I’m in the middle of getting myself organised for my final Pride author event of the year. I’ll be joining a fabulous bunch of Sapphic authors at Loud and Proud Logan for what promises to be a fantastic day of fun selling, signing and chatting about our books.
The first time I ever had an author stall at a Pride event was way back in 2012 at Brisbane Pride’s Perry Park Fair Day. I was a newly-minted author with boxes full of my first novel, Out of Time, and it was pretty nerve-wracking putting myself out there in public. But it all went well and I learned that people are pretty chuffed when they realise they’re talking with an actual author.
I’ve done a lot of Pride events since then, solo and then teaming up with YA author, SR Silcox. It’s hard work being “on” for an entire day, but totally worth it to see the delighted and surprised expressions on people’s faces when they realise the books we’re selling are 1) sapphic and 2) written by the women they are talking to.
My confidence grows with every Pride event I attend and I am now much more comfortable putting myself out there as an author and feeling proud to say “Yes, I wrote these.” The excited feeling I get whenever someone actually wants to buy one of my books never wears off though, and I hope it never does.
I’ve been reading – and participating in – a lot of debates about the use of generative AI (GenAI) in creative fields lately, and I am just going to put it out there right now that I am dead-set against the use of GenAI anywhere.
Quite apart from its massive environmental impacts – consuming huge amounts of water and electricity – which should be argument enough against its proliferation, GenAI is trained on the stolen creative output of authors, artists, and musicians. That’s right, stolen. The tech bros pushing GenAI freely admit that the industry would be unsustainable and would die if it had to compensate creatives for the use of their work in training their machines. Think about that for a minute. The only way the AI industry can be profitable (and make these guys rich) is by stealing from creative human beings.
Creativity is all about expressing the human experience. We’ve been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. Art – in all its forms – is how we connect to each other, how we share our emotional responses to the world around us. Why then would anyone want to read a book, look at a picture or listen to a piece of music constructed by a machine?
“Oh, but I’ve always wanted to be a writer/musician/artist and GenAI helps me do that” is an argument often trotted out in defence of its use. My response? You want to be a writer (or composer, artist etc), then you put in the years working to hone your craft, like the rest of us have. There is nothing creative about typing a few prompts into a machine. The results are almost always soulless, mistake-ridden slop anyway.
One guy – and it is almost always a guy – argued that GenAI was good for freeing writers up from the tasks they didn’t like. For instance, he said, he loved revision, but hated drafting, so used GenAI to do that. Bro, drafting is what being a writer is all about! If you’re getting a machine to do that for you, then what is the point? As many people have said – “If you can’t be bothered to write the novel, why should I bother to read it?”
I will never use GenAI in my work, not in the writing, nor for cover designs. If that means my novels get lost in amongst the deluge of dross churned out by ai-prompters, then so be it. At least, I will be able to hold each of my books in my hand and take pride in being able to say “I wrote this.”
The waiting is over. Deadline To Love is officially released! As an ebook, anyway. The print version will be available from 20 May 2025. It’s been a long journey, but my latest ‘baby’ is out in the world. Now all I have to do is sell a shit-load of copies to justify Bella Books’ investment in the book!
So, if you want the ebook, head over to Bella Books. Looking for the print version and live in Australia? You can buy direct from me at elldeebooks. Everyone else, you’ll need to purchase it from Amazon
You know what helps sell books? Reviews. So, if you do buy a copy of Deadline To Love, please leave a review at place of purchase, or on Goodreads
Now, to crack on with Love Strikes Again, my current WIP (that’s work in progress for the uninitiated) and second lesbian romance
I have reached that agonising stage on my journey to publication where there is nothing I now have left to do but wait for my novel’s release. After months of inactivity for most of 2024, the year ended in a flurry of book cover design and a mammoth three-month developmental re-write, guided by the wonderful editor, Medora McDougall, who Bella Books assigned to my manuscript.
The book has now gone through its final proofing and is back in the hands of the publisher. I got quite a thrill when I received the proof copy and saw Bella Book’s imprint on the title page. It suddenly all began to feel very, very real. As does seeing listings for the book all over the internet.
Deadline to Love is due to be released on 12 June 2025. You can pre-order the e-book from the Bella Books site here. If you prefer a physical book, you can pre-order it from Amazon. Me, I’ll just be sitting here waiting for my box of author copies to arrive…
I’ve always loved birds and am a keen birdwatcher and photographer, although not a particularly dedicated one. But recently, birds have come to fill a large part of my days. Not the feathered, singing ones. Nope, instead that little idea I had back in December to try my hand at crocheting some birds has really taken off.
I’m having so much fun making a range of different birds and it turns out other people like them enough to pay me good money for one! A lovely friend – whose own crocheted creations inspired me to try my hand at creating birds – invited me to share her market stall back in February so I could ‘test the market’ as she put it.
By the end of the day, I had sold ten of the fifteen birds I had in stock, and had an order for two Conures to be made as Easter presents for one woman’s children. I was just getting over the excitement of that when another order came in for four Sulphur-crested Cockatoos – which I had to make in a week to get them to the buyer in time for their overseas trip!
Before that trial run at the market, I had been planning to have a stall at the April market – giving myself plenty of time to build up stock – but that’s gone out the window. Instead, I am now focussing on the Queerswich Pride Day in August. I’ve got a stall all booked and am now busily creating a rainbow range of birdees and keychains, as well as my original range of cockatoos, lovebirds, cockatiels, galahs and novelty birdees to sell alongside copies of my two novels, and my range of greeting cards.
So, until the royalties from my books start rolling in and making me rich, it looks like I have discovered my ‘side hustle.’
I am an indie author, and proud to be one. What’s that? I hear you ask. It’s short for independently published, aka self-published. It means that I have taken on the job of, not only writing a novel, but then publishing it myself. It means I bear the cost of getting the book into print. The marketing and distribution of the book is all down to me too – which is the hardest part of being an indie author. We don’t have the networks and infrastructure that traditional publishers have, so it’s up to us to approach bookshops and libraries and try to convince them to add our novels to their shelves. It’s hard work and my least favourite part of the whole ‘indie author’ tag.
The up-side is that I am in complete control of the entire process of bringing my novels to the reading public. The cover design is up to me. I don’t have to change the vocabulary or dialogue to appeal to an overseas readership. I can set the price. And – most importantly of all – I can write the stories I want to write without worrying that they won’t see the light of day just because they are about lesbians.
But, as I alluded to in my last post, I have just landed a contract to have my first lesbian romance published by a mainstream publisher – well, as mainstream as a publisher that specialises in lesbian fiction can be. And I am inordinately excited about it. Not because it means that now I am a ‘proper’ writer. I was already a proper writer. I didn’t need the imprimatur of a ‘proper’ publisher in order to consider myself a ‘real’ author.
No, the exciting part of it is that I now have the entire machinery of a publisher behind me, working to get my lesbian romance into print and onto bookshop shelves. It means there’s a whole bunch of people other than me invested in seeing Deadline To Love come to fruition and it’s them who will be doing all the work! With Bella Books doing most of the heavy lifting with the marketing, promotion and selling of my novel, I can focus more on doing the bits I love best – writing my next lesbian novel.
There’s just one question arising from all this. If I have a book contract, am I still an indie author?
It’s the first day of a brand new year and the only resolution I’m going to make is to enjoy myself as much as I did in 2023.
I’m kind of shocked that 2023 is over all ready. It seemed to go by at a gallop. One minute, we’re planning a trip to the UK, the next we’re putting up the xmas tree! That UK trip was brilliant, by the way. We spent two months traversing the country, seeking out bridges and standing stones, sampling tons of local beers, gins and whiskies, as well as heaps of potato crisps and novelties such as Yum Yums and Penguin biscuits. Sorry, cuz. Penguins are no where near as good as a Tim Tam! Speaking of cousins, I also got to meet up with two I had not seen since emigrating to Australia 53 years ago, so that was pretty special.
We did quite a bit of travelling last year. A road trip down to Victoria and Tasmania, then the UK trip and a 2-week trip through Central Asia towards the end of the year. And then there were the shorter camping trips in Snowy, our camper-trailer.
In between all that, I managed to finish writing my first lesbian romance and submit it to a publisher. And guess what? They offered me a contract! My first-ever book contract! That was quite a way to finish the year, I can tell you!
Despite spending way too many hours playing Angry Bird throughout the year, I did manage to read 105 books, fifty of them from off my own bookshelves. I have to admit though, that I scarcely seem to have made a dent in the piles of unread books sitting on the shelves. I guess it doesn’t help that I cannot resist buying new books at regular intervals. I can see at least a dozen new titles from where I’m sitting right now…
One new thing I took up towards the end of 2023 was making crocheted birds. The plan is to sell them at markets, along with the cards of my watercolour sketches of birds. It’s been a long time since I crocheted anything. Even then, it was nothing more challenging than a blanket. So, it’s been quite a steep learning curve but a lot of fun
As you can see, 2024’s going to mean a whole lot less Angry Birds and more crocheted birds if I’m to build up a decent stock!
So, apart from more birds, what’s in store for the coming year?
It almost goes without saying that there will be more travel. In fact, Smithy and I will be off to India this month for a 3-week trip from Kolkata up to Darjeeling and Gangtok and back again. Smithy’s been to that part of India before, but it’ll all be new for me, and I’m very excited to finally be getting to Darjeeling. I’ve already started packing!
I’ve already started writing a new lesbian romance and I’m hoping to be able to finish writing Smithy’s travel memoir of her 1970s overland trip from London to Kathmandu and start work on the third Lindsay and Kate adventure, so there’ll be lots of writing happening. I’m sure Bella Books will be keeping me busy with edits and rewrites of Deadline to Love as they work towards getting it published too.
And, of course, there’ll be a lot of reading too. In fact, I’m going to go and read a bit more of Jane Eyre and see if I can’t make it the first book I finish in 2024.
What’s going to be happening for you in 2024? What adventures and ventures do you have planned?
If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to infuriate me more than anything else, it’s being called a girl. Especially if it’s a man doing it. I hate it when a man calls me a girl, or addresses the group of women I’m with as girls. I hate it when men (and women) refer to women in general as girls. We’re not girls. We’re women.
Yes, I know groups of women who know each other, are close to each other, will call themselves girls. Just as close groups of men will refer to themselves as boys. Sports teams, in particular, do this all the time. I still cringe when I hear sportswomen do it because it just perpetuates the mindset that all women are girls. But that use of ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ in situations where there is a close bond between all members of the group is kind of acceptable. It’s not acceptable, though, for outsiders to refer to that group as ‘girls,’ or for women unknown to the speaker to be called girls.
I’m constantly yelling at sports commentators on the telly calling female athletes girls. It was rife during the recent Women’s FIFA World Cup. FFS, some of those ‘girls’ were married with children of their own!
I’ve noticed the propensity in the UK to use the phrase ‘young girl’ all the time. Every time I hear it, I picture a small child, but no, the speaker is referring to a young woman. It’s like we are girls, or young girls. We can never be women. Those same speakers would never refer to men as ‘boys’ or ‘young boys’, just as the woman I overheard the other day referring to the young female receptionist at our hotel as a ‘little girl’ would never dream of referring to the woman’s similarly-aged male colleague as a ‘little boy’.
Women are often just as bad as men. “I don’t mind being called a girl,” said one 60+ year old woman recently when I was remonstrating with a man for calling the women in the group ‘girls’. And no, we were not a close group of friends, just a bunch of strangers all travelling together. Why didn’t she mind? I’m guessing because she, like so many other women, has been socialised into believing that it’s shameful for a woman to grow old. That somehow, she thinks she’s being flattered when someone addresses her as a girl.
Well, it’s not flattery, or a compliment. It’s insulting, condescending and patronising. Calling me a girl is denying me my autonomy as an adult, disrespecting my maturity, experience and knowledge garnered over many decades and I’m going to call you out every single time.
There’s always lots to get excited about, and think about, in the days and weeks leading up to a trip. What clothes am I going to pack? How many, and which, books will I take with me? Do I need the travel clothesline? Have I got enough knickers? But there’s one little ritual that I look forward to the most – organising my travel journal.
What do you mean you didn’t realise there was any more to organising a travel journal than buying a notebook and pen? Well, if you are me, that’s just the beginning of the whole exercise!
It all began with my very first overseas trip – a 3-week trek in Nepal with my now-wife, Smithy. This was to be the adventure of a lifetime and I needed to prepare for it. And no, I’m not talking about all the training I had to do – although there was plenty of that. No, I needed a journal that would reflect just what an epic adventure I was embarking on.
That very first travel journal of mine was a masterpiece. It had a title page. I printed off and pasted in the day to day itinerary notes. I found relevant images and illustrations and pasted them in on the appropriate pages. I wrote down useful phrases (in Nepali) and the name of each day of the week. I drew a daily altitude gain chart. I cut out and pasted in maps of our route. All that before I had even written a word!
Three of my early travel journals
I’ve continued the trend for every overseas trip since, although not to quite the same extent. Every journal still gets a title page and a brief itinerary at the beginning. Some of the earlier ones did get little pictures pasted in at intervals throughout the notebook, but I’ve learned not to do that anymore after over-estimating once too often just how much writing I would get done.
Coming up with a title for the trip keeps me occupied for weeks. Often the sort of trip we’re doing will suggest the title eg Three Peaks, Three Passes, India Overland, Kathmandu to Mumbai, but we’ve designed our own itinerary for this next trip, so it took me a while to come up with the right name for it. As we’ll be motoring around the UK for 2 months, seeking out picturesque bridges and doing some birdwatching along the way, and because I can’t resist a bit of alliteration, I eventually hit on “Bridges, Birds and Byways: our UK Odyssey.”
Title page of my latest travel journal
One of my biggest challenges – after coming up with a title for the journal – is finishing the darned thing. Every single one of my journals has petered out before the end of the trip. Sometimes, it’s because I’ve become too physically weary after weeks of high-altitude trekking to find the energy at the end of a long day to write. Other times, I think there’s only a few days left to go, I’ll catch it up once I get back home (never happens). And then at other times, it just feels a bit too much like homework. Too much like something I have to do each evening and I baulk at it. And so, I end up with yet another incomplete travel journal.
Not this year though. Oh no. I am determined that in this 20th anniversary year of that very first trip, I am going to write until the very last day of the trip. If I can write a 50,000+ word novel, surely I can finish one travel journal!
My wife and I returned home last weekend from a big road trip down to Victoria and back, creating our own silo art and street art trail through NSW and Victoria to Ballarat, and then from Benalla northwards on our journey home. One of the things that amazed me as we navigated from one small town to another was just how many of them had fascinating claims to fame and histories.
Our route took us through Tenterfield – birthplace of Peter Allen – and to Tamworth, where there was some water tower art to check out – and the Golden Guitar. We had planned on staying in Tamworth that first night, but hadn’t realised the Tamworth Country Music Festival was starting that weekend, so decided we’d ‘do’ Tamworth on the way home and pushed on to Gunnedah for the first of the trip’s silo art. Turns out Gunnedah is the birthplace of Dorothea MacKellar, and the silo art commemorates her and her immortal poem.
Rather than travel through Coonabarabran, we took an alternate route to Dubbo and found ourselves in Coolah, home of the Black Stump. I never knew there was an actual Black Stump. Did you? Still on the silo art trail, it was on to Eugowra, which had street murals rather than a silo. It wasn’t until we got there that we discovered Eugowra’s claim to fame. It was where notorious bushranger, Frank Gardiner and his gang, held up an armed gold escort in 1862 and stole almost 85kg of gold and thousands of pounds in cash. Sadly, Eugowra has more recently been hit by terrible flooding that has devastated half the town, destroying many of its businesses.
Grenfell was next on the silo art list. You know what else it’s famous for, apart from some amazing silo artwork? It’s the birthplace of Henry Lawson. Didn’t know that, and would never have known that if it weren’t for that silo art.
Our route then took us from our overnight stop in Young through Cootamundra, which we discovered is the birthplace of Don Bradman, and onto Junee, which is not famous for anything that I can ascertain, but does have a fabulous liquorice and chocolate factory situated in a huge, old flour mill. Our lunch stop was in Jerilderie, which, of course, is indelibly linked with Ned Kelly. It also has some rather fine street murals.
Wedge-tailed eagle mural on the wall of a bakery in Jerilderie
After our 3-week sojourn in Victoria and 10-day small ship expedition around the southwest coast of Tasmania, we were back on the road and heading home via more of the silo and street art we hadn’t managed to see on the way down. After checking out some of the lovely murals around Benalla, and in the process, thrilling the locals who were well chuffed we were there for the art, it was on to a series of small towns listed in Smithy’s Silo Art Atlas – Goorambat, Devenish, Tungamah and St James. Imagine our surprise when we got to St James – population 132 – and discovered it was the birthplace of none other than GJ Coles, he of the Coles supermarket empire, and the location of his first store, which still stands, although we did not stop to see if was still a going concern.
There was a certain amount of unavoidable retracing of our steps as we travelled homeward, but taking alternative roads took us through Cowra, site of the infamous WWII prison break, in which 234 Japanese POWs and 5 Australian soldiers died. Leaving Cowra, we had to drive through Canowindra. While the town does have a bit of bushranging history, it is probably more famous for its name not being pronounced anything like it is spelled. Ca-noun-dra
Wanting to avoid Dubbo – having checked out its street murals on the way south, we took the backroads through to Gulgong. Not only is Gulgong famed for being the town on the $10 note, its where Smithy’s great-great uncle worked for a number of years in the later 19th century as a Receiver of Gold. So why was Gulgong on the $10 dollar note? Because it was a childhood home of Henry Lawson, who was featured on the note.
From there, it was back to Tamworth, where the water tank art turned out to be non-existent. But we did discover a lovely little Nepalese restaurant for dinner, so there was that.
Now home and with a ton of photographs of some incredible artwork, I now also have a new-found appreciation of the legacies of so many of Australia’s small towns. They all have stories to tell.
elldeewrites 
