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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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Handling Rejection

April 13, 2019

It’s hard to know when to give up, especially on a piece of work which has taken years, but I’ve reached that point with my second novel. Another rejection arrived today, and it confirmed a decision I’d already made. Compared with the first novel, it collected a lot of personalised rejections, with praise for my …

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Shortlisted!

April 2, 2019

Yesterday I discovered my memoir piece, “If…” was shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize. I am so encouraged by this – for a couple of reasons. First, when I wrote it, I instinctively felt it was a piece of writing I could be proud of, and I submitted it unusually soon after I wrote …

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What the author meant – a rant

December 19, 2021

This meme surfaces on Facebook with depressing regularity. I wrote about it on my expired blog back in 2015, but I saw it again earlier this week. There seem to be a never ending stream of people who like and agree with it, and every time I see it, I argue. It keeps me out …

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Eggcorns and other language mishaps

March 19, 2019

An eggcorn is a misheard word – eggcorn itself being a mishearing of the word acorn. I’ve always enjoyed the misheard lyrics – from Gladly the cross eyed bear in my childhood Sunday School days, to the more adult collection from Peter Kay which you can watch on YouTube. There’s something just a little bit …

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Lanny

March 13, 2019

Spoilers everywhere, so do read the book first. It’s only a very intense seventy pages or so… I read Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers at the end of last year (thanks Graham) and I immediately pre-ordered Lanny. I was nervous about Lanny because how could it measure up to such an extraordinary …

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Leaving Neverland

March 7, 2019

I watched Part One last night. I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch Part Two I had wondered why the parents, the mothers especially, would have looked the other way. Starstruck, yes. But really? Why would any mother let her child sleep in the same bed as a grown man? This made it …

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Nature or Nurture : Three Identical Strangers

March 3, 2019

Truth is much stranger than fiction is allowed to be. So it is with the Tim Wardle documentary about adopted triplets who had been brought up in three different families, and found each other by chance in their late teens. “It was a fairytale story and people need to hear wonderful things” says the aunt …

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