It's always interesting to be a guest speaker  - so many diverse groups from different organisations. But one of the pleasantest audiences I've had lately was last Saturday at the South Australian branch of ACLA (Australian Church Librarians Association)  - a lovely group who were really interested in books and writing.

As always, the two basic questions were a) Where do you get your ideas from?  and b) how long did it take you to write the book?

So I focused on the first question, and explored the origins of each of my six books, and tried to identify the sources that fed into each of these. A bit of a trip down memory lane, in fact, but also a useful reminder to me just what had been the background material that had generated each of these very different books. It was interesting, also, to realise the importance of travel in my writing, especially as my seventh book is due for release sometime in the next weeks. It's a small Picaro Press chapbook, one in a series which is now being produced by Ginninderra Press, and it will be in a similar format to my fifth book, Flowers & Forebears, which is currently out of print but should be available again very shortly.

The new book, Indochina Days, is a collection of poems, all of them written during our August/September tour of Vietnam and Cambodia. There I followed my usual practice of writing a poem each day, a wonderful way of fixing travel experiences in one's mind. It's all very well to keep a detailed journal, as I do, but the focus provided by writing the 'poem a day' is even more valuable, and a great memory-trigger. So it's these poems that will be published as Indochina Days, and it will be available, like all my other books, for purchase through the final (order) page of this web site. I've checked the draft copy, so it shouldn't be too long before it's available. After that, what next? Who knows?  I don't ... yet.