The Joker...

The  cleverest card in the deck… care and trouble free…  (posted by Jaye Marie)
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I think my brain has reached another tipping point.  Since we began this journey into the weird and wonderful world of self-publishing, an avalanche of confusing and often unhelpful information has assaulted my poor brain.I have tried my utmost to assimilate what I thought (and was told) was necessary to be successful in this new digital publishing world.  You know what I mean... that you must have a good and interesting blog, you must be on Facebook, and Twitter... the list goes on and on.
Well, I have tried to do all of those things, but it doesn't help to discover you might be using an unsuitable website provider... and that Facebook keeps changing the rules (which I didn't understand the first time) to maybe our keywords are not good enough. (More about keywords in another post)  Not forgetting the most important one, have we forgotten something crucial?


Remembering last year…
All of which made me remember something that happened last year.  I had been gazing out of my window to where all my bonsai lived on their shelves, hoping for some divine inspiration, when I noticed something odd. I had to go and have a look, for my eyesight is not what it was and I sometimes see things that are not there. But not that time. It was real and I had to take a photograph to prove it.  On the shelf, nestled between a pine tree and a Ginko, I had placed this huge pine cone that we found in a forest. It must be about six inches long and it really does tell you about the weather. It closes up tight when it rains and opens wide when the sun comes out.
But what was special that day (as you can see in the photo above) was the fact that tiny mushrooms had sprouted from inside it. Don't ask me how... it just had. I think it is magical, and it got me thinking differently about many things.





An impossible dream?
That maybe we were trying too hard on all the wrong stuff. Because one of the things that has started to annoy me big time, was the fact that what with all this networking, blogging and searching, there seemed to be precious little time left for what is important...writing. And as hard as I tried, I couldn't squeeze everything in. It was simply impossible.
That was then and so much has changed. It is still hard to fit everything in, but I have written my first book since then, so it wasn’t as impossible as I thought. The sequel is well under way too.Overall, I am pleased with our progress. Anita has added another book to her repertoire, shortly to be followed by another, later this year.We are told that what you really need to be successful, is to keep producing brilliant books, so that is what we are doing... and loving every single minute!