In just seven days we will be on our way, over the North Sea and up the spine of Britain to the beautiful Isle of Skye. This trip will probably be the most well-planned adventure I have ever embarked on. In the past, holidays were rather opportunistic affairs where me and a significant other would…
They have it all, don’t they? Writers on TV shows and in films spend their days swanning about, visiting bookshops, eating their bodyweight in muffins without gaining an ounce of weight, drinking coffee like it’s water and their bladders are made of iron. Their time is their own.
A bit of flash fiction on this bleak winter’s day There’s something living in my kitchen ceiling. It moved in about three weeks ago. At first I thought it might be my cat playing around on the roof, as he is wont to do when he has a corpse he wants to toy with. But…
Tempus fugit to the max! I could hardly believe my eyes when I looked at the date of my last post and saw it was somewhere back in the foggy beginnings of March. Has it really been six weeks since I went to London? Surely not! There is something rather odd about how time moves…
There are two things one learns when inviting a Podenco into their lives. One is that they are part Husky, the other is that they are part Limpet Crab. You will never go to the bathroom alone again. You will also never be in any doubt about their needs and wants, especially the wants. Lucy…
It’s been a hot minute, but here we are, back to the basics of good old fashioned blog writing. No matter how many fancy new platforms I try, I always end up back at this place. Back on my self-hosted, self-controlled website; back to the roots of what words mean to me. Last year in…
The fictional world in which a story takes place matters. If the world is not believable then the story will lose power and the reader will lose interest. Writers call this suspension of disbelief. You can have the craziest stuff going on in your story, but if something about the world in which it is set is off, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
For a while now, I’ve been kicking a novella around my writing desk in the hopes that its missing piece would make itself known. Despite beta readers telling me they enjoyed it, there has always been something not quite right about it. Something that nagged me. Something that made me feel uncomfortable about saying ‘It’s done!’ Every so often I have taken it out, dusted it off and had another crack at it but still that something eluded me, until yesterday.
It’s not always easy being consistent with blogging. I should know. I look back over the past year of this blog and see very large gaps in between posts at times. This is something I am now trying to remedy by sticking to a consistent schedule and making sure that I use whatever time I have to work on the three elements that need to come together to create one post. Because it’s not just about writing the thing. It’s also about presenting the thing.
Things are afoot in the manse. Mother has been keeping odd hours and rearranging the furniture. Strangers come and go at odd times of the day, and a four-legged fiend haunts my dreams… what does it all mean?