​Recently I’ve been driving round several parts of the North Island and the pleasure of exploration has been enhanced by visiting areas where several of my favourite books were set.  Like wine makers, I think some writers have their own terroir – a deep personal knowledge of their settings that adds immeasurably to the flavour of their writing.
When travelling along the Kaipara Harbour I had the joy of recognising Jean Louise Allen’s territory –  the Northern Wairoa river that runs like an artery through all her books and stories. The whisper of wavelets on mudflats, the tide gurgling among the mangroves, the scent of sun-warmed jetties – all felt familiar from Bitty by the River, River at War, and River, River. Her books are set in a simpler age when lives were entwined with nature and hardships were faced with courage.

​Nearby, spending a few days in Tinopai, I was reminded of Ines Helberg’s heart-filling novel A Tumble and a Litre of Milk. I found myself looking for the grocery store and the big house on the hill, quite forgetting it was fiction.

​Further up the island and into the wilder parts of Northland I recognised the flavour of Peter Rankin’s thriller Stealing the Trees, where his main character wants to live a quiet rural life but finds himself mixed up in murder and kidnapping out in the bush. The scent of crushed manuka and a fresh breeze from the sea give the story a sense of place that anchors it firmly in its setting.

​I even found a historical homestead way up the North Cape that any colonial heroine would have felt at home in, like brave young Brigid in Vicky Adin’s novel The Girl from County Clare, making a new home in New Zealand after sailing halfway around the world. The white picket fence and roses, the shady veranda, and the rich timber floors felt perfectly familiar from Vicky’s detailed descriptions of houses of that era.

​Right at the very tip of Cape Reinga, if you look to the right (past the teeming hordes of tourists), you may be able to see Kerr Point - named for Thomas Kerr featured in Jean Day's non-fiction book The Search for Thomas Kerr, which is a fascinating insight into a man who lived several lives' in his careers of mapmaker, missionary and meteorologist.

​I’m very much setting-driven in my own writing, especially my crime novels, and have a tendency to look at places with an eye for murder and mayhem. A tense scene in Eye for an Eye came from working in a dark photographic studio in Toronto, and the Theatre Mysteries Murder in the Second Row and Body on the Stage would never have been written without a detailed knowledge of the old Theatre Royal in Nelson.

Have you found books that transported you to places so well you felt you’d been there? Which writers have succeeded in mastering their terroir and taking you there?

​Signing off from a wild campsite at the easternmost part of New Zealand, 15th January.

Well dear readers, since I seem to have brought myself to a standstill for almost a year by trying to write the perfect series of blog posts, I’m going to quit stalling and just post little items of interest as we travel instead.

To explain the situation so far… in the previous post, Blogging and the Fear of Failure, we were about to sell our house after long and exhausting renovations, and were uncertain if our massive gamble would work out. Short answer – yes and no. The house did sell, and for a fair price – just not as much as we’d hoped for so at the time it felt like a huge failure. Our wild dreams had to be trimmed back, but once we started to move ahead the heartbreak of the house auction soon faded.
We flew to Canada where my husband has family in Ontario with the plan of buying a cruiser to travel the Trent-Severn waterway from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron – something we’ve been hoping to do since our honeymoon in 1981. Yes, it has taken a while! It took two months to buy a boat and we spent two months travelling the waterways before the season ended and we stored the boat for winter halfway along the canal. The plan is to return in May 2017 and complete the journey.

So back in New Zealand in October with nowhere to live, we bought a motorhome (RV) so we had a base to explore other options for property-buying, income opportunities etc. As I write we are in the process of buying a house and cottage in the Mount Ruapehu ski area which will earn maximum rental in the winter while we’re away. Ohakune is a delightful ski town in the middle of the North Island and while we had no intention of moving there, it doesn’t seem a bad place to have as a base. We’ll let you know how that works out!

From April 2016

These days when you set off on a big adventure, it’s usual to write a blog so that others can follow your ups and downs and live the dream vicariously. If you do it right you can even ‘blog the book’ afterwards so your eager followers can have their own copy of the whole story. But what if you’re uncertain of how the story will pan out? It’s fine to tackle a challenge, but if the whole world is able to watch you fail, how much pressure does that add to something that’s already difficult?

About eight months ago my husband Ed and I decided on a major life change. He was feeling the chill winds of retirement approaching and we were already finding it hard to make ends meet in the lifestyle we liked. With a mortgage-free house and a ridiculously high property market, we decided to sell up and release the capital. We’d use it to have some adventures for the next decade before getting too old and infirm to enjoy them. The bucket list and the ‘one day we’ll do that’ were calling.
But first, to get top dollar, we needed to do some basic repairs to the house and update it to a modern look. The bank cheerfully lent us the recommended 10% of the house’s value for the renovations and we threw in extra for contingencies. Quite a lot extra, which proved to be a wise decision.

Ed quit his job (which he didn’t like anyway) to work full-time on the house and I assisted while fitting in my various editing projects and photography work as time allowed. We worked. My God how we worked! From August onwards we rebuilt the kitchen and laundry floors, had all the tiles ripped up and replaced, new carpet throughout, fresh paint inside and out, and transformed the backyard. We shovelled uncounted cubic metres of clay, gravel, scoria, gap 7, sand, topsoil and bark. We painted dozens of corrugated iron fence panels, and posts, battens and trellis. We wore ourselves to a nub trying to meet the agent’s suggested deadline of late October and finally, battered and broken, had to admit defeat and postpone the sale until February.
​
It was then that I felt greatly relieved, not just that the immediate pressure was off, but that I hadn’t done what I originally planned and embarked on a regular blog to tell the world about our progress. We’d failed, but at least it was only in front of our friends. I hadn’t built up expectations among people who might have been less charitable than our wonderfully kind mates who’d done their best to cheer us along the way and had even come to help when they could.

We soldiered on. January arrived and the house was finally ready. We signed up with an agent from a small local company that I did a lot of photography work for, the one who’d been giving us all the helpful advice on presentation and marketing, and the house went on the market. Everyone wished us well and said ‘you’ll have no trouble selling – you’ve worked SO hard’ but failure made another unwelcome appearance as few people showed up at the open homes and interest seemed low. There were no offers, and after a month we decided to withdraw the property from the market until things picked up. Again, thankfully, no audience watched us stumble. We picked ourselves up and carried on.

Another month has passed. The house is now re-staged and immaculate, the new agent from a much bigger company is more forceful and dynamic, and we’ll finally get to auction in early May. That’s the point when life will change dramatically. That’s when we’ll leave normal life and set off into the unknown to see where our hard-earned cash will take us. That, I think, is when I’ll start my blog. We may still fail from time to time but I think I’m ready to share the adventures, both good and bad. We’ve already been inspired by several blogs of people living aboard their boats and travelling the world and it’s enticing to see things through their eyes. I’ll screw up my courage and try to bring some entertaining real-world adventures to an audience.

Responding to Matthew Wright's Short Story Challenge this week, here's one I prepared earlier... sorry it's a bit bleak!

I’m gazing at golden sand beside a sea of sparkling blue that cradles a chain of islands, the nearest ones warmed to a soft butter-gold under the autumn sun. I feel the heat on my skin and the rasp of sand between my toes. I listen to the quiet sighs of small waves gliding up the beach. I might swim soon to let the cool water embrace me under the open sky. Paradise.
 
Then the bird comes.
 
A black bird. A bloated bird.
 
I’ve seen this bird before. Its haunting visits suck light from the sky and leave a gloomy cast, no matter what the day was like before it came. It stands on sturdy, silent feet, watching me.

​I dread this bird.
 
Now cool wind sends shivers down my back and a foul smell drifts past. The sun is dimmer, shrouded by a veil of cloud that dulls all colour. The sand is gritty, harsh. On the islands, dull green shrubs spread across the yellow slopes like mould.
 
It’s time to go. There is no more pleasure in the day.
Just as I feared, the black bird follows when I leave.


https://mjwrightnz.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/this-weeks-short-story-challenge-10/

 I found this email in my in-box ta while ago, that came via my blog. Yes, my unattended, neglected blog that’s been patiently waiting for new content while I fritter away my time shovelling gravel, landscaping, painting and decorating and generally wearing myself to the bone doing up a house to sell.

I recognise the style though. That’s not my blog speaking – that’s my Canadian brother-in-law Dan. Hey bro! You make a good point and I do plan to resurrect my postings just as soon as this beknighted house goes on sale and I can take a break from the months of hard labour.

There will be plenty to post about if our plans work out so call back later to see what we’re going to get up to!

Dear Bev

This is your BLOG writing. I've missed you this past 6 months.
With winter I thought we would be together more. But I checked with your home computer and it appear you busy giving it a nice new place to sit with painted walls and a view to match.

It OK with me I live online with a view to the world.
it does get lonely when only a few visitor coming by and they are mostly family looking to see what YOUR doing.

Sorry nothing new here, please move on to Facebook

miss you
hope to chat soon

signed
Bev's Blog

  'It's easy," they said, those nice people over at Indies Unlimited. (Yes, I'm talking to you Kat Brooks!) You can just post monetised links to anyone's books on your own blog and earn money when there are sales. Yeah, right.
OK, I've had a stiff coffee, my head is as clear as it's gonna be - let's DO this!
First step is to upload the cover of Vicky's book. That's easy enough.
Then I embed the code that I copied from her book via my Amazon Associates page so if anyone follows the link to her book from here and buys it, I'll get a tiny percentage of the sale. I think I've done that right but I won't know till I publish this post.
Stand by caller...

All right - cover me, I'm going to publish this page and see if it works!
Sometimes being an indie author is a lot harder than it looks.

PS. Ok, I think I made it work! Turns out I didn't need to post the cover photo at all - the code I copied held all that info and clicking on that image took me to the right place.

So if all you lovely readers out there would click on Vicky's book and GO BUY A COPY that'd be great! I get a few cents, Vicky gets a few more, and you get a few hours of thoroughly enjoyable reading. Win-win!