St. Patrick's Day Blog Hop

It's the St.Patrick's Day Blog Hop! First, a huge thank you to Carrie Ann for organizing this and all the hard work she's put in. Second, as before there's a grand prize up for everyone who comments on the posts for the hop. That means the more posts you comment on, the higher your chance of winning!

So, the prize for the blog hop is....1st Grand Prize Winner: A choice of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet
2nd Grand Prize Winner: a $90 Amazon or Barnes & Noble Gift Card

As for one lucky commentator on this blog, the prize will be a $15 Amazon Gift Card.


For the St.Patrick's Day Blog Hop, the suggestion was to tell how I celebrate (which I don't) or why I wear green. Green happens to be one of my favourite colours, so I thought for something slightly different I'd share a university project I had to do on the use of colour for inspiration.

The task - choose a colour. Choose a piece of music that matches the colour in your mind. Sit in isolation with your eyes closed and the music playing. Picture the colour in your head. Then free write, without correcting, without grammar, whatever comes into your mind, as fast as you can.

I chose green - emerald green to be specific, though I don't think the exact shade was required! And my piece of music was the theme from Harry's Game by Clannad - the reasoning behind that may become apparent later on.

I felt a little silly sitting there and thinking green thoughts, but then I picked up my pen and scribbled furiously for the requisite minimum of five minutes, and a little beyond. This is what I came up with.


Emerald green makes me think of velvet, soft and warm. The medieval tunic I bought with a long pixie hood, laced up the front with black cord and through little brass rings, like something out of a book by Tolkien - elves and magic.





Walking through deep, dark pine woods. Needles all glossy green, the dead brown ones crunching slightly under my feet. Soothing silence and the smell of resin. The smell of damp. Black soil beneath the needles as I dig them up with the toe of my boot.

Thick grass shaking in the wind on the hillside in Ireland. (Here the association to Clannad leapt to mind - Irish!) A long green slope down the the cliff's edge before it falls into the sea. Even the water looks green - beautiful blue-grey-green under a cloudy sky.



A circle of stones on the Isle of Arran.Three huge stark slabs of slate or something, 10, 12 feet tall with long brown streaks down them like rust. Grassy slopes leading up to them and then down the other side, open moorland.

Tiny emeralds in a ring my mum wore, one of them missing, replaced by another paler stone.
Pistachio icecream.
Lime cordial, so hard to find now. Am I the only person in the world who drinks it?
Peppermint cordial. Tastes like toothpaste, ug! But looks so pretty in the bottle, clear emerald green.

I'm offering a $15 Amazon Gift Card for one random commentator on my blog. So tell me whether you like green or not, and why (with your email included so I can contact you if you've won.) Then stop by the other blogs on the lists for more prizes and your chance to win the grand prize!

And on the subject of freebies, you can download my free scifi short story - The Bones of the Sea - from Smashwords here.

Visit the other blogs on the tour by clicking on a link in the list below. :)