Thursday Doors – Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California

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You might think, looking at these pictures, that the doors are from some castle in Europe, home of an ancient king. In fact, both can be found in Hearst Castle, California, high above the winding Pacific coast road. That’s not to say the doors couldn’t have started life in a European castle somewhere – Hearst was a lifelong collector of antiquities and, when Hearst Castle was being built in the early part of the twentieth century, he would visit Europe and buy up bits of castles and monasteries and churches that were being demolished, sending them back to his long-suffering architect, Julia Morgan, with instructions to ‘fit them in’ somewhere.

IMG_0591I think the door at the top, with its overwrought carvings of cherubs and masks and dolphins, looks rococo in style, possibly Italian in origin. The other door looks more ecclesiastical, as though it came from a British or French church, built long before the United States even came into existence. You can see how Morgan fitted it into the fabric of the building, matching the colour of the stone and building a space to fit it into.

The photos are not the best, but they’re the best I could do, trying not to include either our tour group or the unattractive carpet laid underfoot to protect the old floors. If you are in that part of California, I’d definitely recommend a visit to the Castle – it’s a place layered with history in a visually stunning location, with a magic that shuffling crowds and roped off areas cannot touch.

This is my entry to Norm 2.0’s Thursday Doors Challenge. For more doors, or to add one of your own, visit Norm’s page and click the link.

The #BloggersBash Agenda and Who’s Who

The Blogger’s Bash is just over two weeks away, and I can’t wait! Here’s Ali’s post about who’s attending and what’s going to be happening – looks like another great day out 🙂

Wednesday Wander – Balinese Rice Terraces

Bali Terraces 2I’ve taken a Wednesday Wander to Bali before, to a temple based around a sacred spring. This time I’m visiting the Tegallalang rice terraces, carved like beautiful sculpture into the lush green hillsides.

Bali Terraces 1The rice terraces are irrigated using a traditional Balinese cooperative system which, according to tradition, was taught to the Balinese by a holy man in the eighth century. Located near Ubud, the terraces can be viewed from the side of the road winding up through the hills. When we stopped, the air was damp and heavy with heat, the rains that arrived like clockwork around dinner time each evening just starting to build. We stood there for a while, trying to take in the scale of the terraces rising up the hillsides, imagining the amount of work it must have taken to create them. If you look, you can just glimpse someone standing at the top of one of the terraces – that will give you an idea of how vast they are.

Thanks for coming on another Wednesday Wander with me – see you next time!

 

Cover Reveal – Hills And Valleys

Hills And Valleys Front Cover

Here it is! The cover for my third Ambeth book, Hills and Valleys, is complete and ready to upload, but first I thought I’d share it with you.

Thanks again to my brother, Rich Jones at Turning Rebellion, for the fantastic layout – I’m thrilled with the finished result and think it fits really well with the first two titles in the series.

Hills and Valleys will be available very soon – watch this space!

My Kyrosmagica Review of Oak and Mist by Helen Jones

A lovely review of Oak and Mist from Marjorie at Kyrosmajica – thanks, Marjorie!

Marje @ Kyrosmagica's avatarM J Mallon YA Author and Poet

untitledGoodreads Synopsis:

‘Alma, even I do not know what he is capable of…’

Things couldn’t be better for Alma. She’s returned the lost Sword to Ambeth and is finally with Deryck, Prince of the Dark. But what’s really going on? Deryck is struggling with his father, who wants to control Alma, while Alma is struggling with her best friend Caleb, who doesn’t trust Deryck one inch. Plus it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with her life in the human world. Falling in love shouldn’t be this difficult. But things are about to get much worse…

Quests and friendship all fall by the wayside when there’s romance to be had. Plus, spending time with handsome Deryck is much more appealing than with an increasingly angry Caleb. The Light are always on about making choices, so they shouldn’t have a problem with her choosing to be with Deryck. Besides, he’ll…

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Take The First Step

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It’s Monday. The start of another week. Thanks for stating the obvious, you might be thinking. But as I wandered along on my morning walk back from school, I pondered the idea of beginnings. Starting something – taking the first step, as it were – is often the most difficult part of any journey. Think about it. Walking into a new job or school. Starting a new sport. Beginning a diet. Making change in your life. Whatever the first step may be, it involves conscious choice and a will to proceed. It also can require courage, especially if you’re doing something you’ve never tried before.

I have a friend who is thinking of writing a book and she recently emailed me, saying she didn’t know where to start. This can be the hardest part about writing, I think. Starting. Sitting down and typing that first sentence, the pathway that leads you into the story. There are so many wonderful examples – Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again‘ and Jane Austen’ It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife‘ are two that come to mind straight away. And there are so many awful ones as well – there are even competitions to see who can come up with the absolute worst opening to a novel. The Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is one to look at if you’re interested, named for the man who came up with the immortal ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’

I’d already been writing for many years when I decided to sit down and start the first draft of Oak and Mist. I remember clearly that it took me a while to get my head around the idea of writing a book. An actual book. I didn’t know whether I could do it, whether it would be any good, or whether I even had a complete story to tell. All I had was a starting point, three characters, and an idea of how they might work together.

My first draft ended up being a monster of over 160,000 words. I managed through successive edits to whittle it down to below 140,000, which I then split into two halves, Oak and Mist and No Quarter. But the cool thing, the thing that really kept me going, is that the story itself didn’t change, nor did the characters – it was the language and structure that needed work. I rewrote and changed the first three chapters so many times I lost count, before finally condensing them into a few short pages. But the beginning incident, the idea that started the whole journey, never changed.

So the important thing with any sort of journey is to start. As you can see, it took time for me to actually sit down and choose to write a book. Then it took even more time to get the beginning of the book the way I wanted it to read. But it didn’t stop me from writing, from continuing on with the story until it was told. For you can always go back. Until the work is published, there is always room to make changes. So don’t let fear hold you back. The story is there, waiting to be told. The journey, there to be taken. All you need to do is take the first step.

(This is an edited and amended version of a post first published in July 2014, when hardly anyone came to visit my blog. Thank you for coming to visit today)

PS I’ve been nominated in the Bloggers Bash Blogging Awards as Best Pal – yay! If you’d like to vote for me, (or even if you wouldn’t), head on over to Sacha’s blog and make your vote count!

#writephoto – The Glade

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I do love Sue’s photo prompts – her photos are so evocative, and she gets such a wide range of responses in different styles and genres. My response this week is… well, I guess it’s sort of a poem. I don’t fancy myself as any sort of poet, though, so perhaps it’s more, these are the words that came to me when I saw this image.

I walk,

Crack and snap

Of leaves underfoot,

Moss cool on my tattered skin.

The journey has been long,

And I a traveller

Through stars and time and shattered woodland

To this place where branches twist,

And stones tumble.

Sunlight golden

As I kneel, humbled.

At journey’s end.

To add an entry of your own, simply visit Sue’s blog for more details, then set a pingback to your post (making sure to post by May 25th). And don’t forget to use the #writephoto hashtag in your title!

Thursday Doors – St Margaret’s Church, Wolston

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This is the doorway to the church of St Margaret, in Wolston, England. It’s a typical Norman-style church doorway – the church was built in 1186 – with a simple wooden door. Yet the colours of the stones, the simple shapes and worn lines, give it beauty, as do the fresh flowers and shrubs in tubs around the door, evidence of a church still well-used and part of the community.

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Despite its simplicity, this door is very special to me, and I have several photographs of it. In one, my paternal grandfather, smiling and in his vicar’s robes, is greeting my maternal grandfather and my mother. My mother is dressed in silk and lace, her father in top hat and tails, and they are on their way into the church when my father is waiting, along with the wedding guests. In another photo, a very small version of me is coming out of the church, accompanied by other small children, all of us dressed in costumes for a festival.

My grandfather was vicar of this church until 1979, when he sadly passed away, and there is a memorial chair to him inside. He is buried in the churchyard, along with my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-aunt, so it is a place that holds many memories. In fact, I blogged about some of them here.

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And this is another reason I think this is a special church. I rather liked this poster. It seemed to me to embody what religion should be – open to anyone and accepting of all. It’s how I always remember it being when I used to come here, so it’s nice to see that nothing has changed.

This is my entry to this week’s Thursday Doors Challenge, courtesy of Norm 2.0. For more doors, or to add one of your own, visit Norm’s blog and click the link.

VOTE NOW! Annual Bloggers Bash Awards NOW OPEN

It’s here! Voting has opened for the Second Annual Bloggers Bash awards, so put your best voting finger forward and make it count! Oh, and I’ve been nominated! So – yay! Thank you so much 😀 I’m nominated under Best Pal, just in case you might want to vote for me (please). And huge thankyous to Sacha, Geoff, Ali and Hugh for all their hard work in putting this together xx

Sacha Black's avatarSacha Black

VOTE NOWThis is it. The waiting is finally over.

The Bloggers Bash Awards are now open for voting.

We had a HUGE number of nominations, over 350, so thank you to everyone who took the time to nominate.

Voting Closes June 9th at 12pm. The winners will be announced on June 11th at the Bash. If you can’t make it then a winners post will go live at 5:15pm on June 11th.

Choose carefully, you can only vote ONCE per category. There are 10 awards, (so it’s a long post) make sure you vote in them all.

Good luck to all the nominees.

Disclaimer: The committee has done their best to coordinate the nominations and to ensure, where possible, we gave nominees a choice of which category they wanted to be in. Due to time constraints and limited resources this may not have always been possible.

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Wednesday Wander – Twelve Apostles, Australia

twelve apostles 1This is the Twelve Apostles, a rock formation located on the southern coast of Australia, and probably one of the country’s most recognisable tourist icons.

I only visited the Apostles twice when I lived in Australia – even though we also lived on the coast, we were to the east of Melbourne, whereas these are to the west, several hours drive along the Great Ocean Road.

twelve apostles 2The Apostles are usually shown from the cliffs above, an ideal vantage point from which to see their arrangement against the blue ocean and sky. However, if you do get the chance to visit, head down to the beach for a different perspective . We did, the first time I went there, the boys surfing between golden pillars of stone as we lay on the sand and paddled in the azure waves. However, don’t get too close. The pillars have been known to collapse without warning – in fact, one if not two of the pillars in my first photo are now gone, the ocean that created them taking them back.

Thanks for joining me on another Wednesday Wander – see you next time!