Returning to Itticca

•July 18, 2021 • Leave a Comment

It seems I have not logged in for quite some years! How the world has changed!

Since my last post some years have passed. Here’s a recap:

  • 2014 BookPal Australia collapsed, leaving my book out of circulation
  • 2014-2017 were years of almost completely dropping any creative endeavours – at least on the writing front – as we (those shafted by the BookPal collapse) organised ourselves on Facebook and tried to sort out the liquidation of BookPal and decide who to go with next
  • 2018 I decided I needed to revitalise the manuscript and retry with Xlibris
  • 2019 I republished with Xlibiris
  • 2020 – Year of Glory – Australian Bushfires and the Global Pandemic
  • 2021 – here we are…

During my hiatus from this work, I have started another writing project – one about an off-world adventure and trying out a different type of writing style.

And now, as the title suggests I have returned to Itticca once again, because I have been fighting writing the prequel story for quite some years now – and it is a complete story inside my head.

I have not yet decided whether I want the “prequel” to be a private work or whether it will end up being a published work. Either way it is fun to be writing again.

I don’t know about you but I don’t sleep very well when stories are telling themselves to me. Weeks of build up and now I have two writing projects on the go. And in these projects I can invest some energy. Sleep only comes when I put these swirling stories on paper. And when they come, they come.

I will endeavour to post more here as well as on my Facebook page. Until next time 🙂

Karen xx

Posted in Pleased to make your acquaintance... :)

Australia Day 2013

•January 26, 2013 • Leave a Comment
So we celebrate Australia Day Down Under.26th January is the day all Australians come together in our national identity.
I was somewhat hesitant to say “Happy Australia Day”. After all, a country — any country was built on unnumbered sacrifices. Some of these are valiant, stands that heroes take to defend values and standards. Many men and women sacrificed their lives in war, in labour and in quiet service for the good of this country.
Some sacrifices are less glorious, the unwitting by-product of a proud and inconsiderate group bent on conquest and land, rather than compassion and humanity. To the men and women who come in the “name of God” and yet do terrible things in vanity, happy to use the name of God as an excuse to enforce acts of brutality and discrimination, yet refusing to bow before a Holy God – the creator of all humankind who hates such discrimination and cruelty – refusing to espouse the very values of compassion and love that God establishes as the very foundations of His Kingdom.

There are many wrongs in our past to be undone, many things to atone for. Australians believe in a fair go for all – and it shall start here in our backyard.

We have an awesome country, that many are proud to call home – but let us not forget the lessons from the past. God Bless Australia.

Posted in Pleased to make your acquaintance... :)

Nephilim and the Sons of God

•January 12, 2013 • Leave a Comment

It’s been some time since I updated my blog – all too many things happening at once!

Well, since my last update I have been reading this brilliant piece of theological essay on the topic of the Nephilim, and how the there are different understandings of the term: who they are, what they mean, and how these “beings” fitted into the Biblical timeline.

The topic was of immense interest to me, as you may well have guessed. I have always taken Genesis 6:1-2 to mean the Fallen Angels out of the Great Rebellion mingled with the daughters of humanity, and out of those unions came the suprahuman beings of old, those who have made their ways into the tales and myths that we take as creation stories and classical mythologies today.

I had not read much on the subject prior to penning my novel, and perhaps if I had read more widely, some details may have changed, but this book was a refreshing read.

The book (on my Kindle) was supportive of this assumption, and laid out arguments in a rational and systematic manner. I love writing of this type.

It got me thinking. We like to think that in our “modern age” we are aware of most things and know most things. I can just hear the Heavenly realms laughing at us feeble humans with our delusions of grandiosity – our blissful ignorance. There is so much in our world we do not understand, so many things that do not fit into our neat little boxes we call “logic”. These things scare us, and we happily dismiss them as “illogical” or “outliers” and disregard them to go back into our cloisters of comfort and delusion.

We so readily put forward opinions and confuse them as “fact”; we make assumptions about life and confuse them with “truth” – in all our folly we are a mess. But what if all our logic is incomplete? What if things we cannot “make sense of” points to higher logic?

The Bible points to people in ancient times hold immensely advanced knowledge, pointing also to a civilization so unbelievably talented – an Atlantis if you will – and yet so foolish in their pride that they offended God so much that they had to be destroyed. All knowledge comes from God, and in their pride they refused to acknowledge their source – the ultimate plagiarism.

And it is out of this very picture that Evanna’s world comes to life, her lineage from the Nephilim was born, an amazing world advanced and yet wonderfully in tune with the land.

So, if you have enjoyed the journey with Evanna, how about examining the source text again? One line in the Bible inspired a book – but another line may yet bring new life. Jesus’ claims and His work from the same book may be the very thing you are a looking for – the source of Life, the Creator and the Author of all the stories on the Earth.

Posted in Pleased to make your acquaintance... :)
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Welcoming 2013

•December 31, 2012 • Leave a Comment

Happy New Year from Sydney, Australia! 🙂 May you all be blessed as a new year starts, and may the true meaning of Life and all the story you have been given become your foundation for years to come – may the reality of True Peace be yours this year. God Bless!

Posted in Pleased to make your acquaintance... :)
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Finally Started a FaceBook Page for the book!

•August 25, 2012 • Leave a Comment

Good day all – I have finally started a FaceBook page for my little project novel 🙂

My boss’s words were echoing through my head on and off, and I decided to take a step (while procrastinating my HR reading) to get it up.

Whatever it is worth I guess I just gave it one extra channel to be known, so here goes!! 🙂 The page goes under the full title of the book “Blue Scorpion – Last Flight of the Ancients”

Posted in The Self-Publishing Journey
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On the Publicity Front

•August 18, 2012 • Leave a Comment

In the past few months since publication, I have been somewhat quiet about promoting my work, and in my boss’s words, it felt like I was just going to “put it out there and let it take on a life of its own” – well, it’s not quite like that.

While I have not actively promoted the work, I am not shy about it, nor am I ashamed of it. The quietness is largely contextual. You see, while at Church, I hold a voluntary office and promoting “my own work” seems inappropriate. At work, I feel I don’t really want to make a big deal of it (I pipe up about other things enough as it is!!). And I spend most of my waking hours in these two contexts.

In recent times, I have submitted ads through BookPal Australia’s promotion and marketing offers to major bookstores, and have dropped postcards to my local Gloria Jeans store, and have made contact with my local library and my own High School to let them know what I’ve been up to. I confess it feels slow, given that I only submitted my “update” to my High School Old Girls’ Union newsletter several months after initial publication, but these were in the works.

Still over all of this, really is my belief that God will spotlight ways I can put the news out there without resorting to begging. And where all this ends up is really still not my call.

Either way, till next time!

Posted in The Self-Publishing Journey
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Solemn Reminders – Circle of Life

•August 10, 2012 • Leave a Comment

It’s been some months since I’ve last entered something in my blog, but the past few months have been pretty busy for me!
Not only was it end of financial year for us in Australia (and along with that come a train of things that have to be done), things also got somewhat busy at Church and well, I also spent a lot more time in my Sims3 Game…

Confessions aside, I decided to log in and write again because the past few months have also been a time of sharing in pain. Whether it was watching friends go through the pain of cancer, or hearing about losses and death (be they of friends, relatives or beloved companions of the four-legged kind) or suffering the aftermath of injury – they were all solemn reminders of one’s mortality and the transient nature of all things on Earth.

As the old saying goes: “There is nothing certain in life except Death and Taxes”. See, we tend to accept death and loss as a “natural” part of life. We become experts as “getting on with life” and “getting over the loss” that we forget to stop ourselves just to reflect. We are so engrossed in “coping” that we do not ask ourselves “What if this is not the way things were meant to be? What if Death did not need to be?”

These two questions are exactly the purpose of my entry today – the proposition that Death is NOT Natural and that it was NOT intended to be a part of the Original Plan. Perhaps Death only came to be, because we (or our ‘First Parents’ as I worded it, in the opening words of Blue Scorpion – Last Flight of the Ancients) did not trust in the Original Plan and decided to be smart and go our own way – not the way that our Maker designed us. Because of rebellion (the Bible calls this “sin”) we allowed Death to enter all Creation.

The comfort for me is this – that for some, Death has been defeated because the Maker of Life has put Death to death. But only the Maker can fix Death up for us. The Rebellion that left us with a deep debt (damage of all Creation!) that we could not pay: but God made the payment for us, that those who accept that payment on our behalf will receive Life – not just “in the next life” but Life from now onwards.

There is nothing certain in Life – except that Life cannot come from our own hands. The offer is there, will you take it?

Posted in Flying with the Ancients - Reflections on Blue Scorpion
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The word spreads…

•June 11, 2012 • Leave a Comment

My stats tell me that it has been some time since I last posted. So I’ll make a short post 🙂 hehe….

I have maintained to date a fairly low profile, and have only recently sent the news of the publication of the “Blue Scorpion – Last Flight of the Ancients” to my old school for their Alumni publication. Friends have been most supportive but I have still kept it quiet.

I have been mulling over the question of when I should step up the promotion and even look into advertising. While I still maintain that God is my main promoter, it does not rule out my looking at where He is opening doors. As I keep my eyes and ears open, I find often that God points out places that I can send a postcard to, or write something to, in order to let people know that such a book exists.

The journey is still on, and it is an adventure to see where God would lead me in this little endeavour. If He gave this story to me to tell, then those who He wants to read it will eventually read it. I have had an awful lot of fun writing this story – almost for myself – and I have decided to share it with the world. I just hope it will be a blessing to others.

Posted in The Self-Publishing Journey

Where does the Music come from?

•May 12, 2012 • Leave a Comment

Music features heavily in this story of Evanna and her adventures. From the half-way hinted mention of Evanna carrying a fife with her at all times and being a “Piper” (or flautist) to the feature picture of the cuatro of Sir Matthias (yes, it is Matthias’ cuatro on the cover!) it is a theme.

Have you ever wondered where the overlaid music that plays over an emotional movie love scene comes from? Why does music move us so? How can a few notes make us dance and laugh and cause us to shed emotional tears?

If I were to be completely purist about it, music consists of varying tones going up and down with different rhythms separating them. If you break down what music is really made of – it really isn’t very exciting at all.

C.S. Lewis once wrote a story about some children who find themselves on a sea-faring voyage on a ship called the Dawn Treader. Eustace, Lucy and Edmund landed on Romandu’s island to discover the man was a “star”. And the “star” said something very telling when Eustace tried to be a smarty-pants and explained that stars were in fact, balls of gases and fire – but responding that while gases and fire may be what stars were made of, that it was not what they were.

I believe the same is with music, a bunch of sounds on a page is what it is made of.

Perhaps we in the scientific era have confused the constitution and make-up of any given object with the identity of the object. In fact, we do it with ourselves. We are more than skin and bones and cells – we call ourselves “human” because we know there is something much bigger, far more majestic – and yet so brittle and fragile and broken.

Next time you hear music, perhaps it would be prudent to stop and reflect on the soul of what you are listening to – what it IS. Perhaps it is a clue to who you are too!

Posted in Pleased to make your acquaintance... :)

Sir Torias and the Priestess Adeline – Auditors and Accountants of the Antediluvian World

•May 11, 2012 • Leave a Comment

And yes, my reference material for this couple was also a couple – and guess what they did/do!

Every story needed a little bit of romance, and instead of making my main character the subject of conventional romance, I decided to make a fairly prominent supporting character into one instead.

Torias was a difficult one to portray on paper. He had to be complex enough to take on the role at the end, but jovial enough to act as the ‘clown’ for the first part of the story. All in all, Torias was a good man to have around when something needed to be done. Evanna knew that and put him ahead of the column to lead the siege. Ischahalia knew that and put him in charge of the defences.But Torias the incurable romantic would frequently journey into the city to see his beloved.

Adeline was perhaps one of my latest character additions – but possibly one of the most impactful. A timid, mild-mannered Priestess and Healer by training, she was also a studious and diligent person. Hidden by hints and cryptic clues at the beginning, Adeline’s character was not fully revealed until the meet-up point where she declared her bold decision to follow the army in the face  of uncertainty and fear. Her courage, devotion and sense of adventure took her to new grounds and the frontline of the battlefield to become a powerful support to Torias and to Zeina.

Posted in Plot's Point

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