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{some of my favourite B&Ws from this year}

It still amazes me that I pay my bills by taking photographs. I’ve been looking through my Flickr stream and as each month passes I see how the techniques have been refined, how the eye has matured and how my confidence has grown. There isn’t a day that passes without some kind of photography-related activity happening. Of course, the ride has been precarious and bumpy and I’m still nowhere near where I want to be with this new career, but the small steps have become strides and I’m now hatching plans for 2008. It took quite a while for me to fully occupy this new identity – for so long I was a journalist/writer and somehow moving away from that felt like a betrayal of past dreams. Making pictures comes easily to me; writing words was more of a struggle – a passionate struggle, but a struggle nonetheless. I think that sometimes you just have to go with the path that makes your heart beat faster, the one that keeps you up at night, plotting and planning.

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But this afternoon I discovered that the words have been doing their own thing, simmering away until the moment is right.  I was sat in my local Borders, nursing a coffee and the new Alice Sebold, and for some reason reading a few pages of her new novel prompted me to get my notebook out of my bag and write several pages of notes towards Book Two (and i will still call it Book Two, despite the fact that Book One won’t be published and possibly wasn’t meant to be – I’ve made my peace with that). Funny how characters you dreamt up so long ago remain as alive and vibrant as they were the first day they visited you. This afternoon I felt them knocking at the walls of my brain, reminding me they were still there… Tell our story.

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For now they will have to remain there – I haven’t the time to sit and write as I’d like to. But maybe when the chaos of the last few months (the stuff I haven’t wanted to share here) has calmed down, I’ll take a walk in their world…. maybe.

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