I arrived in Thailand two weeks ago, after living in Northern India for the past three years its a nice change to come to somewhere where things, ermmm, shall we say work!

Don't get me wrong here I love India, it's a great place to live and be creative but it sometimes wears you out. The monsoon seemed to have lasted for an eon this year, all the roads were repaired over the winter and completely washed away during monsoon. The poor guys spend ages building new drainage ditches alongside the McLeod Gang-Dharamsala road which is long, steep and treacherous at best. However, in rather typical Indian fashion they didn't actually think to create a retaining wall to stop mud-slides and rock falls from falling into the drain, which of course happened and now the drainage ditch is full of mud and rocks and the road has been washed away again, go figure.

Thailand is a nice change, the roads are smooth rather than full of huge invisible pot-holes and water actually sprouts from the tap on demand, power failures are rare even in the more remote parts. I hired a motor-cycle and toured around the North a while, a thing I would not dare do on Indian roads where straying cattle, dodgy trucks, weaving rickshaws and manic buses threaten your life at every stage of your journey.

It was great to hear Obama got the presidency, many people here in Thailand were watching the election and when it was announced he won everyone was cheering so hopefully we might be entering a new era, we can but hope.

More Thailand adventures later.

The world certainly seems to be a different place to wake up to this morning, excitement and change in the air. For me, I may be in France, but I am also appearing in Australia today, the second leg of my Walking the White Road virtual book tour! A small taster from blog author Angela Meyer:

"Tania Hershman takes you on a series of short imaginative adventures in The White Road. Some stories are casual, tough, or laid-back, many are poetic. There are backwards unravellings, fantastical flights, speculated inventions, surprises, cleverness, humour, and scorn. The snapshots vary in tone, and explore possibilities - scientific, technological, emotional. The book is physically bag-sized and each story can be read in a sitting, but are all worthy of full attention.".....

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... but won't be able to blog for a while. Frozen shoulder plus neck problems. On drugs, plus physio, but rather painful.

Hope all well

Love

Axxxx

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The US is not my country but it does matter to me who becomes the next president, and guess what, I DON’T want it to be John McCain.

Here’s a link to the latest stats at [more ...]

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I arrived at La Muse writers and artists retreat at midnight last night, so this could still be counted as day one. My journey took rather longer than expected, do to trains being stuck in tunnels between Spain and France, and then more trains not arriving, leaving me sitting for 3 hours on the floor of Narbonne Station, watching the last episode of Mad Men season two on my laptop!

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My only television interview is for a local access digital cable channel in a shed in Shropshire. A young balding man greets me at the door and shows me to the green room which is just a cupboard with a portable TV showing dreadful documentaries about the local community. I make a cup of tea and then the same man leads me to the studio which is another tiny room with one fixed camcorder on an Argos tripod pointing at two plastic chairs in front of a green screen.

The screen makes me nervous because they are able to project anything that takes their fancy after the fact. On my Media Production course at Bournemouth University I once floated TWAT above the head of a fellow student who I actually quite liked, so I know what people are capable of...

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Woke up with a very painful shoulder today – I can barely raise my arm to chin level, so poor Lord H had to help me get dressed. It’s not the shoulder that was numb either – it’s the other one, so obviously I am having deep trouble up top at the moment. As it were. It feels like I’ve somehow pulled a muscle so I have taken a double dose of Nurofen Plus and put some Deep Heat cream on it and am hoping for easier days … I’m wondering – though I admit it sounds strange – if it’s because over the last couple of weeks or so I’ve been piling up the pillows when I sleep to try to ease the breathing problems. Lordy, but I sound as if I’m barely clinging to life here on the dark side. I’m lucky to be still around at all, you know! Anyway, I removed one of the pillows last night and am waiting for the healing to begin, ho ho ...


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I'd like to draw your attention to this, it's a new blog by writer Adorna Shine, and it's cool. You can read my review of her book here.

Even cooler, is this - Jenn Ashworth's A Kind of Intimacy available for pre-order with a cover and everything.

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So, a quick round-up for now, and I'll sort out something coherent as soon as my brain's cleared of jet-lag, and jet-virus, and jet-landing (as in coming down to earth to laundry, tax bills, empty fridge, Christmas catalogues and so on, after ten days of being dined, wined, conversed with, taxied and bag-carried...)

WIN A SIGNED COPY OF A SECRET ALCHEMY: silly competition coming very soon, so watch this side-bar...

EVENTS: if you feel like dropping by for a listen, do come and say hello. And if after that you feel like buying a copy of A Secret Alchemy or The Mathematics of Love or even both, I'll be happy to deface it/them with a signature and a dedication to whichever aunt on your Christmas list will leave you out of her will if you don't come up with something other than bath salts this year.

Wednesday 19th November at 7.30pm: I'm reading from A Secret Alchemy at one of my favourite indie bookshops, Review, in Bellenden Road, Peckham. This is part of the Peckham Literary Festival, and there'll be drinks, nibbles, and the general atmosphere of off-beat literariness which South East London's hallmark.

Wednesday 26th November at 5pm: I'll be reading at Goldsmiths College. Goldsmiths, in a very real sense, is the birthplace of A Secret Alchemy. Drinks and nibbles, and if you're thinking of doing an MA or even a PhD in Creative Writing, either there or elsewhere, it's a chance to get the low-down from staff and students, as there should be a good few of both present.

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Have spent most of the day being wonderfully lazy, hurrah! Well, I felt I deserved it after yesterday's excitements. And I probably also needed to recover from yet another disturbing dream last night - actually more of a nightmare I think. Bizarrely I and another girl (though I somehow managed to be the consciousness of both) were on a journey, but our fellow-travellers were being kidnapped by strange women dressed in black with machine guns. The girl and I were desperate to avoid this fate, but were unfortunately captured anyhow. Not entirely sure what happened to the girl, but the nasty women operated on me by removing a kidney and inserting a container full of purple liquid instead - as they wanted me to carry it over the border for them, thus avoiding the border-guards. Ye gods, what the hell is all this about??? I woke up in a right state in the middle of the night, and poor Lord H took a while to calm me down. Anyway this morning, I have no unusual scars so it looks like (a) I haven't been operated on by aliens, and (b) I still have both my kidneys. Thank the Lord for that then ...


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