The Battersblog: MOVING ALONG

Fine, thanks. How are you?

Corpse-Rat King is lurching towards a conclusion. I've completed 95 000 words and have one longish section towards the end to knit togvether and the first draft will be completed. Say another 2 or 3 thousand words tops, and then I can let it stew until January before I go back and begin carving it up into tiny little pieces and painting them different colours.

Oh, and I've joined Nanowrimo again this year. The project this time round is a novelisation of my TV script Cirque, which garnered some positive comments from last year's WA Film Corporation script competition without managing to win. If you're of a mind to join the program (or already have) and want to buddy up, I'm entered under the name leebattersby, and my page is here.

Elsewhere, domesticity reigns. Mandurah in spring is a groovelicious thing: we pressed the nostalgia buttion big time the other weekend by packing the kids up and catching the ferry over to Penguin Island, prompting me to tell anyone who'd listen about how the last time I'd gone over, back in 1990 when I was still living in Rockingham, I'd walked across on the sandbar; how there were no boardwalks and we could clamber over all the rock faces that are now sealed off for the bird sanctuary; how I'd stayed at the camp buildings that stood where the penguin feeding area stands now; how we'd sat under the caves that are now sealed off beause of the falling risk.... in between my old man stories we spent a gorgeous afternoon beachcombing for shells, sharing lunch with the enormous skinks that invaded the picnic area, and embarking on the glass-bottom boat tour to Seal Island to watch seals play in the surf and a solitary dolphin bully a stingray out of its meal.

Idyllic? Bloody paradise, mate.