It’s over ten years now since In The Garlic: Your Fun, Informative Guide to Spain was published, a quirky book in A to Z format that distils the essence of Spain, written by myself and my friend and colleague Theresa O’Shea. Critics and readers loved it. And over the years many people have said to me: “you must write a Garlic-style book about Catalonia.”
In The Garlic included a number of entries relating to Catalonia, where I live. (Catalonia is an autonomous region in north-east Spain with its own language, history and culture; its capital is the cosmopolitan city of Barcelona.)
We then wrote part of ‘Garlic 2’ (published as an A-Z column in the Costa Blanca News), which included more Catalonia entries. I brainstormed content for the Catalonia book and imported all the relevant content from the Garlic and elsewhere. Since then I’ve written many bits and pieces about Catalonia: for our old In The Garlic blog, for the Barcelona Women’s Network and the Barcelona Metropolitan magazine. Every so often I’ve added material, rewritten, edited, tweaked…
Recently, on one of those sleepless nights, I was planning stuff in my head and I thought: OMG – we’re halfway through March. Time is going so fast. It’ll soon be April. OMG again – the April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. What to write about this time? More bullshit? I mentally ran through all the half-written A to Zs languishing inside my computer.
And then it came to me.
The Catalonia book.
It clicked. It’s time.
So: kicking off on 1 April on the Blogging From A to Z Challenge 2017: Stuff Catalans Do.
Stay tuned.
