Life as a Butterfly!

This week I’m going to talk about butterflies. A tenuous link to writing but trust me, a link nevertheless!

I love butterflies and try and plant flowers in the garden that will attract them. Sitting in the garden watching them flit around the several buddleia bushes is always a pleasure and an uplifting experience as they swarm over them. Buddleia is not known as the Butterfly Bush for nothing.

My latest book, Rosie’s Little Cafe on the Riviera, came out a fortnight ago and since then I’ve had to be seen to be here, there, and everywhere on social media. In other words I’ve had to become ‘a showy person: a social butterfly’. I am so not a natural social butterfly - even in real life - let alone on the internet.

Networking on social media has become my ‘butterfly bush’ where I flit from FaceBook page, to Twitter, to blogs, to anywhere that will help me to spread the word about my book. Being seen swarming all over the internet certainly doesn’t have the same uplifting experience as watching butterflies on a real bush! Although seeing the book climb the charts is certainly uplifting! 

My dictionary gives a definition of butterfly as a verb : 

verb ( -flies, -flied) [ trans. ]

split (a piece of meat) almost in two and spread it out flat : [as adj. ] ( butterflied) butterflied shrimp.

I can identify with that! After a couple of hours in front of the computer networking I definitely feel like a butterflied shrimp!!

Does any writer really enjoy the hours spent on the internet trying to garner attention for their books? Because it does take hours to do it properly. I’m extremely grateful to friends and everyone else who allow me to promote my book in their corner of the internet, but it’s still a necessity that gives me butterflies in the tummy! 

And now a final photograph - just because I love it!

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

-Nathaniel Hawthorne