Life is always busy but over the past couple of weeks it has been even busier as I have been populating this website with more notebooks, cards and now wall art – all featuring my images.
I have been a photographer for the best part of my life but it is only in the last 12 years or so that it has become my main occupation, along with writing.
Most of my photography shows my deep love of Norfolk, particularly the coast but increasingly the city of Norwich too as I came to live alongside the River Wensum two years ago. I have actually lived in Norfolk for 30 years. Although I know it well, I am constantly discovering new things to love about this incredible county.
If asked, I tend to say I am a landscape photographer but the truth is, I am passionate about most kinds of photography so you can expect to see a real mix as the website evolves further. My sneaky pleasure is street photography but I will talk about that and my influences (both famous and local) in later posts.
This site will also include wildlife and street photography, I just haven’t started uploading many of those yet (but you will find some seals…) so please be patient with me if that is your thing.
Many people have a love of photography and want to learn more about it so I will share some tips on that too if you are a beginner. Please don’t be shy to ask if you have any questions. I may not be a technical expert in all areas but if I don’t know the answer, I have photography friends who will know for sure.
This website isn’t only about my photography and products, my alter ego is @PetraKidd who writes short stories. I want to make this website a great place to discover new authors and books, both local and from all over the world. It is writing that led me to create notebooks. I love to use a nice tactile notebook to jot my ideas down so it made sense to create my own collection.
In a world full of troubles, it’s good to escape sometimes into the world of art so I hope you will enjoy your visits to this website.
Subscribe below to keep updated with what’s new. Something I like to do every month is to reward subscribers with a giveaway, at the moment it is usually a notebook but I could also create digital downloads of my prints or colouring in pages so that overseas subscribers can enjoy a freebie too. At the moment, for obvious reasons of postage costs, I only send the giveaways to UK subscribers but I’d like to be able to change that going forward.
So hit the button above and let’s keep in touch. Feel free to message me at myriadlifebooks@gmail.com if you are an author who would like to be featured here. I try to be inclusive of most genres.
Norfolk UK is my home, I live in Norwich by the River Wensum where everyday there is something different to see and learn.
I feel a big affinity with the river as I grew up in Cambridge, another great river city. My childhood and teens involved many walks along the Cam where we would watch 'The Bumps,' raft races and as we grew older we enjoyed adventures on our punting pub crawls.
Growing up in a multi cultural university city definitely influenced my reading choices, I am a big fan of Japanese fiction, love French literature and enjoy Shakespeare. As a young teen I entertained myself with Jilly Cooper and Dick Francis and then became quite obsessed with Henri Charriere's Papillon. At school all I cared about was English, Art and French, in that exact order. When I finished with school I went to live and work in Greece for a wonderful year before returning to study English Literature and Sociology. At this point I read more classics like the Wyf of Bath, Wuthering Heights and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man plus poets such as Wilfred Owen.
My first UK full time job was with Heffer's Paperbacks where I devoured several books at a time, excited by the fact I could borrow what I liked. Bizarrely for me I remember reading The Zurich Axioms, I have no interest in the stock markets but it had me gripped. I can't remember why I picked it up but I have never forgotten it. Heffers introduced me to so many authors, via their books and sometimes in person. It was here I learned about all the genres, it fascinated me that science fiction and horror were so popular, I tried reading it all.
Aside from writing letters, it didn't really ever occur to me to write anything myself for many years as I worked my way through a variety of interesting and varied jobs. Then on a visit to the London Aquarium I became struck by an idea so powerful I sat down and wrote my first novel. It went nowhere as really I wrote it because I wanted to. I wrote another novel and again, didn't have the persistance or determination to take it further, I simply enjoyed the process of writing and my characters.
Then years later another idea struck me and during a severe bout of Pleurisy where I couldn't do anything physical for months, I wrote the Eight of Swords and The Putsi. This time I published them as ebooks and they became pretty popular. When I fully recovered, I had to concentrate on my business and looking after my mother who has various health issues and the writing went adrift again for many years until 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world.
March 2020 I moved to my apartment alongside the Wensum to live alone for the first time ever. During the first lockdown I began to write a diary and then the idea for a new set of short stories came to me and in February 2021 they will be published. The Covid-19 Pandemic is not simply a scary virus, it is a historical time and here we are trying to live through it. To many it will feel like a punishment but to me as a writer, in some ways, it came as a gift.
Please stay as safe and as well as you can. I hope to entertain you with my stories as we all try to get through this together, even though we are apart.
Petra
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