Oh, now look what you've done...

February, 2025

In a blink, we are at the close of February in a world that is changing faster than tech. I am astounded that the new world order is letting so much slime climb from beneath dark and dank rocks under which they mutter their conspiracies and spew their hatred at everyone who isn’t as hateful and bigoted as themselves. I am even more amazed at how individuals with openly unethical characters can rise to power with the blind if not self-interested support of so many idiots. History, of course, is littered with these people and the destruction and tragedy they wrought upon humanity and the earth, but in what ought to be an enlightened age they still thrive among us, buoyed by their insane wealth and the greedy self-serving sycophants who cling to their coattails.
 
Can you imagine anyone writing a novel or play, or creating a film with such unbelievable characters as we are currently witnessing on the daily news? Oh wait. Writers do. So many writers have created works portraying the horror we currently face on a world scale.
 
Anyway, I’ll do the only thing I can and write about the rise and prevalence of evil and the never-ending if often futile effort of people with good hearts to thwart evil’s plans. Yay for fantasy and scifi.
 
Wow! I must be really angry to forego blog space for a petty political rant. Believe me. I have barely started on what I dislike and I would change if, by some cataclysmic miracle, I could assert political power. But there is no cataclysmic miracle looming for me and I have absolutely no power at all. Can’t even win the lottery.
 
However, if you want some not-so-light reading on what we face around the world in current politics and potential and actual outcomes, here’s some books you could/should read:

---

---

On the writing front in February, I’ve:

• run my first Think Tank session for writers on behalf of Writers SA: sixteen people attended and I feel we had a great time; can’t wait for the March session and a focus on structure/plotting.
• written and submitted a 4000 word story to a competition on the theme ‘Australia in all of its diversity’: set the story in eastern Australia during floods - topical
• uploaded five novels to Draft2Digital and Smashwords: the novels were Girlie, Joy Ride, The Need, In My Father’s Shadow and Caught in the Headlights. Draft2Digital distribute to multiple ebook and print services
• delivered weekly writer mentoring sessions through Spectrum Writing
• started a makeover of my web site: I intend to include sample chapters of books on the pages for readers to consider
• began seriously editing and extending a novel project: sorry, no details to be shared yet
• began rewriting two scifi novels that need to better reflect the growing populist right wing and selfish/greedy wealthy vs everyone else movement evident worldwide (terrifyingly, even here)

​And that’s it for February, really. We live, as all humans throughout history have lived, in interesting times. Here, in Australia, most of us (sadly, not all of us) can only be grateful that we don’t live in multiple countries in Africa, so many countries in the Middle East, Ukraine, Myanmar and others riddled with criminally related violence. Or the United States right now.