But in that lovely little town on Nong Kai on the border between Thailand and Laos I met a man whose conversation turned my head towards adventures in epublishing.
I saw his name in the register as I checked into the Mut Mee, his occupation caught my eye.
“A book designer?” I questioned Harps, the kiwi guy who was checking me in.
“Yeah you should meet him,” Harps.
Strange that as a writer I had never considered the idea of designing a book, possibly because I hadn’t moved past the wrangling with various publishing about the value of my manuscripts and into the hard core area of publishing. The idea intrigued me and so I sought him out in the restaurant later that evening, plonked myself down at his table and shamelessly picked his brains about the future for the publishing industry and the idea that writers may soon become endangered species if we didn’t keep up with the changes.
He pointed out to me the tourists in the restaurant traveling with e readers, he pointed out that I was already driving people to my website and had people reading my rants on the blogs I wrote. Why then was I still thinking in terms of the print media? Why wasn’t I thinking of an E Venture into self publishing?

Why indeed? Did I imagine it or did I actually hear Bob Dylan in the background of that restaurant beside the Mekong River? The times they are a changing, especially for writers.
Print publications are struggling, payment issues drive a lot of freelancers to their knees but with every downside there has to be an upside. There are still opportunities out there for the adaptable writer, for the writer who isn’t trying to support a family or pay a mortgage or even eat three meals a day there are still a few cracks in the woodwork that we can worm our way into.
So I have been quietly working away at trying to understand this brave new writing world and all the time the sales of e readers have increased while the price of the things go down making them more and more accessible to people such as myself who would never have thought to own one before. It’s exciting to think that even at my advanced age, I can still learn stuff!
This entire year has been a huge learning curve in terms of having an online presence; of how to put that ball of me into the cyber air and how to keep it in the air so that my name comes up in Google searches and other queries, epublishing just seems to me to be the next logical step. I have carried these particular stories around for long enough now that I want to set them free into the world so that I can get on with the other stories tapping for attention inside me.
At the moment I am in the final stages of formatting and cover design and plotting the launch campaign. Watch this space as I work my way through this e venture, I will be running a competition on this blog called Mystery Monday where you will get the chance to read the eversion of my book Chasing Shiva and offering other downloads for free.
It’s going to be a brave new year!

]]> http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/heartofindia/2010/12/30/eventuring-into-2011/feed/ 2 http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/heartofindia/2010/10/03/speaking-in-tongues/ http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/heartofindia/2010/10/03/speaking-in-tongues/#comments Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:14:07 +0000 Dianne Sharma-Winter - Heart of India http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/heartofindia/?p=580

When I was a child and living in the wilds of an Australian city suburb, my aunt who worked at a printers turned up one night with a book. The book was called Speaking Strine, at least from memory I think it was so. Strine, for those of you out there who are unfamiliar with the term born in the sixties is the correct way to pronounce Australian. The Australian version of the English language has been filtered down from the early colonials and their ship loads of white slaves (otherwise known as convicts, in fact they were the poor and dispossessed of the advancing industrial revolution sent here for the crime of being poor), to the version we have today which is known as Strine. It’s a lazy idiomatic laid back kind of language, as you can see from the tourism promotion shot above. For a country to encourage tourism with what we were taught was a swearword speaks volumes.  Where the bloody hell did they get that idea from I wonder?  If it wasn’t for the fact that I had seen the television commercials that went with the “Where the bloody hell are ya?” promotion (A white Australian bimbette in a bikini on some gorgeous beach mouthing the same words), I would look at this picture and think it was directed at the indigenous people of this area. But that’s another story to be told another day by the people whose story it is.

I suspect that Strine and the shortening of some words in the language has to do with the amount of flies in the country. They are the most persistent little buggers, the Aussie flies. They will land on your face as you are walking or talking to hitch a free ride, get sucked into that great vacuum we call a mouth and the Aussies call a gob if you happen to be one of those non Australian individuals who can walk and talk at the same time. The stickability of the Aussie fly has given birth to what is known as the Aussie Salute which is the constant waving of the hand in front of the  face to keep the flies at bay. Then there is the beautiful Aussie expression “Standing around catching flies” which means obviously, that someone is standing around with their mouth open and otherwise unemployed. But if someone talks about blowies then this also refers to flies and is short for blowfiles.

While my Asian and South American workmates are busy exchanging words and expressions that come from our own cultures and countries, our favourite one to use at the moment is “No Worries”. You can say No Worries instead of saying you are welcome when someone thanks you for performing a service, you can also use it to express your understanding of spoken instruction. You can also just say it to make your workmates laugh and to test that you have the accent down pat. Laughing and joking around too much will result in you being labelled a rat bag which is not a bag of rats but is intended to mean that you are playing silly buggers. Further up the scale is the term humbug which I think came from the indigenous Australians to describe the white fellow. The white fellow has an interesting and sorry history in Australia, something that is yet to be fully resolved and which the original Australians refer to as sorry business.

Now if someone is trying to tell you lies or to exaggerate a story, you can say “Don’t come the raw prawn on me mate!” Conversely, if someone pleases you, the correct response is to say “You little ripper!”  If you are somewhere and need to ‘go’, you ask for a dunny. The Aussies are inordinately proud of their dunnies, they sing songs about them, decorate them, sell little models of them to tourists and generally treat them as some kind of holy shrine. I am not sure if this is because sewerage is still a novelty to them or because they talk so much shite that they venerate the end product as well.

If you sit outside at night, they will dive bomb you as they hurl themselves towards the lighted window.

The worst thing is when they get inside and you have to deal with them woman to bug.
The other night, a storm and a power cut and lightening flickering on the distant Himalayas and a bug somewhere in the room. My hair stood on end and my nerve ends tingled in anticipation of the attack but soon I realised the bug was between the curtain and the screen on the window. No need to deal with it then, I relied on the beetles instinct to flap with insane futility at the window all night. I reckoned the pull of the light would keep him out of my range and yanked the covers over my head prepared to ignore him until I fell asleep or he gave up.
The whirr thud whirr continued as the lightening flickered on and off in the distance like lights of a distant house showing the way to a visitor.
Stupid bug, even if I was prepared to release it so that its mad flight could continue he would never reach the light that was his hearts desire. He would get trapped by some other light on the way, dazzled by its nearness and forget all about the lightening he yearns for now.
Whirr thud whirr, he danced to the beat of the lightening flashes. It was a dance of desire and futility and pretty much the story of a human life, I reckoned somewhat softening towards the bug. We are all in the darkness to various degrees, fumbling or flying towards the light.
Yeah baby, we do exactly that. We flit from light to light dazzled, bedazzled, drunk with desire and distracted at every point along the way and yet there in the distance is the miraculous light, the mysterious light. Anyway he will be dead by morning, I thought.
But he wasn’t.
And he had shrunk to manageable proportions, so I released him and blessed his miraculous journey.
Easy for you, I said as a parting shot.
I would trade pure blind instinct such as his for my ‘intelligence’ any day.