I’m Back!

I had a great holiday in August – we went to Edinburgh (my first visit to Scotland) to see the Military Tattoo, an amazing spectacle which I can highly recommend.  Honestly, the televised version comes nowhere close.  My sister felt that the lone piper at the end was better on TV but I have to disagree.  The zoom of the TV lens loses the poignancy of the one lone piper on the castle wall in the distance.  Anyway, a wonderful experience.  I loved Edinburgh – such a beautiful city and so vibrant!  The Edinburgh festival was just starting, also the international book fair so the streets were really jumping.   We were lucky with the weather too, though the locals have a very different idea of fine weather.  When we were reaching for an additional jumper and pulling on a rain jacket they were all saying how lucky it was the weather was so fine.   But it wasn’t really cold – days about the same midsummer as our Cape Town winter I suppose, though there were some warmer days.  We stayed in a cottage, formerly a cow shed, a few miles out of the city, next to a very beautiful reservoir.  One of the highlights for me was that we picked delicious small wild raspberries, growing wild near our cottage – much nicer flavor than their larger cultivated cousins.   I love foraging – I am definitely a gatherer rather than a hunter.  I have just received my copy of Sergei Boutenko’s new book Wild Edibles and the DVD, which I am really looking forward to starting.
Then after just over a week we flew to Bristol to see our daughter and son-in-law, which was just lovely.  It had been a full eighteen months since we had seen them so a very happy reunion.  We were also able to see our grand-dog and meet our two new-grand cats.  They gave us a wonderful time, highlights of which were the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta,  a truly mind boggling spectacle, and the other was whole day trip on a narrowboat down the river Avon to Bath which was very interesting and also just lovely, so relaxing and good for the soul.  I love boats – our year spent on a canal boat in France is still such a fond memory.

All too soon it was time to come home – though not too soon for our cat, who thought we had abandoned her in a cattery forever and who didn’t leave our sides for the first week after our return.  Our dogs were pleased to see us, but had been having a lovely holiday on a wine farm with our friends, so they were feeling anything but abandoned.

Since getting back I haven’t actually written a word – sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever write again, then a new story just hops on board and I find myself devoting eight to ten hours a day till I have got it down.  Are all writers so obsessive?  Or is it just me?  Who knows?  I haven’t even finished tweaking my latest one, On the Ninth Day the Cat was Sick.  Partly because my friend and fellow writer Deborah Goemans, (http://www.amazon.com/Amaranth-Bloom-Deborah-June-Goemans/dp/1439286906)  very kindly assessed part of one of my novels and as a professional editor told me all sorts of things I didn’t know, such as the rules for indentations, and spacing and dashes.  So now I have to go through this book and make all these changes, when I do the tweaking and the rewriting.  (Not to mention my previous six books!)  I am most grateful to Debbie but this means lots of work and I am very good at avoiding work!  The trouble is I don’t have a deadline – and I am one of those people who can only work with a deadline, even a self imposed one.  So I should probably set myself a date, like the first of November for this book to be up-and-running.  Yes that’s what I’ll do – you saw it first here.  Look for my new book on Amazon on Friday 1^st November!

Till next time J