A Fun Excerpt From "Land of Fire".

I am currently rereading, "Land of Fire" to get my headset in the right place to start writing the sequel next week.

I've got to the entrance of the irrepressible Brodie, and have been enjoying it so much I thought you might like to have a read of it too.

Enjoy!

Perry hung up his fifth cheesecloth shirt in a row, and above this line of dripping hippydom an apparition leapt into view from around the side of the house. It had wild, fine, orange hair that blew out like a halo about its head, a blunt, jolly face, forearms like orange-furred treetrunks, a broad, naked, furry chest, and it wore a kilt and nothing else.

   The apparition’s name was Brodie Mac Brodie, and the last time Perry had seen him was at a medieval event in Sydney, where he had been the best fighter on the day, as he usually was, which had included thrashing Perry’s arse from one end of the Eric to the other. Brodie and Perry went way back, back to their early teen years at least, and they had always been friends.

   “M’Lord Peregrine!” Brodie roared, and swept a flashy bow that left his hair even more excited than before.

   Not big on fast reactions, Perry was still standing behind his shirts, peg in hand and mouth agape. A larger-than-life Australian Highlander in your backyard didn’t happen every day, not even to Perry. He scrambled for his wits and ducked under the washing to come give Brodie a hug.

   “Bloody hell!” Perry groaned as he was hugged back (groaned because all the air was being crushed out of his chest). “What are you doing in Perth, you mad bugger?”

   “I’ve come to stay with you of course,” Brodie answered, looking not at all offended at being called a mad bugger, probably because he was one. “Well, that and I wangled a short short-term contract over here. Going to have my arse in the river of gold for three months! Two weeks on the rig, one week off, which I want to spend every minute of with you!”

   Perry can be forgiven for looking dismayed for just a second before he managed to get that welcoming smile back on his face: Brodie Mac Brodie, whose real name was lost to the mists of childhood, and perhaps these days only seen on those oil rig contracts and the like, was as bad as Perry’s parents for living what was to most people only a hobby. He was Mad Medievalist incarnate, an odd thing to find in an Electrician, but there you have it.

   “What’s the local group like?” he asked, and Perry needed no further explanation to know that he was asking about the local members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, which back in Sydney filled Brodie’s life as well as providing him with a family.

   “I don’t actually know,” Perry had to admit. “I came over here to be normal for a while.”

   “What’s normal, my friend?” Brodie asked, and gave some mysterious, probably bare, area under his kilt a good scratch.

   “Not kilts as streetwear, that’s for sure,” Perry rejoindered, “and not spending all your social life poncing around in tights.”

   “Neither you nor I wear tights, unless you’ve changed your persona,” Brodie answered happily, “and kilts are fashionable. Come help me get my gear off your front lawn. The taxi guy wanted to leave in a hurry.”

   “Saw your weapons or something, did he?”

   “My helm, actually,” Brodie said, and grinned a lunatic grin. “I’ve got a new one.”

   The new helm proved to be polished steel with a particularly scary stylized face on it, although, as Perry pointed out, it wasn’t as scary as Brodie’s own mug when he got going.

   They lumped all of Brodie’s gear into the house; his small case of clothing, his large bag full of rattan weapons, his huge trunk full of armour, and the heavy, scary helm. All of it went into Perry’s spare room, which was also his junk room.

   Brodie professed himself happy with the old mattress on the floor amongst the piles of Perry’s old computer components and his multitude of stacked books, and dropped his gear randomly in any available space.

             “Now,” he told Perry, “we get pissed together!”

     

Hairy

It's time to cut my hair again.  These days I have it cut once a year, washing it first, then wandering next door and having my mum cut it straight across at the back.  All my life, I have felt like some of my power lay in my hair, and as a child, hated having it cut.
 
In consequence, when I had a choice, I just didn't.  It got this long and stayed this way for many years.

That horse is my dear Isabeau, by the way. I'll do a post about her one of these days.  We took this pic one day when we were having fun taking photos in our SCA gear. I love this 'hair out' one of my sis, Jen, and I too.

Mostly, though, it stayed in one or two very long braids, because it was just too damned long to bother with.

  

  
Anyway, at some point I got into martial arts and, while I loved my braid down my back as I did patterns and such, I kind of felt like I needed a cooler change.  I started cutting it.  This is about the shortest it got.

 

Weirdly, this very short hair coincides with the beginning of my descent into ill health with lyme. Go figure. Maybe my personal superstition had something to it after all.  :)

I missed my hair and couldn't be bothered with constant trimming, so I stopped cutting it again.  Nowadays, as long as it sits somewhere around the region of my shoulder-blades, I'm happy, and I feel I have my power back.  

Maybe Sampson had something?    


    
   

A Fairy Tale for Our Modern Age.

No much news here. Writing on Heroic Plans is going well at over 30 000 words  and I am >THIS CLOSE< to having Bunyip Dreaming ready to publish.  I'm dying to show you the cover art for it, not to mention give you a chance to read it, but you'll just have to wait a little longer.

In the meantime, here's a funny little story about how we came to have modern society, which, by the way, I think is pretty much insane.  Why is it that some of us seem born to toe the line willingly and to follow the advertising blindly, and others can see right through the bullshit?  I have no idea.


Anyway, do read this.  It's an interesting perspective.

http://godsandradicals.org/2015/08/25/the-disenchanted-kingdom/

Us as happy somewhat rich 12th C Scots at an SCA event. It's always been better to be one of the nobs.   :)

 

Horses I've loved: Sherry

Sherry was so pretty.  She always delighted my eyes.

 

I owned Sherry the longest of any horse I've had.  She stayed with me till the day she died unexpectedly at 22.  I thought she'd live much longer than that.  She was a registered Part Arabian, Buckskin and Australian Stud Saddle Pony, and had been very successful in the show ring, but I never really showed her after one attempt at halter where it was obvious she was bored to tears.  By the time she came to me at 11, Sherry was over showing and preferred to do fun stuff.   We did all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

This was some sort of medieval jousting demo in a huge dome thingy in town. I was the jester.  The demo itself was a bit of a disaster, since the jousting horses wouldn't actually come together to joust but Sherry was a marvel, coping with the noises and sights of the crowd and indoor space like an old hand, galloping around the arena, tail and mane and ribbons flowing.  Look at my bare feet!  Imagine the insurance nightmare that would be nowadays!
 

Actually I seem to be barefoot in most of these pics. I was such a feral!

  

We did other medieval stuff too.  I love this pic of a group of us coming home after a quest we did at an SCA event we ran at our share house.  Such a mix of costumes and we all look happy, so it was obviously time well spent.  I think I was 21 then.  I had high hands, I know. I did that a lot on her.  Something to do with the way she'd get her head down and pigroot if I didn't, maybe.  :)

 

Here she is, maybe pigrooting, or maybe just cantering, on the same day. Her back end was always overtaking her front end.  Sis used to say that from behind it was like watching a Staffy run, the way she'd just get those back legs working together at the same time. Argh! My hands, my hands!  

      

I also trained Sherry to harness and drove her about the streets.  Never used blinkers.  I'd been too influenced by reading Black Beauty.  It never caused an issue, as she was pretty much bombproof in harness, as long as you didn't canter, but then she was always a handful at canter, saddle or harness.  She was a whizz in a cart, could really skim along with that floating Arab trot.  Funny how much faster you seem to be going when behind them than when on top of them.    

 

By the way, that skinny horse behind us there was a rescued Tb broodmare who came from a stud that was closing down, for obvious reasons. She was fattening up by then, believe it or not!  The two dogs are my Keech and Sam. 

Sherry hadn't done any jumping before she came to me and I can't say she was ever wild about it, but we did do low level stuff and even a few small one day events.  This was at Adult Riding Club.

 

We did a heap of trail riding out into the bush and she was a fantastic trail horse.  That's my sister Jen riding a part Arabian, part Standardbred mare called Duchess, who she leased for a while.  She and Sherry made a great pair on the trail, being both ripsnorting hotties who liked to hurry it along.  No dawdling for those two!  Heh, we've both got bare feet in this pic.  We were such bushgrubs.     

 

By the way, the liver Dalmatian in some of these pics is Flicka, who was my sister's dog.  She was pretty much bonkers but very pretty.  Here she is being bonkers at Christmas in 1997.

 

Sherry was a 'hoon' whether saddled or unsaddled. 

But she was also very clever and sensible when it counted.

Like Misty of Chincoteague, she even got to come inside when we had a couple of bad storms here, though I didn't get any photos of it.  She ate all my hanging herbs in the kitchen and watched tv with great interest, and I'm just lucky she didn't decide to wee!

She didn't mind giving pony rides, but was never a beginner's horse.

She was complicated, funny, beautiful, opinionated and fun.  I always think of a particular Icelandic quote when I see this pic of us.

 

"Between a man and a horse and a dog lies a secret bond."

Between Sherry, Keech, Sam and I, there was a bond, no doubt about it.     

  

About Freya and the Golden Bear

The character Freya Fjordrider began as a persona for me in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism).  I chose the name Freya because I'd recently moved into a household of Pagans and begun to discover the Gods other than the Christian God, and Freya of the Norse Pantheon was the first Goddess who came to my attention. 

I chose to add Fjordrider to my name because I then owned a little mare called Sherry.  She was buckskin, and Fjord horses look similar (though are golden or cream duns).  She was actually a Part Arabian and not really very Fjordy at all!  I'd like to own the real thing but not many Fjords in Oz, even now.  Sherry was a fiery, opinionated little lady, who never walked if she could prance, or trotted if she could instead canter sideways.  I adored her and she was mine till the day she died.  Anyway, she was close enough to a Fjord, so Freya Fjordrider I became at SCA events. I think I was about 22 then.

This is Sherry and I at a camping event we had held at our place. On one of the days, we had a Quest, and Sherry and I had been charging about through the forest pretending I was a bored immortal. If questers encountered me, they had to work out that I needed to be entertained in some way in order to be convinced to give a clue to them.  It was heaps of fun.

By the time this photo was taken, Sherry was a bit over it, as you can see from her expression!  You can just see the somewhat tired ears of my dear heart dog, Keech in the bottom left of the photos too.  She and her sidekick, Sam, were a little tired of traipsing back and forth through the hills as well!  For so many years it was we four together.  Me, Sherry, and those two dogs, Keech and Sam.

 Anyway, at some point the character of Freya Fjordrider, in my head, became louder, wilder, and stronger than my SCA persona, or I, myself, ever was.  By the time I was stuck at teacher's college, knowing it wasn't the right place for me but determined to stick it out till I got my degree, she had become a bit of an icon for me.  What would Freya do, I wondered to myself in certain situations. Generally be a lot more outspoken and have a lot more fun than I was having, I usually decided!

So, in those teacher's college years, and on into the time I spent as a bad relief teacher and then as a better youth worker, I wrote that first novel, Freya and the Golden Bear. The more I dressed and acted as something I wasn't, crushed myself into a mold I was never made for, the more important it was to spend time writing Freya's adventures. All my formative years of reading Robert E Howard's Conan books, and all those Asterix Comics, stood me in good stead, as Freya and her bad-tempered horse managed to fight their way out of every situation I put them in.  I think she somehow also channeled Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, another of my early favorite characters.  

I had a ball with it!  I wrote it on a little orange manual typewriter that my Grandmother had given me as a present way back when I'd first decided I wanted to be a writer.  Often I'd be sitting right by my potbelly stove on a cold winter night, typing away madly, with the typewriter on a milk crate and me sitting on a low footstool, the better to be right by the fire and warm as I wrote.  I remember I was deep in the middle of some exciting scene one time, when a log fell out of the open door of the fire, and I jumped right to my feet and was all set to fight off the invaders, I was so adrenalised.  I was very glad no-one but the dogs was there to see me do it!

Of course it's had a lot of revisings, this book, but as I've polished it, I've always tried to maintain the energy and rough humour of it. I think I've managed that.  It's for sure the funniest book I've written yet, and also by far the rudest!

The latest book I'm writing is about as serious as anything I've done so far. Not by planning, it's just how it's worked out.  I do wonder if perhaps my next book will be a revisit to the world of Freya Fjordrider, just to really loosen my writing up again.  She has plenty of land left to rollick over yet!