Scorched Earth

I love Australia. I love the people, the animals, the land. I lived in Adelaide longer than I have ever lived anyplace else, and a part of me will always call Australia home. Watching the fires burn across Victoria these last few days has left me sick at heart.

I know what it's like to hear the roar of a bushfire descending on your home, to see the walls glow red from the flames. But I was lucky; the bushfire that threatened my house in the hills above Adelaide stopped a few hundred feet away. Ironically, I would use the "list of things to take in a bushfire" I drew up after that event a few years later to evacuate for Katrina.

Seeing the devastation left by these fires has me thinking, inevitably, about Katrina. Australia is talking about forming a reconstruction commission to oversee the rebuilding of the devastated areas. After Cyclone Tracy destroyed Darwin in the 70's, a Reconstruction Commission was formed with the task of rebuilding the city in five years. They accomplished the task in three.

It's been three and a half years since Katrina, and New Orleans is still a mess. I'm thinking we should have brought in the Aussies.

The Month of Oz

Last week, an old Aussie friend of mine contacted me out of the blue. Now, this week, I find out that Allen and Unwin have bought the Australian rights to WHAT ANGELS FEAR and WHEN GODS DIE. What a strange coincidence!

I can't tell you about how excited I am by this sale. I've had many overseas sales, but never to Australia. I lived in Australia for eleven years and I would have given anything to see my books in the stores there. Now it's going to happen (even if I'm no longer there to see it).

In my experience, things like this always come in threes. So now I'm thinking, What's the third Aussie link going to be?