Which way to the winner?

Thanks for all your entries to the competition to win a signed copy of Natural Navigator book.

I pulled out a correct winning entry and the book will be searching out its way very soon to Rachel Green...

Congratulations, Rachel, and if you didn't win and are still intrigued by the book, it really is very good - you can buy it here.

WIN A COPY OF THE NATURAL NAVIGATOR!

However many times I rave about Tristan Gooley's book, The Natural Navigator, I will still find something new to say. Just as everytime I read it, I learn a new trick, a new myth, a new story idea.



This time, it's made me think about how many times I've stifled a natural desire to play through a tendency to read too much theory about it. Something interests me, hey, I will go straight out and look for experts or classes or websites to tell me about it.

Because if I'm honest, many many times I buy the books and I don't even read them. It's as if I am buying the time or desire to be an expert in the subject. As if the book will miraculously leak its knowledge into my brain.

But anyway, I am digressing, following a scenic route (although I feel somehow Tristan approves of scenic routes). Why I'm thinking about this, is something he says about how, in his desire to find out about navigation he took and passed many many courses before he started wondering about what he was doing:

"In the midst of studying books at night about air law and learning how to find my way using radars, I came to the ackward realisation that this technical detail had little in common with the passion that had been within me since early childhood.... it was the sense of connection that the journeys brought that really excited me, the contact with the world around me.... In a bid to gain the skills to undertake the journeys I dreamed of, I had been forced into another world, one as removed from my romantic impulses as can be imagined.'

And I think why I love this book so much is that Tristan Gooley is so good at getting across - and back to - his original passion, not just for navigating but for travelling in the first place. As he says,

'We travel not only to escape, consume and copulate, but also to think and create. Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote, 'When I stay in one place I can hardly think at all.'

(above is the cushion in my writing room, probably one of my favourite possessions)

And now I'm delighted to say that Tristan has offered this blog a chance to win a signed copy of his book. All you have to do is to answer this question:

Which of the following is untrue...

Drivers have blamed satnav for:

a) driving into the wrong country
b) getting stuck in a country lane
c) nearly driving off a cliff
d) all of the above

For obvious reasons, you'd be better sending your entries to my email address - sarahsalway -@- googlemail.com (obviously the dashes and spaces are to confuse the spam robots, not you guys so just leave them out!).

Good luck!

GETTING THE PICTURE COMPETITION WINNER!

After a hard judging session round a bridge table, the winner of the love and old age quote competition is ...



...

HOLEN SABRINA KHAN

with...



"Even when we sleep we watch over one another
And this love heavier than the ripe fruit of a lake
Without laughter without tears has lasted forever
Day after day one night after us."

From Paul Eluard's - 'Even When We Sleep'.


Beautiful.

And big confession here because I haven't heard of Paul Eluard before so I'm a double winner. Here he is ..



And you can find out more about him here, but for the moment, here's a video worth watching made by some French schoolchildren of his most famous poems, Liberte:



(There's an English translation here)


BUT more importantly, congratulations HOLEN! A signed copy of GETTING THE PICTURE will be on the way to you shortly. Just send me your address, and thank you EVERYONE for all your lovely quotes and stories. It was a real privilege to read them, and I felt very lucky to launch the book on a wave of love words like this!

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE

So many great quotes yesterday. Thank you! And keep them coming ... we need to give that judging panel a proper challenge. If I say that they are giving up a regular bridge game for this task, you will be able to understand just how seriously we are taking this competition!

And, as an extra, I have asked some of the people I find continuously inspiring for their own favourite quotes. First up, is Danielle LaPorte, who is ..



(That postcard above is from her own line of stationery, by the way. I have it on my wall and it always makes me smile. You can find out more here)



As well as her website, and her national television slot, and her consulting work, Danielle is currently working on a book aimed at jolting entrepreneurs up to the next level. I can't wait for this because I've experienced one of her firestarting sessions myself and it was electric. SO many good ideas, and she made me think about even my writing in a whole new way because what are writers if not entrepreneurs?

Here's Danielle's favourite quote about love. And this is what she says about it: "the simplicity and grandness of this always break my heart a little":

Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
- Walt Whitman

Beautiful.

You can leave your quote for entry to the competition either at the bottom of this post, or the previous one, or email me at sarahsalway @ googlemail.com.

IT'S COMPETITION TIME!!!!

So, as mentioned in the last post, my third novel GETTING THE PICTURE comes out at the end of this month.

HURRAH!

It's the story - in mostly letter form - of love, life and sex in an old people's home. The genesis of it began when an elderly woman turned to me at a poetry reading and said she hoped she would never get too old to cry over love.

I suddenly realised that I did too, but more importantly that I had only really thought of writing about love in youthful terms before. And once I started thinking, I realised how limited that approach was.

Publishers Weekly have said this about it:

'Salway (Tell Me Everything) refutes the adage about old dogs and new tricks in this breezy epistolary novel set in a British retirement home. Not that the residents of Pilgrim House don't know plenty of old tricks already: Salway's appreciation of her characters is refreshingly nonpatronizing—her oldsters have rich and naughty pasts, but live in the present, very much alive and eager to gossip, conspire, and seduce... relationships and characters evolve nicely in this lighthearted novel about family and lovers and the not-so-lighthearted secrets that separate them.

Anyway, now I'm offering you the chance to win one of my very first copies - signed and dated. All you have to do is to send me - either by email (sarahsalway - at - googlemail.com) or in the comments box - your favourite quote about love and old age. It can be old, new, or you can even have made it up yourself.

Here's one of mine: Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I'm compiling a panel of over-eighty year olds to judge this, and they are fierce so no quarreling with them please. As we all know, and as GETTING THE PICTURE begins with: Old ladies must never be crossed: in their hands lie the reputations of the young ones. (Pierre Ambroise Laclos)

My panel will pick their favourite, and the bonus is I'll put up all the quotes on the blog so we get to have beautiful words too.

And thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I asked Alain de Botton for his recently and this is what he came up with ...

Some people would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing La Rochefoucauld

So what's yours?

Entries should be in by 26th March, please. Winners announced on 6th April. If two people choose the same quote, the one who sends it in first, gets to enter - but I'll let the second one know. You can enter as many quotes as you like!

A VERY COOL COMPETITION

So you've bought and enjoyed the book ... you have, haven't you? ... so now it's time to wear the t-shirt. And you don't even have to buy this. I have one t-shirt, modelled above, for you to win. Just send me an email with your address on it to sarahsalway@gmail.com and I'll put the names in a hat on Friday and the first one pulled out will get a t-shirt and copy of the beautiful little book containing stories by Sally Spedding, Patrick Chapman and yours truly.

Just think how happy you will be wearing all three of us ...