I am off to Cradle Mountain in Tasmania for a few days. It’s cold in Melbourne, it will be colder down there being that much closer to Antartica. But the beauty and serenity of the place will sure make up for it. See you when I get back.

Just when I thought I had come to the end of my novel, Little Paradise, and had even gone out to a French restaurant to celebrate, I have now found that I still need to write two more chapters.

It’s so tempting to rush an ending. But my duty to the novel and to my readers is to draw out the suspense, to make the story that much more satisfying when the last page is turned.

It was very nice to find my blog, A Passing Whisper, on the list of the Top 50 Aussie Writers Blogs.

You can see the whole list at http://tinyurl.com/dmw9l2

If you have a website or are setting one up, it’s really important that you’re able to change the information contained within it without having to ask the web designer to do it for you. My web designer and nephew, Jin, used Wordpress to create my website. And now I can add new pages and pics, change copy and generally have fun playing around inside its borders. This gives me enormous flexibility as far as adding ideas or new info. A website needs regular updates to keep people interested.

I am a very slow reader and a subvocalizer. That’s someone who has to say each word out aloud in their head. Until I met my husband, I thought that everyone subvocalized.

I’m not sure if it was the way I was taught to read when I was young, or whether it is the way my brain is wired. I tend to think it’s the latter. It didn’t stop me from loving books though and that’s why I am an author now. I did read but it always  took me a long time to get through a book.

Being a slow reader has its disadvantages. If you’re a student studying for an exam, it’s hard to get through all the required reading material. If you’re an author writing a novel, it’s a huge disadvantage because authors HAVE to read other people’s works. We learn from other writers about style and rhythm and use of language. And then there’s the research. I have had to do a heap of it for Little Paradise and the process has been slow and arduous. To a subvocalizer like me, with the exception of the dictionary, any book that is more than an inch thick is daunting.

To compensate for my disability, I listen to audio books as well as read.

If this problem was picked up in primary school, with a little help, slow readers would not carry this problem into their adulthood.

As I sit in my small office in a suburb of Melbourne, I think back to my nine days of solitary writing time at Lorne. While I was there, I could feel the space inside my head expanding with each day until, in the end it was as if I had a huge head like one of the aliens from the movie ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. Without the interruptions and distractions of daily life, my thoughts were given their freedom to fly. I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed there for six months. Would I have ended up being pure mind?