View from chopping board over my workspace and beyond!
The New Zealand retreat was wonderful! I cooked and ate clean, NZ produce, drank and washed in sweet rainwater, chopped kindling and built a fire for my heating each day and I managed to slow my brain right down and get lots of writing done. The Northland winter was astonishing, equally cool, sunny, blue sky days and wild, wind-whipped stormy days which made one think in sympathetic wonder about Tasman and Cook and the men who lived through that weather out on the seas to find the place.
I was highly inspired by both the isolation and the scenery. The fiction writing mood continues, however, so the blog writing feels a little like time taken away from it – hence the tardiness and brevity of this post.
This slideshow is mostly of photos I took from my little house – you will see why I felt no need to leave and why the creative juices flowed!
In fact, this post was a little longer but I was writing it on the WordPress dashboard – which looks better than it did in 2.7 but seemingly still fails as a writing tool because when I pressed ‘publish’ it published it’s own autosave from fifteen minutes previous. I’ve written this in Live Writer which developed issues with images with WP 2.7 but frankly I’d rather have to manually insert an image than lose fifteen minutes of writing. Grrr wordpress – welcome back to technology, me 
Hi there. Enjoyed this post. Am wondering if you stayed near Mangonui. Some of the places in the photos look familiar.
Yep that’s Mangonui
The house overlooked Mill Bay so Mangonui proper was down the coast to the right.