It often strikes me how life can catch us up and carry us along like a river in full flood. That is how it seems to be for me of late. Since submitting my first contribution to the wonderful faezine.com, I seem to have been swept up in a maelstrom of activity - I have been both delighted and afraid on a recent bushwalk, I have made several forays into the realms of photography and photo-manipulation and have discovered that I enjoy both very much, I have reworked two of my tarot cards, have written the meanings for the many of the major arcana cards, and have written a notepad full of notes on the minor arcana. Oh, and I finished the first draft for my book, Dreams of Magick.

I have been working on my book now for almost a year, in between working on the artwork and text for the tarot, several commissions, and the final artworks for the now published, Mythic Oracle. To come so close to completion is both a delightful and cruel. Delightful, because it is alway fulfilling to finish something in which you have invested so much time and effort. Cruel, because there are always the inevitable requests for changes by the publisher, and those changes mean more work on a project that you had hoped could be put to bed at last.

I am currently making those requested changes - the cover artwork I had selected was not quite what the publisher had in mind, and so after sending them several new options, some painted and some unpainted, one of the unpainted was deemed to be more suitable and I have spent a good deal of the last two weeks working on it with great care so it is as close to perfect as possible. I am, so far, really quite captivated by it. It will be one of my best works to date and captures the direction in which my art is now going.

Once the painting is finished, I will turn my attention back towards the changes that still need to be made to the text. I don't mind making them as I know it will result in a finished product that I will be very proud of for both it's beauty and content.

But the simple truth is that while I am making those changes, my attention is somewhere other than here. I must be getting old *laughs at self* as I am discovering that I am simply not as mentally limber as I used to be. I've always been quite skilled at multi-tasking, but the older I become, the more I realise that I can only do two or three things at a time, not half a dozen.

So, I just wanted to stop in and say hello to everyone, and let you know that you were in my thoughts even though I have been silent. Soon the flow of the river will slow to a gentler pace and I will find it a lot easier to stay afloat.