“Dear Dr Irina

Thank you and your husband William for a most interesting and informative lecture at Moruya FAW Group last Friday. I bought a copy of your book and read it from cover to cover over the weekend. It is a brilliant book. Thank you also for your communications since last Friday. I am keen to sign up with a mentoring programme with you, but cannot start until next week. (no I am not procrastinating!!)

My book is a re-release of a book I wrote in 1992. The title of the book Travelling Abroad I will change and there is much I will have to update.

This is a health-care handbook for International travellers. It gives details of vaccination schedules, disease prevention, signs and symptoms of diseases, treatment. It also includes a section on poisonous plants and sea ‘nasties’ and first aid treatment if unlucky enough to encounter such problems. It is a little book packed full of advice to travellers to enable them to enjoy international experience.

I am a retired UK triple certificate nurse and trained at The Royal United Hospital in Bath, Southmead Hospital in Bristol and at University College Hospital in London. I spent many years living and working in Africa, Fiji and the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.

If I may,I will be in touch with you next week.

Very sincerely

Yvonne Holt”

Hi William and Irina,

please see below- my few words about my publishing experience etc and also a short spiel.

Entering the world of digital self-publishing was a new experience for me. I never considered myself a perfectionist but discovered I am. If there were problems I made it known and eventually they were fixed.

The end result is a beautiful book. The layout inside, with my own illustrations, is exactly how I had envisaged it.

Echoes of a Blacksmith is about the hardships faced by Joseph Simpson and his family during the later half of the19th Century. It is set in Deniliquin, N.S.W. It is a fully researched novel, a true story, about real people and real events.