I'm currently reading THE HEART OF THE VALLEY aloud to my elderly sister who is in hospital and I find myself wondering how on earth I wrote it - it seems to know so much more than I do! I remember that it took me over two years to write it and that much of that time was spent simply looking. Really looking. At trees, at birds, at clouds, at hedgerows, at tracks in the grass, at shadows as the sun moved. At everything in the valley where I lived. And in many ways I realised that I was seeing for the first time. Really seeing. At the same time I was reading works by people who had looked as intensely as I was doing - Wordsworth, Thoreau, John Stewart Collis. I was also intrigued by the similarities I was finding in mystical books and the latest scientific speculations about the sub-atomic world.
I suppose somehow all those things came together and, in the mysterious crucible of the imagination created something that surprises even me.
