Green Living, Sacred Life is steadily heading for publication in late March 2011 It has been a long journey for this book, from a small, but crazily popular chapbook to a full blown one hundred thousand word epic. Initially it was created to fill a space on my sales display. I was taking my published books and a few self published chapbooks to summer events and felt there should be just one more. The decision came a couple of days before we were due to travel, so I hastily cobbled together all of my thoughts and previous articles on spiritual and environmental issues, popped them into a book, added a title and cover illustration and hit 'print'. I was still stapling and folding the morning we were due to travel, but I managed to get enough done to make a respectable show. The books sold well generally and I felt it only fair to warn people who picked up the new chapbook that it was probably full of errors, due to the unseemly haste. People nodded and perused - then bought. It actually sold out faster than any other title, closedly followed by another chapbook Spirit of the Runes. When I got home I quickly contacted my publisher Capall Bann and they immediately sent contracts for me to work up both books, plus a third I'd had in mind, Another Side of M.E., about my experiences with the illiness. Fantastic. Contracts for three books. Work on Spirit of the Runes came first as I had plenty of material and was able to complete it quickly. Capall Bann wasted no time in bringing it out and I must admit I was very proud of it, but felt I'd been too ambitious trying for three books, so by mutual consent, the M.E. book was shelved. That left me free to begin Green Living, Sacred Life, which I'd envisaged being a brief but informative little book. How wrong I was. It just kept growing and growing. At the same time I was getting sicker and so I enlisted the help of another writer,Tye Jamie Coxston, to get Green Living, Sacred Life out. Tye is an eco warrior and very spiritual, so she seemed the perfect choice. Unfortunately she was also doing a degree at the time and struggled to give our project as much time as I'd hoped. Nonetheless we managed to get it finished by the end of 2008.
Because of a mass of glitches, mainly due to various pieces of technology refusing to 'talk to each other' properly, it has taken until now to bring it to print, but thanks to the dogged determination of Jon Day at Capall Bann, who not only sorted out the technical issues, but also slotted in my updates to keep the text as current as possible, we're on the home straight and I'm waiting with some little excitement for my author's copies to arrive. Tye and I will be meeting up at the end of this month and plan to celebrate (in a green and spiritual way, of course).
