Thank you Kirsty the booklover!! (This book is on a kindle monthly deal at the moment (ebook) until end of January in Australia and New Zealand) #Repost - @kirstythebooklover by @get_regrammer Book 5 for 2023 a great read my 2nd by this author looking forward to many more 🙂

Bookpack giveaway competition run by Canberra Weekly. Four awesome reads ;) #australianauthor #canberraweekly #ruralfiction

The wirraway plane was used in the defence of New Guinea in 1942. Kirsty, in my aussie fiction book A Town Like Clarence, restores one and hopes to find a museum with the room and resources to display it. Thrilling to see some of these machines still flying today. #Repost - @jetfighter_australia by @get_regrammer Wirraway an amazing piece of History and the First Nations people’s word for “Challenge “ . We are fortunate to have two of these amazing Aircraft still flying today. Have a fantastic day everyone! Team Jetfighter. . . #wirraway #caboolturehistoricmuseum #sunshinecoast #huntervalley #paulbennetairshows #challenge #history #firstnationspeople #aircraftlovers #aircraftphotography

I've been tying orchids to an old frangipani in the garden for six months now to start my "orchid tree" and here's a flower! The leaves of this one look like a crucifix orchid but the flower is different. #orchidtree #orchidsofinstagram

WHAT DO SERENDIPITY AND DINOSAURS HAVE IN COMMON? Top left ... today, my daughter and colleague wear dinosaur outfits to work at the oncology ward in the childrens hospital. Friday is dress up day, and there is a sick little boy there who LOVES dinosaurs. My mum made this dress for my daughter. Bottom right ... two thousand kilometres north, same day, I go visit the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum on the outskirts of Winton. (Research trip for my 2024 book) ... Bottom left ... a huge tour of footprints, preserved fossils, this was me meeting a bronze lifesize cast of Matilda (or Elliot? an Aussie sauropod, at any rate) ... Top right ... this is the SERENDIPITY bit ... we were in the working lab part of the museum, where volunteers work on the careful cleanup of 96 million year old bones from the digs around Winton. I spied a square, beanbag-looking cushion (lots of them) in a very familiar fabric and asked what they were. They're used as resting bases for a fossil piece when they're being worked on with the pneumatic chisels and mini-jacks. They provide stability when you wedge a fossil into them so you don't accidentally damage the fossil. And ... made for the museum by the mum of one of the volunteers. Conclusion: mums rock. And so do dinosaurs. And volunteers. And dressed-up doctors who look after sick children with such care and kindness. #kindness #australianageofdinosaurs #roadtrip

5.45pm in Winton. 🔥🔥🔥 Looking forward to a cold beer at the pub!

This African violet grew from a leaf of the mother plant in my kitchen window. My leaf strikes can be hit and miss so feeling very proud of this one. ❤🌱 #africanviolet #plantlover

I'm spotting a theme here! Loved The Nancys -- cosy crime, set in NZ, funny, engaging kids, and RWR McDonald's givens some talks on podcasts I've very much enjoyed. Now onto The Guncle, which I bought after hearing Rachael Johns talking it up on her bookclub. I'm off on a research trip to Longreach and I have 3 hours on a tiny propellor plane toorrow (i hate flying) so books are a necessary part pf my plane support system. The two I'm packing will be The Guncle, as pictured, and a nonfiction one I've bought for reearch called Locked in Time. Its blurb assures me its "a rousing romp through the fossil record". I dunno. I mean, I write romance. Does "rousing romp" mean the same thing to a paleontologist as it does to me???

I finally read Tin Man by Sarah Winman which has been on my TBR since 2017 according to the date I wrote in the front cover when I bought this book. I didn't love it as much as I loved her earlier novel, When God was a Rabbit, but I admire it possibly more. Split across two POV narrators, Tin Man is very much about grief, and love, and loss. I found the scenes in the Michael section in the HIV ward and in the countryside in France to be so beautifully written, it was a hardship to leave those paragraphs behind and move on to new ones. My dog, Joey, was a reluctant book stand for the photo, as his expression attests.

If you ever wondered what last-minute editing looks like, this is it. Three things are missing from this photo for true accuracy: 1) me hunched over the keyboard 2) a dog under the desk 3) the 46 coffee cups and 16 half empty diet coke cans I just cleared up. Manuscript in play at the moment is A Home Among the Snow Gums. It'll be in book stores across the country 1st week of May. (Did someone say perfect Mothers Day gift???)