BUGTOWN

 

                                One of the good reasons I wanted to get back on the Kindle Publishing site was to put my books up for free. Nobody is going to buy them otherwise! I don't need the money and if folk can find them and download them ... well, someone is going to read them. They are not dead.

                                 So you can stick them up for free for five days every three months. Normally, you will get maybe twenty downloads from the eleven books on my page, so you get a couple downloaded per book if you are lucky. 

                                  Few people have downloaded my two books for 10 to 14 year olds. But I put all the books up for free for the five days starting with my birthday on the 8th of February. On the first day, Bugtown was downloaded maybe thirty times. What? This is weird. I guess maybe some teacher somewhere has come across it and got it downloaded for a class. It's been downloaded 47 times as of now.

                                    I'm pleased that some folk will read it. I got lots of kids to read it when I was a school librarian, and told them it was written by Alison Main, so that the questionnaires I got them to fill in would be uninfluenced by me being the guy who wrote it. 

                                    I had a look at the entry on Kindle and read through the reviews I got from the kids at the school I was working at then. Remembrance of things past. The faces of some of the reviewers were still fresh in my memory,

                                     I didn't manage to get a single agent to have a look at this book. Weird. But it's not what you know, it's who you know.  But it doesn't matter. I loved writing the two kids books. Still alive in a way now.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bugtown-John-McKenzie-ebook/dp/B004XZUE3G

When the Springtime will come ...

            Nothing but good stuff to report. On Sunday I picked up four hundred wee onions from the allotment shop and that felt great. Although there will be snow and sleet yet, I feels like the end of the dark times. Next Sunday I'll be picking up my tatties, so every afternoon when the weather allows, I'll be able to go up to the allotment and dig for a bit before meditating. Digging, planting ... I'm really looking forward to it. As you can see from the photo, it needs a bit of work done.

            I'm just about finished a book by Gopi Krishna called Kundalini, The Evolutionary Energy in Man. It's not as good as Living with Kundalini, but it reminds you to watch out what you wish for. He had two kundalini arousals which seem to be just about killed him. He got this from meditating. I remember the wee conversation I had with Ringu Tulku in the long ago when I was asking him about raising inner heat. He said opening the channels is not too difficult, but you have to be able to close them again. You have to do things in the right order. You'd be daft doing Deity Yoga without having someone to ask about stuff. 

            Of course, I completely ignored that advice from Ringu Tulku, but I've been lucky so far and I've only had good things from meditating. And everything in that regard is getting much better. Much, much better. Something is happening in there!!! Maybe something wonderful. What a fortunate creature I am, I am. What a fortunate creature I am!

            I think only two people regularly read this blog. It gets hits from folk looking for vase breathing instructions and that's about it. But recently someone has been reading big chunks of it here and there. With the statscounter thing, you can find out roughly where hits are coming from. Tappahannock in Washington, Virginia. The thing that comes up is the Tappahannock Police Department. Well, as a Scottish school kid I was taught the mantra for all occasions: it wisny me. A big boy did it and ran away.

        The Susquehanna River runs into Virginia. Susquehanna was my mantra for over a decade when I started meditating. Just looking at it on the page engenders pleasantness. Susquehanna, susquehanna, susquehanna ... that's the way to do it!!