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Finally – the perfect gluten free sandwich loaf

June 8, 2019

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 …

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A very short story

June 2, 2019

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 …

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Talking to myself

May 23, 2019

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. …

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The Iron Throne

May 21, 2019

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 …

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My mad ramble about the mad queen, first of her name

May 17, 2019

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 …

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On writing while ill

March 3, 2020

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 …

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The Wolf

May 10, 2019

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 …

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Why I write

April 29, 2019

Why write at all? It’s hard work – the hardest work I’ve ever done. It’s not a way to earn a living. It’s hard to get published – and although self publishing is now an option that’s more hard stuff you have to learn and do or pay for… Yet lots of us do it. …

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Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me

April 22, 2019

Be aware that this is long and chock full of spoilers. There’s no way to write about the stuff which interested me in the novel without them, and I couldn’t find a way of minimising them. Still, if you’re planning to read it and you’re the kind of person for whom spoilers actually spoil the …

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Time Management – in Memoir

April 17, 2019

I’m working on the second draft of my memoir/fictionalised autobiography – keeping to a straight forward chronological structure, from earliest memories until now. At the same time, I’m doing a lot of thinking about a better structure. One of the problems with my current linear approach is that the first twenty thousand words are in …

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