My current heroine is going horse riding for the first time in years. She was prevented from doing it for reasons I won’t go into (it would be a spoiler) and has had to borrow a riding habit. It’s an old habit, a little out of date but of course she doesn’t care at all about that: she used to love riding. If you want to know more about riding habits, go to Candice Hern’s excellent site,  which is where I got this picture from. She goes into quite a lot of detail and she shows some wonderful pictures from the fashion magazines of the time. But beware, her site is a rabbit hole that’s very ..read more

It’s a lazy Sunday morning here, and I’ve just had a couple of slices of pizza for breakfast.  Pizza for breakfast? you say, mildly horrified. Yes, I respond with glee.  I went out for dinner last night with a friend who’s moving interstate. It was a very pleasant evening, full of good book-talk and movie/TV talk. And we ate pizza. It’s a good restaurant — we’ve been there before, and they have all kinds of delicious Italian food, but we both admitted we’d had a craving for pizza recently, so that’s what we ordered.  When going for pizza, I always check the menu carefully. Will ..read more

In a change from the cooking posts, here’s a little touch of beauty from a new-to-me artist, Norwegian watercolorist Aud Rye. You can see more of her work here or by searching the web ..read more

The other day, I was chatting with friends  and the topic of  the Womens’ Weekly cookbooks came up. Australians reading this post will know exactly what I’m talking about. The Australian Womens’ Weekly was an institution in Australia from the 1930’s onwards. During the 1950s and ’60s it had the highest circulation (per capita) of any women’s magazine in the world. And cooking and recipes and diets and fashion and all sort were a feature.   But the cookbooks I’m talking about began in the 1970’s. They were a new kind of cookbook, cheap, but with masses of colored photos on gloss ..read more

Last week when I made choc-chip cookies for a visitor, I didn’t take a photo. But I had half a tin of condensed milk left, so I had to make another batch, didn’t I? <g> This is the “before” pic — blobs of raw dough, not neatly rolled into balls as in the website I linked to in the last post. The final cookies look a bit rough, but they tasted lovely. I really like the recipe with the condensed milk in it. If you follow it, make sure you’re using condensed milk — not evaporated milk. Condensed milk is thick like honey. And below are the finished cookies.  They don’t look as pretty a ..read more

Good morning, all. I’m sitting here, sipping my morning coffee (white no sugar) and eating a hot cross bun. Which isn’t hot, but is still delicious.  They’re called”Hot Cross Buns”from an old rhyme, that goes “Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns, One a penny, Two a penny, Hot Cross Buns.”  They’re very tasty, spiced with cinnamon and other spices and  studded with currants and sultanas. I bought these ones fresh yesterday, and they’re still delicious. Once they start to get stale, they are equally yummy toasted. In my old house, my neighbors’ kids  once brought me some home-mad ..read more

Thanks to all of you who played the jigsaw game and saw the cover for The Secret Daughter. For those who didn’t play, or couldn’t, or didn’t have the time, here it is in full. My editor and the Berkley Art Dept and I went through several cover designs and the final version was tweaked several times. I’m very grateful for their patience, but covers are so important, especially now that the market is flooded with books and most people buy on line. But I’m very happy with the final result. It’s so pretty, don’t you think? I’ll tell you more about the story later — it comes out on Christmas Eve 2 ..read more

My publisher and I have finalised the new cover for the book I’ve just finished, The Secret Daughter, and  I’m very happy with it. As promised, I will share it first with the people who subscribe to my blog — that’s you! But I’m being tricky , so first up I’m sharing it as an online  jigsaw puzzle.   This one isn’t as hard as the last one, which quite a few of you found too hard, so it’s  only 35 pieces.   https://www.jigsawplanet.com/?rc=play&pid=3c274453253d But if you want to try one that’s a little bit harder here’s one with 70 pieces.  https://www.jigsawp ..read more

I love lorikeets — small rainbow-coloured parrots and usually, when I hear them chittering and screeching in my tree at home in the morning, I smile. It’s such a happy sound. But here in Coolangatta, where my writers’ retreat takes place, hundreds of them nest in the Norfolk Island Pine trees that line the street outside. So in the evening, when they come in to sleep, and at dawn when they wake, they make a tremendous racket. It’s quite deafening. By the time the sun’s up, they’re gone to wherever they go to forage for the day. (Probably to the nearby Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary where peopl ..read more

I’m away from home at the moment, on my annual writing retreat. We’ve been doing it since 2007, and for the past few years we’ve come to the same place, a holiday apartment complex opposite the beach in southern Queensland. That’s the view from my “office” for this week. There are nine of us in the group, all multi published, and though we started out all writing for the same publisher (HarlequinMills&Boon) we’ve branched out quite a bit since then. I was already with Berkley before that first retreat but others have moved to different publishers since then, and quite a few of us have dip ..read more