...........................SO MANY BOOKS, SO FEW LIFETIMES!........................

This is the space where I get to tell you about myself, and inconstant creature that I am, it's always changing, growing and being revised. Please take the time to visit my wishlist: who knows, you may have something I'd adore, and I may have something you've been searching for! I'm happy to play swapsies, or even freely-given-RABCKs.

I read (no surprises there then), I write, I paint, I'm occasionally lucky enough to sell a painting. Up until I moved across the country I hadn't worked for nearly two years, and in that community if you're a woman over forty, that makes you Officially Dead (something my doctor confirmed once when she couldn't find my blood pressure). Nobody likes giving work to steeenkin' corpses, especially steeenkin' fat lesbian corpses.

I have just relocated across the country, from the Far East to the Wild West, from suburbia to a rural location. I'm in a town of less than 500 people, where it simply is not possible to go out for a meal, have a decent capuccino, or walk into a bookshop, and rather to my surprise, I'm loving every minute of it.

By religion I'm Wiccan, showing strong Thai and Russian Shamanic influences. By preference I'm slightly eccentric, with a nice line in mad hats, an unfortunate tendency to tell the blunt and brutal truth as loudly as possible in the name of ethics, and a tendency to smile like a lunatic despite long-term pain which, however, is rapidly fading here in the bush. Everyone should get out of overcrowded regional centres into the back o'beyond. It's good for the soul, and good for the body.

As to bookcrossing, this is something else I really should discuss with a doctor, if only the town had one. I started off slow, registering and releasing a book a day, but it got out of hand, and I've swapped books with other bookcrossers by mail, upped the ante to twenty, sometimes thirty registrations and releases a week, and have an unholy suspicion that next Christmas I'll buy absolutely everyone books - and register them before wrapping them!

This has got to be verging on a clinical addiction. I know there are rehab units for alcohol and illicit drugs, I know there are powerful pharmaceuticals like Zyban for nicotine, and I know kicking a fifteen-mug-a-day caffeine habit gave me the worst headaches of my life decades ago. I have had serious coffee and nicotine habits at different times. I keep well away from the illegals and from alcohol because I recognise in myself a capacity to go all the way with them on a first date. But there are no infomercials about the harm that a bookcrossing addiction can cause your bank account and time, and there seem to be no counselling groups or self-help manuals to help you deal with it. I'm addicted to bookcrossing, and even though I've drastically cut back, I'm still out of control! Help!

I've been a regular blood donor since I was eighteen and in uni. In 2005 I got my 75th donation pin - something they don't give to just anyone. So I'm also Officially Nice. In addition to Officially Dead.

Oh, and it's worth noting, in the interests of being Officially Nice as well as Officially Dead, that every so often I package some other present for the finder of my books: it might be an audio CD, it might be a small piece of original art, it might be anything. So they're worth hunting down.