I’m going to France! Provence, to be specific. I’ll be going in the European summer, specifically so I can visit the flowering fields and distilleries of essential oils, all in the name of research for my next book. Squee! I’m pretty excited.
Lavender fields are one of my favourite places to hang out
I do have a long history of lying down in lavender fields. Here’s a pic my sister snapped in a Tasmanian lavender farm back in 2004, when I was thinner, younger, and apparently wearing some sort of red striped PJs!
Provence
My lovely dad is chaperoning me to Provence and we’re planning our itinerary now. If you have any suggestion for fields, farms, flowers and distilleries (or better fashion sense), I’d love to hear them.
This is precisely why I write books: to make people feel good.
Books like (legal) brownies for all!
I love this story. From May this year, ‘Books on Prescription’ will begin in the UK, with doctors able to ‘prescribe’ a book to assist a patient and improve their mood. The books include both non-fiction and fiction, as well as poetry. It’s also hoped the scheme could help the struggling libraries. Win-win. How wonderful!
In the first couple of months after my baby was born, life was pretty insane in our house. Something I missed the most was reading and it was only when I began to learn how to get the reading time back into my life that I started to feel normal again. I always read before going to sleep, something that’s a very powerful mood producing activity for me. I literally feel stressed if I don’t have a good book nearby to delve into.
But it has to be the right kind of book. For me, there’s no point in reading something angst-ridden, violent, negative, sarcastic or miserable in order to feel better. Uplifting, comforting, engaging and fun–that’s what I want to read and that’s what I want to write.
My contemporary fiction novel, The Tea Chest, about three Australian women thrust together in a bid to sell tea to the English, will be out in 2014. And if you’re looking for something to make you feel good (a book that reads like a chocolate brownie tastes) then it might just be the book for you.
Want a cool Christmas advent calendar with a fun book theme for your kids?
My clever sister has made a Christmas book advent calendar. She’s taken a heap of Christmas themed books and wrapped them in Christmas paper and put them in a big red box.
Each night during December, her two boys (one-and-a-half and three-and-a-half years old) get to take turns to pick a book (like a lucky dip) to unwrap and read before bed.
What a wonderful tradition to start with your kids (or indeed yourself!).
