I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...

 It is nearing the end of Summer and the flowers are doing well. Its the first year I've had a decent display, probably because I've remembered to water them. I planted petunias and dahlias, oh my gosh I love dahlias, and I had a host of marrigold seedlings one of the kids gave me. And a few other random flowers I got in punnets at the gardening centre. Pretty happy with the results but definitely, the top three are the marigolds, the dahlias and the petunias. I should remember that for next year. 

Already six days into February. What's been happening? The writing has been going well. I got sidetracked reading a partial I am hoping to submit to Harlequin and on reading the first 20,000 words, I loved the story. I'd written it a while ago and I'm very happy with it, so I'll keep on with that, a small town romance set in the USA. I haven't submitted to a traditional publisher for a while, since I always get rejected, but I have high hopes for this one. And if it is rejected, I can see it doing well in my Frazier Bay series, a small town series set in New Zealand. I just have to change a few a lot of things. My fourth book in the Dating Daisy series is coming along as well and I'm looking at a March release, while I work on another book as well. In home news,   I    one of the boys chopped down a massive, massive tree so the back yard is filled with branches and leaves. While I will miss the privacy, the birds who loved the tree, especially the Tui, and of c...

Hello Readers,  I have got back onto the Facebook. Mainly to promote my books to be honest. HOWEVER, I hope to post the odd interesting thing to make it a bit more interesting. I do have a long history of love-hate with the platform (with all the platforms to be honest.) I don't mind the ads (well, of course I don't or I'd be a hyprocrite) but its all the random stuff, isn't it, that is so annoying. Stuff you don't want to see, and can't be bothered with. And all the fake stuff. Like the other day I saw a post which said there is a Golden Girls reboot with Tina Fey, Lisa Kudrow and others. Really, I thought. Why would you? The entertainment industry has done strange things... but really? So, as I do these days, I figured it was fake, and did not even bother to read more. Sure enough when I mentioned it to someone, they checked and it was FAKE. Even if it wasn't fake, you can not do better than Rose, Bea, Sophia and Blanche. YOU CAN NOT.  But I am not fake, s...

Last night we watched the final in the series Ludwig . Oh my gosh. It is one of the best TV shows I have seen in ages, and we have to wait for series two, whenever that happens. I am sure it will. On the plus side, we can watch them all over again with the On Demand on line website of the TV.  We had also been watching Matlock with Kathy Bates, which has taken a hiatus on New Zealand screens but of the two, both brilliant, I love the comedy drama of Ludwig, and absolutely love David Mitchell, who I'd only seen on the TV Show Would I lie to you? Now I'm getting shown Mitchell and Webb skits all the time by the fam.Hilairious. Sunday nights won't be the same without dear  Ludwig .

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...

 Apparently some time in January is Clean Off Your Desk Day. I don't know who invents these things. But a bit of a search came up with some writing room set ups that look to me legitimate.  First up is is Roald Dahl's, (from The Guardian.) I like the old chair with the tray to hold his equipment though I read somewhere he did have a bad back. https://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/40-inspiring-workspaces-of-the-famously-creative Martin Amis. This is good, too. A bit of mess. Stuff  on the floor. Pretty much the way I write.  And this is Danielle Steel's, from her Facebook page. She said it is her Paris office and writing space, includes a vintage typewriter for writing, and a computer she uses for emails etc. She has personal memorabilia around her as she writes.  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157345663904713&id=21250804712&set=a.10150666308874713 My writing style is a combination of the first two. I like sitting with my laptop, and I have a des...