Flickr is a wonderful place to share photos and a laugh with friends and other good-minded folks. I've discovered amazing photographers and amazing people on here and it's become a safe place to explore my own burgeoning photographic interests. (Apparently flowers are my thing.) I have even been encouraged to start my own first group. It's for my favourite drinks and goodies: coffee, chocolate, and tea, and I've called it Caffeine Planet. I hope you will check it out and join in the discussions!

I have found it passing strange that some people with no profiles and no photos favourite an awful lot of pix from an awful lot of Flickrites. Then I learnt this may be a way for some to use my (and others) pix for illicit commercial purposes. Don't like that! So I will block anyone who favourites my images who does not have their own photos visible in their photostream and has nothing in their profiles, no groups, no contacts, nada.

It’s been a long journey from deciding I wanted to write for a living to seeing my first book published, and it’s not over yet.

I had been writing short stories for awhile and was contemplating fleshing one out into a novel, when I had a lightbulb moment -- to write the story of Judy Taylor, the first person in the world to live on artificial feeding (intravenous nutrition or TPN) without eating one morsel of food. I had met her when a kid, and my father was the one who saved her life, so it was a natural. Only thing is, I didn't anticipate that that decision would begin a very loooonnnnggg journey of being injured in a car crash, recovering and finishing the research and starting to write my book, then being injured again in a multiple-car-crash (the universe does like to escalate things), resulting in a closed head injury and an endless lawsuit involving four lawyers (including mine) and two insurance companies that finally ended July 18th '08 and me wondering if I'd ever be able to write again, never mind write a book! But I did!! Blogging saved my writing life! Flickr saved my sanity! And I wrote my book!!

Read about Lifeliner and my writing life at my "official" author website.

Find my photos on useful and fun stuff at www.cafepress.com/ShireenJ.

And check out my articles on Squidoo listed on my lensmaster page.