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Last few weeks have been, thankfully, a bit more focused, and there's been a bit more writing done than I've managed for many months. A few poems, but the main effort has been to finish the new book, Bystanders. It's out for reading by a few people at this stage, and will be going to a publisher at the end of the week. I'm in that awful stage of huge self-doubt. Should never have written this. It's prose. Should have stuck to poetry. Maybe should stop writing altogether. Time to stop and smell the roses. Can't do that. The rose season is over, and it's almost time for the winter pruning. Perhaps a message in that too?

Another month gone by, and yet again I wonder where it's disappeared to. Just before Easter came the lovely Words@theWall evening, where Ros Schultz and I read at the State Library a smorgasbord of the poetry we've written over the years. Next day it was off to Canberra for Easter with family and catch-up time with old friends. Since return, there have been a number of Rotary Club speaking engagements - Holdfast Bay and Marion Clubs, followed later that week by Edwardstown. These are always really enjoyable events, as was taking part in the Hills Laneways Festival, where a group of poets read from our works outside the Red Cacao chocolate shop and cafe in bright sunshine with crowds of passersby wandering around the festival areas.

But now it's back to the desk again, and the computer, as I try to draw to an end the next book, another one many years in the thinking, and now at last getting on to paper. This book at last is the prose work that members of my family have been urging me to try for years. But in between, just to keep the muse pacified, scraps of poetry for the many writing groups we now belong to. It's so satisfying to be back to writing. All too soon June and July will bring the next crop of speaking engagements, and the balancing act will be on again ....

A lovely guest speaking session at the Mount Barker Library last Saturday. Not a large crowd (I gather most Hills people were off in Hahndorf watching Professor Tony Robertson film his TV history show) but a most responsive group to talk to about Oberammergau. It's always good to find some familiar faces from the past in an audience, and it was fun to catch up with people from my Immanuel teaching days. Next public event: the Words@the Wall guest reading at the State Library on Wednesday evening.