I was told this story once about how the Cambodians train their elephants… From a baby, the elephant is chained with thick metal to the ground. As the elephant grows older the chain around its leg is replaced by a thinner chain then a thinner one and so forth. Until one day, the chain is removed altogether and the full-grown elephant is kept in place by a small stake and a thin piece of rope. So used to not being able to break free of its constraints, the elephant does nothing to try to free itself.

I have read of studies done on fish who were kept in a bowl with a glass partition dividing it. After a time, even after the glass partition is removed, the fish will not cross over to the other side of the bowl.

What happens when you grow up in a city that was divided by a wall?

Then what happens when you take that wall away?

In Berlin, I spoke to a lovely American lady who married an East Berliner who said, “I can see the whole of Berlin. But my husband, he can’t see West Berlin. When we drive there he needs me to direct him. To him, it’s like the wall is still there.”

I have heard a similar story from a doctor who provides training seminars. When she holds seminars in West Berlin only West Berliner doctors attend her training sessions. When she holds her seminars in East Berlin, only East Berliner doctors attend those training sessions.

Unsurprisingly, the younger generation of Berliners don’t have this ‘blind spot’.

The Berlin wall fell in 1989, 24 years ago. That’s a generation ago. Yet an invisible wall still remains.

As a fantasy writer I think a lot about immortality (vampires, werewolves, demons, angels, gods) and mortality (basically everything else… except for the Immortal Jellyfish. Seriously, there is a kind of jellyfish which scientists have discovered to be ‘biologically immortal’ <—Science: it’s good for you.) I often wonder why us humans weren’t given this same gift.

But then, if we were given the gift of immortality, would it really be a gift? Or would we just be repeating one life over and over again? Repeating our old patterns and old prejudices over and over again?

Maybe death is the gift… to allow the young and ‘untrained’ and un-indoctrinated the chance to create change.

Additional note: I like to think I have explored these questions in my Dark Angel series. Stay tuned for Angelstone (Dark Angel #2) due out in June 2013. Follow this blog for news about the never-to-be-repeated Launch Day sale.

I am thrilled to pieces at some of the reviews coming in 🙂
Night owl reviews just gave Angelfire (Dark Angel) 4.5stars, a mind-blowing review and rated it a Top Pick.

Some of my favourite bits:

” She grabs her audience by the throat and shakes the “sugar” out of the reader.”
“Ms. Peach’s development of the characters was incredible along with her artistic depiction of the settings and storyline… She creates a book that will have her audience hungering for the next installment, which cannot come a moment too soon.”
Read the full review here.

Also check out this 5 star review from Michelle’s Paranormal Vault of Books where you also get some never-before-publicised snippets of Michelle’s favourite scenes including a steamy scene (oh my)!

And if you could like or share these on FB I would so love it! 😀
ok, enough gushing, I’m going back to work, haha

Singapore is most known for its modern cityscape, a business hub and its shopping. Even when I asked the locals what a tourist such as I should see, they produced a list of shopping centres as long as my arm.

Yes, the malls here are huge and impressive (look they even parked a boat ontop of one)…

… even their botanical gardens are built up and outrageous (see those weird mushroom looking things? Don’t they look like something you could see the angels of Michaelea in Angelfire living in? You can climb up them and walk along the walkways that are strung between them)…

… but to think that this is all that there is to see in Singapore would be selling it short. There is history in this little piece of earth, you just have to look carefully.

I have this paranormal/scifi/timetravel/thriller (geez can I just pick a damn genre?) series idea that has been bubbling away for a short while.  For some reason when I walked through Clarke Quay this series began to shout at me to be set here. Not in modern Singapore, but Singapore of the early 1900’s.

Clarke Quay is a historial quay on the Singapore River which (back then) helped to make Singapore a prominant port. You can still see the bumboats (or junkboats) moored along it in this shot, however, these days these kischty things are used to take tourists up and down the river.

I began to seek out more of what Singapore was like 100 years ago.

Near the Merlion park I found this Cavanagh Bridge, Singapore’s first suspension bridge over Singapore River dating back to the late 1800’s.

I needed a hotel, an old hotel, in which to set a murder (a character of course)… This gorgeous old building is The Fullerton Hotel. And apparently this hotel has ghosts! Perfect yes?

No. Gorgeous… but not right for this scene as we discovered that back in the early 1900’s it used to be the General Post Office. So… the hunting continued…

Then I was directed to the Raffles Hotel by my history hunting partner in crime, my Auntie Nina. An old British colonial style grand hotel built in the late 1800’s and the opitome of style and money. (From the prices of the coffee and orange juice that my aunt and I had in their hotel restaurant – yikes, almost $30 Sing dollars – it still was).
Unfortunately their Raffles museum was closed indefinately and we couldn’t (althought we tried) sneak my way inside a room. But I found my hotel in which to set the scene of the crime! Here are some photos that I was able to take.

Stay curious, xHanna

Real and ruthless.

Two things I had to be to be in the process of reducing my life (in reality, it is just my ‘stuff’) down to the 23kg limit (about 51 pounds) of the 1 suitcase that I am taking with me on my gypsy journey and whatever I can carry in a backpack on the plane. You ready to see all my worldly possessions?

Hmmm, looking at that photo now I can’t decide whether I am extremely brave or extremely stupid. Perhaps a bit of both.

During this process of purging I lessened the pain of having to assess each and every item I owned (like picking teams at school physical ed class) by inventing the Space x Weight x Usage x Cost of Replacement algorithm. (Total genius btw. I am waiting for the call from the Nobel Prize committee. Any day now) Through this process I had to get very real and very ruthless about what were truly ‘needs’ versus ‘wants’. Example…

Need: underwear (seeing as I’m not relocating to a nudist beach it is safe to say this is a definite ‘need’)

Want: hair straightener (believe it or not, there was a time when we didn’t use these. You remember the poofier-the-better 80’s?)

Need: my Cue limited-edition designer military-inspired metallic embellished and hand-beaded attachable shoulder pads…

What? Why you looking at me like that?

Okay, okay, that last one was really a ‘want’ but I couldn’t bear to part with it and the piece (notice I said piece, as in piece of art, and not just an accessory) damn near broke the algorithm in the ‘cost of replacement’ part of the equation as I bought the last one’s ever made and have never since seen another pair like it sold and have since been offered three times more than I paid for them by a fashionista friend (practically an investment, really). I have inserted a photo below. Commence drooling…. now.

To be honest, the process wasn’t that hard as I knew that I could live happily from the contents of one suitcase. I was lucky enough (glass half full) to experience this during the Brisbane floods of 2010 when I came back from overseas to find myself temporarily homeless as the place I lived went 1.5 metres underwater. I went almost 2 months (overseas time included) living out of that one suitcase. And you know what? It didn’t affect my happiness at all. I didn’t get voted off the island for having naturally dried hair or no makeup on or a pair of shoes on that were sooooo last season dah-ling. I did miss the hell out of my books thought, although thanks to ereaders this problem is easily solved (Kindle, where have you been all my life?).

Just for fun I thought I would list some partly-proud-of-partly-can’t-believe-I-did-that results of The Great Pre-Gypsy Purge of 2013:

* I now own 1 single pair of heels. Yes ladies… that reads ONE pair of heels. (I can hear all the people who knew me and my previous collection of heels in-every-colour-of-the-rainbow-and-then-some falling out of their chairs in a collective thump)

* I now don’t own a hair straightener (better hope the 80’s hair makes a comeback, hey?)

* The only makeup I now own is one single stick of mascara

* I own 1 physical book being Recipe for Dreaming by my old mentor, Bryce Courtenay (which he signed and dedicated to me), a slim, inspiring book that captures my reasons for this gypsyventure. (Does my +150 and counting ebooks on my new fabulous and bestest present ever Kindle count?)

* I haven’t missed anything I’ve sold, thrown or given away…

Yet.

I add this as a caveat as, who knows, maybe one day I will miss those clothes that I bought because they were on sale but never wore, or the stack of CD’s (what are they again?) from 2001, or that really bad 80’s wig (don’t need that anymore thank you to the no straightener thing) that I bought for a costume party and never wore again.

I end this post with a question (or two)… if your house was about to flood and you could only take one suitcase with you, what would you pack? What could you leave behind? What absolutely absurd but extremely justified ‘want’ (see Cue shoulder pads above as an example) would you just have to take?

Would love to hear your answers. In the meantime and always… Stay real

xHanna

Update: 29 May 2013: I decided that (for now) I needed to stay exclusive with Amazon. Contact me if you are a kobo/nook owner and want to hurry me up to put my books back on the other retailers.

 

You can now get Angelfire through Kobo, Smashwords and Barnes & Noble!
To celebrate I have made Angelfire FREE on Smashwords for the next 2 days. This FREE pricing should also filter to Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble shortly.

SMASHWORDS

AMAZON

KOBO

BARNES & NOBLE

And don’t forget to leave a review and enter to win a $25 Amazon Gift Card – only 2 weeks left til this giveaway ends. Entries for posting reviews to Smashwords, Kobo and Barnes & Noble have been added to this giveaway.

Sometimes, not often, I have the pleasure of receiving a fully formed idea in a cascade of inspiration. This was one of these cases.

I was listening to a youtube reading of a poem written by a UK poet named James McInerney and my body started moving to the lyrics. ‘Why don’t we (the lyrical hip hop community) dance to poetry?’ I found myself wondering. No sooner did this thought enter my mind then a whole idea – a visual concept – unceremoniously knock its steel-tipped boot in the door and barrel its way through after it. It is rare, a gift, I believe to receive such an idea already fully formed. I knew that I had to, had to had to had to, see it through.

So I gathered all the players who were to help me in this quest (all those who passed *The Bounce Test’) and we set off on this creative journey together that took 6 weeks in total, over 8 hours of filming over three days, and countless hours of labouring and tweaking during the video editing process.

*The Bounce Test: my personal method of selecting who I work with. If someone is so excited about the project that they are literally bouncing out of their chair, they pass. I also picked out my cover artist and everyone who worked with me on the Angelfire book trailer using this method – look how well those projects turned out!

But wait? I hear you say. You’re a writer. What does that have to do with creating the short film, nay, the dance concept piece you briefly describe?

It has everything to do with it. Whether we produce creative pieces through words, through poetry, through visual media or through dance… it is all based around the Art of the Story.

and now… for (something different) a little dance…

Dedicated to my writing mentor, Bryce RIP 22.11.2012

WIN A $25 AMAZON GIFT CARD! Post an honest review of Angelfire to enter.

So, I wanted to do something to thank everyone who had already taken (or will take) their precious time to read Angelfire and post a review. What better way than a competition and a lovely Amazon gift card to spend on how you will as the prize 😀

Also, just in case you haven’t had a chance to download Angelfire, we are doing a promotion through Amazon in which Angelfire is FREE for this whole weekend (9-10 Feb, Pacific Time). Download Angelfire HERE for free or HERE for UK friends. Feel free to share this promo and comp!

Go to This Page to check out the competition details and Terms and Conditions.

All the links are up and live! Enjoy! xHanna

Starting from the 14th Jan 2013 we will be running a ‘Media Story’ for Angelfire with the help of some gorgeous bloggers.

Find the schedule (so far) below to follow the media story. The links and stories will be added and updated as the stories go live.

Angelfire ‘Media Story’ Schedule

14 Jan – “Strange Vision Leads to Body” at Booksniffers Anonymous

15 Jan – “Coverup after second vision” at Reading Between the Wines

19 Jan – “Alyx flees Michaelea” at Book Passion for Life

21 Jan – “Leaked! Footage of Symon’s interrogation” at Michelle’s Paranormal Vault of Books

23 Jan – “‘Who is the real Alyx?’ Interview with Alyx’s friends” at Book Briefs

26 Jan – “Alyx’s home searched: illegal items discovered!” at Seeing Night

27 Jan – “Alyxandria Spotted!” at YA Bookworm

28 Jan – “Wanted: Israel” at The Book Queen

31 Jan – “Wanted: Jordan” at Tricia Kristufek’s Blog

1 Feb – “Wanted: Alyxandria” at Nomi’s Paranormal Palace

2 Feb – “DreamWalker interview with Alyx” at Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf

3 Feb – Interview at YA Bookworm