantic suspense novels I have read this year.”  That was an email worth opening!

I’ve posted an excerpt of the review on the book’s page (here), and of course pasted it all over Facebook and Twitter. :)

_____

Fatal Wild Child emerged onto the secondary markets while I was away.  You can now buy it at Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony and I’ve added buy links to the book’s page.

_____

Smashwords will soon be adding mobile apps to the list of formats they offer readers, which means you will be able buy formats for Apple, Android, Windows Phone 7 and HP’s WebOS.  I’ve been reading my books on my cellphone for years.  It appears that many other readers have been, too, if Smashwords are making this move to provide formats for mobile phones.  In Japan, reading on your cellphone is the norm, which is why ebook covers are so small and simple.  With the first surge of popularity in ebook reading passing on and early adopters are already looking around for the next cool gadget to play with, perhaps there might be a secondary wave of movement toward cellphone reading as people merge their handheld devices into one convenient all-in-0ne handheld.

____

That’s it for now.  I’ll be back, I’m sure.  As soon as I hit “publish” I’m sure I’ll think of something else…!

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It’s a few days later now, as I type this.  Unfortunately, time to write posts is at a mimimum, but we’ve been taking lots of photographs, so perhaps the best thing is to do a photo commentary.  Then you’ll get the best of both worlds.

Also, although I have a stick modem that technically covers all of Western Australia, it’s only a technical coverage.  In fact, that coverage can cut out at any moment as we’re barrelling along the tarmac (a two-lane skinny piece of bitumen is considered a highway, here at the toe-end of Western Australia).  Losing your Internet connection as you’re trying to write a blog post can be a BAD THING.

So after losing three posts because of satellite drop-out, I finally wised-up (she can be taught). What I’m doing now is typing this post in Word, resizing photos as I go along, so the post isn’t the size of Uluru, chopping the post into smaller sized pieces, then uploading a post when I have coverage.  Makes everything much safer and easier.  (In fact as I was typing this paragraph, my network coverage died as we drove further away from Norseman…but I’ll catch you up on that).

We hit the road last Tuesday.  We’re driving around in what most North Americans would call a Winnebago, but Australians just call a van.

On the south-west highway, heading for Bunbury.  Gum trees and dried out bush.
Australia has been short on water for years now.

Mark riding shotgun.

Mark’s first kangaroos.  The pic is grainy because the kangaroos
were a long way away, and the camera was at
full zoom.  This has been cropped and expanded.

Busselton Lighthouse

We visited relatives in Bussleton (I have relatives all over Western Australia!), then started doing the tourist thing.

Around Busselton is where all the south western national parks and the really big karri trees start to appear.  If you’re used to wide open prairie, like Mark and me, or miles and miles of flat, hill-less and treeless land like most Western Australians, the south west corner of the state is a wonderland.

Busselton:  Longest Jetty in the southern hemisphere.

Giant Moreton Bay Fig tree, Busselton Beach.  If you look very closely, you’ll start to notice more and more Sulphur Crested White Cockatoos sitting on the branches (it’s sort of like “Where’s Waldo?” times one hundred).  The fig trees liniing the beach had hundreds of them, all cawing loudly.

We spent the first night just outside of Busselton.

My mum and dad, and me, with the ever-faithful laptop on my knee,
madly trying to get the first of my lost posts up.  Mark is behind the camera, of course.

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Well, I’m on-line.  And I’m in Australia.  These two facts, put together, constitute a small miracle.

My Mum, Bunty. Taken just five minutes ago, with my cellphone. I'm sitting on my Mum and Dad's back patio writing this post. It's nearly 30 degrees Celsius (86 Farenheit) and there's a kookaburra chattering in a gum tree behind me.

It has been a helluva week, lemme tell you.  The flight(s) to Australia…don’t get me started.  Whoever invented long haul flights must have been been related to Torquemada.  It took 24 hours to decompress after we arrived.  The first 12 hours you think you’re just fine.  Then the impact catches up with you, slams into you and dumps you on the ground bleeding and gasping for breath.  I wiped out like a beached fish.  I could barely string sentences together. Oh man…!

Once I was coherent again, I innocently tried to find the nearest public WiFi network to check email and see if my kids had burned down our house or remembered to feed the cats yet…

And so began a saga that ended with us shelling out for an expensive stick modem that will give me satellite broadband Internet access anywhere in the state of Western Australia for the entire month — prepaid of course.  It turns out that there are no public networks in the small town where my parents live.  And no (sob!) Starbucks!  There wasn’t any Internet cafes, either.  The nearest Internet cafe was in Perth, the state’s capital city, an hour’s train ride away…

My dad, John.

As we are about to head off in a van that is Australia’s version of a Winnebago, touring the state for 20 days, schlepping back to Perth to check email each day is out of the question.

So, a stick modem and satellite access it is.  Damn, what a pain, huh?  Access wherever I go.  What a bitch.  :)

And here was I thinking I would have been suffering DT’s by the end of the month, using public networks….

Tomorrow we pick up the van, pack it, and Tuesday we head out on the road.  Somewhere in there, I should probably get some writing done.

No related posts.

As you read this, I will be strapped into my seat and white knuckling my way through the first take-off of a marathon 38 hour milk-run series of flights to Perth, Western Australia.  For the first time since I landed in Canada on October 4, 1996, I’m heading back “home” for a visit — although Canada is as much home, if not more so, than Australia now.

In order to get the cheapest tickets possible, Mark and I had to suck in a smidgen over 26 hours of flight time sandwiched with 12 hours of layovers. We’re stopping in Seattle, L.A., Auckland, and Melbourne, before we finally hit Perth.  The L.A. — Auckland leg, thanks to the International Date Line, technically takes two days to complete!

We’ll be in Australia for all of May, and my Internet connection will be sketchy at best.  I’ll be roaming for public networks where I can, and uploading posts and photos of our travels.  We’re going to be travelling all over the south-west of the state and I’ll take lots of photos and write posts in advance.  In the odd times when I get a connection, I’ll post.

See you then.

Tracy

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