I am so fortunate to be able to say that I read an early draft of Carmilla Voiez’s novel Starblood way back in the dim and distant past – 2010, I think – when somehow I ended up as a (virtual) member of a writing group based in Aberdeen… I’m currently in the middle of …
I have avoided detailed spoilers but I do give some indications of the overall storyline – so please don’t read this if you don’t want to know anything at all about how that develops. I finished reading the latest Margaret Atwood yesterday – the long awaited follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale, which I first …
I’ve been meaning to add some of my best textile arts projects here for ages. Kate Savage, the narrator and hero of A Savage Art, is a textile artist and I loved imagining her various art works – although I lack the skill to carry them out. However, I am an enthusaiastic amateur and I …
Of course, once I started embroidering again and I saw this project, I couldn’t resist.
I’m not well enough to attend any protests, so I was thrilled to discover there was something I can do!
I’m sorry about the whole clown thing. I have been more than a little coulrophobic since an unpleasant incident in Blackpool Tower Circus back when I was a toddler.
But it’s the image which sprung to mind, and oh, I did enjoy every stab with that sharp needle.
If you are tempted to join in, all the details are available on Holly Searle’s blog, here
Ann
I’m so pleased that my first ever published short story, A Dog’s Life, is appearing in this anthology, edited by Elizabeth Zelvin, and published today. The kindle version is available here on Amazon UK and here on Amazon US, and I believe a paperback edition will be appearing soon. Mine is the only story set …
After a long fallow period, I’ve been working on some textile art pieces again. Anyone who’s read A Savage Art might guess that there’s some wish fulfilment going on, and it’s absolutely true. I would love to be a textile artist, like my heroine Kate. I don’t have her talent, and yet, I do enjoy …
Yes, I know – a very childish and quite deliberate misplaced modifier… You can’t be surprised, surely? For a long, long time I have been convinced that I am totally rubbish at short stories and it’s beginning to look as if I might just have been wrong. I’m thrilled to say that I’ve had a …
I’ve just finished reading this fabulous memoir On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, about the secrets and lies in her mother’s childhood. There’s an excellent extract from it here in the Observer ” This is how it began, and how it would end, on the long pale strand of a Lincolnshire beach in the last …
Crime fiction readers and writers, that’s who, according to the self-serving, publicity-seeking founder of the Staunch Prize, which was set up to encourage the writing of thrillers without any violence against women. I wouldn’t normally be quite so sure I knew what someone’s agenda was, but I do have a rule which is not so …
I was reminded today of this theory from Fay Weldon, which I first discovered on the Open University Creative Writing courses. She suggests that every writer needs two personalities, who I call Ms Free Spirit and Ms Bossy. Ms Free Spirit has to be, in Fay Weldon’s words, “creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy” – and …