This evening I was googling the title of my new book to see whether it was on Amazon yet (it is), when I came across a link to a major poetry competition, The Margaret Reid (which is entered by thousands of poets) and into which I had entered six of the poems from my manuscript last year. To my surprise and delight, all six poems had received Commendations! They were:

Reflections on Healing

Messages in Water

Wind Voyager

Eternal Sparrow

Sonnet: Beyond, Behind, Before, Above

The Wonderful Wizard.

I feel very pleased with myself. I wish I had checked months ago. I could have been insufferably smug for soooooo much longer!

One of my clients has a son who regularly visits the States. She is ordering the book and organising him to collect it on his next trip. Friends are telling me that they are forwarding on the press release to their friends, too. I popped in to my local booksellers, Muswell Hill Books, and the lovely manager, Tim Robinson, remembered me from my last book. A Year Of Spirituality: a seasonal guide to new awareness had sold very well, he remembered, and is going to order lots of copies of Eternal Sparrow for the shop.

We are beginning to meet potential students for next year's course of Soul Therapy. Kathryn has met a gynaecologist who sounds very interested in acquiring a nationally accredited qualification in healing, which is what the course centres around. I have met a couple of jewellers and a Feng Shui Consultant who are also very interested and can see the benefit of adding healing and psychotherapy as well as a knowledge of other major subtle energy techniques (which combination defines Soul Therapy) to enrich their work. We are delighted that last year our curriculum and the standard of our tutors were accepted by UK Healers (National Professional body) as having reached the highest level (Stage 4) of national accreditation for professionally qualified spiritual healers.

Publication launch today in the USA for my book, Eternal Sparrow: poetry for love, laughter and life, ISBN 978-1-60860-535-4. What a great feeling - I have just had a message from Inez at my publishers, Strategic Books, to say that today's the day. Strategic will be setting up a website for me from which to sell it, and will be also selling it from their own site. I am a little shell shocked, I have to admit. This has all been done by email until the final Galley Proof arrived a few days ago in the post. Already two of my beautiful, generous friends, Maria Grachvogel (gorgeous designer dress shop: 162 Sloane Street London SW1X 9BS) and Vicki Sarge Beamon (fabulous fashion jewellers: Erickson Beamon, 38 Elizabeth Street, SW1W 9NZ) are wanting to sell it in their shops. I am very lucky with my friends. Another wonderful friend, the supermodel Marie Helvin, is offering to give me a UK launch party even though Eternal Sparrow is only published in the USA. I feel very blessed and very grateful. People will, of course, be able to buy it on the internet booksellers like Amazon. So now I am just praying that everyone will feel an uncontrollable urge to go and buy themselves a copy and lay in a stock to be used as Christmas, birthday or anniversary presents for their nearest and dearest - and then for their not-so-nearest and less-dear too. It is only $9.99 so bulk buying won't be painful on the pocket and will make this old lady very happy. It's kindness to old folk week, my darlings....

At last, the Galley Proof of my book, Eternal Sparrow: poetry for love, laughter and life, has arrived in the post today (see above, front and back cover.) Giovanna's design is beautiful, and shows off the title and text really well. This is one step nearer to publication and I am so happy with the finished article. I have sent a list of names and emails to Strategic Books, so they can alert people when the book is ready.

Another two reasons to celebrate:

A new client with a bunch of debilitating allergies, whom I saw yesterday for the first time, rang me today to say that she felt brilliant and hadn't felt this well for ages.

Our friend Fru's aunt, whose doctors gave 48 hours to live a week ago, is not only still with us but is now conscious, sitting up and taking food. We have all been sending healing to her and it seems like it's working.

This afternoon my mother, Mona, comes back from Leeds after having spent a week up there in our home town sitting Shiva (mourning) for her younger brother, Ronnie, may his dear soul rest in peace, who has died aged 85 years. At 88 years, Mona is still going strong, surrounded by a loving family and lively group of friends, with a hectic social and intellectual life. She is devastated at the loss of Ronnie, but knew that she has in reality been mourning for the loss of him for a good few years as senility gradually claimed his mind. In Eternal Sparrow I have included a poem written whilst Mona herself was fighting for life a couple of years ago in the Whittington Hospital. The poem is sparse, stark, because I could hardly breathe myself at the time. Her doctors were asking me to decide whether to switch off her life support system, and I had decided not to agree to that. Luckily that was the right decision but, at the time, I didn't know whether I was making it for selfish reasons. I wasn't prepared to take responsibility for my mother's death, and wanted her to stay even if she emerged from her three week coma (following emergency six hour surgery) with brain damage.

Her present love of life and thrill of every new day is a constant relief to me, as you can imagine. I am profoundly grateful to all those spiritual healers in my Soul Therapy circle who joined with her medical team and me in helping to save her life.

Welcome to my blog. I am delighted to have you here. This could be the start of something small....

Just received word from my publishers that the galley proofs of my book, Eternal Sparrow, are in the post. Can't wait! I love the whole process of publishing, and there is something so satisfying about holding a newly published book in my hand.

I still remember the thrill when my first book, A Year Of Spirituality, was published. I recommend the experience to you, so if you haven't already written it, go and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. It is a complex, scrambled set of emotions, a mixture of bliss, relief, fear (what if it doesn't sell?), vulnerability, pride (this has to be a best-seller!) and courage. Courage at the exposing of my innermost thoughts and fantasies, pride that my publishers, Strategic Book Publishing, considered my manuscript worth taking a gamble on. In my "day job" as a Soul Therapist , my clients see in me whatever it is necessary for them to think I am. With the publication of Eternal Sparrow, this is nearer to the reality.

Having said that, poetry - the new rock 'n' roll? - is a distillation of who I am, plus an enormous amount of discipline in the crafting of each piece until it satisfies my super-critical ear. I hope that the birth pangs and agony are not in evidence (a swan glides over the water but we don't see the feet paddling madly underneath) and that each poem reads easily and, as Shakespeare said, speaks trippingly off the tongue.

Apart from everything else, bringing out a new book is one wonderful excuse to have a party.

I've been meaning to get to grips with blogging for ages but thought that it was some mystical, powerful entity that only the young and computer-savvy knew how to create. Now, I am thrilled to have created this blog at last. Chuffed up to the tickle mark, in fact.