Captain's Log.

Sometimes I just have to laugh at irony's effect on human life. There's nothing else left to do but smile. Golden Bay Western Australia is a picture postcard place. It's a stretch of around 15kms of sapphire blue ocean meeting rolling dunes. It's natural and untouched. No one in Golden Bay wants to see the dunes flattened by a new developer's plans to put a couple of thousand houses on it. Once that happens, the postcard look will be gone. The irony is that most of the placards placed around the Golden Bay area are on properties built in Golden Bay 20-40 years ago. These homes were taking bites out of the dunes long before someone got offended by it. Animals are today's bargaining item. Mass destruction means mass execution - a matter that leans on greater losses over shorter times. Forget that animals were lost when their homes, roads, highways, power, sewage went in. Death and destruction is totally different now. Irony continues as t...

Just looking for an address in Raby Bay, Cleveland for which to focus my next murder story. And I think I've found one! It needed to be on the water - a canal estate. It had to have good water access to Moreton Bay. It needed a berth large enough in which to moor one motherstuffin' sized catamaran. Now I need to write me a hot lady skipper to captain this yacht. She needs to be a doctor and has the credentials to perform surgery on the boat. She'll be a stunning woman, a fertility specialist with an exemplary record of  turning childless couples into parents... but she also has a dark secret. That's all for now. Stay tuned - M

Deaths at music festivals are on the increase. It's sad but this week another innocent teen died at the hands of an accidental overdose. It's occurred three times in the last month. Now's there's a debate about testing the drugs distributed at musical festivals. If you read the tweets and listen to the traditional media on this topic, it'll have us believing the general consensus is that pill testing should take place at every musical festival - to find out what's exactly inside the concoctions that are illegally dispensed to young Aussies before they swallow and then become victims. What has happened to this world? Why are we at the point of debating of testing pills? When I was younger, I was taught not to put foreign things into my body. Don't do it. The message was clear. The extension to that was 'Don't accept anything from strangers.' It was so simple. DON'T DO IT. Each of us are responsible for OUR own mistakes, not s...

Moreton Bay brings many sights and sounds to the eyes and ears of a sailor. During my time on the olive green liquid in the middle bay I saw turtles, dugong, dolphins and such on a regular basis. I have fond memories of everything I did on the water but the one thing that has stayed with me is a sound - the sound of dry, lonely wind wailing through a she-oak tree. She-oaks in Sandgate. They line the coast everywhere. In a light wind they softly pine. At night they whimper from the darkness. When you're alone and anchored near an island covered with them, they whisper their despair openly and endlessley. Only the sounds of cold water lapping on the hull accompany their tears, your tears, my tears. Setting sail out of Manly for the first time was scary. I'd never sailed before. I raised the sail and air quickly filled it, tipping the boat, making the water whoosh around one side of the hull. It lurched forward, leaning further and I thought the boat would tip over....

This is an insightful post about some necessary writing skills required to create AND finish adult-sized novels. Before breaking into my short tips on how to maintain a prolonged mental state for large writing projects, let me say this, keep plenty of backup power on-hand and practice periodic saving every few minutes! (Technology failed me twice while compiling this article.) Now that the tech-part has been said, let's move on. Ti me for writing, only writing. It's impossible to write an entire novel on five or ten minute intervals with the idea that the passages can be stuck together later and make sense to a stranger. They won't. Good writing takes more. Novels require their writer's attention for hours at a time. It's not unusual for an author to sit and write for eight or nine hours without stopping. I've found it takes about two hours to re-engage with the previous day's work, three hours of new, good material that follows it,...

I Love Scratchy, Crackly, AM-Band Transistor Radios! My Fishing Radio Yes, it's kooky. I've so much good audio around me these days, what with phones, iPods, tablets... why go backwards to A.M. radio? Sub-woofing thumps are nice but they're intense, overpowering. Sometimes I just want a little background music - in the damn background! Maybe I'm getting old. Industrial sized bumps and crashes aren't always needed. I don't want my body penetrated by sound - don't mind the sound of a pathetically tuned, low resolution pocket AM radio - especially when fishing. So I've found myself browsing E-Bay for old radios.  And I have a few - one adorns my workshop, another I keep in the boat and there's another for when I move around the house. Yes, we also have a lovely home stereo system for those times we want the fullest musical experience... but there's nothing like the comforting sound of AM radio when I'm  writing  or wor...

  Asexual : An organism that can reproduce all by it's f*cking self! It would seem my education was off when it comes to the definition of asexuality. Apparently this description doesn't apply to humans. Here , we use it in a totally different way. Just what did she mean when she asked that absurd question anyway? She placed her hands onto my chest, leaned forward for a moment and then began to nestle herself down onto the tip of my rod. Her eyes closed, opening only when she'd reached its end. Sarah's a cute kid, very amiable and tries really hard to impress. She's a real breath of fresh air. I just can't remember anyone asking that question when I was her age. Asexual? Linda used that word too. She said almost the very same thing to me a couple of months ago. Of course, her situation was a little different. She was going through a dry spell. There was a fear she wouldn't get laid again. It was bullshit talk.  She...