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 …
Well, I did include “making” in my blog description, and this is the project which has consumed most of my spare energy this year. First – the most important part The recipe 275g Shipton Mill bread mix 1 level teaspoon yeast 1 teaspoon honey 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 tbsp olive oil 255g luke warm milk …
I confess I became very bored with how depressing many modern short stories can be so I decided to write something a little different. This is my most romantic story ever. Love Potion Number 39 You get to meet a different class of people at Uni. Let’s just say there’s no one quite like Emma …
Everyone who knows me will no doubt find this very funny. To be fair, I do too. I’m currently doing this author mentoring programme run by the brilliant Sophie Hannah and it involves a lot of positive thinking stuff. I’m rubbish at it. See? The thing is, I never wanted to be good at it. …
Spoilers, everywhere… I was, of course, up at some ridiculous time on Monday morning to watch the final episode. The Iron Throne. I already knew that I wasn’t going to regret starting to watch Game of Thrones, all the way back on March 30th this year. And that I certainly wasn’t going to regret watching …
tl;dr – Game of Thrones : it’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for me. There are spoilers for all except the last episode, so please consider yourselves warned. I wasn’t planning to write about Game of Thrones, partly because I came to it so late. I understand many people are very invested, having watched from …
Today is World Lupus Day. There’s a famous quotation from Flannery O’ Connor that sometimes floats past in meme form on my Facebook feed – “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” Wrong. That’s lupus, which is possibly the only thing I have in …
Poems for World Lupus Day When I decided to do the Open University Creative Writing course, I was so intimidated by the idea of the poetry module that I phoned up the course team and asked if it was possible to complete without doing the poetry TMAs – and I allowed myself to be talked …