God is great! It is good 🙂
This is a filler-inner blog as I haven’t posted anything in a while. The majority of my June 2014 was spent marking 150 odd papers from 50 to 150 marks per learner… 23×50, 93×80, 36×100 and 26×150. Ja, that’s a lot of marks! Then calculating them into the equations with the other 4 marks accumulated during the term… a report comment for each child and then the term was rounded out for a three week break! Amen. I can’t believe the first of which is now over and gone… craziness. As per usual I spent the first couple of days sleeping off the exertion of the term. Then things started to happen!
I managed to get into a recording studio and record some of my poems. {http://www.booksie.com/poetry/poetry/miss_lea/daylight-starlight-with-audio-too} I’ve wanted to be able to do this for a very long time and now I can tick it off my bucket list.
Within 24 hours of that excitement in studio, some of my photography was accepted by a local shop-owner to be sold in her store in an ‘exhibition’ format 🙂 I am super happy about it and am holding thumbs, toes and touching wood and praying that the glory of God that I’m ‘exhibiting’ will indeed happen and be wonderfully supported. Here’s the write up for the ‘exhibition’… 25 photos the shop-owner is taking with this story:
“A Window of Dawns: Light, hope, joy and inspiration; a gift to us all every morning without fail. The earth will move, the sun will rise, and so too should we.
This exhibition is a set of original, un-edited, non-photo-shopped photographs taken by Shannan on various mornings through 2014. Each composition of colour is a gift to everyone from nature herself; untainted by man and presented in awesome beauty for every human being, regardless of race, language, class and/or status, to enjoy. These photos are her way of saying Thank-You to her Father in Heaven, and our Creator, for the love that resounds around us every single day; if we only take the time to look, see and feel that the grass is green right here where we water it.
These photos are also presented as a celebration of our city; its colour, its diversity, its beautiful people and the way that it offers us a life and surroundings worth appreciating.
Every morning Shannan witnesses the earth turning and these photos are her evidence of the glorious miracle of that fact. As you look at them, may they gift you with the inspiration, love and peace that they have gifted her with, knowing that today IS a new and wonderful day, a gift :-)”
I sit at the moment with the photos and the frames I have to put them into whilst adapting them to be hanging instead of standing. Personally, I prefer the standing option, but the lady is keen on hanging, so I’m trying to configure a plan to have both options… God bless me with the way please.
Further to these two fabulous moments for me, I posted a blog I put up here onto my LinkedIn site as they emailed me to say that I could, so I did. I was so busy marking at the time that I never even logged in to check on it, until Saturday night. Oh my greatness! 389 Follows! I almost fell off my chair and then double-checked that maybe I had it wrong and it was actually my ‘connections’, and not ‘follows’… no, I have way less connections than 389! It was bizarre and awesome at the same time. The stats for this site: no-one’s checked in or read anything here for about 2 weeks!
The other good news is that my play that I have on Kindle has sold a few copies, in India and Canada! How random. I’m fascinated that something I wrote has been bought by someone in a far off land; it is totally awesome, miraculous really. Oh, AND a group called “Off the Wall Plays” are backing one of my plays “Choices” and marketing it for me off their website and selection of plays for sale! How cool is that!?!?! I wrote that play back in 2007, now, 6 years later I’m finally getting someone to publish it for me, even if it is online, that’s ok, it’s a marketing platform, which is FABULOUS!
As far as “Eish! London” goes: I’m still selling the odd copy here and there, so I reckon I must have hit the 55 sales by now… 17 months after I self-published it on Kindle.
Then last, but not least, my desire to create pass-it-on books for people to write in and pass on to another person to write in, and so on; has taken off faster than I expected. I had planned on getting 100 out this year and I now have 62 out in the world in 5 months. 1 to France, 2 in Bolivia, 1 in Turkey, 3 in Greece, 1 in Italy, 1 went from America to Norway, 3 in Australia, 5 in England, 2 in Germany, 1 in Switzerland, 1 in the Netherlands, 2 to Ireland, 1 to Swaziland, 1 to Thailand and 3 have just gone off to the World Masters Championships in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the one I sent to Canada never arrived. A few have gone to Johannesburg and many have been scattered around KwaZuluNatal. From there I have no idea where they have all gone to, I know one KZN girl said she was sending it on to Dubai, I’m hoping that happened. When I got the idea through ‘Artist’s Way’ I was enthusiastic and excited, now I just want to get it over with as it takes so much time to make and cover each book. Then there’s buying the book, finding all the pictures to collage, the glue, the contact, the postage expenses… sigh… I still believe that God has a plan for them, and I do hope that one day I’ll get to see one of the books filled and be inspired myself by what’s in it and the journey it has travelled. The exercise has indeed helped me learn to “LET GO”. Not to hold on to creations and gather things I don’t need. It has helped me pass on control and leave it up to God to take care of. It was most certainly what I needed to do.
In my prayer time yesterday morning God asked me to go to the local Botanical Gardens… it was raining and such an odd request that I thought I was making stuff up in my mind. The request persisted and eventually I got in my car, in the rain, and drove to the gardens, parking near the buildings. I got out and walked in the entrance. To my left was a new church gathering. An extension to the church my dear friend Andrea (Eish! 27 October 2009) has been a part of since the 80s! They are now in my city. The little voice in my head said, “That’s what I needed you to see…” So it looks like I’ll be investigating that church soon as my Spirit needs more nourishment and the verse I read today was Hebrew 6v1-3 where it says that it is time to move away from the ‘principles’ of Christ and into perfection… so bring that on!
Yes, so all of that is why I haven’t managed to blog in a while. Lots of blog topics have been popping up though, so I’m hoping to get some of them down in typing and posted for whoever would like to read them 🙂
One last thing … for my next book that I’m formulating at the moment, the antagonist needs a nationality, so I’m going with my bet for the World Cup Soccer Winning Nation = Germany… and his girlfriend / mother of his child can have the nationality of the 2010 World Cup Winners = Spain… 🙂 I thought that was a fair way of deciding their nationalities 😉 Then when it came to settling on his name, Tim it needs to be. A guy called Tim just won the Ballito Surf Championship, there’s currently a Tim in the top world golf rankings, there’s an annoying radio advert for ‘Tim’ber City on at the moment and I found a cartoonist who draws comets called Tim Walt… so I’m going with that one… and I’ll have to see where it ends up.
Thanks for reading. Stay beautiful!
Shannan
novel1eishlondon 