No Discipline!!

I can't believe I've let my blog languish for over two months - I mean, if anyone is finding me through the book website and actually reading me, I should be consistently out here!  I guess I'm still afraid and more than a little unsure of what I'm doing here.  My main goal, as a writer, is to promote my novel through social media and it takes discipline to sit down here and think of something, anything, useful to say or report on. No excuse!  I appreciate the few people who have somehow found the book and posted a "like" on my book facebook page [from as far away as the UK and Australia! - who are you?!]  I take solace in knowing I DO have a book out there, it's not going away, Amazon's createspace has helped make the process incredibly "doable", and there's no real rush. Hey, it will be out there for a long time to come and slowly, even slowly is OK, someone here or there will find it and spend a few hours in their lifetime reading it and [hopefully] enjoying their time with it. That's enough to make me feel content.

On another note [not an excuse], I spent part of August in Poland and Hungary - two vastly different countries and peoples but both equally interesting.   Poland has a truly tortured past, ravaged through the centuries by Swedes, Turks, Hungarians, Teutonic Knights, Mongols, Russians - you name it - and, most devastatingly, by Nazi Germany. Lastly, she was occupied by the former Soviet Union until 1989.  Polish people are fiercely independent and proud of their country; the extraordinary combination of Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul secured the road to independence for that country. The resilience and human capacity for recovery in the Polish people is unrivaled - Warsaw, a city left in ruins by the Nazis, has been beautifully rebuilt and its Old Town is one of the loveliest areas in central Europe - incredible.  The Nazi death camps decimated Polish Jews but almost 3 million other Poles also perished in the camps. [No wonder Poland reacted so vehemently to Obama's stupid mistake in calling them "Polish" death camps!]  They have NOT forgotten a thing that happened in the sorry 20th century! A remarkable people - dour on the surface but profoundly humane on the inside.  I was fascinated and awed by the people.  So much to learn from their history and their tough spirit! Below is Market Square in Warsaw, rebuilt as it existed before the war.

Comments on Hungary next - a far different story!