Yrae Chronicles

How has it been over a month? Gdit and I thought I was getting better at this shit. I am better on Insta, so there's that, I guess.

So anyway, somehow it's March already, dunno how that happened so fast, but February went pretty sodding well. Finally got to Chihuly Nights at the Botanic Gardens. It's an exhibition that's been on since October and runs til April, of these massive glass sculptures all around the gardens. I've been several times during the day, because it's just a great place to go for a walk or run after work, but yes, finally got there for the night showing :D The stuff inside the tropical glasshouse was all new to me, since that costs money during the day, and god it's stunning. I mean the whole thing's stunning but... yay new things!

Last weekend we drove to Melbourne to see Green Day! It was SO awesome. Baby's first mosh pit, at the tender young age of 39, aww. Boys were fantastic. It was a bit of an anniversary concert, of their first album, Dookie, 30 years ago; and American Idiot, 20 years ago. They ran through both those albums, track by track, with stuff from the new album last year scattered around, so it wound up being like a 3-hour concert. I last saw them right there back when Marvel Statium was the Telstra Dome back in 2005 (better rundown here on the Adelaide concert, which was earlier that year) and I promise they rocked just as hard as back then. Billie-Joe Armstrong doesn't look like he's aged at all; Mike Dirnt (bass) does look like he's aged about 20 years; Tré Cool (drums) looks like he's aged about 40. BUT LIKE. Drumming is frigging hard work. Mike was often running up and down right in fornt of us and god, that man makes some fun faces <3 I got a couple of them!

The brought up one girl from the mosh pit to give her a mic and sing with Billie-Joe and, after like three seconds of deer-in-headlights panic, it as like she consciously chucked all her inhibitions out the window and just ran with it. She was running up and down the stage, air-guitaring with both the guitarists, also sang really well after the initial fear of holy shit people had been thrown away. Then at the end of her bit, Billie told us all her name was Honey, so of course the crowd started chanting, 'Hon-ey, Hon-ey, Hon-ey!' and it was just a delightful moment :D

Thank you, boys. I did, indeed, have the time of my life 🖤❤️

The final show of the tour was supposed to be this Saturday on the Gold Coast, but um. idk if you've heard but it's a little... breezy... on the Goldie right now. So sadly that one was cancelled :< I feel so sorry for everyone up there, woulda been awesome, obvs.

On Sunday~ we went to Cranbourne Botanic Gardens, which I've been excited to go to for a while now. So many native botanic gardens are planted to look like they do ~in nature~ but like... I already live in the Hills, the bush is literally right there. I don't want to come to a curated garden to see bush, I come to see curated garden. So that's what Cranbourne is, properly architecturally-designed native gardens, and it is stunning. From photos online I've already taken a lot of inspo for the Raykinian royal palace, but seeing it in person is so cool. The red desert one is what you see first walking in, then everything else surround that. I could've spent hours more there, but we got home around midnight as it was, so I'll just have to go again when I go back to Melbourne next. Maybe it won't bloody rain, too :P Seriously, can't remember the last time we had rain in Adelaide* but it was last year, the two-ish days I'm in Melbourne and I get rained on when I'm out in a garden with no shelter. Course, then we started driving home and it was clear blue skies by Horsham. Bloody Melbourne.

I~ have bunged my ankle. This happened last Monday, the week before Green Day, by stepping in someone's footprint wrong in the wet sand on the beach. It's not bad but has just enough of a twinge that it's clearly warning me not to do more than like stand on it. Clearly walking is out. Running 10km? HAH. So I have disappointingly not done any fitness since last Monday. I'm so pissed off. I was doing so well! Running was starting to actually flow and feel natural. Doing the fitness literally every day, even on both days of the weekend, had become just a normal thing I do. I was excited to see the little wheel of confidence (how confident my Garmin app is that I can achieve my goal) go up and up and break from the green Confident range into the purple Very Confident, Maybe You Should Make Your Goal More Ambitious range. I got my VO2 Max, which is a key number for fitness, go from 32 up to 34, just this year! One more point and I'll be up from Poor into Fair! I could even become Good! Not Excellent cos that's the realm of elite athletes and shit knows I can't be bothered with that.

But all because of a bung ankle, that's just stopped. I can pause the actual training app, the one that tells me different running things to do each day, but that doesn't stop my actual body and fitness from going backwards. SO miffed. It's feeling much better just today, no swelling when I got home from work, which is a change, so I'm hoping by Sunday I'll be able to start working back up to doing fitness again. I'm not letting this slide, not this time. I've been doing so well and feeling so good about it, I won't drop it.

I've submitted four stories to various competitions, which I believe all start judging this month? So it'll be exciting to see if they go anywhere. First time submitting to competitions, I don't expect to, but it's still exciting!

Limes were $4.50 for a bag so cosmo's for cocktail hour tonight when Amanda gets home 🍸

OH and Sculptures by the Sea, that was in Feb, too. See, I'm good at Insta!

OH OH and I won a thing! Just on a whim I entered a radio contest to go see Tommy Little's Naughty Fortieth, which is basically part of the Fringe in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, and I won! It was a lot of fun =3 Opened with a stripper Fringe performer who uses FIRE and she was awesome. Then Tommy Little and Carrie Bickmore, who are said radio show, plus three comedian Fringe performers in Luke McGreggor, Ivan Aristaguierta (who is Venueulan and awesome) and Ross Noble came up to play Tommy's card game. Ross waid he got the single most Fringe experience ever, cos they didn't see the opening fire boobies act, but he was backstage. So what he got was this extremely hot, semi-naked woman (she had star nipple stickers and a gstring) wandering around with a giant cannister of parafin under her arm. 'No idea what the show was but it looks like fun!' XD That is indeed the most Fringey thing I've ever heard and I'm so pleased he had that experience X3 And he's been doing Fringe for frigging decades by this point. Ross Noble and Arj Barker are like the unofficial mascots. I LOVE THE FRINGE. And then walking back up Rundle Street to get back to the car, street closed with lights up everywhere, tables and chairs from the restaurants all out on the road, and this at like 11:30 on a Tuesday night. It's just such a fun, vibrant time to live here. Got another, this time paid, show happening next weekend, so excited for that one, too X3

All right now that's everything. Probably.


* If I don't even need to turn my windscreen wipers on, it's not rain. Also for the record, even that's only happened twice this year.

Amanda's started a new job, well, end of last year, but this month it's been on what will be regular hours, which are the late shift at a flour mill, meaning she gets home around 11ish. I go to bed at 10, 10:30, which is kinda suck but also I get my me time? Which is nice. Currently catching up on all the YouTube videos I've fallen way behind on XD; And I can go back to making dinner once or twice and just having the same thing all week. Do miss having her cooking tho, and sportsball is always better to watch with someone. And seeing craft projects grow and come to life. The ideal would be like 2-3 days a week, but she does get home earlier on a Friday and I can stay up later, so it's not a total loss.

I've discovered a feature on my Garmin wherein I can set a fitness target and it'll give me fitness to do so I can achieve it. My ultimate goal is running jetty to jetty in an hour, currently takes me about an hour and 10 mins and it's just shy of 9km round trip. So I told the watch I want to do 10km in 1hr 10mins (it's 5km or 10km then it goes up to a marathon. HAH) and it said you'll be struggling to do that in the time frame. So I went to 5km in half an hour. You'll be struggling to do that in the time frame. 35 minutes? You'll be struggling--SCREW YOU. So it's at the longest possible time it can train me for, 37:30, which I'll be doing on ANZAC Day (25 April). I can currently do 5km in 38:40 so yay, I'll be carving off a whole minute 10 seconds in three and a half months. See if it'll let me try for 5km in half an hour after that .-.

I've finished my first short story, 4000 words about a guy in a Kazinian prison where the cells aren't walls and cages, but deep pits which you get out of by growing a tree from a seed. Not yet entered cos I want to read it again with fresher eyes before the deadline and see if I can improve anything, so if anyone wants to join me on this journey of short story competition entries please let me know! I'd love all the concrit I can muster 💚 The next one is proving difficult. 1000 words about alchemy. I've got something in my brain about an alchemist losing their license because they're making dodgy gems but it's just not happening. It's been a looooong time since I've written anything short. 1000 words is like one scene. Maybe two at a stretch. Fleh.

Garden continues to thrive despite heatwave. It's not attrocious (aside from the 39 on Sunday, that sucked) but it sure is lasting. My tank ran out of water yesterday so we're on tap water now, boo :< Adelaide tap water, ftr, tastes chlorinated and bad. There's a cyclone going on off WA so cross fingers we get dumped on at some point, but it's so far been a normal-arse January with no rain (we got like 3mm two weeks ago and that's been it) so I'm not holding out hope. Filtered tap water it is, ew. Anyway. The garden's happy it gets water at regular intervals now so that's good. The dichondra (ground cover) is already starting to spread out so I'm particularly excited to see how that goes.

Since the last post, I've read a couple of books, written a porny Novelember* and generally taken a break from SH. Novelember was so much fun, omg. Loved watching those boys develop from not knowing them to suddenly having a relationship after a month. I just finished editing it over the weekend, nothing major, just some typos and fixing of clunky sentences but nothing wholesale.

Lunch today, finally opened up SH again, scrolled back to chapter 19 where I'm up to just the last read-through before it's ready to go... and my shoulders slumped, eyes stinging, brain wondering what's the point.

So yeah. Distance ain't cutting it.




* Replacement for NaNoWriMo since that went down the toilet this year. Same concept, no arseholes involved.

Happy New Year! I feel I can more properly say that now because on Friday night, I took myself down to the Horizons coctail lounge overlooking the (highly smoke-affected) sunset and I finished Silent Harmony. I feel like, since beginning of NaNo, I've kinda had just EVERYTHING on hold in favour of finishing this thing, so now I have it really feels like a new year. I was just thinking earlier today, with some actual nice weather this week, I'll be able to take my laptop to the botanic gardens as I've always planned to do and do some wri--no, wait, there's nothing to write. WELL THEN.

Random old dude came and tried chatting to me when I was literally five paragraphs from the end I MEAN. I know I'm on my own in a cocktail bar on a Friday night but PLEASE. NO.

Just as I'd finished and was posting my margarita of triumph to Instagram, another random sat down to start chatting, this time an Aboriginal chick. One of the most interesting conversations and fascinating people I've ever met. She started out by saying how I looked intelligent, because of the Word doc and clearly not being on Facebook or whatever, so I said YEP just finished a novel I've been working on since I was 18! So we got to talking about how words and language are sexy, and how cats are better dependents than children, and how nice it is just coming down to the beach and getting a cocktail/wine. She's a nursing technician mostly working in elective surgery but sometimes shoved into Emergency, so with my sister-in-law as a nurse we talked a bit about how you see the best and worst of humanity in a job like that.

Came back around to language again, which led into herritage, me being of bog-standard white Aussie nothingness while she was brought up in a Jehova's Witness family. WTF says me? Cos that's weird enough normally, let alone Aboriginal Jehova's Witnesses. Oh yeah, says she, because I was adopted into an English/Irish family. Well, 'adopted,' cos I was one of the Stolen Generation, and oh dear my glass is empty, lemme just go get a top-up, can I get you another one? Oh, no, I'm driving and this is my second cocktail for the evening already and also holy shit???

JUST

CASUALLY DROPPED IN THERE. STOLEN GENERATION.

FRIG

I swear she was about my age, but nope, 46. She's since found her biological family, including two or three siblings, and SEEMS to have a good relationship with everyone. Including the English/Irish Jehova's Witnesses. Like, all through our conversation she used 'Mum' to refer to either or. idk it was in parts refreshing and disturbing to hear her so casual about it? Like... I've never met one of the stolen generation. The only time I've ever encountered them has been on TV, when they're generally very angry and bitter and, in a lot of cases, guilt-trippy. So to meet someone who's just chill with her life, it's like... idk. Good onya for being able to get your shit together, thank you for not having a chip on your shoulder towards all white people even tho you have literally the best reason in the world to be pissed at white Australia... yeah. I said none of this at the time because I was still in the middle of processing HOLY SHIT and by then conversation moved on. Like I said, just casually dropped it in there.

More casual chat, how scary bushfires are, how I live in the Hills and have my own place, she's living in a Housing Trust home which I thought was... odd, for a nursing technician? Dunno how much they earn but I would've thought it could fund a rental place. Turns out she's recently (I got the feeling no more than a year ago) gotten out of an abusive relationship, and left with just her car and the cats. She went to get Government support and they've given her the Housing Trust home, which I was pleasantly surprised by. She did the heartbreaking thing of not blaming him, or rather, trying to blame him but feeling guilty for doing so. He had scizophrenia, but chose to take marijuana instead of his medication, and that made him paranoid that everyone, especially she, was out to kill him. Like, driving past roadworks and saying she paid them off to make him crash into the roadworks and die, that kind of thing. Bashed her up badly, hence the finally getting out.

So I told her she was incredibly brave. For getting out, for asking for help after it, for keeping herself on track and holding down the job even in the midst of all that. Just, so brave.

She said she still felt guilty for leaving him, cos he was unwell. He needed help.

Yeah, I said, but it's not your job to care for him. It's not your fault. It's not your job to look after him.

It was like a lightbulb moment for her. She just looked at me for a moment and went, 'Nobody's ever told me that. That it's not my job.'

GIRL. GIRL. I can't even. I'm glad she's finally heard it, at least? More importantly, she was very drunk by this point, but very much of the thinking over her words and still making intelligible conversation kind of level, so hopefully she remembered it the next morning, too.

So there you go! That was the night I finished Silent Harmony! Most fascinating conversation ever. You go, girl.

Okay, so, what in the high holy shit has LJ done to memories now? They don't appear to function. Previously it's been a list of keywords, click your keyword, and you get a list of entries in order of when they were added to the list of memories. Now though? I don't even know how this functions. Already you can see it's just posting the full entries, not links to the entries, which is GREAT for if you want to start from the beginning of the list (it's not).

Through that, for example, I challenge you to find the chapter I just posted, which is the prologue for Steel (I know, I'm excited, too 8D). It's under 'Silent Harmony Chapters', which makes sense, yeah? So you select that memory from the dropdown, sort entries by Order Added... and top of the list is Gold: Twenty-Five. Then comes Gold: Nineteen... Fifteen... Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Two... What the shit even. Maybe it's on the next page? Click Previous Page (I mean...) and it's General Nimay's Character Design. That's not even under the category of Silent Harmony Chapters. Neither is General Nimay in the Big Book of Stuff. The next post by giraffe_warrior isn't even in the yrae journal. So it's at that point that I gave up and came here to bitch.

I'm just going to have to make a new post with the list of chapters and update that periodically, because this is ri-goddamn-diculous.

On the plus side, I wrote a prologue! I may even have an actual full chapter before Cassie gets here and then NaNoWriMo starts the week after. That'd be cool. Wouldn't that be cool? Hell yeah.

I also bought pjs. On Wednesday, the pair of pants that'd gotten a hole in the knee at the beginning of the week gave up the ghost, and by morning the hole reached all the way from ankle to hip, because this is how holes in flannelette pjs go. So I chucked them out, put on my other pair of flannelette pants on Thursday night, and as soon as I sat down they split right up the arse. So that's the story of how I lost two pairs of pj pants in two days. I used the last of my Myer voucher to get two pairs of silk pjs, mostly because I'm sick of how flannelette barely lasts a year and I'm hoping silk will last longer. We'll see. One pair is black and hella comfortable, and the other is black with flowers and also hella comfortable. I feel swanky.

Yesterday, I finished Gold! Book three of Silent Harmony is finally done! I am so, so very stoked. I love everything. I'm quite proud of how it all came together, after so many bombshells the characters dropped on me all through it. One book to go, and I have effectively zero ideas for it. Thiras will turn up somewhere, but that's all I've got. I don't know the ending, I don't know the beginning, it's wide open.

For each book I've had a preceding (sort of) NaNo to develop the featured kingdom (Vermilion for Llayad, Bouquet for Kazin and, to a lesser extent, Blade Archer for Raykin. I'd been doing so many shorts around that time, though, that Raykin was already pretty well-developed by that point) so I'll give a shot at a NaNo for Tsayth, too. I mean, working full time will make such things tricky, but I'll try! Between now and then, I'll read back over Tarnish and Gold as I did Rust at the beginning of the year and get Thoughts together for the rewrite (because boy oh boy do I have Thoughts on Rust already), and I'll get a plan and maybe an outline together for Steel.

I've also worked out a method the last few months while I've been on a roll: write about the chapter in the spoiler book before I write the actual chapter. It's been great for nutting out problems that would inevitably come up and otherwise become a block. See if I can keep that up for the last book. I might write the thing in a year, you never know. I'm excited! SO excited!

I had hoped to go to Bridgewater Mill yesterday to write the last chapter, purely so at the end of it I could have a celebratory cocktail, but unfortunately they were closed for a private function, so I finished it at Red Cacao instead. Somewhat fitting, since I've been there every Saturday for writing for the last month or so XD Then ordered a pizza with garlic bread for dinner, opened a nice bottle of Chris Ringland shiraz to go with it, and drew Nol looking far more badarse than he actually feels. So that was pretty cool. Still want to go get a cocktail somewhere for celebration, too.

I FINISHED GOLD! I'M SO HAPPYYYYYY!!!!!

K SO FUNNY STORY. Every time I've been on the computer since the last update, it's been to write. The previous chapter I finished before this current awesome run was in April last year. I'm now halfway through the fifth in less than a month, and holy shit balls I love it. You'll remember my last update, a month ago, was about how I'd finally forced myself to work out was happening in this mess of a book, and wishing to do the cliché writer thing and go to coffee shops to do the writings. I've so totally been doing that. That very week, the weather was GORGEOUS, so every day after work I took my laptop down to the beach, picked a café with a power point and, ideally, a view of the beach, and wrote. I've spent entire weekend days down at Brighton and Glenelg, just writing, and it's been magnificent. That's honestly been most of what's been happening.

Easter happened, though! With the traditional Oakbank races, where we open with a champagne breakfast and continue the day from there. I've found my calling with the veggies and they were so good. I got lots of comments :D I had fennel, carrots, eggplant, cherry tomatoes, pumpkin, red onion and half a clove of garlic each, all roasted on the barbecue. I had an awesome oil I made up for them, too, made up of about a quarter oil from a sundried tomatoes jar, a quarter of my own chilli oil I've previously made, tablespoon each of paprika, rosemary, oregano and thyme, couple of cloves of grated garlic and a few chopped up sundried tomatoes, then topped the jar up with olive oil. It was soooooo good, especially the roasted garlic in the middle, and the steak Dad did (also on the barbie) had such an amazing gutsy sauce with it, aww yeah. There's just something about having barbecued gourmet food outside, even though this was just the most perfect weather day we've ever had for Oakbank, there's still that rustic outdoorsiness of it all that makes food taste even better and gutsier.

Also some horses ran past every now and then.

The previous weekend, when the weather was more autumny and Mum and I were having coffee and talking about options for my very dead garden, Mum just suddenly sat up and went, 'Ooh! Gran has wooden crates in the shed!' So we quickly checked with Dad's brother to make sure they didn't want them, then that very day we headed down to Gran's and obtained said crates. They're just perfect. Also grabbed a whole lot of bricks to stand them on and carted them up to my place to dump in the back garden in anticipation.

The rest of the Easter weekend, so Sunday and Monday, Mum came over and we implemented the crates. Hacked up the weed mat of the pallets to get the dirt out, which was so horribly dry and dusty because they just weren't working. I lined the new wooden crates with more weed mat while mum filled them up with a mix of dirt, soil wetter and dynamic lifter. We got most of them done on Sunday, but had an impromptu call from Colin on Saturday to go to theirs for dinner that Sunday. In truth we's both had enough of them by that point anyway, so woo! Easy out.

Dinner was awesome crispy skinned barbecue pork with Laura's roasted veggies and incredible three-layered cake 8D I ate well Easter weekend.

Monday we finished off the boxes and went PLANT SHOPPING WHEEEEEEE. God it's fun. The fruits of our labour. Some of the plants down the far end will grow to around 1.5m tall so they'll make a gorgeous little jungle down that end.

Last couple of weekends have been the writing thing, then this weekend, well 8D I've decided to take a week of leave. It's Anzac Day on Wednesday, which is a really messy day for a public holiday, so I'm taking four days of annual leave for a nine-day holiday, hell yeah. I've never taken leave purely to take a break and still hang around Adelaide not doing anything, so this is just delightful. Theoretically, boss will text me on Tuesday to tell me if it's gotten busy and I'll be needed on Thursday and Friday, but given that a pretty serious chunk of our clients will probably be doing the same thing, I don't think that's likely to happen.

So through the week while I was at work, Mum came up and deposited ten slabs of slate at my back door, also from Gran's, so today I laid those down the services end of the garden, under the washing line and in front of the tank and hot water service. I also planted a few more of the alpine pratia, which is the little green blobs in the ground to be my ground cover. They're just loving the warm weather right now, just about doubled in size since those photos were taken. Now I've got dirt laid down in the ground in place of that horrible sand I was recommended before, I reckon I'll give the baby's tears another shot down where the slate is, cos it likes growing between rocks. This time, the garden will live, just you watch!

Tomorrow, trip to the art gallery with the whole family, first for lunch, then to see the Musée D'Orsay exhibition, which I'm super excited for. It's an exhibition of impressionists, like Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Manet... Impressionism is probably my favourite historical art movement so this will be awesome.

For the rest of the week, the weather is still ridiculous (29 on Monday at the end of April? What is this madness?) so I'll be going to the beach, sitting in the garden, might book a massage, have breakfast at disgustingly hipster cafés, going to see movies... it's gonna be awesome.

Also the Crows beat Sydney last night in Sydney with literally half the team, including pretty much the whole midfield, out with injury. I'd written them off so hard I didn't even tip them, but they WON. I'm so proud! A truly glorious start to my week off.

I got a good chunk of plotting done, know what's happening with the main plot for the rest of the story, but all the side-plots, mostly in Wensleydale, are just... ugh. They all feel so disjointed and nothing's tying back together. I keep reminding myself that there's still another book, I don't have to tie all the loose ends up in this one, but it'd be nice to tie up one or two, y'know? I've got all these potentially major events that, when I think about them, have no tangible effect whether the character/s live or die. But then if I try and make that event have an impact on the plot, then I've got yet another loose end. Finally bringing Raykin back into things, while awesome, has kinda made Llayad irrelevant. So that's. That's where things are there. Mrr.

Writing is hard. I still plan on having a(nother) rejigged outline complete this month, tho. Just you watch.