Hit Lists, holidays and haikus

Book News:

A big thank you to Andy Frankham for his lovely 5-star review of The Hit List - it's much appreciated, especially as I think The Hit List is a book and indeed a main character that you either love or hate, so nice to know Jamie's story might not be as bad as once feared, ho ho. I'm also pleased to say that The Delaneys and Me was briefly up at No 44 in the Amazon Kindle Gay Fiction charts, and that Martin and The Wolf is now a bestseller at All Romance Ebooks, along with The Bones of Summer, so they can keep each other company, hurrah!

In other writing news, The Boilerman and The Bride is now available at All Romance Ebooks where it looks as if people might actually be buying it, so that's nice, thank you! I've sent the final galleys for Tuluscan Six and The Time Circle back to Amber Allure Press ready for publication on 18 July. But before that, I'm happy to announce that my comic fantasy story, Creative Accountancy for Beginners, will be published by Untreed Reads on 14 July - that's this Wednesday, so it's going to be an action-packed week indeed.

Some of my ebooks are also now available at a new ebook seller, EntourageeDGe, in EPub and PDF versions, so that's definitely worth a browse ... And, finally, in the news section, five of my meditation poems now appear in the first edition of Thirty First Bird Review, which is available in paperback and ebook versions, and you can find out more about this new magazine here. And, of course, the final part of Chapter Thirteen is now uploaded at The Prayer Seeker's Journal.

Meditation poems this week are:

Meditation 385
Fighting over the ownership
of a baby
isn’t my idea
of a fun day out

and, unlike Solomon,
I might have been tempted
to finish the bloody job
and leave the mothers with nowt.


Meditation 386
In the list
of meaningless cities
and men
owned by the king

an ancient poetry
rises like unseen dust
stretching all the way
from then

to now
and holding me
in its strange
and glittering spell.


Meditation 387
A thousand songs
whisper their magic
through the cedars
of Lebanon,

drifting like gold shadows
through wheat,
waiting for a wise man
to catch them.


And there are two haikus this week, as I've been rather inspired by this hot spell:

The scent of roses
carves dark glory into air,
enriches my skin.


Scented we walk through
a chorus of lavender.
Like the bees, we hum.


Life News:

I have been deeply pleased by the fact that the ridiculous attempt at a compromise over women bishops in the UK (bring 'em on, and soon!) has been rejected, an item of news which you can find out about here. I mean, really, just let women, and indeed gay men, be bishops where they ought to be, and ruddy well get on with it, I say. If the C of E splits because of it, well, so what, says she radically - frankly I don't give a damn and perhaps we even ought to let it happen - it's increasingly obvious that we as a church simply don't fit in any more with the people inside or outside us and we need to create something else more fitting. Now there's a thought ...

On a less radical note, Lord H and I had an absolutely wonderful day out at Polesdon Lacey yesterday, admiring the lovely rose garden and really appreciating the new approach of opening more rooms and letting people try things out, hurrah! I loved seeing the bathrooms and toilets (how I love bathrooms & toilets!) which we haven't been able to see before - and how Lord H and I especially loved the fact we could sit on the comfy chairs in the Billiard Room and read the old 1930s newspapers. I was amused to see that the English football team in 1936 were having a spot of bother, and the manager had decided that to cheer them all up he would take them out to the theatre. What a good idea! Perhaps we need to bring those old ways back again? Surely a night out at Les Miserables might put the oomph back into the England team today? You never know. Lord H was equally impressed to see in the 1938 Daily Chronicle that the good Neville Chamberlain has promised us peace in our time. I replied that it would never last, to which Lord H's response was that surely I wasn't saying we couldn't trust the German leadership?? What frightfully bad show to think that a man's word wasn't his bond ... Ah well, hindsight's a wonderful thing.

I must end however, with an appreciative nod to the wonderful article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph magazine about the worst and best holidays taken by children. It's fantastic and so honest, and hell I don't even like children. But who couldn't warm to 4-year old Birdie who says "the best moment of my holiday was me, in the swimming-pool looking very beautiful." Ah, Birdie, your character is already set in stone and you're a woman after my own heart, you know. Apart from the swimming thing. And I also thought there was a hell of a lot of fascinating stuff going on in the mind of 11-year old Valdis, who would most like to go to Greece, because he really wanted to see the origins of all those brilliant myths, and who, bizarrely, most wanted to go on holiday with John the Baptist. Ah, a writer in the making, I see ... though whether Valdis wanted John the Baptist with or without his head remains uncertain ...  Time will tell.

Anne Brooke
The Prayer Seeker's Journal