books – don't confuse the narrator

wool gathering

When I lived in Madrid, I had a friend who collected building façades.

These weren’t just the well known landmarks like the bright red bricks and decorative paintings of the Plaza Mayor, the imposing white, wedding-cake like tiers of the Palacio de Comunicaciones or the complex scrollwork of the Palacio Longoria (which was ruined, anyway, in those days, by ugly air-conditioning units.) No. These were the kind of façade you can find on any street – if you’re paying attention.
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across the world

As anyone who sees this on a desk top and looks beyond the posts to the surrounding information will have realised, I do a lot of writerly things other than this blog. There’s the Modern Pagan Prayers project, other books and author mentoring, as well as online courses and occasional workshops.

Apart from the workshops and book mentoring, which actually need me to show up in person, most of the activities can just tick over without any input, so it’s all fairly relaxed: I don’t go out of my way to market the books and courses – they just sit somewhere online and get found (or not). So, occasionally, I receive a small quantity of “passive income”.
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celebrating the harvest

It’s been a while since I mentioned the Modern Pagan Prayers project. But today is Lammas – the traditional First Harvest – and this week the third of the books became available to buy on Amazon, so I think it’s a good time to talk about the project again.

I’m really quite proud, as the publication of Turn of the wheel means we – my co-author Lucía Moreno-Velo and I – have managed to complete three books in little more than a year. It’s an appropriate time for us to pause and celebrate the harvest of this writing collaboration.
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edges and angles

Many of my photographs seem to be images of juxtapositions of spaces: of fences with flowers poking their heads through, of blossoms cascading over garden walls and into alleyways, of plants growing incongruously on manmade vertical surfaces.

In the countryside, there are hedges and ditches, river banks and the green verges of country lanes, all rich with wildlife. In urban spaces, these borderlands are formed by iron railings, razor wire, wooden planks and panels, brick and concrete walls, gutters, kerbs and drains.
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daisy, daisy

Many years ago, when I was a little girl, I had a giant walking doll. Looking on Google images now, I see that she was probably only two foot tall, so perhaps she wasn’t as giant as I remember. Of course, I was a lot smaller then.

I don’t remember whether the doll talked as well as walked, but that wouldn’t have mattered: I’m pretty sure all my dolls and stuffed animals talked to me. I certainly talked to them.
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