You might be wondering what’s been going on at the Studio. Well, the short of it is: working. Hey, what kind of a build up was that? Fine, I’ll try again. “It was a dark and stormy night. The floor creaked as a dark silhouette cracked opened the secret passageway to the Studio and slipped in. The intruder could see that Paul was…working.” Better?

So, the main project is still the next book ‘The Imprisoned.’ Writing has been…ummm…sporadic. Garden work and other things really got into the way this spring. There was also the usual inner demons to tackle, which is an artist’s bane. Actually things went a little haywire after I’d gone to the Finnish Archipelago in March, to a far-away island of Jurmo, where I worked on finishing the first draft of the manuscript for ‘The Imprisoned’. It was my first official “writing trip” where I secluded myself in isolation in a little shack to write. After some inner demon bashing, things started to work out quite well. See for yourself in the below picture what a rough time I had (that’s some single malt Bowmore at the top of the island).

Oh, and another one at the very Western tip of the island, a bird sanctuary only open before April (again Bowmore in hand). After coming back from that hike and walking in the savanna-like peninsula with endless ocean to my both sides, I really started getting visions of a work to come, involving cowboys, zombies and giant spiders…but more on that next year.

So you might be thinking that all I was doing was taking it easy. But that’s not…well, you see, it’s hard work to write…it’s a mental process you know…ugh. Nah, really, it was a great experience, a soliloquying, self-partying fun it was in that tiny cabin, one that I want to make anew one day. I’m still kind of trying to figure out what it all means, and I think, as usual in my case, everything represents a multitude of symbolisms in the story. As I like my stories and my whiskeys, to have them complex, so as to make you ponder for a long time.

This has all ended up being a little behind the scenes of the process of creating ‘The Imprisoned’. I guess I really haven’t been much of a prisoner during the process, getting out quite a bit. Oh, the book will have images too; I got a bunch of cool photos to help me get some “lonely island” mood…but I’ll let you know more when the time nears. The tome should be out sometime this Fall.