BEING TOTALLY OUTRAGEOUS.

I can't go overseas this winter, it's not the cost of air travel, it's the price of travel insurance which at my age puts premiums into the mega basket.  Strolling around exotic airports won't happen. I won't meet my writer friends in Loutro, or drink coffee at the Irish Writers' centre and I had to turn down the invitation to 2012 Wordsstorm Festival in Darwin. I shall try to be there in 2014. That gives me something to look forward to.

In the meantime I have been making notes for the next book.

The setting A settlement on the banks of a major south island river.

The narrator Here I have choices; a feral cat could see everything going on, but her vocabulary migfht be rather limited; the alpha cow in the dairy herd next door perhaps, but her views could be a bit moody. It's difficult to narrate from the eye of God when I don't believe in him, but I am creating the characters so I could create God.

Main Character I am spoiled for choice here.

• A retired nuclear phycisist kiwi who has returned to N.Z. because her conscience won't let her design weapons any more. She uses laundered money to buy a dairy farm..
• A Phillipine farm worker, qualified vet but cannot practice because he cannot afford the fees to qualify in N.Z.
• An Australian hiding under the witness protection programme. His brain is so addled with drugs he keeps forgetting his cover story. He is looking for 'lerve' forgetting he has had to abandon wife in Oz and a de facto in Dunsandel.

The main action  The settlement was originally holiday cribs for salmon fishers, but with the squeeze in the economy some owners have sold their houses in the city and retired to the settlement. Others have put their cribs on the market and they are being bought for nefarious purposes, like P labs, dumping grounds for psychiatric patients, witness protection hideaways.

And having just finished 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' I am going to write the most outrageous fiction I possibly can. My outrageously gifted grand daughter, Rhiannon, sent me a page from the redwinged blackbird blog starting me on this train of thought. The topic? How to tell if a woman is lying when she tells you she is on the pill. Appears WOTP blink frequently, up to twelve times per minute, and are attracted to men with rugged features, so a male's come on speech should include

• confession that he likes to climb active volcanos
• owns and flies a private jet to travel to exotic, primitive places, with active volcanoes of course
• a custom of sending explicit texts.

Wish me luck.