Thoughts about things I’ve written or read or heard or seen. An attempt to stay positive in a turbulent world.
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FICTION ALLSORTS
A literary agent friend of mine has just told me about a new website for writers and readers called Fiction Allsorts. There aren’t any links up to either readers’ sites or writers’ sites, nor links to books read or written yet … the site is still under construction. But I like the name (I can...Continue reading→
Writing about writing
George Mackay Brown wrote this about writing: Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silenceBut put on mask and cloak,Strung a guitarAnd moved among the folk.Dancing they cried,‘Ah, how our sober islandsAre gay again, since this blind lyrical trampInvaded the Fair!’ Under the last dead lampWhen all the dancers and masks had gone insideHis...Continue reading→
Booking Through Thursday
Here’s today’s: COMFORT FOODOkay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than...Continue reading→
The short story that was a novel, part 200
Hmmm … even though I’ve written that my relationship with my writing has changed, see here, I haven’t actually done any writing since then to test it. So how do I know it’s changed, I hear you asking? Because, just now, I returned from my writers’ group (we meet monthly but we haven’t met all...Continue reading→
The LibraryThing
I have spent most of today making a library of my books (no, I mean making a library of a small number of my books) on my library at the LibraryThing – a wonderful invention which I discovered when a member kindly wrote a review of SPEAKING of LOVE there. And as I chose the...Continue reading→
Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes and synchronicity …
I was talking to a friend tonight, and I told her that I discover myself through stories, in every way. I find out who I am by reading fiction, and I find out who I am by writing fiction. But I didn’t know I did this until I began to read Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s...Continue reading→
The Man Booker shortlist, FIRST NOVELS
So, none of the first novels longlisted made it to the Man Booker shortlist but perhaps, because this list has been so wonderfully readable (no I haven’t read them all, hardly any in fact, yet, but I’ve been reading dovegreyreader’s reviews and Asylum’s and I’ll get to them soon) maybe there’ll be more next year...Continue reading→
What kind of writer am I?
Thanks to an archived blog at John Baker’s blog, I discover that I am this kind of writer: You Should Be A Poet You craft words well, in creative and unexpected ways.And you have a great talent for evoking beautiful imagery…Or describing the most intense heartbreak ever.You’re already naturally a poet, even if you’ve never...Continue reading→
A new relationship with my writing …
… is what I need. I realised over the weekend, while thinking about other relationships in my life, that the relationship I have with my writing is one of dread fuelled by the certainty that it will be a struggle: that I always expect to discover that what I thought was a story isn’t, that...Continue reading→
When is writing also a MAT?
When it’s another piece of writing. I managed to stop writing the short story (the one that was a novel, you remember) this week so that I could resurrect the idea for a children’s novel from a horrible first draft written one thousand (well, ten) years ago. And the reason for stopping? To send three...Continue reading→