Well, it's been Australia Day here recently. We didn't really know what to do on this particular festivity, so we just chilled at home for some of the day and then went to the Weir later. I thought the Weir would be less busy than the local swimming pool - which it probably was. Still, it felt like most of Chinchilla had showed up, chilling in Australian flag towels or shorts and eating water melon.
There's nothing like getting your body temperature down on a hot day though. We enjoyed the water and deliberately stayed on the side of the wharf that is farthest away from the jet skiers. That's what a lot of people do at the Weir - they take a boat into the water, hook someone up at the back of it and tow them around the Weir in rapid circles. They get around it in less than two minutes and create waves in otherwise calm waters, meaning the other half of the people who are there (who are most probably calmly bobbing around on blow up floaties) get thrown around a bit every so often. The jet skiing can be fun to watch but it is slightly stressful if you take a kayak out to the Weir, because you make significantly slower progress than a motorboat. So you've just managed to frantically paddle your kayak over to one bank to avoid the motorboat. Then it passes; you relax and kayak out into the middle of the causeway and breathe a sigh of relief. But right then, the painfully close rumble of the motorboat crescendos as your favourite waterway friend sweeps around the bend just behind you again. Cue frenzied paddling with the motorboat and the wildly swinging jet skier bearing down on you. And in the meantime, you're trying to prevent your dog from jumping ship and getting run over by said motorboat.
Nice.
We survived, but I have to admit, it's different than kayaking about the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, because you don't encounter the same motorboat twelve times in less than half an hour there. Next time I should just tie our blow-up kayak to the back of a jet skier's boat and go for a ride myself. It's probably easier being behind the thing.

In the meantime, Michael's been at work, getting used to a new school and new culture, and I started teaching singing again this past week. Year eight of music tuition, here we come. So far my students are representing Australian singing tolerably well. This week, many things are starting up again. There'll be Bible Study, and the first official meet up of the brand new Chinchilla Writers' Group. I didn't start it up, by the way. I just attended the first casual meet and greet. It consists of essentially two young ladies who work for the local paper who like to write a bit. So it should be good fun working on stuff together.
I'm sort of used to attending things like this, being asked what I write, and pulling one of my published books out of my laptop bag to save time explaining. But it doesn't seem to get old for other people. They look at me like I've arrived from another planet. Seriously though, writers are just normal people.
Scratch that - we are really weird, but apart from that we're normal, whatever that means.
In the meantime, daily life around here includes trying new ways of keeping the dog cool. I've never seen her pant so much - or lie around languidly for such long periods of time. Yesterday I tried putting her in a sink full of cold water after her walk. She unfortunately associated this with a bath, so it took her a long time to relax. I seriously do not understand her. Baths seem so relaxing to me.
I've had the privilege of looking over the interior of Consort to the Shadows, Part One this past week. Together with my author care manager, we've been working on improving the overall look. It's beginning to look really good, and I'm so excited to hold it soon!
I wonder how long shipping takes to Australia from the USA.

One of the cool things about living in Australia is that you get to use Amazon. New Zealand is missing out. My husband has become extremely excited about Amazon, and he's ordered three or four things in the last ten days alone. One was an air fryer that came in a massive box which contained another massive box which contained a third less massive box that actually contained the product we bought. Has anyone ever told Amazon they're not very efficient with packing?
Still, our New Zealand packers could learn a thing or two from them. They destroyed our dinner set and my antique soup tureen.
And in the meanwhile, the heat continues. 37 today again. Nothing new on that front. Still, you've got to admit that the giant blue sky behind the gum trees does look pretty spectacular. I just have the ceiling fan on three throughout the night so that I can sleep. It's kind of like having a helicopter permanently landing in your room. The sheets are blasted against your body and loose papers go flying about. Sometimes I wonder if the fan will fly right off and decapitate me during the night. Still, I'm too hot to care!
More soon.

Well, this past week has had some fantastic developments - the first of which is that we have internet properly installed! Hooray. Now I can do my writing and blogging from home instead of in the library.
We had an interesting journey with Belong internet. First, the courier left our package on the front doorstep of our rental, even though we had told Belong to deliver it to the local post office, as we wouldn't be in the country for another couple of weeks. Thankfully, our local pastor kindly picked up our modem before someone stole it. Next, Belong delayed our installation somewhat, so we rang up to talk to them about it. Every time we rang them up, the call went something like this:
"Hello, this is Yvette, and I wanted to call about--"
"Sorry, I can't hear you. I can't hear you - are you there?"
"HELLO, THIS IS YVETTE--"
"I can't hear you, sorry, I can't hear you, are you actually there?"
"HELLO, THIS--"
Click.
Ugh. We rang them up from two different phones, and every time we had the same result. This was because their phone line was being updated, apparently. (Is "updated" code for downgraded?) In the end, I complained in a comment on their Facebook page, which got a response very fast. And now we're connected.

In the meantime, everyone in town is eating watermelon, which I suppose is unsurprising as this is the watermelon capital of Australia, and they do have a massive model slice of watermelon at the front of town. (I keep wanting to take a picture with said slice, but because the melon festival is coming up, the local council is very protective of it. They've fenced it off with orange netting and even sometimes set a couple of watchmen/workers over it.) Watermelon was sixty cents a kilo the other day at the farmer's market, so I picked up a ten kilogram monster. I keep telling my husband we're eating so exotically here, with all the dragon fruit, rock melon, and watermelon. He pointed out that the word "exotic" implies foreign, but we actually live here now, so it's not exotic.
And because we live here, we've discovered that we've been eating watermelon wrong our whole lives. For a start, the locals told us that you have to get the round ones that aren't too big or too small. They should be the ones that have zero black seeds. Apparently, the football shaped black-seeded watermelons are a necessary evil with the breeding process, but they're not good to eat.
Well, blow me down, because until I moved here I have only ever eaten football shaped black-seeded watermelons. The Australians I was talking to on this occasion informed me that it was because those particular melons weren't considered good enough for consumption or even for smashing at the melon festival. So they sent them to New Zealand. This was, of course, a joke. But they still seemed pretty pleased about it, and I suppose it is kind of funny living across the ocean from a country that is consuming all the worst melons and remaining completely ignorant about it.
So, my apologies, New Zealanders: many of you have never eaten a proper watermelon in your lives.

I also bought some tomato plants this past week, and I planted them in three different places in the back yard. Unfortunately, four died miserable deaths. I couldn't even see them when I went out to water them the next time. I assume the sun just gobbled them up. The other four are still hanging on. I planted them in the shade. Who could know you could have too much sun?
Apparently, this is the perfect weather for snakes. Someone a kilometer down the road from us had a brown snake (an innocuous name for the deadliest serpent in the world) in their backyard the other day. It slipped away, but that means it (and its invisible cronies) are still on the loose. So I'm wearing proper shoes and socks out there, despite the heat.
In all honesty, you could pretty much believe yourself somewhere much more ordinary than Australia most of the time. Obviously, there are parrots and crows and the occasional fruit bat. But the only unusual things I see daily are skink lizards and flying cockroaches (I prefer the lizards). Now and then, you'll see a kangaroo at the Weir. But the grass has gotten so long where they graze that they're mostly hidden. And I wouldn't want to walk through it unless I magically transformed into Steve Irwin. I know I haven't seen any snakes yet, but I'm not fooled. They're definitely out there.
Although, I'm saying all this while our house still has some form of pest protection on it. When that wears off, I may see more unusual things. We went to a friend's place for dinner the other night, and they were talking about red backs (poisonous spiders that are essentially the Australian version of the black widow).
"Do you know, our house had a red back infestation before we had it pest treated? I was trying to put my USB into my computer and it wouldn't go in. And when I scraped out the port, there was a very sick red back!"
"That's not too bad. We knew some friends who had a red back infestation so bad, they were just dropping into the baby's cot, ha ha ha!"
I used to live in Victoria in Australia where we were told red backs could kill you, so don't go rummaging in any wood piles without gloves, etc. In Queensland, people don't seem to have that much of a problem with them. Still, I can't imagine myself cheerfully going "ha ha ha!" if red backs were dropping onto furniture in my house. 
One day, maybe, I'll be a true Queenslander.

By the way, just before I sign off - you know those beautiful pictures of the Whitsundays towards northern Queensland? Apparently those are taken during winter. In the wet season over summer, you sometimes don't see the sun for six weeks. And you can't really go swimming either, because the stingers (box jellyfish) and crocodiles are out and about and looking forward to meeting you/preying on you. So I think we wound up in the right place in Queensland. I love it here.
But then again, we've seen nothing but sun for the past ten days!

It's been exactly eight days since we immigrated to Australia, and so far things are going pretty well. I have to admit that I do fluctuate between full of energy and wiped out. I probably still have some jet leg, and the heat is rather... well, hot. It's thirty-eight degrees today, I believe. And the weekly forecast goes something like this:

Thursday: 37 degrees.
Friday: 37 degrees.
Saturday: 37 degrees.
Sunday: 37 degrees.
Monday: 37 degrees.
Tuesday: 37 degrees...

You get the picture. It's been a bit of a baptism by fire, but we are coping. I've had some more singing and piano students sign up - mainly singers - and I now have twenty music students looking forward to beginning the school year with a new music tutor. In the meantime, we've organised ourselves with some food, tidied up the house a bit, updated our address on a few things, and bought bits and pieces we needed, like a hose end and a proper sunhat (one the size of a small continent). I was, I thought, quite sensible, and I bought some compression bandages in case of a snake bite.
To my surprise, it doesn't seem that many people think about this. Someone told me at coffee this morning that I was probably more prepared than many of the people in town. I'm also probably a deal more jumpy. Every time I'm gardening and something moves, I jump about a mile. But hey, what's life without a little excitement and heart failure? Haven't seen a snake yet, so that's all good. A number of different things have bitten me so far, but I always wake up in the morning, so that's positive too. And I tell myself that if I die, I die. The gardening still needs to be done.
So much for that.
By the way, we've had more experiences with the ants. They were in church this past Sunday. Michael and I were sitting there trying to surreptitiously slap them to death while they crawled all over our feet and nipped us between our toes during the long prayer. After the service, I took the bull by the horns and said to someone:
"Look, this might sound weird to you, but I was wondering - do you guys notice the ants?"
"Funny you should say that," one of the ladies said. "One of them got in my clothes this morning and bit me on the hip! There are rather a lot of them. Probably time to get the pest man in."
I felt relieved that we weren't the only ones.

Michael and I took our kayak to the Weir the other night. Now, I might not have mentioned that Michael got a Grab One deal before we left New Zealand and bought a well-priced inflatable kayak. This also meant that we were fifteen kilograms over our weight limit for the airport when travelling, but hey, you have to live a little. We left some academic books behind in New Zealand. No big deal. We'll get them again soon.
Anyway, we took the kayak to the Weir and inflated it while a bunch of cowboy-hatted Australian men watched us from their bench with fascination. No wonder. Everyone around here has a massive four-wheel drive. No need for an inflatable kayak. You could fit a boat inside.
Inflating the kayak was more exercise than kayaking itself. Michael had wanted to take the dog with us in the kayak, which I wasn't sure was such a good idea. She was shaking in terror. Michael promised to take her on his lap, and off we finally went (although not before a tree branch laden with our favourite flesh-eating ants collapsed on the kayak while Michael was blowing it up - insert frantic killing here). After a shaky start, we started to enjoy ourselves. The Weir was beautiful, and we entered some shaded areas of the waterway, where the ghost gum trees stood like sentinels on one side and the fully-leaved eucalyptus trees stretched their parrot-laden branches over us. Peyton kept trying to get out, which worried Michael and I because the last time we'd tried to take her swimming she had nearly drowned.
We made it safely around the Weir and glided back to the bank, where we placed our kayak under a gum tree and prayed more ants wouldn't rain down on it. Then we went for a swim. You know how in New Zealand water, it can be really difficult to get all the way in when you're swimming? For me, it's often a real effort. Anyway, we felt nothing but relief once we got right into the water. We felt adventurous and decided to test whether Peyton could swim once and for all. We passed her between ourselves, and to our surprise, she swam rather well. Although, every time she glimpsed the shore behind us, she started determinedly heading for that and kept paddling in the air even when she was picked up. She still seems terrified of water. (This explains bath times completely.)
Anyway, these are our adventures to date. I need to finish up shortly so that I can write more on my book and steel myself to walk the dog. People keep asking me if I've melted yet. They mustn't realise the stamina Kiwis in the Outback can have...

It's with great pleasure that I announce the upcoming release date of Consort to the Shadows, Part One. This book will be releasing on February 15th, this year. Leading up to the release date of this book, I will posting updates along the way to remind you where the series took you in the last book and to give you hints about what this next volume will contain.

I will create a book release event on Facebook for February 15th. However, since most of my immediate readers are in the Southern Hemisphere, it will actually take place on February 16th for all of you. This is most appropriate, because February 16th (Ki Zion 16th in the books) is Rafen's birthday, and the most important day in the Festival of Zion. If you decide to join, you will be able to see more updates during the day. I'm looking forward to continuing the journey the first four Fledgling Account books began.

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Consort to the Shadows, Part One
(Back Cover Text)

“Have you found a dragon?” Rafen’s voice barely repressed his excitement.

An egg Sherwin has discovered in the Cursed Woods unexpectedly gives Rafen hope. In the meantime, Prince Richard Patrick is planning his execution, and a Zaldian dragon fighting champion is preparing to murder Rafen in a public challenge before his people. Rafen must defeat the dragon rider Tirok so that he can win the right to lead a Zaldian army back to Siana, where he will overcome Richard and secure the throne. The Lashki Mirah has been strangely inactive lately. Is it because of the black wound Rafen bears on his left hand? And will Rafen’s worsening injury get the better of him before he can win his army?

I'm sitting in Chinchilla library in Queensland as I write this. I wanted to write several days back, but couldn't get enough internet to publish a blog post.
What a whirlwind time it's been!
To start where I left off: my husband and I finished up work in Christchurch and then spent a week trying to relax and do touristy things, like the river walk around the CBD. However, some of these things were a lot of effort, as the weather remained ridiculously cold. We did the river walk in a miserable fourteen degrees, with rain drizzling on us. Towards the end of our time in Christchurch, I developed a terrible sinus infection from all the hay fever. Every time I bent over, I thought my head would explode. It seems weird writing this now, as my sinuses are completely clear and my head feels light. Anyhow, I had to take some serious medication so that I could fly without my eardrum blowing up.
In the meantime, we attempted to sell my car, which had been hit and run in November, the first time we had attempted to sell it. We had paid the money to fix it, only to discover that closer to Christmas, everyone is broke and doesn't want to buy a car. Then the car door handle stopped working from where the panel beater had messed around with it. When we took it back to the panel beater, he could see that he was in trouble, and he offered to buy it for a measly $500. I was so tired and stressed that I accepted it - and then shed a bitter tear when I saw he was trying to on-sell it for $1400 on Facebook. And he had had the gall to tell us it was barely worth anything!
But the time came to move on, and we headed to the North Island for a round of farewells. There, we spent a wonderful five days on Moturua Island in the Bay of Islands. My husband's grandfather has several houses on the island, and it was a privilege as always to experience the bay in privacy. Kayaking around the calm ocean waters afforded some amazing views.
From there we went to Hamilton to farewell my family. We enjoyed half a day out at the stunning Hamilton Gardens.
And then before we knew it, immigration day was upon us. My in-laws saw us off at the airport, and we got on the plane, only to discover we were in one of the few aisles that had no window at all. So our first sight of our new home was a tiny slice of the window in the row in front of us, that we could just see if we leaned forward and twisted our necks in the right direction.
My writer friend Russell Proctor put us up again for the night at his house in Brisbane. It was a pleasure to chat with him and greet his cat Humphrey (most reverently). The next morning, we picked up our dog from the Qantas cargo center. When the forklift brought her crate around and she lifted her little head at the sound of our voices, I was actually very moved. If you've never had a pet that you adored, you probably wouldn't understand. If you have, you'll know the gentle power they exert over you.
We discovered Peyton had wet herself in terror before or during flying. Her crate was absolutely saturated. So we had to bath her soon afterward. She was so relieved to see us that she fell asleep at my feet in the car.
Then we did something which - in retrospect - was probably insane, and we headed to the Gold Coast for a day, staying with a friend of Michael's for the night. The Gold Coast is stunning, there's no doubt about it. But I have to say, the humidity was simply crushing. I had never felt anything like it. Even a cold-blooded reptile like me was dying a slow, agonising death. And I was exhausted after immigrating the day before.
The next morning, we got up at four thirty, put ourselves, our luggage, and our dog in the car, and drove to Chinchilla, to be there by nine thirty. We met with our landlord and landlady, and got a quick tour of the house. I have to admit, I was very out of it. Getting up at four thirty does that to you. The local Presbyterian pastor arrived to give us a hand, and then the moving truck pulled up twenty minutes later, and it was all go, all day. The day soared to approximately thirty-five degrees, and I frequently felt like I was on the point of collapse, because I kept forgetting to eat and drink in my frenzy to make sure we had everything there. The pastor grabbed us fruit, food, and coffee, and helped us tirelessly till the end of the day. By the end, we had all our rooms more or less sorted and the most important things were organised - a bed to sleep in and a working fridge to stick our heads in if we died of heat.
The pastor and his wife generously had us to tea, and then we slept the sleep of the dead that night. Today has been busy too, but I'm beginning to feel more and more at home. I feel that we've definitely come to the right place. And to think, I had never heard of Chinchilla eight months ago!
Today, we applied for medicare, registered our dog, and got library cards. We also did a huge grocery shop that broke the bank. But it means we now have meat. I'm still waiting for a breeze to come up so that I can walk the dog. I keep getting warned that a carpet python might come along and eat her. I haven't seen any of those fiendish creatures yet... but it may not be long.
If/when I see one, I will take a picture. I promise to take pictures of many interesting things that we see here.
Certainly, not all wildlife is friendly. I stepped on the grass last night to be nipped in numerous places by little ants. But hey, at least they weren't fire ants. It could have been infinitely worse!

More soon...