for the BC community and on a seperate note, for me.

Yep, sometimes you don't appreciate how much you rely on something until its not there, of course, the world didn't stop without BC but for many of us, in varying degrees, its even temporary loss created a hole in our lives. There are people, friends that we only speak with through BC, its so much more than a story exchange, it really is a community and its loss, however short, can be devastating. So special thanks to Erin, Piper & co for all your efforts to keep the site up & running.

Its bean a bad week for me too, January was a bad month for book sales, how bad i hadn't realised until this week - lets just say baked beans will be a significant part of my diet until after Easter! It does mean i've had to trim back some plans for this month although i hope to still make it up to GOC next week for my grandsons 4th birthday.

What's next? cycling i think. So i was feeling a bit down over the money situation on Tuesday and after the excesses of Saturdays ride i thought i'd go for a shorter ride, just to clear my head. For short read a single mile, thats as far as i got before a sudden hissing announced a deflation, i had a spare tube of course but i didn't feel confident about continuing, especially as i didn't appear to have any patches with me. So i returned to base, my thuse having taken a further knock.

After a short mope i decided to use plan B, the bike currently off the road, so i rolled that out and set off again, this time with less intention which resulted in a ride to Bath and back, barely 25 miles but better than nothing.

Keeping on the riding theme for a moment longer, yesterday, ie Thursday, i decided to do a reasonable ride up to Stroud and back via Tetbury, hoping to get a tailwind assist on the return. It was indeed a cold headwind heading northwards, cold enough that as i climbed up onto Minchinhampton Common i got caught in a snowstorm - yup straight up, snow in Gloucestershire. It wasn't the last i'd see of white either, during the tailwind run back south there were another 3 or 4 flurries, not enough to settle on the ground but i had a coating a couple of times. So my last ride of March was more wintry than the rest of the 'winter' but i scored 116km despite the 2c average temperature!

You may or may not have picked up that on Tuesday, the next part of Gaby - Smell of the Crowd went live on Kindle. I've been working hard on the writing over the last couple of weeks, 24k words in a little over a week which for me is really going some. I got to the cut off point on Monday evening then spent hours collating and editing to get it onto Amazon and for once they turned things around very quickly, @ 3 hours!

So in case you missed it, here are the details:

A short synopsis: Gaby returns to bike racing on the bands day off, Nena aka Misty gives herself a dramatic makeover, BlauHase continue to travel across Hessen spreading their own style of Goth Rock to the masses. There are of course many twists and turns along the way but you'll have to read it to discover what they are!

I hope you all enjoy it, I'll try to be a bit more with it as we go into the next chapters as we head towards the grand finale. Of course, i only have a vague notion of how that'll go atm but i'm sure it'll be fun getting there!

Until next time
Wiedersehn
Madeline Anafrid