D is for Decorating

I had another word lined up for today, but it suddenly dawned on me that the letter D fitted in perfectly with what I'm actually doing. There has been very little crafting to show and tell about lately, and here you see the reason for that. I have been spending a lot of time climbing that stepladder and wielding a paintbrush lately.
When space is at a premium (isn't that a posh way of saying that I live in a tiny flat? ) it isn't all that easy to do what they do on those decorating shows, that I incidently love watching, where they remove everything before they start - It must be so much easier to have an empty shell of a room to decorate! Instead I have been doing my living room wall by wall - moving furniture out of the way, painting, waiting for the paint to dry and moving everything back, before tackling another wall.
The area I have been dreading the most, and which is why it has taken me ages to actually start this project, is the one I'm doing today - look at those empty shelves! It took me all morning just to empty them, and as a result the rest of the room looks something like this: I have tons of books. I'm sure of it. My back tells me this is so. I did some serious purging of my collection last summer in preparation for this task, but I still have plenty of reading matter! Which brings me to what today's post was really going to be about. I thought it was too obvious to use B for Books, as so many have done that already, so I thought I'd share some of my favourite writers along the way instead. So today's post is really:

D is for Dewar, Isla.
I love her books, and have in fact just ordered a few more from Amazon. This one is sitting in one of those piles on my floor though, and is really great. Isla Dewar's books are set in Scotland, and she writes about everyday life and people in a way that really makes you care. Her heroines often find themselves in difficult situations, but manage to rise above them in a way which gives hope, yet seems realistic. She doesn't beautify the dilemmas they face, whether it's the loss of a child, giving up one's job to start a new life in the countryside or coping with a mentally ill parent. In spite of all the potentially problematic situations she writes about, the stories are told with a lot of humour of the laughing aloud kind. Great stuff! And with the beginning of the post in mind: you didn't think I chose this particular book at random, did you? ;-)