Emotions and Talking About It

Posted on

As many are aware by now, on Friday March 15, 2019, my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand came under attack. On the morning after that attack, I posted my thoughts about what had happened, trying to make some sort of sense to the insanity. While that post was well received, there were other things going on in the background that highlighted a few others things to me about myself and how people react to stress in general.

As a country as a whole, this is going to be a long road back to any sense of normalcy. This event will change our perceptions of our home forever, and in ways that none of us can predict right now. A friend said to me that this event, in a way, is our 9/11. She’s right.

But we will heal. How do I know this? Because I refuse to go into a shell and hide like a turtle. And I refuse to let others do the same.

Read More→
New Zealand

But in New Zealand???

Posted on

It is Saturday morning, and I’m now facing a shift in my sense of reality. Less than 24 hours ago, my world was safe and calm, and my worst worry was how I was going to convince my husband to buy the new lounge suite that I want, or how was the next scene in my manuscript going to play out, or where does one find the money to pay for the writers conference that I want to go to in August.

No, instead, my worst worry has now joined that of many others around world.

Will today be the day that a terrorist takes my son, my daughter or my husband away from me?

On Friday 15th March, 2019, an unknown number of madmen marched into two separate mosques on opposite sides of Christchurch, New Zealand (my home city) and opened fire. They then proceeded to locations north and south of the central city, attempting to evade arrest while causing more acts of terrorism.

For the first time in history, the entire city of Christchurch, New Zealand was on lockdown. All schools, all malls, all businesses closed and locked their doors. Residents citywide were encouraged to stay inside. For nearly 4 hours, an entire city was held to ransom. And what makes it all bizarre… It happened in little, old New Zealand, one of the safest countries in the world. 

Lives have been lost in this senseless madness. Families have been ripped apart by an act driven by hatred. Nothing can make up for that. New Zealand as a whole is now suffering.

Be warned, this is a LONG post, but I had to get it out, because so much is going on in this mind of mine.

Read More→

Device-Free Experiment Gone Awry!

Posted on

So, over the Christmas holidays, my family and I began an experiment where we would go device-free for one day a week. In the beginning, I saw the withdrawal on my teenage children’s faces, and my husband was just as bad. A month later, we started to notice patterns within our activities on how so much of our lives actually revolved around the internet. (Stationary lists for the school were online.)

We’re now at the beginning of March 2019, and the experiment has gone completely awry!

Read More→

Traditional vs Self-Publication: The argument has flipped.

Posted on

There was a time when the world at large looked down their noses at anyone who self-published, like the writing was sub-par. In many ways, it was. In those early days of Amazon and Kindle, self-publishing was so easy. Getting your book out into the world was just a matter of uploading your file to the internet and clicking on a few buttons. You didn’t even need to pay a dime if you didn’t want to. As such, everyone from the dog to the neighbor was self-publishing — and the world became flooded with books, many of which should have never been published when they were.

The market is still flooded with sub-par self-published books, but things have moved on. With the changes that have occurred within the industry as a whole, the quality of the self-published works has gone up and the ability to get traditional publication contracts has dramatically become harder. And the attitudes about self-publication have now flipped, and the stigma is now attached to the traditional roads.

For someone like myself, it is exciting times to see these transformations within the publishing industry. However, the shift in attitudes actually make my blood boil — but not because of where the stigma now lies, but because of the way people treat me when they discover that I’m determined to go down the traditional route with my fiction.

Read More→

We Let Strangers Into Our Lives

Posted on

For the last few years, I’ve been writing crime thrillers. Thinking in the head of a bad guy can be liberating. Not sure when these stories of mine will be published (the publishing industry really is a hurry-up-and-wait industry), but I keep pressing forward, and continue to write stories where the bad guys come after us in ways that we are all subject to.

I always wanted the novel to be a cautionary tale about oversharing on social media and the internet. The more I delve into various aspects of internet security, the more I get excited—and scared.

I'm excited, because I know exactly how my serial killer is finding his victims—how he's stalking them. And I also know how he has managed to elude capture for over twenty years. As the writer of this creepy tale, this is fantastic. However, it also scares me, because I'm consciously aware that there will be some sicko out there doing exactly what the bad guy in my story is doing.

I've decided to start this blog series on social media and internet security on my personal blog in the hopes that at least one person out there will take notice and start to examine their own practices. If my ramblings can save just one person from becoming the victim, then I'll be over the moon.

Read More→