Hi Everyone, hoping you are enjoying the holiday season. Out here in Southern Australia, it’s been a mild-heat with late rain so far. This has helped fill our rainwater tanks so we are better able to cope with summer. As a way of stopping to think about my latest story and let in all those new ideas, I’ve been baking some bread. Today I grabbed some German Grain bread mix from the local supermarket and tried to create a hearty cob loaf. It is filled with generous grains made to an old Barossa German traditional mix recipe. I used my dutch oven, treating it as if it was a sourdough mix when it wasn’t but hoping to get that chewy crust. Tapping on it, it sounds right, and it certainly smells great and I don’t think I overcooked it. Tomorrow morning will tell. Breakfast with fresh home laid eggs should be a great start to set me up to almost finish my current work in progress.

Hoping everyone is doing well over the break (southern hemisphere break here or wherever you are in the world) and I hope you are coping with your weather and enjoying time with family and or friends.

Today I set up more of my Goodreads page, which is nice, but kind of circular because this blog links to it, but I think that social media is like that. So now I have my Amazon Author page and the Goodreads one. Not sure where to go next, maybe twitter? What do you think? Still working on the off grid homestead story, and penning an update to Crawford’s Forest while some other ideas percolate in my brain. Oh, and we did get a few days rain, which was nice. I think it was an extra month’s worth. The generator did a great job at providing an alternate supply for the three days without any sunlight and I think the lowest the batteries got down to was 62% so we had plenty of capacity which was a relief. Anyway, I’ll link the Goodreads site below

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20338179.D_H_Allendale

In December we normally have 20mm of rain but we had 2mm. Before today we had 4mm of rain in January, but in the last 24 hours we have had an extra 12mm of rain, and this will keep us going for an extra 2 weeks. We have three tanks: one for the horses (which I took 150mm of future rain from already), a spare rainwater tank and the main tank. Prior to the rain the main tank was quite low, but this afternoon the main tank is sitting at half full which means that we don’t have to reduce any further shower reductions. Thrilling news!

Today we were able to increase our battery holdings up by only 10% and this was unusual for this time of the year so we had to resort to using the generator to power a chocolate fudge cake (most important) and two loads of washing using the dishwasher. Tomorrow is likely to be the same and we will use the generator to power the washing machine and some dishes. Maybe a further two extra week’s rain tomorrow. Here’s hoping as I sat inside and evaluated the merits of the LivingWriter software against my existing Scrivener software. As old and “clunky-difficult” Scrivener is reported to be, it still won hands done as a writing tool.

I decided with the release of new short novelette, Maralinga Winds, that I would change the theme of the eBook version. I did also add the book and author title to the spine of the print version, which was an obvious error – but it’s fixed now. I’m hoping that you like the more Australian version of what Crawford’s Forest might look like. For me it had clumps of pine too, but there was only one pine tree I could find and was on top of a crest and so it didn’t really fir. Anyway, I’m going to have an unofficial release of the more standardised covers. Below will be a link to the official Amazon version. Stay safe and well in the meanwhile.

Hi, you’ve found the off grid page of D.H. Allendale. There is not a lot here as yet, but I’m hoping to share some of our experiences going off grid, but also this is where Dave writes from. I suppose he’s no different to most authors who start by dreaming big. Today he updated The Murders at Crawford’s Forest and released Maralinga Winds. So yeah, this is him being super excited during COVID-19.