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It seems for the moment my writing fervor has died down a bit. Spring fever is kicking into overdrive as temperatures dropped back into the teens over this past week and the sun persists in mocking me, knocking coldly, brightly against my tightly-closed and wind-rattled apartment windows. How I miss day-dreaming and hillwalking! It's hard to fight the body's urge to rush from one warm place to another, to numb the need to be out with music and DVDs and books.... I miss my warm days in the park, long hours watching the dogs and the ducks and the people, allowing my mind to wander. If attending classes all through high school and college was good for anything, it was good for enforced day-dreaming time. Gazing out those uniform panes of glass while the lecture rolled, letting classroom debate spark ideas and jotted margin notes while I slumped in my seat shuffling my restless legs back and forth. Those were the days... Now, it seems i've grown too skilled at keeping myself occupied. You have to, when your day-job dominates your short-term memory center with drink orders and the "usual" of a dozen or more regulars swinging by for breakfast each morning; and your time-off demands carpe diem commitment to self-directed study and learning and writing. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but I almost miss my days of institutional learning. Ah, to be a student again, a real student, somebody else's student... and to have nothing more required of me than to sit and think and day-dream for a while.

But why I'm really writing now is to ask you a favor. Yes, I mean you, my wonderful loyal readers. At the moment, I'm making an honest, nose-to-the-grind-stone effort to put together a book manuscript for publication, a collection of essays on spirituality and the Druid path, much like the kinds of posts here. So, I'd like to ask you a question or two, receive some feedback to help me out as I think about where such a collection might go, how it might hang together, what it might include. Of course, I love you all already, so I can't blackmail or bribe you into responding. But it would warm my heart and itch my brain to hear from you. After all, why even bother to write a book except to speak to readers out there about the things we care about?

So. Without further ado...

(a) What have been your favorite posts in this blog over the past almost-two years, and why? Which posts might you like to see included and/or expanded in a print format?

(b) What would you like to see more of? If you picked up a "book by Ali" in the bookstore and flipped through its table of contents, what kinds of things would you really be hoping to find, what subjects or styles would just thrill you to the bone to read and to share with others?

See, that's it. Just two little questions. Not so bad! And I promise to adore each of you even more than I do now, as difficult as that might seem, and to take you to the candy store for your pick of penny candy when we're done. Meanwhile, I'm still working on a post or two about polytheism and approaches to deity, so those will be up eventually. That, at least, is a promise I can keep.