Looking at this picture always brings back a smile as large as the one I had on my face the day I took this photo. I had busted a move on some friends and jumped a local bus in the dimly washed lemon light of a winter morning in rural Rajasthan. The early morning bus heading for the six-hour journey to Ajmer was full. Settling into the bedlam, I move to make room for a woman who sits beside me and we smile at each other. As the day warms and the journey begins, we also warm to each other and begin to talk. Days of rough travel dissolve instantly after our first shy hesitant hello. As the journey grew in miles, it also grew in smiles as everyone on the bus warmed to me and my camera. We were having such a lovely time that I almost missed my stop and as I jumped from the bus, I paused to take this shot of my new friends. They all waved to me as the bus rattled off down the highway.

Banjarengi who was found beside his dead mother by a sadhu living outside of Pushkar. Baba ji has raised this baby from a few weeks of age and was convinced that nurture would win over nature as Banjarengi grew into maturity. I would visit Baba ji and Banjarengi often during that winter season taking milk for the monkey and potatoes for Baba ji who only ate potatoes. Banjarengi was always happy for female company and would scamper to sit on my head or shoulders and lope around after me in the garden. Often watching him, I would catch a far away look in his eye that made me feel he was remembering his mother…and my heart would do that funny little flip flop of compassion for our precious charge. What to do? This is life.

But in that lovely little town on Nong Kai on the border between Thailand and Laos I met a man whose conversation turned my head towards adventures in epublishing.
I saw his name in the register as I checked into the Mut Mee, his occupation caught my eye.
“A book designer?” I questioned Harps, the kiwi guy who was checking me in.
“Yeah you should meet him,” Harps.
Strange that as a writer I had never considered the idea of designing a book, possibly because I hadn’t moved past the wrangling with various publishing about the value of my manuscripts and into the hard core area of publishing. The idea intrigued me and so I sought him out in the restaurant later that evening, plonked myself down at his table and shamelessly picked his brains about the future for the publishing industry and the idea that writers may soon become endangered species if we didn’t keep up with the changes.
He pointed out to me the tourists in the restaurant traveling with e readers, he pointed out that I was already driving people to my website and had people reading my rants on the blogs I wrote. Why then was I still thinking in terms of the print media? Why wasn’t I thinking of an E Venture into self publishing?

Why indeed? Did I imagine it or did I actually hear Bob Dylan in the background of that restaurant beside the Mekong River? The times they are a changing, especially for writers.
Print publications are struggling, payment issues drive a lot of freelancers to their knees but with every downside there has to be an upside. There are still opportunities out there for the adaptable writer, for the writer who isn’t trying to support a family or pay a mortgage or even eat three meals a day there are still a few cracks in the woodwork that we can worm our way into.
So I have been quietly working away at trying to understand this brave new writing world and all the time the sales of e readers have increased while the price of the things go down making them more and more accessible to people such as myself who would never have thought to own one before. It’s exciting to think that even at my advanced age, I can still learn stuff!
This entire year has been a huge learning curve in terms of having an online presence; of how to put that ball of me into the cyber air and how to keep it in the air so that my name comes up in Google searches and other queries, epublishing just seems to me to be the next logical step. I have carried these particular stories around for long enough now that I want to set them free into the world so that I can get on with the other stories tapping for attention inside me.
At the moment I am in the final stages of formatting and cover design and plotting the launch campaign. Watch this space as I work my way through this e venture, I will be running a competition on this blog called Mystery Monday where you will get the chance to read the eversion of my book Chasing Shiva and offering other downloads for free.
It’s going to be a brave new year!

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