Wiggle Room

I’ve enjoyed reading how other writers write.  Thanks to Simon Sylvester, Marion Husband and Sophie Duffy for following through with the blog tour. I am grateful for their insights – and for their writing –  I enjoy reading what they write. I am looking forward to what they produce next. Sometimes, I have  wondered if I […]

Blog Tour – The Writing Process – My Turn…

The idea of the writing process is often talked about in creative writing literature. Whatever your take on it, writing well and consistently requires hard work and dedication. Halo not polished enough in my case, but I do know that magical thinking is not enough!  Writer Kathleen Jones invited me to follow her in the ‘writing […]

Mind, Body and Writing

I have been asked to join a ‘blog tour’ on the writing process, by distinguished writer Kathleen Jones. Writers answer four questions about their writing process and nominate other writers to follow them.  Kathleen’s answers are already posted on her blog – A Writer’s Life – and mine will appear on this blog next week on […]

Future Past

I turned on my laptop a couple of days ago and got an opening message: ‘preparing your desktop’. Unless I had a new machine, or was using it for the first time, this was not good news. My ‘new’ desktop had none of my settings, none of my files. It had recognised my name, and […]

Good coffee, bad coffee

This is not the first mention of coffee in my blog. There seems to me a natural connection between writing and coffee. Coffee and coffee houses originated in the Ottoman Empire, with the first coffee house appearing in the 16th century in Istanbul. Coffee and coffee house culture migrated through Europe during the 17th century and cafés of diverse kinds are now firmly established […]

Dead languages, useless knowledge and rocks from outer space

This little ramble is inspired by a memory: my mother once said that she couldn’t understand why Latin – a ‘dead language’- was taught in schools, and why anyone would want to learn anything so useless. Latin is embedded in English grammar along with other linguistic influences, and is our ancient language of prayer and […]

Reading the 21st Century

Born in the mid 20th century, in a not very bookish household, my earliest  literary influences were Enid Blyton and comics. Especially comics, which I could buy for myself at pocket money prices from the corner shop, long  before I was old enough to take myself off to a library. The comic format seems an obvious […]

Fiction Within

Why is creative writing such hard work? Part of the reason is that writers deal in emotions and it is intense. Fiction is ‘real’ when the emotions are evoked. It is not just about story and plot – that is more like a game of logic, which in itself is challenging. Emotions – even fictional […]

The Life Validated

A cold February afternoon twenty years ago, when visiting a hospice where my father was dying, I met a man of 60 who was in respite care, but was terminally ill. He seemed calm and content. ‘I’ve had a good life’, he said. He had no regrets about dying. I was a young mother with […]

New Year Blog – Resolutions and the Apocalypse

We have not only survived another Christmas and end/beginning of a year but also the 21st of December 2012. Endings are beginnings. The Mayans encoded that into their calendars – they reset them each new cycle. Of course,  some preferred to interpret the Mayan ‘prophecy’ in terms of an apocalypse. There are always anti-Pollyannas who have a death […]