Well, my lovely followers, I have been in France now for two months! I'm in a tiny village called Sérignac in the Midi-Pyrenees. I'm a third of the way through a self-directed writing retreat with a few projects, not least of which is the rewrite for Sleeptalker.

Mostly I find myself distracted by the beautiful countryside, quaint medieval villages and the amazing markets. If some of you have been following along on FaceBook, you'll see I'm quite obsessed with the purchasing of weird and wonderful foods and the cooking of them! In fact, my friend Ingrid suggested some poems about food which I thought was a rather good idea and which did kickstart me into writing a few poems, albeit nothing on the projects I'm supposed to be writing! But there you are, if nothing else we writers are very good at 1. procrastination and 2. beating ourselves up about our practice.

So, it's a couple of weeks before the holiday season - mercifully I am spared, to a great extent, the onslaught of TV advertising and the gross commercalization of the season - and I figure I'd better get something done. And, with that in mind, this week I will embark on rewrites for the play.

As an aside, I don't know how many of you know about the project I was wrapping up before I left Canada. I spent a bit of the summer working with Graham Powell on a collection of musical poems, tentatively entitled "Gratitude Songs" - Yes there is a theme there! Some of the poems from my latest book have been set to music that Graham composed especially for them. Check out his site - he's also a great photographer! When I get back to Canada we're planning a bit of a launch for the CD, so I'm also working on my Lady Gaga-ish costume - an homage to Leigh Bowery.

But don't think I've been completely idle. I was in London doing a reading for fellow-canuk, Todd Swift - who is now more English than the English! - at the Oxfam Bookstore and then the following day doing a guest lecture at Kingston University.

So friends - onward and upward!