The Magical World of Tylluan Penry

Writing my latest book, Sacred Shadows, has been mind blowing. It has shown me so many things that I only suspected were there. Once I really started looking, they came out from the shadows (hence the title!) And one of the greatest lessons is that money has been given importance it never deserved, and we have to ask ourselves why. Yes, it can buy things, but why oh why does everything these days come down to money?

To give you three examples. Firstly, the 'Donate £15' campaign to save the bees. Now these campaigns (and this one has been posting out fliers, which can work out very expensive) are all well and good, but better still is teaching people how to do it for themselves. Saving the bees (or anything else for that matter) is not just about money. It is about acting. If all we do is throw money at a problem, we are missing out on the opportunity to try and become part of the solution.

Anyway, on the weekend I discovered that my compost bin down at the bottom of the garden was literally seething with bumble bees. I hadn't put them there. They'd just arrived unannounced one day, decided this was the bumblebee equivalent of the Hilton and moved in. And it cost me nothing. And who knows? Maybe it did more good than £15 would have done.

(I always exercise what Mr Penry calls 'benign neglect' in our garden, allowing dandelions, buttercups and other plants that some would call weeds to flower in profusion. Along with herbs and just about anything else that will grow there! And the bees love it.)

The second example: Many years ago, I had a neighbour whom we'll call Janet. She was poor as a church mouse, had a lot of children, worked when she could and supported her husband who worked every shift he was given just to keep a roof over their head. Her house was painted a myriad of colours simply because she only bought paint that was on offer - so nothing ever matched.

Anyway, one day there was a knock at the door and it was the local vicar collecting for 'The Poor.' Janet was a kind hearted soul, so she invited him in and promised to help.
'We need money,' he explained, 'to give them basics, like saucepans and so on...'
'I can help there,' said Janet and went to the kitchen, coming back with two of her saucepans to give him.
The vicar regarded them with horror. (You should have seen the look on his face, she told me later.) 'Well, that's no good,I'm afraid,' he said, 'They're second hand!'
'What's wrong with that?' asked Janet. 'They're clean. They do the job. They're my saucepans and I got them second hand.'
'Well, we can't possibly hand out old saucepans to people.'
'Well I've got old saucepans, Vicar. I've never been able to afford new ones. And if they're good enough for me, they're good enough for anyone else, too.'
Needless to say, the vicar went away empty handed. For him it wasn't about helping in a practical way - it had all boiled down to money. And he couldn't spot a real gift, a real sacrifice if it punched him in the nose.

Now to my third and final. Someone I rather admired, began telling everyone who would listen that he had a great plan. A plan that would set the world on fire. A plan that would change everything.

And because I rather admired this person, I listened, and wondered what the plan could be. He'd had lots of interesting ideas in the past, so I thought this latest one must be brilliant because he was so fired up about it. When he eventually let me in on the secret, it was.... a fundraiser.
'We only need a couple of thousand,' he beamed.
And suddenly my admiration turned to dust. We all could do with a couple of thousand for our 'great plans.' But we don't have it. And our great plans become just little ones, and we have to accept that.
Does it matter? Well, not always, as the bumble bees showed me. It's not always about what we can pay, it's about what we can do.

Now there are times when projects need money. No doubt about that at all. But they need other things too. And we need to feel we can be useful, not just hand over a fiver (or a few thousand) and leave it to someone else. Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference.

Sometimes, even by my own standards, I feel I am getting a little paranoid. That’s not to say that I go chasing after all and every conspiracy theory because I don’t. But, perhaps more than some people, I get this uneasy feeling that all is not quite as it should be. That perhaps we should be paying a little more attention to the small things in life.

To give you an example. Back some years ago in the 1990’s, I was – so I thought – just an ordinary housewife and mother. I had had some work published many years before, I occasionally wrote letters to the local paper, and on one memorable occasion informed them that a certain MP’s name was actually an encryption for ‘Anal Chimp Mule’. (They didn’t publish it – no surprises there.)

However, I was becoming increasingly uneasy and it was hard to put my finger on it. The only thing I could think of was that we didn’t have a television and hence, no TV licence. This lead to a long running correspondence with the licensing people (exasperated, I often replied in verse) and sometimes a TV detector van would park outside the house all day long.

But there were other things too. Post was arriving late or not at all. And when it did arrive it often appeared to have been opened and resealed. There were occasional clicks on my telephone line. Occasional odd sounds and voices too. People I phoned occasionally remarked on GPO workmen outside their homes, messing about with the telephone lines. It was random. But it was worrying.

When we eventually moved house, we paid to have our mail redirected. Most of it was only delayed by a day or so, but some took about a week and had clearly been opened, even though I knew our old home was still empty (it was being renovated.)

Eventually I decided to send a letter to myself at my old address. I typed a load of gibberish on a slip of paper, folded it, and put it in an envelope. Then I waited to see how long it took.

Twelve weeks.

I wonder what their code-breakers thought it said?

Some of you may be surprised that I’ve just published three books of children’s fiction online as e-books. Actually, I’ve been writing children’s fiction for a long time, certainly ever since my own children were small and I used to make up adventures to entertain them. These three stories were originally written long, long ago, and then updated to take into account things like mobile phones and laptops. But essentially the stories are just the same.

Although I wrote them as children’s stories, in a way that’s a misnomer. Children like stories. These are stories I hope they will like. I haven’t intended to make them childish or simple. (And if I have, then I apologise!)
Fiction serves many purposes. To entertain, naturally. But it also allows the reader to safely explore issues that in the real world would be frightening or disturbing. They know – because it’s a book – that they aren’t going to be hurt, and no matter what happens to the characters it’s only temporary. So in that sense, storytelling is cathartic. It serves as a release.

It’s also a form of escapism. Through the pages of a story, we can have adventures, friends, find love or whatever. All important things in our everyday life and often unfulfilled. But in a story we can win the lottery, rob a bank, climb a mountain, find our long lost relatives... the possibilities are endless.

Anyway, this is the link for the books.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=T.P.%20Penry&search-alias=digital-text
You’ll see I’ve written them as T.P.Penry and not as Tylluan in order to distinguish them from my other writing. If you click on the covers you can read the first chapter or two for free – rather like browsing in a bookshop.

Hope you enjoy them!

I loved the garden the moment I first saw it. Overgrown, neglected, yet it had been loved once, and could be again. There were brambles as thick as my wrist everywhere, but underneath a few valiant plants struggled to emerge.

In the first year we spent time putting the house straight. After all, you live in the house for most of the time, not the garden. But the garden was my first love, and I dreamed of making it lush and fertile once again. Not for me the straight backed herbaceous borders, everything in its place and a place for everything, or the bowling green lawn that no-one's allowed to walk on. No, I like a bit of wildness, a bit of the unexpected. Perhaps it's the Celt in me. After all, the Welsh have a tradition that gardens should never be too tidy, there should always be a little corner set aside for Himself. Whoever He may be.

Likewise with sowing seed. As the old saying goes: One for the earth, one for the mice - and one for the Master.

It's a mentality that takes hold all too quickly. The belief that someone else, the genus loci of the place if you like, is there, watching, nodding approval - or not, as the case may be. You can't help yourself, it influences you, makes you a little more aware that you are only the caretaker, the trustee. You don't own a garden. It owns itself.

And of course, everything in the garden conspired to produce beauty. Even the beech tree, at the bottom of the garden. Did you know that beech leaves make the very best leaf mould? All you need to do is pile them up and leave them to rot down. Couldn't be simpler. No need to mess about with compost accelerators and all that, just make a bloody great tump at the bottom of the garden underneath the tree and leave 'em. Which I did.

At first Mr Penry didn't like the slow worms that soon moved into the great gooey pile of copper and purple leaves. But then he likes slugs even less, so when I pointed out that slow worms hunt, kill and eat slugs, he was happy to leave the slow worms alone, provided of course that they reciprocated and left him alone. In fact, I think he's beginning to lose his fear of snakey things since coming across a few of them while out in the garden.

Anyway, you begin to get the picture, don't you? The garden was more than willing to work with us to make it beautiful again. All I had to do was read the signs, (plus a couple of well chosen gardening books) and with a minimum of effort there were flowers everywhere. I cleared away a load of old branches left at the bottom of the garden and suddenly there were golden daffodils in the spring and flaming orange montbretias in the autumn. I didn't have to buy or plant anything. The garden took care of it.

Soon I began to see the garden as a separate entity. It had its mystical places, and we did our best to enhance these. A great wooden toadstool on the lawn became a place to sit and think. We made a well head and placed a Roman goddess to watch over it. We put up fountains, made a herb garden, a giant bird house. And the garden, I believe, was well pleased.

Now we hadn't heard from the people who bought our old place since the first Christmas. I'd spent ages writing a history of their new home and its environs, complete with maps, references to nineteenth century street directories etc., and posted it to them, complete with a ‘Welcome to your new home’ card and their response was - nothing.

Then just before Christmas, we had a card indicating their intention to visit. The cheek of it! I was furious, and so was Mr Penry. He was so mad he ripped their card up and stamped on it. I couldn't blame him. They'd really made moving house hell for us. They'd fought and stalled every inch of the way. They'd even gone on holiday in the middle of things! We should have easily been able to move in so that the children could start at their new school on the first day of term. Instead it was three weeks into term before they set foot in the place. Starting a new school is hard enough anyway, the Moorcrofts had made it ten times worse, and I didn't forgive them for that.

In the new year we began thinking about getting the hedge cut. The whole place is surrounded by a high laurel hedge and while it gives us a lot of privacy, it's the sort of feature that's liable to run amok if you're not careful. I'd been giving it a bit of a trim myself from the inside, a snip here and there to keep it in check, but outside, what with the boundary wall and everything it's about twenty feet tall and we knew we were going to have to get a professional in to sort it out.

It was while I was cutting the hedge, however, that I found the witch bottle. Just a small bottle, carefully tied into the hedge long so ago that the cord had bitten into the bark of the branch. Weird, I thought. But then we found lots of odd things here when we moved in. Stones with black crosses made of electrical tape.

At first I thought maybe they were grave markers, you know, the sort of thing kids do to mark their hamster's grave. But there were rather too many, and in odd places. Like near the fireplace in the hall. Or out on the stone terrace (don't tell me there's a chinchilla buried under there cos I won't believe you. It would be much too difficult to dig the flagstones up and then replace them.) And there were an awful lot of those stones with their black markers down near the bottom of the garden.

It was when one of my daughters finally got a computer that I finally discovered the significance of the bottle in the hedge. It is a witch bottle, put there to guard against ill wishing and bad luck. Most witch bottles are very old, and when I consulted the gentleman who is apparently the authority on such matters in the UK, told me that he thought the tradition had died out only to be revived in the last 5 - 10 years by the New Agers. That is, until I sent him my bottle.

Now he isn't so sure because our bottle had obviously been in situ for a long time, yet not more than thirty years. So the tradition of witch bottles never did die out completely, as he had thought. It was alive and well in the Welsh Valleys. But why? What were the last occupants so afraid of?

Perhaps at this stage I ought to mention a bit about the history of our house. I've been up to the local reference library, copied maps, checked the street directories, all the usual stuff. The most interesting thing about the place is that it isn't the first house on the site, there was another, much earlier on, built in what is now the front garden. The trouble is of course that unless I know its name I can't begin looking up who lived there, though believe me, I've tried. The copper beech tree is marked in all the maps, just at the front of the house. Well, it must have been a lot smaller then. The fact is, though, the tree is much older than the present house.

The people who lived here before us were a bit of a funny bunch. I know, I've met some of them. As sanctimonious a shower as you would ever wish to meet, they only got the place because of their connections with the big old chapel in the next town and even then they had to pay through the nose for it. But that's beside the point. What is relevant to our story is that they regarded themselves as God-fearing folk. Definitely not the sort to put up witch bottles. Not without good reason, anyway.

We, on the other hand, are cut from different cloth. Though Mr Penry has a degree in Divinity, God-fearing is not a phrase that springs to mind when you meet him. Irreverent, yes. Blasphemous, occasionally. But God-fearing? Well, not really. And then there's Yours Truly. I've always been into the witchy side of things, even when I was a child. I celebrated Halloween when nobody else in the house ever did, and always felt there was something special about it, something which needed to be celebrated.

The house must see quite a difference from its previous inhabitants, which until 1960 were almost all Chapel clergy and their families. Crystals, runes, tarot, oh, and the ceremonial ringing of bells to purify the place every week. Quite a change.

Or is it? It all depends who lived in the earlier house, I suppose.

Anyway, to get back to the Moorcrofts. It was Mr Penry’s fervent wish never to set eyes on the ‘little bastard’ ever again, and for a while we didn't. Though we never quite worked out why he bought our old house, it turned out to be quite an investment as house prices when the boom began and house prices went through the roof. Moorcroft stood to make more on our old house in two years than we had made in almost twenty.
‘Moorcroft should be pleased,’ said Mr Penry, ‘the greedy little bastard.’
But Moorcroft wasn't pleased. Far from it. He began to pester us. First it was a phone call, vaguely rabbiting on about ‘things we hadn't told him’ and hinting that he would be taking legal advice.
‘Cheeky sod,’ said Mr Penry.
Then we got a letter. ‘Matters had not been disclosed,’ it read, ‘I shall be going to the High Court and Issuing a Writ.’
‘Let him,’ said Mr Penry. ‘I'll tell him I'm a Judge.’
‘And a good judge too,’ sang our merry band of children who were raised on a strict diet of Gilbert and Suliivan.

But I have to admit, I began to worry. Every morning when I went out to get the post, I kept looking for anything which looked vaguely legal. But nothing came.
Then we had another phone call from Moorcroft. Before moving he had asked us specifically whether the loft conversion we had had done back years ago had been fireproofed. We had told him it had (which was true, so far as we knew) and he said he now had proof that it wasn't and would be suing for the costs of putting it right, plus legal costs and substantial damages for putting him and his family at risk.
‘I'll put him at bloody risk if I ever clap eyes on the little shit,’ said Mr Penry.
And then - nothing. Not a word. No solicitor's letter, no writ. Nothing. It was as though he was playing a game with us, piling on the pressure, taking it off, putting it back on again. It took the sunshine off my summer, I don't mind telling you.

Months passed. Summer came and went, and not a word from Moorcroft. I wanted to contact Mr Martin, the man who'd done the loft conversion for us, but Mr Penry said we ought to sit tight and let Moorcroft make the first move.
That move came last week, in the form of another phone call. ‘We ought to meet to discuss this,’ announced Moorcroft.
‘Sod off,’ said Mr Penry, only he didn't say ‘sod.’
‘I will take you to court and I will win and you will have to sell your house and pay me everything,’ persisted Moorcroft, sounding more and more like a bad impersonation of the Demon King in a pantomime. ‘Come and see me and we shall try to settle this before it gets to Court.’
‘What is it you really want?’ I asked, snatching the phone away from Mr Penry who was just taking a deep breath to hurl obscenities at our caller. ‘You had the house at a rock bottom price, it's almost doubled in less than two years, for God's sake! You could sell the place now and make a bloody good profit!’
‘Why should I sell the 'ouse? I do not want to sell it. In another two years I’ll be able to make an even bigger profit!’
‘So what do you want from us?’
‘Come and see me, both of you, and we shall discuss a price. I am thinking of £20,000.’
Mr Penry snatched the phone back. ‘And I am thinking of strangling you, you arrogant little....And if you think I'm wasting my time coming down to see you - ‘
Moorcroft sighed. ‘Then I must come and see you. Tomorrow morning. Ten o'clock.’ And he put the phone down.
Well, we both knew we were in deep shit. We didn't have £20,000, nor any means of raising it, not without selling the house. Besides, we were certain that the loft conversion had been properly done because the building inspectors had been out to check that everything met the current planning regulations. So what the hell was Moorcroft going on about?
‘He's talking through his arse,’ said Mr Penry. ‘By the time I've finished with him it'll be the only place he will be able to talk through!’

Neither of us knew what to do for the best. We still believed he was bluffing, but we also knew he was quite capable of ripping out any fire-proofing and then claiming it had never been installed just so he could claim damages. Although it was the end of October, it was a still warm and sunny so we sat out in the garden discussing it so the children didn't overhear. There was no point upsetting them, at least, not until we had a better idea what was going to happen.
‘He's got money worries,’ said Mr Penry, ‘that's what it is. He needs the money and sees us as a soft touch.’
‘But if he goes ahead and takes us to court,’ I said, ‘and if he wins...’
‘He won't win,’ said Mr Penry, ‘he hasn't got a leg to stand on.’
‘But he might, He could have ripped out the fire proofing for all we know - who'd listen to us then? We'd have to sell up, and leave here....’ I looked around sadly at the garden, wondering how I could ever bear to say goodbye to it.
‘If he has the nerve to turn up here tomorrow, I'll kill him,’ said Mr Penry.
‘Then maybe you'd better stay out of the way,’ I suggested, ‘and let me deal with him.’
‘He probably won't even turn up,’ said Mr Penry.

But Moorcroft did turn up. And promptly, too, just as the clock struck eleven o'clock. In he swaggered, all teeth and designer clothes, his beady eyes taking in everything as he looked around.
‘Nice house,’ he nodded.
‘We'll talk outside,’ I said, ‘it's a lovely warm day.’ This was true. It was one of those rare days in October that makes you think winter won't be quite so bad after all. Besides, I didn't want him in our new home. That was one thing we'd promised ourselves when we moved here. It was to be a new start, nothing from the past would be allowed to taint it. Still, Moorcroft didn't mind staying out in the garden, and we had plenty of benches where we could sit and discuss exactly what he had in mind.
‘Just so you know, I mean to have compensation from you,’ he announced, ‘I will take you to court if I have to, but then the judge will award costs against you, and that will cost you much more. So - suppose we say you make a one-off payment of £20,000?’

Upstairs I saw a curtain twitch in our bedroom window. Mr Penry was lurking there, listening to everything. Any minute now I expected a spanner to come flying out of the window and bounce off Moorcroft's head.
‘We don't have that kind of money.’
‘Then you will just have to find it, won't you?’
‘Look Mr Moorcroft,’ I said, ‘you know that loft conversion was a good job. It was fireproofed. You can't prove otherwise.’
He gave a small, cold smile. ‘Oh, I think I could.’
‘Only if you cheat.’
He laughed out loud at that. ‘But of course! I fully intend to.’
‘We're not paying you,’ I said. ‘Not one penny.’
Maybe I was getting jumpy, but I was sure I saw something move down the bottom of the garden, by the pile of leaf mould. Maybe it was the neighbour's cat, I'd have to shoo it away later, before our Floss spotted it.
Moorcroft walked down the three stone steps that lead from the front terrace down to the main lawn. ‘How do you feel about losing this place? You've done a lot of work to it, I can tell. And the garden especially is really very beautiful.’

He wandered around, pretending to be interested in the bird table Mr Penry had made the first year we moved in, in the hydrangeas, the roses and hebes. But in reality all he was interested in was the money he thought he would make from us.
‘You don't have a mortgage, do you?’ he asked suddenly. ‘So why don't you raise a mortgage on this house? Twenty thousand is nothing on a place like this.’
‘We couldn't afford to repay it,’ I said. ‘We'd have to sell.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, this place is too good for people like you, anyway, I might even buy it off you. I could offer a good price.’
‘Like the last time? If you think we'd ever do business with you again... ‘
‘You don't have a choice, Mrs Penry. I mean to have the money one way or another.’ He glanced around smugly. ‘Yes, I think I would enjoy owning this place.... of course I'd put new windows in, and that hedge would have to go...much too gloomy, don't you think? I could offer say - £45,000. You could pay me off and still have enough to buy a nice little terraced house somewhere.’
And then either something really weird happened or I started hallucinating. A man stood up in the middle of the pile of leaf mould. A big man, easily Mr Penry's height and build, he was covered in leaves, in his hair, over his face, his clothes, everything except his eyes and he began to move towards us. Moorcroft with his back to him, didn't seem to notice.
It was like one of those dreams where you want to shout but when you open your mouth nothing comes out. Nothing came out of Moorcroft's mouth either. One minute he was going on about making us pay, the next thing he was struggling with a gob full of leaves, retching and choking.
The creature - almost a man, but not quite - had hold of him around the neck and the waist, lifting him clear off the ground and dragging him backwards down the garden towards the tree. Of course, nobody outside the garden could see anything because of the high hedge, and the whole attack took place in virtual silence.
By the time it was over, and the leaf man had returned to his mound of leaves, dragging Moorcroft with him, Mr Penry had hurried down from upstairs and was standing there in the garden beside me. Neither of us made any effort to help our visitor.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Mr Penry, ‘did you see what I think I saw?’
‘Possibly. I'm not sure.’
‘What was it? It looked like a man made of - leaves.’
‘I think that's exactly what it was. The Green Man. Spirit of the Woods and fields. And Moorcroft was his human sacrifice.’
Mr Penry shuddered. ‘Do you think we're safe?’
‘Oh yes. We understand this place, don’t we? But Moorcroft was threatening to make us sell to him, and talking about how he was going to change everything, especially the garden. Clearly someone - or something - took exception to that.’
We waited a while, then moved closer to the heap of leaf mould down by the tree. There was no sign of Moorcroft, though the heap seemed to be moving a bit, and there were sounds of chewing and slurping coming out from the centre of it.
‘Shit,’ said Mr Penry, ‘he really has gone. What are we going to do? They're bound to come looking for him.’

Funnily enough, though, the police made very few enquiries. Moorcroft's car, a nice flash number with all mod cons quickly disappeared from outside our house, driven away we suspect by one of the local yobbery who took it for a spin up on Rhigos mountain before setting fire to it. Moorcroft, it emerged, was a man of many faces, married yet had more than one mistress, his business dealings enmeshed with the type of people it's better not to know.

In a way, his secrecy was his own undoing. Nobody knew where he should have been the morning of his disappearance simply because he never trusted anyone enough to confide in them, not even his wife. Nobody was really surprised when he just disappeared. It's as good a way as any to avoid paying the bills. About 30,000 do the same thing every year, and only a tiny percentage ever resurface. And in his case it was as good a way as any to avoid paying his bills. That was why he'd started coming onto us, he was heavily in debt and needed the money.

And this year, the pile of leaves at the bottom of my garden is deeper and denser than ever...
Best to leave things as they are....

Copyright Tylluan Penry 2012

I shall try and keep this post relatively short. The end of the world in all its predicted forms is something of a pet peeve with me, ever since someone informed me that the world was going to end next Friday and she was very annoyed because she'd planned on going out that evening.

I did try pointing out that she wasn't likely to have much time to be annoyed (or anything else about it) but she wasn't having it. 'I was going to get my hair done, specially,' she whined.

Well, yesterday we had one of our regular visits from The Rat Man. Ratwen cambrensis has yet again taken up residence in our garage and is making himself well and truly at home. The cat will not deal with it (the rats are too big and have a nasty gleam in their eyes, apparently.) Little Aud, our indefatigable Bassett Hound can only do so much by herself. And ignoring the problem simply means that a small colony of half a dozen rats rapidly spirals out of control.

Now The Rat Man is a truly great character. He even thinks like a rat (or so he told me last time.) And he explained, just as he was leaving yesterday, that if the world were to end tomorrow, he was sure that rats would still manage to survive.... 'Cos rats is like that.'

Then, as he reached the gate he paused and turned.... 'And politicians,' he added.

Over the past year I have blogged less and less, it's true. Yet look at my blog site and you will see that I've always loved blogging. What has changed? This site.

You see, you might think that spamming doesn't really matter. But it does. It is the cyberspace eqauivalent of a particularly aggressive type of cancer, in that it fills everything up and stops it from working properly.

Everything slows down. To try to get to page two of my list of friends' blogs today it took FOUR MINUTES TO LOAD!! That is just unacceptable. I have a good connection, no problems with any other sites, just this one. And it is driving me away. In the past couple of months I've hardly blogged at all, it's too much hassle.

So if the owners of BCUK want to just sit back and do nothing - okay. Where do they think it will all go then? Because I used - several years ago - to be a pro blogger, but I don't do that any more. There's no point. And if enough people feel as I do, there'll be no revenue from that, either.

I don't want to blog here as often as I did... so even the bloody adverts that are papered inappropriately all over the place will go unread. And advertisers aren't going to pay you know, if people don't bother reading their ads.

And if I don't blog and others stop too, then the wretched spammers are going to be at a loss too, aren't they?

If you own a site, at least take an interest in it. Don't just sit there and throw up your hands when people start protesting.

To the owners of BCUK - I am assuming you are human beings, the result of millions of years of evolution....

Bloody well act like it.

For anyone who missed last night’s radio show, The Magical World of Tylluan Penry, and the interview with David Rankine, it is now available as a podcast at:
http://tylluanpenry.podbean.com/

Putting broadcasts up as a podcast has been a steep learning curve for me. I quickly realised that not everyone can listen to a show at its set time - quite apart from the fact that it goes out quite late, if you happen to be living in a different time zone, it's certain to cause a few problems. So a podcast seemed ideal.

But when you're not really very technically minded, just connecting things to the computer seems like a huge challenge (it is.) And then all the different file types etc., and editing the recording, well, you can imagine that it's been taking up quite a lot of my time.

Still, I reckoned it would be worth it, and I think it is. People give their time to be interviewed, and I feel it's only right that as many people as possible should be able to hear them. That's only fair. The radio stations do a few podcasts, but of course space is always going to be limited because audio files are quite big. So the answer was to set up my own site.

And of course doing this means that I can keep earlier shows such as the one with the interview with Sorita d’Este and also with Kevin Groves still current. I think it's important to try and put as much information out there as possible. !

It's taken time and sometimes it's been a bumpy ride. The podcasts aren't exactly the same as the shows because I've had to remove the music due to copyright issues (although I have a few ideas of my own to deal with that - I'm nothing if not creative in my thinking!)

I think I will also do some broadcasts that are intended entirely as podcasts on specific subjects at some point in the future.

Now... what can I try next? You tube?

Being the busy girl (!??) I am, I have also recorded a radio show, in which I interview the well known author, researcher and Kabbalist, David Rankine. If you want to catch up with it, it's going out at 10pm British Summer time tonight, on internet radio,http://www.oneworldradio.org.uk

If you aren't able to listen at that time, don't worry because I will be putting it up as a podcast in a day or so over at my site on podbean http://tylluanpenry.podbean.com/ There are already two other broadcasts up and running, one with Kevin Groves and the other with Sorita d'Este. I hope to be putting up a lot more in the near future and they are all downloadable, or you can just listen to them online if you prefer.

The only thing really different about the radio show and the podcast is that I've had to leave the music out of the podcast due to copyright matters.

Anyway, apart from that I am cracking on with my sequel to Seeking the Green which was my very first book, published back in 2008. I remember being soooo excited about it, and now I'm on my fifth book. Mind you, this promises to be a busy year because if all goes to plan I will have a couple more books out at the end of the year too. Fingers crossed.

The past year or so has been a huge learning curve for me, at a time when my health is on a curve all of its own (mostly in a downward direction ) However, sometimes I feel that I am meant to stay at home more so that I can get this work finished. There is so much to do and I always seem to be chasing my tail!

That said, Mr Penry remains, as always a tower of strength. I honestly don't know how I would have coped without him. He's always there, always encouraging, always wise.

Our new puppy, Noah, is probably the happiest dog I have ever known. Every day he's delirious: It's sunny - hooray! It's windy - hooray! It's pouring with rain - hooray!

Honestly, we can learn a lot from our pets sometimes!

I know I've not been around much on BCUK recently, but part of the reason has been the sheer pressure of writing. The thing about writing is that it is very time consuming - researching, writing, editing, it all takes time. My most recent book :
http://www.thewolfenhowlepress.com/Magic_On_The_Breath.html

has been out since the end of October 2011, and if you click on the link you can read the first chapter absolutely free. I always feel this is a good idea because it gives people a taste of what the rest of the book will be like without costing a penny, rather like browsing in a book shop!

At the moment I'm working on two other books which I hope to finish this year. These will be available in both print and on Kindle. I've tried to keep the prices for both as low as I can - by doing so much of the work myself I can cut out a lot of extras and pass the savings on to the customer.

I also have a couple of Kindle-only projects in the pipeline which will hopefully he up and running by December.

I am still putting out my radio shows on One World Radio - the next goes out this Thursday at 10pm BST and features a long interview with the well known author, David Rankine. I now have my own podcast site too, at this means that if you miss the radio broadcast, you can catch up later either listening online or downloading the show to listen to it at your convenience.