I watch her cooking Each movement precise and confident Concentration and grace Punctuated by joyous singing along to the radio I watch her entertaining Talking, laughing, making sure everyone’s glass is full The perfect hostess Queen of her domain and ruling with benevolence I watch her working The cute frown line forming between her eyebrows […]
Month: September 2016
The End of All Things
I wait. Formless yet conscious, just beyond the edge of reality. I know I have a role to fulfil. The passage of time has no meaning for me yet, but my time will come. Nothing can remain static forever. All things change and, when the change comes, I will be ready. There is a shift […]
My Writing Day
Write every day – that’s what we’re told, isn’t it? It’s the only way to cultivate good writing discipline, and train your mind to see every day as a writing day, no matter what. Well, in order to hit a self-imposed target of 100,000 words written in the first half of 2016, I ended up […]
Preparing to be eviscerated!
There’s a regular column in Writing Magazine, called Under the Microscope, in which author James McCreet analyses the first few hundred words of a reader’s novel. He’s notoriously unflinching in his critique and really gets into the nitty-gritty of what works – and mostly what doesn’t – in those all-important opening paragraphs. Aaaaand, in the November […]
The Benefits of Forced Focus
Writing is a tricky business. It’s the thing I most want to do with my time, and it’s the thing I least want to do with my time. This seems to be true of all the writers I know. We desperately want to create amazing things – and in fact can’t imagine life without writing […]
How It All Began
Way back in October 2010, I signed up for an Open University creative writing course, with a good friend of mine, who is also a writer. The very first assignment was to write a 1500 word short story, on any theme. The idea for my story came from a conversation I had with my husband […]