Australian Author, Fleur McDonald will be blogging with me on Tuesday 1st December. Her wonderful book, ‘Red Dust’, is set in the mid-north of South Australia.
Fleur will also be talking about her new book, ‘Blue Skies’ due for release in April 2010, as well as giving some insights into life in rural Australia. Drop by and have a chat!
One lucky visitor will win an autographed copy of Red Dust – we’ll have a random draw at the end of the week.
Red Dust
“After the death of her husband, Adam, in an horrific plane crash, Gemma Sinclair defies community expectations – and Adam’s dying words – by deciding to hang on to Billbinya, the 10,000-hectare station he bequeathed to her.
As if Gemma’s grief and the job of looking after Billbinya aren’t enough, a wave of innuendo soon sweeps the community that Adam’s plane crash was no accident. Police officers confirm the rumour when they visit Gemma and tell her Adam’s death was almost certainly related to his involvement in a cattle and sheep duffing ring. And not only that, but Gemma is indirectly implicated because Billbinya was used as the holding station for the stolen stock.
Intent on clearing her name, Gemma sets out to get to the bottom of what Adam was doing. In the process, she’s stunned at the depths of her husband’s wrongdoing and shocked at the identities of his criminal associates.
Struggling to put the past behind her, Gemma wonders if she’ll ever be able to love again.”
Fleur McDonald lives with her husband and two children on a station near Esperance in Western Australia. Like the heroine of Red Dust, Fleur is very involved in the running of the station.”
Huh! I know what you mean about the internet police. I googled ‘dark matter’ once when I was doing an astronomy project – boy did that come up with some interesting sites! (Not that I looked at them):)
Hi Sandy, what a great question!
If a scene develops that I don’t already have a mental image for then yes, I’ll go hunt down whatever that critical point is – google it, look in books, find it in real life. Web searching can be a bit alarming sometimes and I do wonder what the internet thought police must make of some of the sites I visit…
(And you’re definitely in the running for Red Dust even though you’ve found my early blog – maybe my blog pages is shifting things without telling me…)
Oh, and here’s one for Fleur and Helene.
How do you develop onwards from an idea?
Say you have an image of a frilled neck running up a tree, where do you go from there? Do you go and look at a tree, actually place yourself in the image and see what your imagination comes up with? I know that’s not much to work with but… How do you prompt muse to get her butt into gear?
Sandy
Hello Fleur,
Thank you for supporting Helene, I must say though it seems the women in writing do that quite well, I wonder how the boys do it? Helene said you’d be out earning your keep today and would check the web when you could so here are a few questions and observations.
Firstly, Has Holly had her puppies yet?
I had a chuckle to myself about you buying stock online – that is so 21st century. We had a similar experience this year when we moved to Brisbane, I think we looked at about sixty houses online and actually only saw three when we got here before purchasing.
Do any of your family suffer from allergies? If so how do you cope at this time of year? I imagine all that stuff flying around in the air during harvest would give someone hell if they were reactive to it.
Hope your day is going well,
Sandy
Hi Noelene, I think we’ll include you in the draw for ‘Red Dust’ even though you’ve commented on an earlier post!
And welcome to my blog – you live in a beautiful part of rural Australia. Your current works in progress sound wonderful!
Sounds like a gripping story and absolutely wonderful to see more great Aussie outback tales.
Hi Helene,
It seems we can breed some damn fine authors down under.