Sarah Barnard's Blog, page 14

I dreamed of you

Last night, right before waking, in those moments where you’re not quite awake but not aware of the line between dream and reality…. in those moments, I dreamed of you.

You were among a crowd of your family, insisting that I came with you but that I stayed apart from the throng.

You stood beside me, gazing down at yourself, laying on your death bed – which, for some strange reason was in a railway carriage. You told me I should go back to keeping a weekly journal. I’ve never kept one, so that confused me.

Then you vanished, with a cold hand on my shoulder and a smile. Puzzled, I knew I was dreaming, but your reaction was odd, in reality we fell out many years ago and you would never have spoken to me, not now, and not without anger. I sometimes wish it could have been different for us.

I was cold and wet, sitting on hard stone in the rain, unwilling to move. You were there, with your hand held out to pull me to my feet but I couldn’t take it. You walked away.

Dreams sometimes really lend themselves to introspection and to thought that might not otherwise happen. I’ve learned to listen to some types of dreams, while others are just dreams.

About Cookies

What is that all about? Cookies that aren’t chocolate chip? Madness….

Have you ever wondered how much information is collected about you as you wander aimlessly around the internet? I have. All those times you put your email address in somewhere and within a week you’re flooded with spam? Coincidence? Perhaps, but I think not.

The internet is vast and complex, and we should all take some care when navigating our path through the maze.  It’s far too easy to trust and give our details to access what we want, what looks interesting.

The European Union recently introduced laws to help a bit with that. They state that:

If you’re using cookies or any other technologies for non-essential tracking, you must:

1. Tell users that tracking technologies are used.

2. Explain the reasons for using those technologies.

3. Obtain the user’s consent prior to using that technology and allow them to withdraw permission at any time.

So, you might have noticed a new page here, and a small, floating bar at the bottom of the page.  This lets you know what is used on this site that uses cookies and might be collecting information about you, and also any information we may collect and how we use it.

At the moment, in full compliance with the EU regulations, I am choosing to assume that you agree with the cookies in use on this site. This is what they term, “Implied Consent”.

I do try to minimise the amount of cookie tracking that takes place here but some are needed, and some are useful.

My promise to you is simple.

I will never, ever share any of the information I have access to unless there is a legally compelling reason to do so.
I will never use anything to spam you or email you unless you ask me to.
I will only store your details in order to complete a purchase that you initiated and no longer than absolutely necessary.

If you have any concerns about the use of cookies on this site then please get in touch.

An Old Oak Tree.

For a while now, I’ve been less than happy with the cover for The Portal Between. The designer didn’t use the tree I wanted, and the resulting cover, although good when it was made, isn’t quite right any more.

Then, when preparing Kate’s interview for the Osier Direct bonus material, I started reading through it again. I’m feeling the need for a re-edit and a fresh edition. Which will require a new cover.

Did I mention that I moved house recently-ish? I’ve gone from the heart of English deciduous woodland, Sherwood and many, many Old Oak trees that I could have photographed…. to South Wales.

Not quite so many Old Oak trees here.

Or so I thought after a weekend of wandering round the local country park and finding only a couple of tiny saplings not even as tall as I am. Plenty of other species, lots of beech, including copper. But sadly, not the copper beech that inspired a scene in The Portal Sundered, that one’s recently fallen. I sat on the broken trunk and felt the loss. It was a beautiful tree, massive and old, and with a curving twist to the trunk.

But, trees grow, age and fall. Then new trees grow. Exactly as it should be.

However, no oak trees.

I’ve walked up and down the local Cwm several times. Back and forth to the garage as we try to work out what the problem is with my car. I’ve spotted holly, rowan, possibly young beech, some conifers, willow of various types.

So, on Sunday the car warning alarm went off, again. Straight back to the garage on Monday. Can you drop it in on Tuesday and we’ll take a look.

Mutter, grumble. Dropped it off on Tues, walked home via a nice man, lots of chickens, a horse, 2 dogs and the hairdressers to make an appointment. So I didn’t walk home through the Cwm. On Tues afternoon the garage called to say they can’t find anything wrong with the car and they think it was an air bubble and it’s now cleared.

Off through the Cwm to fetch the car.

And there they were.

Oak trees. Old, large, imposing, Oak trees.

One I’ve loved since I first saw it but had convinced myself, before it came into leaf, that it wasn’t an oak. Two more large trees, and a scattering of tiny babies and saplings.

Today I spent over an hour, with 2 cameras, taking lots of pictures. I have over 100. This is a splat of a few of my favourites. I think, somewhere among them, I may have the source image for a new cover.

A little sad.

At the Naiad’s water, across her river in the glade where Sam lived, there were stepping stones.

The portal opened unnoticed in the trees beside the stream and Sam stepped out silently onto the grass that grew there, thick and full of moss and she smiled at the stepping stones so similar to the ones in the Naiad’s Mother Water.

From The Portal Sundered.

In 2008, when I was looking for a cover image for The Portal Sundered, I took this picture while on holiday. It’s a lovely spot, in a country park in South Wales. My kids had been playing on the stones just before the picture was taken.The river was wide, deep, fast and noisy.

I loved it. Loved the size and solidity of the rocks, loved the babble and rush of water.

Happy memories.

For one reason and another we’ve not been back there since.

Roll on a few years and we moved house to the place where holidays used to happen and we’re now within 20 minutes drive of that country park.

Yesterday we went back and we set out to find the stepping stones again.

This is the same spot. The picture is taken from a slightly different angle, but it’s the same spot.

The stones have been removed from the river. They’re still there, on the banks. My daughter, in the foreground, is sitting on them. But they’re not in the water. The river is narrower, shallower, safer for playing in. But the noise, the rush, has gone.

Some trees are gone, cleared to make way for new growth. There’s more of a river beach and we had a lot of fun skimming stones and finding creatures under rocks.

But it’s not the same.

In the story, Sam died, the Naiad left and the river changed, dried up. Drummer cleared the channel and the river flowed again, but the Naiad never came back. Not to that water. She moved on, found a new home.

I know things change and that the park is a managed place, controlled by human hands, and I can see why they removed the stones. But it was still a moment where the realisation that reality almost, sort of, reflected fiction.

I don’t trust it yet.

The car got fixed. The engine cooling fan was seizing sporadically and in need of replacement.

Probably. Almost certainly.

But it was an intermittent fault. So, the only way to be certain is to drive it and see if the alarm that doesn’t always go off, goes off. If it doesn’t go off, which it didn’t always do, then it’s fixed.

It hasn’t gone off yet, under similar driving conditions to when it used to sometimes go off. But only sometimes and with no obvious pattern or trigger.

Yes, I know, my brain hurts too.

The fan was definitely sticking and causing a problem and definitely needed replacing and that would definitely have caused the alarm to go off, when the fan tried and failed to come on. And the sensors, relays and other parts of the system all check out as having no recordable faults. The garage is almost certain it’s fixed.

I still don’t quite trust my car yet.

But Sage seems to, and she  is back in my head, just when I was gearing up to write something else, and Lily has taken more of a back seat again. Sage has brought Diana, some aliens and a spaceship or 2, and her new car along with some more story.

Neither of them are talking to me much though, the sun and warmth outside are calling much  more loudly. The grass needs cutting again, I have bulbs and plants to place and a garden to think about trimming, sculpting and arranging.

Oh, and a couple of new voices have arrived and I need to get to know them a bit and decide if there’s a story to be told there.

It can be a bit nuts, being a writer.

The Portal Between – Direct Edition

I’m revamping the Portal books….. This first stage is to add in some extra material that’s only available in the Osier Publishing Direct Edition – which you can only get through here or the Osier Publishing site.

Book One in the Portal Series.

Sam’s escape is just the beginning of her journey. Sam must go back to confront and defeat her abductor, leaving Kate to care for her children. Sam returns to the old oak tree, and the Portal to the world where she was held prisoner. In a whirlwind world of magic and monsters, where people and things are not who or what they appear to be, there are hard choices ahead, and Sam must learn if she’s strong enough to make them.

This Osier Publishing Direct edition of The Portal Between features exclusive extra content in the form of an interview with Kate, the key character for this book in the series.

 

Buy The Portal Between, Now.

Click the links below for the Osier Publishing Direct Edition of The Portal Between in the format you need.

UK Readers

£2.28

Kindle


All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.



















ePub


All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.



















PDF

All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.




















US Readers

$3.50

Kindle


All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.



















ePub


All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.



















PDF

All downloads are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. These downloads may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share your download with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader, or in the case of free content please ask that person to download their own copy. If you’re reading this book, or using this item and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to www.sarahbarnard.co.uk and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting my hard work, and the hard work of any artists involved in the creation of these items.
Sarah Barnard

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.

Note: These files will not automatically link to your ereader, device or application. You will need to link your device directly to your computer and copy the files onto your ereader, or app.

Payment is taken through Paypal, where you can use your credit or debit card or paypal balance in a secure environment. Although the currencies listed here are for the UK and the US, the files are not location dependent and Paypal will convert your currency if required.

Once payment has cleared then you will receive a separate email containing the secure download link. Use this to retrieve your download file.

The Portal Sundered is being arranged at the moment, and shouldn’t be too long.

A quick question for you, what type of extra material do YOU want to see in books?

Alternative timelines.

One of my favourite games is, “What if?“  I’ve spoken about it before. Sometimes it’s a curiosity driven pondering of alternate story lines, sometimes it’s pure self indulgence.

I wonder what might have happened if Sage hadn’t skidded on that dark road. I wonder what might have happened if Sam had gone straight to her parents, or if she’d talked to Kate and Lily before she went to the woods that night. Those are just my own characters.

I know there is a huge array of fan driven fiction being written, some of it shared online, some discussed over tea, or wine, amid giggling between friends. We all do it.

What if a police box arrived in our garden, what would you do if he said, “Come with me?” What would you do if you, or your child, got a letter from Hogwarts? What if Ripley had just said, “No.” when Burke came to ask her to go back.

I know you play the game too. We all do it. We all pretend. Even if we pretend we don’t.

I bet you can all write a short scene featuring a What If from your favourite film, TV show or book. That’s the challenge here. Take a character from a film, TV show or book, find a key moment in the story and play what if.

A couple of rules:

Keep it clean – this is a workplace friendly blog.
Please name, and credit the original creator of the character and story – we’re only borrowing their creation for a short time and they did all the hard work.
If you’re a writer – the character you choose should be someone else’s creation.
If there’s a link for their work then please leave it – it helps provide a reference for anyone reading who may not have heard of your choice.
Bear in mind that hugely long comments don’t get read – so try to limit yourself to around 500 words or so.
Feel free to share on your own blog, site or page but please link back to here – this is my game and I’d appreciate the credit for it.

Go on, I dare you….

I have something in mind for my own contribution but I’ll put it up as a comment later.

Kate laughed at me.

Yesterday I went to the dentist. I spent half the day with a frozen face, unable to drink without drooling. Not very attractive. The car’s intermittent electrical issue was in full effect with an alarm going off every now and then as I got everything done. But the garage was booked for this morning, and I know it’s just a minor thing, not doing any damage so I wasn’t in the least bit worried, just irritated as it makes me jump each time it does it.

Last bit of driving of the day and on trying to get back in the car to drive home, the handle on the driver’s door snapped off in my hand.

Sage threw up her hands in disgust and stormed off. “I thought you were getting this fixed!”

I fell about laughing.

So did Kate, and Lily chuckled softly in the background.

I clambered across the passenger seat and into the driver’s seat to get home, giggling for most of the 5 mins it took. The car is now safely in the garage with her beloved mechanics, after more hilarity when they shook their heads and commented that colour matching the new handle might be tricky. Then the looks of utter relief when I laughed; I really don’t care what colour he handle is, I just want it to work.

Sage is now sulking, and Kate is being interviewed. Jack’s not happy with me. He’s waxing his car outside and I can feel his concern. It’s Kate’s birthday today, she was born at Beltane, the coming of summer.

It’s raining. But the garden is becoming more green every day and if the soil would just dry out then the grass is in need of a cut.

But first, Kate. If anyone has any more questions then add them here in the comments and I’ll work them in as I write up the interview. This will be the Exclusive bonus content added to The Portal Between when it becomes available to buy directly through here or through Osier Publishing.

Sam’s next.

Kindle


Paperback

The Portal Between in All Ebook formats at Smashwords.

When will the car be fixed?

It’s funny how characters can reflect real life at times. I’m sure it’s all tied up in the writer’s subconscious and can be explained away by anyone who ever looked at a psychology book. But only the writer’s mind turns that into stories.

Since moving house, and changing country too… Wales is a different country, with a different culture and different life. It may all be part of the UK, but England and Wales are different countries…. Anyway, since moving, I’ve not done as much driving, and the driving I do is slower. Purely because the speed limits are lower, the roads calmer, so I travel at a slower pace to get where I’m going.  And the car has had some issues. I’ve been focused on home, painting, hanging wallpaper, sorting out furniture.

Sage has been silent. She prefers me to be on the move, at speed, comfortable and at home in my car, and then she speaks. Until the other day, Sage has stayed away from my mind and Lily has been to the fore.

Then, last week, on my way out to go shopping, my car went bang. Literally, there was a loud Bang as I was pulling off my drive and then the most horrendous noise.

Sage stormed off in disgust.

It turned out to be easy to fix and while that was being done, I had a chat with the mechanic about a more technical issue. His face lit up, “Oh my mate had one of those [car like mine] and he had that problem. I know exactly what that is.”

Sage woke up. The car’s getting fixed? More driving? Can we go to the beach?

Kate shook her head at me, and at Sage, smiled indulgently and wandered off, refusing to even think about the interview I want to do with her.

That’s the way it goes some days.

Hi Sage, the car is booked in for Tuesday and next weekend is a bank holiday. I think the beach is definitely on the agenda. As long as it’s not raining.

Amazon Kindle US.

Other ereaders.

Direct with Exclusive Digi-autograph and message.

Ask Kate.

A while ago, I interviewed one of my Portal characters, Lily and it was a lot of fun as well as enlightening. Most of the questions for that interview came from you, people who read the books and who follow my blog, and who come and play on my facebook page.

Would you like to do it again? This time I’ll get Kate in the chair.

Do you wonder how she coped while Sam was missing? Why she took Jack back? How she manages to feed that brood of kids? What her favourite flower might be?

Ask anything you like in the comments here, or on my facebook page, and I’ll collect questions for a few days before I put together a chat with Kate.