Tassie Travels

For those of you who are my friends on Facebook, you’ll know that I’ve been traipsing around Tasmania for the last fortnight. For sheer rugged beauty, Tasmania is hard to beat. It’s one of those places that can quite literally take your breath away, but it’s also endearingly quirky, so I thought I’d share three of my favourite things about my recent holiday with you.

1. The Beach! Obviously. ;-) Down the road and around the corner from my accommodation was Bellerive Beach. Happy sighs. I spent many a happy hour ambling there. But what was even better was if you went the long way around (along the little headland), you were treated to the most spectacular views of the harbour and Mount Wellington, as well as the beach. This is a small sample of the pics I took:

The beginning of the walk

Steps! They always make me want to explore further.

Mount Wellington standing guard over the harbour

Glorious views

I fell in love with this house! Naturally it had the best views :-)

Little paths and railings led off the main walkway, which had to be explored

Bellerive Beach in the distance

My destination: Bellerive Beach

2. The headstone. Now around the other corner and down the other road from my accommodation was this lovely old church with an array of weathered headstones.

You can’t read it here (you could hardly read it there either!), but it says: Margaret died age 57 years. She was a most pious woman who has in death, as she did in life, found comfort in her redeemer. Beneath it is says: Joseph died 70 years. Long-term resident.

Long-term resident--that's the best they could say about him? Doesn’t that just make you chortle? Don't you wish you had an inside line on that story. Obviously Maggie was a bit of a favourite with the congregation, while Old Joe wasn’t so popular. ;-)

3. Tarraleah: We took a trip northwest from Hobart towards Lake St Clair in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. We were on a bit of a time schedule so we didn’t make it all the way, but we did stumble across the de-commissioned township of Tarraleah (which was once called Ticklebelly—what a great name!). It was a town built in the 1920s and 1930s as part of the hydro-electric scheme. Workers had to walk in with pack-horses as there was no road. But it became a booming township with a population of 2000 before automation made the workers’ jobs defunct.

The view from Tarraleah lookout

BUT, and this is the interesting bit, the town (the whole town!) was sold and restored, and it's now a tourist accommodation hub. There’s a grand art deco lodge, fifteen 3-4 bedroom art deco cottages (built for the engineers and architects), accommodation in the old schoolhouse, as well as cabin-style accommodation on the grounds. You can hire the entire place out! I was dreaming of the writing retreats we LoveCats could have. Happy sighs. The lodge comes with its own butler and chef. Happier sighs. Oh, dear reader, there’s a book in that. And I believe I’m the woman to write it. :-) What do you think?

Oh, and who is now dying to visit Australia's Apple Isle? Seriously, the air was constantly scented with apple blossoms (and jasmine, wattle and freesias), the breezes were crisp and clean, and the traffic slow. Nearly every person I passed on my walks said hello. I felt like I'd gone back in time.

The Problem with Yoga

Don’t get me wrong - I love yoga.  It is my absolute bliss.  I want to be one of those ninety-year-olds who can downward dog like a teenager.

 

Because I’ve always been more of a stretchy bendy girl than a runny jumpy girl and add the quiet, the strength, the ability to give my mind a much-needed time out and it is necessary to my life.

I’ve also been doing it so long now, that it actually works. And thank goodness.

Outside of yoga my mind is a constant crazy scribble.  A jumbled mess of appointments, memories, things I should have remember but know I’ve forgotten, current books ideas, new book ideas, kids stuff and so on.

Until the moment I step into a yoga studio and for a good hour and a half all that simply goes away.  My mind goes quiet.  My breathe evens.  And I am truly in the now.

Thoughts do happen.  And that’s okay!  Normal even.  One simply learns to accept the thought then let it go.  I like to watch mine float across my mind and out of sight like clouds on a windy day.

Now, here’s the problem.  What happens when the thought that I am meant to watch blow away is a pertinent plot idea for a book?!?!? 

I had that very problem last night.  There I was, lying with my legs up a wall as I began to wind down.  My brain filled with blissful oxygen.  My muscles all warm and tingly.  Getting my yoga on.

Image created by Freepik

Then BAM!  Idea.  And not just any idea, but A Very Important Idea That Will Tie My Entire Book Together.

It was the most truly odd sensation. (In the moment I likened it to drowning, drama queen that I am.)  My mind all floaty and soft, my instincts fought for all they were worth.

Instead of choosing a gentling mantra (inner peace, patience, good health etc) I was secretly chanting the bones of my idea (“Prime Minister, University Grant, Old Lecturer”) in my head, hoping all the while my yoga instructor couldn’t tell that I was totally cheating.  It was very stressful!

The moment Namaste left my mouth I ran to my phone, frantically typing down those notes, breathing a sigh of relief when done.  Phew.  Crisis averted.   

I think I need another yoga class just to get over the last one!

 
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Have you ever tried yoga (if not, you really should!)  Or is running more your bag?  What about Pilates?  Soccer?  Underwater wrestling?  Rescuing wine from a bottle? What’s your favourite way to decompress?

 

 

What to write next...?

 I have a book due at the end of the month…and, of course, all of my concentration should be on it, but I’ll let you into a little secret—if I don’t know what my following book is going to be about, I get a little antsy. I like to know that advance. Not in any detail, you understand, but in terms of themes and the main tropes. I'm going to write a reunion story next or an office romance or...  If I don't, panic starts to build--and I get short of breath whenever I think about it.

But I’ve yet to settle on anything. Not for lack of trying! I've been playing with all sorts of story ideas, but so far nothing has stuck. That's when I came up with the inspired idea to pop on over here and ask what  kind of story you’d most like to see. :)

So let’s list a few tropes to help us warm up:
* Friends to lovers
* Enemies to lovers
* Reunion story
* Royal story

I’m going to rule them all out. Why? Well, quite frankly, I think a good friends-to-lovers story is seriously hard to pull off. I’ve done two (His Christmas Angel, and First Comes Baby…). So before I dip my toes into those particular waters again, I want it to be because I've been gifted with a marvelous flash of inspiration. :-)

As for the next two—there are elements of enemies-to-lovers in my current story (only minor, though, so I could rethink this). And my February 2016 release was a reunion story. And while I love reunion stories with all of my madly beating heart, it’s probably too soon to do another one just yet.

A royal story will be fun one day. But at the moment I think the Romance / Forever / Cherish line is a bit flooded with them. So I’ll save that one for a rain day.

Some other tropes that do have potential:
* Cinderella story
* Beauty and the Beast
* Office romance
* Marriage of convenience

* Fish out of water story

Do any of them appeal to you?

Instead of an overall story trope, what if I consider some individual story elements, like:

* An unexpected baby!
These are always so much fun. I don’t know why--maybe it’s because babies force a heroine and hero to work out what they want, and to fight for what’s important. Also, babies (especially the fictional kind) are seriously cute. There’s lots of inbuilt emotion in an unplanned pregnancy / baby story.

* Sheikh hero
I’ve never done one, but what do you think? Ooh, I could set the story in a glorious desert landscape with a nearby oasis where my heroine could nibble delicately on dates and Turkish delight. (Uh huh...guess whose fantasy it is to nibble on far eastern delicacies ;-) ).

* Virgin heroine
These can be tricky. But they do tap into a really attractive fantasy of a sexual awakening (Sleeping Beauty!) with a seriously scrummy man. :)

* Glamorous setting
I LOVE armchair travel! Where would you most like to see my romance set—Rio, Trinidad, Egypt, Paris, Singapore, Puerto Rico…?

So come on—play the game. What story would you most like me to write:

* The Sheik’s Pregnant Cinderella
* A Puerto Rican Marriage of Convenience
* The Virgin’s Impossible Boss
* The Sheik’s Impossible Virgin (dear lord I can’t believe I wrote that)
* The Virgin’s Vegas Adventure
* Called to Duty by the Sheikh
* The Billionaire’s Scandalous Deal
* Bodyguard to the Plain Jane

 Please feel free to come up with your own title. You never know, you might just help me find the spark of inspiration that I need. :-)

Idea Factories and Real Estate

People often ask me where I get my ideas for my books and I get some odd looks when I tell them that often I get my ideas from houses.

I'm not sure why, but I love browsing real estate listings--especially large older homes--imagining the lives of the people who live there and making lives, loves and memories up for them along the way. I'll often print out house plans and photos and pop them into an ideas folder and browse through them at a later date.

Maybe it's because I'm hopelessly sentimental but, to me, houses have a soul--a "feel", if you like--that's usually immediately apparent when you set foot in one. Lately we've been helping one of our kids as she and her partner have begun hunting for their first home. It's been an interesting exercise and, oh boy, have we seen some "interesting" properties but, if anything, it's heightened my belief that echoes of previous owners are so often left behind in a home. Of course, very many of the homes we've been looking at have been bought by investors, keen to make a profit on a swiftly (and not always well-) renovated property, and for most of these a lot of that "echo" has been obliterated, leaving new owners with a clean slate to move into and a new soul to set. But others, like a house we saw on the weekend, had been in the same family for over 50 years and you can "feel" the family vibe that new carpet and window dressings can't quite erase. So far we've only been to one house that gave all of us a cold sick feeling as we entered--coupled with a sense of relief when we left it--and we've seen one that would have been better demolished than lived in, but overall we've really enjoyed the experience.

When I started thinking about the story behind THE WIFE HE COULDN'T FORGET (out June 2015) it was only natural that I hit the real estate websites to find the right home for my characters. It didn't take long to find. An 1880s two storey dwelling in Devonport, one of the older parts of Auckland, New Zealand, was absolutely perfect. As soon as I found the house I could visualise scenes for Xander and Olivia Jackson with no effort whatsoever.

The story idea itself had rattled around in my head for many years--initially with my heroine suffering from amnesia. But then I got to wondering (as you do when you're a writer and daydreamer by profession), what if I turned the story around? What if my hero was the one with amnesia, and what if my heroine was prepared to do just about anything to win her husband back after tragedy tore them apart? Can they have a second chance at love or will Olivia's deception force them apart forever?

So, how about you? Do you like house-browsing? Old ones, new ones? Apartments? What's your favourite dwelling place? And do you have any fun stories to share?