July-August 2002

August 27, 2002

A good friend found a whole string of reviews for me, and I have added them to the reviews page. Aside from being described as an accountant in the Cairns Post, I am happy with them. At the moment, they are just dumped in there — but I will clean them up later. For now, you can see the whole thing, rather than the snippets they will become.

August 20, 2002

I have a completed draft, but I am already finding extra bits and pieces that need to fit in. I expect to add more as I read through that on the screen, then I will print it out, make scrawls all over the hard copy, make those changes, and finally, read it aloud to myself from the screen. Then it is over to editing, and I am beginning to think about the next book — there are three possibles at the moment.

August 15, 2002

I am close to completing the first draft, as floods rage through Dresden and Prague, two of the places I visited while I was planning this book. Right now, I am telling the V2 story, and that involves concentration camps like Auschwitz, and places like Dresden, largely laid waste by Allied military vandals. No side was guilt-free in World War II.Some things are hard to forgive, but I take comfort in the Berlin Wall, reduced to the status of a tourist attraction, and Warsaw, rebuilt in accordance with paintings by Canaletto. The human spirit will triumph! Now all I have to do is to put that in words. And tomorrow, we will know if the scramjet trial went well or not.

August 3, 2002

Rockets have been a major part of my life lately — I flew over to Adelaide and drove up to Woomera to see a launch of a rocket carrying a scramjet test rig. One account of this will be found on an ABC site.Ever so slowly, the book is creeping to completion. I seem to keep finding new aspects that need to be broached, almost as fast as I close other bits off. Depending on the results on the scramjet test, that could prove to be a history-making feat as big as the Wright Brothers first flight at Kittyhawk in 1903, and Goddard's first rocket launch in 1926, and I may need to reshape the book to include this new generation of rockets.

July 13, 2002

Well since then, I have done about six more radio interviews, and some television stuff to come, but the real buzz was being in a university library today, and just happening to see a copy of Bittersweet sitting on a desk — so I have one reader at least, or maybe just somebody who looked and put it down in disgust.

And why have there been no additions? Because I am flat out researching the next book, and thinking out the one after. Aside, that is, from posting some stormy opinions on what literacy and reading are all about. Jen McVeity and I are both on the same teachers' list — Jen is a fiction writer, I write non-fiction, but we both have a clear idea of why we write, and a phobia against people using our writing for sterile exercises in the classroom. So we have had a bit to say against the Dark Forces.