Tongariro

In the centre of the North Island is Tongariro National Park, the oldest of our national parks and a fascinating area to visit. I had an extra reason for my most recent journey there, as one of my characters visits the park in my work-in-progress.

It's a volcanic landscape, with tussock and beech forest, mountains and streams, lakes and waterfalls.

Mount Ruapehu

Mount Ngauruhoe

Taranaki Falls

Wairere Stream

There are multi-day hikes in this area. There are also walks that range from a few minutes to a whole day. The main walk we did on this visit was to and from the Tama Lakes, two old explosion craters.

Lower Tama Lake, Ruapehu in background

Upper Tama Lake, Ngauruhoe in background

My character stays in a rather basic hut, but I was fortunate enough to be staying in the very comfortable hotel that opened in 1930. It's just visible as a white speck below the patch of dark green a little to the right of the centre of this photograph, below taken from the track overlooking the upper Tama Lake:

Journey's end was in sight, albeit at quite some distance. I slept soundly that night.

Rangitoto Island

One of the delights of writing my books is the excuse it gives for visiting interesting places. I hadn't been to Rangitoto Island for many years, but when a character decided to go on an outing there in my work-in-progress, I decided it was high time I paid the island a visit.

Rangitoto Island is a familiar sight to anyone who's visited Auckland. The island is roughly circular, so it looks the same from all directions. It's a relatively young volcano, last erupting a mere 500 or so years ago.

We took the ferry over one morning, and set out to climb to the 260-metre (850 feet) summit.

The dominant species of Rangitoto's forest cover is pohutukawa, sometimes called the New Zealand Christmas Tree for its profusion of red flowers at Christmastime (we were there just a little too early for its flowering). Pohutukawa and other species are gradually covering the island, especially since the major pest eradication of recent decades, but there are still large areas of bare lava flow:

Those fields of jagged lava make it all the more impressive to see how vegetation takes hold, survives, and eventually thrives in this challenging environment.

Looking into the crater from the summit:

We walked around the crater, with fine views in all directions:

On our descent, we took a short detour to the lava caves. These were formed when the outside of lava flows cooled while the contents kept moving, leaving hollow tubes:

We made a more leisurely day of this lovely outing than the energetic young visitors of my work-in-progress, but enjoyed it just as much as they did.

1908 - travelling on the Main Trunk Line

Building the North Island's Main Trunk Railway Line was an enormous task for New Zealand. It took more than twenty years to complete the 680 kilometre line from Wellington to Auckland, through some challenging landscapes. The line was officially opened in November 1908, but the first train to travel its length was several months earlier. On 7 August 1908 a group of parliamentarians, including Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward, boarded the train in Wellington. The track wasn't quite finished, but those politicians really wanted to get to Auckland. The engineer in charge was offered £1,000 (a lot of money in 1908) to get the line finished in time for this August journey. The train and its passengers survived a section of temporary, unballasted track, and the politicians got to Auckland after a journey of 20 hours.

And why were they so keen to get to Auckland? The attraction was Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, a massive naval deployment and a major news story of its day. The politicians made it to Auckland in time for the Fleet's arrival on 9 August.

These days one can fly between the two cities in less than an hour, or drive the distance in around nine hours, but in the early years of the 20th century this 20-hour journey (reduced to a mere 18 hours in 1909) was a huge improvement over the long sea journey or going by stage coach.

The Main Trunk Line was a major achievement, but it still left many provincial areas isolated, including the Bay of Plenty. Rail did not reach the central Bay of Plenty till 1928, and got no further east than Taneatua, near Whakatane. The proposed link through to Gisborne was never achieved. My fictional Ruatane never did get a rail link.

I'm currently at a section in my work-in-progress where a character has to travel from Ruatane to Wellington. It means taking the coastal steamer to Auckland (which means going north when his destination is south), then the train to Wellington. Even this long, somewhat convoluted journey is a great improvement on the trip he would have had to make before 1908.

Passchendaele

Today is the anniversary of what was, in terms of lives lost in a single day, the greatest disaster in New Zealand history. On the 12th of October 1917, during the Battle of Passchendale, 2,700 New Zealanders were killed or wounded. More on the battle can be found here.

Last year I went to an exhibition commemorating Passchendaele, sent to New Zealand by the Passchendaele Memorial Museum in Belgium. It was held at Fort Takapuna, from where some of the departing soldiers were deployed. On the grounds of the fort over 5,000 white crosses had been set up, one for every New Zealander killed in Flanders.



My work-in-progress has some of my characters being caught up in this battle. It's not really a spoiler to say that at least one will die there, because I could not claim to be at all realistic without reflecting something of the tragedy surrounding Passchendaele. Oddly enough, I have no sense that I'm "killing off" a character here; the death feels as inevitable as the events that drag these boys to Belgium. Foolish as it may sound, I do sometimes cry over characters who die; all the more so when it's one I've "known" since he was a child.

Celebrating Spring

It's springtime in this part of the world. Blossom on the trees, daffodils in the orchard, calves and lambs in the paddocks (although not in ours; our sheep live a celibate lifestyle).

Calving was (and is) an important time of year on a dairy farm. Here's a snippet from my work-in-progress:

New Year's Day

The New Year arrives early in New Zealand, thanks to our position close to the Date Line. So it's already eleven hours old as I write this. 2010 has got off to a pleasant start, including leftover méthode champenoise for breakfast.

Musing over 2009:
- I substantially edited Sentence of Marriage, removing most of what made up the first five chapters and reducing the word count by over 20,000. I also tightened and polished the three later books.
- I joined Authonomy in November 2008, so I've been a member for all of 2009. Sentence of Marriage has been in Authonomy's top 40 for the last few months. More importantly, I've received useful feedback and real encouragement, and have had the chance to read some fine manuscripts. I've also had a lot of fun there.
- I put my books on Smashwords, which has itself made huge progress this year as an increasingly high profile e-book provider. Sentence of Marriage is currently at number 15 on Smashwords' Top 100 list, and has had almost 3,000 downloads.
- I've had fine reviews on WorkingGirlReviews for Sentence of Marriage and Mud and Gold.
- I've made some progress on my WIP, most importantly in getting to know the characters who make their first appearance in this volume.

Looking ahead for 2010:
- I'd like to see a completed first draft of my WIP by the end of the year. It will take the series from 1912 to the mid-1920s, so will include the years of the First World War (though from the point of view of those left at home, not at the Front), a new area of research for me. The whole book is going to demand much research, a thought I relish.
- I'm hoping for more reviews (Sentence of Marriage was accepted for review by a site specialising in historical fiction on 31 December), and to gain more visibility for my books.
- I have a list of ideas for future books that keeps expanding, much to my delight.
- I hope to keep growing and improving as a writer (which, as Mr Collins said to Lizzie, perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier).

Happy New Year to everyone reading this.

Writing about real people

Although I use historical settings, I've studiously avoided using real, historical characters in my works. Over the years I've read and enjoyed many books that do portray real people, but I have an aversion to doing it myself that almost borders on fear. I'd hate to "get it wrong".

Recently I was blog-browsing, following links from one to the next, as you do, until I was so many link-layers in that I can't now remember whose blog it was or how I got there. I do remember that the blog quoted an author whose opinion on the subject helped me crystalise my own: what I feel most unwilling to do is use a real person as a point-of-view character. I simply don't feel comfortable thinking someone else's thoughts for them, when the person is not one of those characters living within that chaotic place I call my mind.

It's good that I've got that straight at last, because it's become increasingly clear to me that in my current work-in-progress I need to include a real, historical figure: the real, historical headmaster of an Auckland school. Oh, I could manipulate matters to avoid this. I could use a different name, but the headmaster at the time was a fairly well-known figure, and the school in question has a building named after him. I could scurry further from the issue and use an imaginary school, but anyone who's at all familiar with Auckland in the early 20th century would know what school I'm referring to. So I've taken the plunge, and am using the real Mr Tibbs (a name I'd hardly dare invent) for a short scene on enrolment day.

I'm fortunate enough to have read the memoirs, retrieved for me from the distant basement stacks of the library, of a man born just a few months after my point-of-view character for these scenes, and who went to this very school. He recorded his memories of his own enrolment day, so I can put words in Mr Tibbs' mouth that he is on record as having said. I've daringly added a few words of my own invention, but I don't think they will have the gentleman turning in his grave. And I've stayed steadfastly out of his head.