New article on writing fantasy + notes on sSouth America

Again, my thanks to all of you for your emails and blog comments. I’ll be talking to Random House next week about Book 5 and hope to have some news to tell you after that.
Meantime, I’ve come back from South America and I promptly got sick. Not good. I’m still battling a heavy cold and getting through boxes and boxes of tissues. In among, I’ve written an article ‘From here to where … and how’ which you’ll find listed under ‘articles’ on my website. Those of you who are into time travel and fantasy might find it helpful for your own writing. Just click on the title to access it.
I’m still coming down to earth from our time away. The absolute highlight, for me, was our cruise around the Galapagos Islands. It started at Baltra, where we were to catch the boat. All the seats were taken by sleeping sea lions: ‘first class passengers’ stretched out along the benches, with ‘2nd class’ sleeping on the floor underneath! It looked really comical. Also saw a host of marine iguanas (ugly as) and also bright red Sally Lightfoot crabs.
There were so many birds and creatures to see on the different islands, I just loved it. We walked among sea lions, penguins, giant tortoises, land and marine iguanas as well as a whole lot of nesting birds, like shaggy grey pelicans and blue-footed boobies (big white birds with bright blue webbed feet – so cute!) We saw pink flamingos (just gorgeous), albatross and the graceful frigate birds who are serious low lives with very budget manners! Their favourite way to gather food is to chase a bird that’s been catching fish, perhaps to bring it back to chicks in its nest. They harrass the bird until it gets so stressed that it vomits everything up = breakfast for the frigate bird, while the other poor bird has to go back out to sea and start all over again. Sometimes nature is NOT nice!
We did quite a lot of snorkeling, swimming with sea lions which was very exciting. They’d come really close and circle around and look at you with their big dark eyes – which is all very well but I couldn’t help wondering if they’d also take a friendly bite while they were at it! (They didn’t.) We also swam with turtles, penguins and white-tipped reef sharks and saw heaps of fish, some really colourful and some in such huge shoals you could get totally lost in them!
We also spent time in the Amazon jungle, at the Iguazu Falls and in Peru, all great and I’ll write about them in my next post.
Please keep your comments coming; I’m always interested to hear what you think should happen next in the Janna Mysteries!