May 31
A few weeks ago, on May the Fourth, I was over on Breathless in the Bush blogging about four of my favourite fictional women who have the Force (and the men who love them).
Missed it?
Catch up here.
May 17
Six months ago today my Dad passed away.
And today, I’m sharing his eulogy.
For those of you who may not know me, I’m Kristine, and I’m the baby.
When I started to think about what I would say at this time, it was the middle of 2019 and Dad was still with us, beginning the seventh week of his longest hospital stay. Understandably, he was feeling pretty frustrated although he could still count backwards from 100 in sevens.
I needed a pen. And my fingers.
Despite his frustration, I’d have been quite happy if he’d stayed safely tucked away in his favourite hospital room, watching the planes and being monitored in hospital forever. The doctors and nurses at St George Private, and St George Public, who have spent time looking after him have been wonderful and have kept him going until he couldn’t go anymore. I can’t possibly name all of them, but special call out to Dr Lynch, Fiona, and Nurse Chris, and Dr G and all the nurses on Level 4 at St George Private Hospital.
They helped him keep going, and he amazed them – and us – at every turn.
None of them could understand how he managed to survive the extraordinarily high potassium counts.
Or the extraordinarily low sugar counts.
Or could fault his ever-present sense of humour.
Every time some poor nurse asked him what he was allergic to, the answer was… women.
He also apparently told highly inappropriate jokes to poor Nurse Chris, who was the only person he ever wanted to change his catheter. No one else ever did it right. And none of the jokes are suitable for polite company.
But at that first hospital admission back in September 2018, we knew we wouldn’t have him much longer.
We were so lucky to have had him for another 14 months.
History 
Dad – born Cecil John Thomas was named after an uncle and known throughout his life as variants of Cec, Jack, John and CJ – was born in 1935, the first son of parents William Charles and Ivy Mavis. He was the first of four kids – followed by twins Julia and Helen and then baby Josephine.
He grew up in Redfern – a much different place to what it is now – married twice and had five kids – Sue, Bob, Natalie, Darren and me, and seven grandchildren – Nicolette, Timothy, Rachel, Tamika, Cody, Bailey and Ruby and a few kids-in-law – Michael, Donna, Ryan and Hayden.
He was so proud of his kids and grandkids, even if he did give a few of them a hard time about climate change from time to time. He liked to call it weather.
He loved being a little contrary, to play a little Devil’s Advocate. He loved seeing how we’d argue back and engage and fight for what we believed in. Even if he didn’t always agree.
He was the best essay editor I had through University. And I think he liked learning as he read. He’d always been a thinker.
After finishing school at Sydney Boys High, he won a Commonwealth Scholarship and studied Economics at the University of Sydney. Later he studied Actuarial Studies at Macquarie University, and at the University of New England.
While studious when growing up, Dad also played a lot of sport.
He claimed to have played rugby league, rugby union, tennis, squash, golf, cricket, soccer, ten pin bowling, basketball, and netball, although I’m still not convinced he played netball, despite his insistence. He was also a rather good hurdler at school – which given his height topped out at about five foot eight or nine, and the fact that he most certainly never had long hurdler legs – surprises me to this day.
After leaving school (where GPS union was the rugby of choice) he played league for the Chelsea United Rugby League Football Club. He played with a few of my uncles and it wasn’t that long ago that I heard the story about him combining with my Uncle Rod to score for Chelsea in front of 40,000 people on the hallowed turf of the Sydney Cricket Ground.
What I wouldn’t give to have seen that!
They used to call him something like the ‘little high-top winger’ and he played against today’s rugby league royalty, having fronted up to Nick Moriatis when he played.
He played President’s Cup for the Bunnies, and he’d have loved to have played first grade for the Rabbits instead of going into the corporate world, but he ended up retiring due to an unfortunate ingrown toenail that gave him trouble – an injury earned during National Service.
Though, if he’d played first grade, he’d probably have gotten into trouble for talking back to the refs – at least, he would have if the last few years were anything to go by. The NRL refereeing drove him nuts – to the point he actually gave up his season tickets at the Sharks.
But he’d still watch. And occasionally we convinced him to come to a game.
And sorry – even though he loved them, I think the Sharkies were always his second team. He was a Rabbitoh at heart.
More recently, while we were walking the corridors of St George Private Hospital – I liked to nag him until he went for a walk – he told me about tackling some guy who was bigger than him – which probably wasn’t that unusual given, as I said, Dad would never have been considered a tall man in stature – during one game. Dad tells me it took some doing but he’d tackled the guy around one leg, and the guy had managed to get a pass away before going down. When they’d both got up from the tangle of the tackle the guy patted Dad on the head (probably ruffled that fabulous hair), said ‘good try’ and jogged away.
Dad was pretty persistent. I reckon he might have gotten him the next time around.
Dad worked at the Commonwealth Bank before moving into the insurance industry, working at Legal & General and later Mercantile Mutual/ING.
Dad didn’t have an issue with telling truth to power. It got him into trouble at least once when he challenged a manager about a decision to send a particular letter. He was the only one to ask why they were sending it in the first place. A good question but a career limiting move.
But he got on with life.
And he instilled in us a sense that people were just people.
And we were pretty much all the same.
That being said, Dad didn’t have a big issue with nepotism, at least when it came down to his kids. Dad signed my first ever pay cheque in the early nineties when I got a summer holiday job working at Merc. I think he might have signed Darren’s first pay cheque too – at least his first ‘full time gig’ one. I’m not sure what Daz did with his, but I promptly cashed mine and bought a discman.
It was a little later that Dad’s lessons on saving and investment rubbed off.
Dad drove to work every day and, working at Merc meant that I often travelled home from work with Dad. He’d also pick me up from Uni from time to time. And there was one ‘Rule of CJ’ that he drummed into us during those drives. Don’t be impatient in traffic. Whenever you’d be in the car with him and there was someone else was dodging in and out of the traffic, he’d tell you to just watch. And, almost without fail, you’d pull up at a set of lights a few minutes later and the dodger would be next to you.
And he’d make sure to point them out. Dodging traffic never got you there faster. Patience was a virtue.
Dad grew up with a love of horse racing, running bets for his grandmother to the SP bookies down the street. He started his kids gambling young, I started at three or four. I think it was something about the numbers that attracted him. Working out the probabilities, studying the form.
That said, I started picking the horses by colour of the jockeys, or by name, and taking the Kirrawee TAB mascot bear Winston home for the weekend. Winston was huge (at least he was huge to me at the time). And Dad would always pay for the bets but, if I won, I’d have to pay him back before I could keep the winnings. I actually thought that was pretty fair and carried this arrangement a fair way into my teenage years!
In later years, before the TAB moved with the times and allowed you to choose your maximum spend, I’d have to call Dad and ask him to do the maths on my bets. I never could work out the multiplication for six horses in a box trifecta for the Melbourne Cup.
I still can’t. But I bet if I’d have asked him this year, he’d have got it spot on.
He’d always wanted a horse – which he finally got at eighty-something (at least a leg or so anyway) but we’ll come back to that.
He was also pretty laid back most of the time – eating any number of pink scones that I baked, or letting Natalie, Darren and I draw all over the walls of the unit at Jannali.
In hindsight, that was a bad idea… when he tried to wallpaper it before moving to Kareela, the texta kept bleeding through the paper… whoops.
He was also pretty tolerant every time my precocious-self corrected his pronunciation of dinosaur names, trashed the lounge room with sheets for a cubby or when I assigned places at the Sunday night family dinner table and made people change seats – much to the annoyance of other family members.
Dad indulged me a lot.
He’d tell me about walking to the corner store on Sundays as a kid and buying individual Arnott’s Montes. One for each of the family members living in the tiny three-bedroom house at 813 Bourke Street. He’d talk about the struggle not to eat his on the way home.
He preferred his ice cream Blue Ribbon, his margarine Meadow Lea and his chocolate Cadbury’s. He had such a sweet tooth… There was ALWAYS a block or two or more of Cadbury’s in the fridge.
And he was easily convinced to stop and buy ice cream and/or chocolate of an afternoon when he was taking me home. It became quite the ritual…
There was also the time he let Natalie, Darren and I order breakfast our first morning in Los Angeles in 1987. Dangerous letting the kids order breakfast – especially kids who didn’t really understand pancake stacks and couldn’t all agree on what to eat. We ended up with plates full of food. PLATES. Pancakes, doughnuts, buttermilk biscuits. We could have eaten for days. Another whoops!
He could have a horrible sense of direction and distance. He’d get lost on the casino floor in Vegas, though, to be fair, casino floors are designed to be hard to navigate and I’m actually not sure whether the getting lost was accidental or deliberate given his phase of love for the poker machines. They seemed to appeal to his mathematical mind, even though that mind knew the House always won.
Then, showing further issues with distance, on our first or second night in Vegas on a family trip in 1997 Dad decided that we’d walk to a casino where we were booked to see a show. It’d be faster than a cab he said.
Yeah, no. It wasn’t.
In fact, Google tells me it was four point six kilometres. A 59-minute walk. Or thereabouts.
And it’s cold at night in Vegas in January. Really cold.
So cold that, the next day, we hit the outlets for scarves and gloves instead of cheap Reeboks and perfume.
He loved encouraging us to see the world. He’d always ask me where I was planning my next trip, or where my favourite place was. He wanted to know we were living our best lives.
The thing I will miss the most is going to Dad for advice. He always gave the best advice but it was always simple and straightforward, never fancy or overwrought.
I’ve always known that Desiderata – A Way of Life by Max Erhmann was a poem he loved, but the words never really resonated for me until last week, and it’s probably because, when I read it again, it sounded exactly like him.
So, today, in closing, I wanted to share it with you.
Because, at the bottom of it all, while he wasn’t perfect, this is how Dad tried to live.
GO PLACIDLY amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive them to be. And whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
Love you Dad xx
Apr 30
Recently, like a lot of other people, I have been #pandemiccleaning and #pandemicorganising – which has included trying to consolidate the mess that is all over the house, stored in various drawers, cupboards and boxes.
Which means I’ve been finding some great stuff!
This week – for #throwbackthursday – I’m sharing a short story I wrote in year nine called CHICKEN DINNER.
This has been transcribed, as is, from the original. Please excuse my complete lack of respect for apostrophes, and full stops.
I can’t believe it, out of all the chickens in the farm yard, they had to choose me for Sunday dinner, didn’t they. Really, I’ve always dreaded this moment, I mean, who wants to be roasted. It’s not a driving ambition that every chicken has, so why do we get roasted. I’ll tell you, we get roasted to feed some greedy family at the Sunday family meal.
I knew it was going to be me yesterday, when the farmer came out and moved me into a pen right outside the back door. A while later the farmers wife came out and began to pluck out all my feathers. How painful! Imagine plucking your eyebrows and magnify the pain a few hundred times, not a nice experience, I can tell you. I spent the night freezing cold, with no feathers and they didn’t even give me a blanket.
Nothing happened until late this afternoon when the farmer came for me again, this time to chop my head off. He wasn’t doing this one easily. As soon as he opened the gate I was off and running! The farmer chased me round and round the farm yard until he lost all his puff, so then he called his kids. There were four of them and it didn’t take long for them to catch me. The eldest boy held me on the chopping block while the farmer chopped off my head. If you thought being plucked was unpleasant try having your head chopped.
As soon as they’d chopped my head off, the farmer cleaned me out, everything, heart, lungs, stomach, the lot. That farmer has no respect for the dead. The he hands me over to his wife so she can cut me into pieces, easier for her to cook, that’s what she told her youngest daughter. She gets to chop me to bits, to make life easier for her.
After I was chopped to pieces, she rolled the bits of me in flour to help crisp up my skin, when she cooked me. When all this was done she laid all my pieces out on a baking tray and put me in the oven.
I’ve been in the oven about fifteen minutes and it’s really just like a very hot sauna, although it’s not very nice, sitting in all this fat and not only is the oven hot but the tray is starting to get very hot and it is burning my bottom, ouch! Oh, look, the farmers wife is coming to take me out now, I’m about to be eaten, oh, help, no, please don’t eat me, no, no!
© Kristine Charles 2020
Feb 22
Did you know it was Ed Sheeran’s birthday on Monday 17 February?
I did… and I was blogging about it – and books, music and romance over on Breathless in the Bush.
Go check it out here #mwah
Dec 1
Hello <waving>
A few weeks ago I was over on Breathless in the Bush talking Planning for 2020.
Fail to plan, prepare to fail!
Link here
Oct 13
I’ve been listening to a lot of the Wicked Wallflowers over the last few weeks. I have been a late adopter of Jenny and Sarah’s podcast and I LOVE IT. If it’s not in your ears yet, what are you waiting for?
Anyway, in their podcast, they’ll generally ask guests what was their first romance read and it got me thinking… what was MY first romance read. It certainly wasn’t Forever by Judy Blume – which I remember fondly, but DOES NOT have a happy ever after.
It wasn’t any of the Sweet Valley Highs I burned through as a teenager and which, frankly, became a little too dramatic and more like a teenage Days of Our Lives than I preferred!
It wasn’t any of the other BRILLIANT books I read at school including Lilith Norman’s Climb a Lonely Hill or Ruth Park’s My Sister Sif – if you’ve not read either, do yourself a favour. They’re great, and have stuck with me since I read them in primary school!
I also can’t really count my mother’s books that I stole away and read all the good bits from when I was WAY TOO YOUNG to be doing so. That catalogue included Lace by Shirley Conran, Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz and a book called Facades by Stanley Levine and Bud Knight that I really SHOULD NOT have been reading, although it taught me what Quaaludes were, and the word milequetoast. Lace also has the most inappropriately hedonistic scene involving a Sheik and a goldfish, but I digress…
It was <insert drum roll> the Chesapeake Bay saga from the Queen, Nora Roberts.
I read the four books in the series on a plane in the early 2000’s, which was no mean feat given they came in two volumes, each about 2” thick. No Kindle app in the early naughties! But I DEVOURED them, and they were then lugged around the USA because I was not leaving them behind. Those massive copies (in that thick, trade paperback size) still have pride of place on my bookshelf.
For those who haven’t read them, the Chesapeake Bay saga follows three brothers (in name, not in blood) unravelling the story of how they came to have a fourth brother, after their foster father passes away. Of course, in so unravelling, each comes to find their significant other – some who have been under their noses and others who have come from further away. But what I loved was that the family was a key part of the story and the general banter and that the relationship between the brothers was as much about the HEAs as the romances were.
I’ve never quite completed Nora’s back catalogue (somewhat surprisingly) although her Brides Quartet, and the InnBoonsboro series are books I’ll often re-read. But those Quinn brothers were my entry into Romancelandia, and were probably my first book boyfriends (I had a soft spot for the artist baby brother). He was an artist and, well, ‘paint me like your French girls’ is a definite thing for me!
Who was your gateway into Romancelandia? Have you been a long time resident or a new arrival?
Share with me on Twitter @wordsbykc or Facebook @wordsbykristinecharles
Sep 16
Hello <waving>
Today, I’m over on Breathless in the Bush blogging about why you should consider entering writing competitions… click here to check it out.
Me (on the far right in the blue flowers) with Valerie Parv and (some of) her 2019 finalists .
Aug 17
Anyone else been suffering from a serious case of conference drop over the last week?
Sadly, there is no cocktail bar at my house where I can find like-minded people to chat with well into the morning. There isn’t a breakfast buffet laid out for me each day with Coco-Pops (breakfast of champions) and an omelette chef to cater to my every eggy whim. And there certainly aren’t three-hundred likeminded writers in my house ready to talk story and plot and marketing and book boyfriends and publishers and … well you get my drift.
Every year, the three days of conference goes by in a blur of hugs, alcohol and information and, every year I promise myself that I’ll hold onto that crazy, excited, I can conquer the world feeling…
Until I get onto a plane and am so exhausted I fall asleep in my seat.
Until I get home and have all the ‘normal’ things to get done.
Until I have to go back to the ‘day job.’
Reality is really a bitch.
And so, this year, while waiting for said plane where – yes – I did fall asleep in my seat, I was thinking about ways to maintain my motivation over the coming 12 months.
This is what I came up with.
I love a good list.
I also know that if I don’t write it down, I’m going to forget it within about 5 minutes of saying ‘oh, I must remember that.’
So, while I was availing myself of decent lounge lattes at the airport, I wrote a list of the things I needed to wrap up after conference. The volunteering commitments I have over the rest of the year. The things I need to send off, and the stories I want to write. I also committed to Sunday night check ins with a few of my writing tribe, so that I had some accountability over the coming months.
I didn’t pitch at conference this year – but I did participate in a Twitter pitch during the conference and received a request (yay me!).
So, like I would advise to any pitcher who asked… I’m going to send my manuscript off before the end of the month.
If you pitched and received a request, if you met someone and you want to maintain that relationship, if you heard something which has encouraged you to make a submission to a particular publisher – DO IT.
And do it soon.
It doesn’t have to be immediate (although the sooner you send it, the sooner you can tick it off your list). But it’s generally advisable to send materials requested in a pitch within about three months of the pitch. And if you’re just looking to maintain that contact you made, you’re better to do that when people still have a chance of remembering you (there are a lot of faces at conference!).
The peeps I met at my first conference in 2015 remain my peeps. They’re extra special. They also live FAR away from me. And as I can’t convince any of them to move (I’ve tried) we have to come up with other ways to stay in touch.
Start a Facebook Group, a WhatsApp chat, a Twitter list. Set up regular Skype calls or, if you’re lucky enough to be a bit closer, regular meet up times. Make an effort to stay in touch because these are the people who get you and who understand how frustrating it is when life chucks roadblocks in the way of words. They’re always going to be gentle with you, but will tell it like it is.
Also, look for other groups in your local area. I work monthly with a critique group, and have recently also been invited to join Breathless in the Bush. Both of these are groups I can meet with face to face monthly and, together, we can work on maintaining motivation (as well as honing skills and reading books!).
If you’re like me, you’ll have picked up a nugget or two of gold while sitting in the various sessions at conference.
Read through your notes and make sure you find them again. Remember them. Write them on pieces of paper and post them above your desk. Write them down in your diary or stick them to your computer screen. Do what a friend did a few years ago and make up sticky labels to stick on her computer with her favourite sayings from conference.
And then, commit to trying them.
Whatever they are.
They may work for you. They might not. But you’ll never actually know unless you try to use them, or adopt them in your day to day life.
I have to declare a conflict of interest here… I’m the Ripping Start Contest Coordinator and I’d love everyone to enter my contest this year – as well as all of the other contests on offer through RWAus.
But, more seriously, competitions are great to keep you working towards a goal. While you may fall over the dreaded third judge (it happens), even if you don’t place in a competition, you will generally get some solid feedback you can use to advance your writing.
Just a tip though: don’t get ‘too much’ feedback, it just confuses you.
And give feedback some time to settle before you decide what to do with it. You’ll know in your gut what feedback is spot on and what veers wildly off into the trees. Trust yourself to make the right choices about what to do with it!
Jun 22
So, it’s been a while since I posted. But what’s new, right?!
Things have been a little more out of control than I’d have liked this year as my Dad (that’s him in the pic, doing laps of the hospital with me) has been pretty unwell. He’s a lot better now – not fixed but we have a bit more of a handle on the cause(s) – but in the last few weeks things have been pretty serious (including a stay in ICU, and no less than four doctors pointing out they’d never seen anyone survive a potassium level of 10.5).
And then there were the poor doctors who had to contend with me (the non medically trained youngest daughter and regular pain in the ass) asking questions and making suggestions for treatment. Bless. Most of them handled it well. Others… well, not so much.
It’s one of those things though. Having a loved one who’s really sick reminds you to make EVERY MINUTE COUNT. We don’t know how long we have on this Earth, and with loved ones. And every minute of whatever time we have is important.
Don’t squander it.
Thinking about time that way has also made me value my writing time a little more. Sure, writing time is time away from loved ones – but it’s something I have to do. For me. So it’s important, but I shouldn’t squander the time I have to write by spending most of it on Facebook, right! #masterprocrastinator
So, I am back, and putting words on a page. YAY!
And I’m getting PSYCHED for #RWAus19 which is fast approaching! #cannotwait #mytribe
Talk soon.
And #mwah
Mar 31
Hello <waving>, me again!
Lately I’ve been hanging with contemporary romance writer Sonia Stanizzo, answering 10 questions on her blog. If you want to check out my answers, click here to be delivered straight to the post.
