General

Sometimes progress is a small pile of pencil shavings. It might take a stretching of the imagination, but you could change the world with a freshly sharpened pencil. You could use it as a weapon and put out the eye of an attacker. The villain starts wearing an eye patch which engenders sympathy and kindness from strangers and soon makes friends with people who aren’t remotely villainous. He (though it might be a she) reforms their evil ways and goes to clown school where they meet someone in need of pirate Vaudeville act. The villain takes along his pet budgie and is such a success he’s soon a TV star making millions of people laugh. An unhappily married couple watch the show and that night make love instead of war. Nine months later the woman gives birth to the person destined to discover that rocks are the untapped energy source which will make oil redundant. All because you sharpened a pencil.

Yesterday I finished reworking Chapter 26 of my book, Dancing the Maypole. All I have to show for four weeks of effort is a small pile of shavings, but I have great hopes that my sharpened characters will keep telling me how their story unfolds and soon I will finish a book. My book might then make someone laugh. That reader might have a good day and impulsively befriend someone who’s shy and lonely who’s then emboldened to start a disco club for shy people [Read more…] about Progress…

I woke up at 10:30 after twelve hours of sleep. Even after some weird dreams I actually felt rested if a bit groggy. Being a silly wench, I sat down at my computer still bleary-eyed and decided to pull up Once Upon a Wager and “fix” the chapter I was working on. Before falling asleep I’d finally accepted, after two weeks of banging my head against another brick wall, that the story wasn’t happy with the direction I was taking it. It was a simple task. Delete half a chapter. I decided to save part of the writing just in case I wanted to use it later. All I had to do was copy the relevant paragraphs and paste them elsewhere and then push the delete key…at least that’s what I did and then found I’d somehow deleted all of chapter 31. [Read more…] about My day…

It’s been years since I kept a regular diary. Some people write private diaries for their eyes only, but all through my teens and into my twenties I always wrote to any future children I might have. At the time I knew they wouldn’t want to actually read it, but I plodded on noting on the odd occasion what actually happened during my day (most of the important moments going completely unrecorded). The greater number of pages scrawled with pen and pencil with the juvenile voice of my brain (and blurred with the occasional tear) recount the not so exciting mental world I inhabited which usually included, “I don’t feel well today…”. I’d occasionally read back over my ramblings and every time I came to the conclusion that I was a hopeless bore. Armed with this depressing self-knowledge, around 16, I decided I needed to make myself more interesting. After some thought I decided (for some forgotten reason) that the best way to achieve my goal was to expand my horizon by reading “great” literature (instead of the regency romances I was addicted to). I was sure this would make me more interesting; if only to me. This is how I ended up reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. [Read more…] about The Diary of a Writer’s Life…

I’m a techno-idiot. About two months ago I managed to somehow accidentally click on something in my blog management page that designated all comments as spam and so I haven’t received any e-mails from my blog telling me I had comments. I thought it was a bit weird that no one (not even one of my sisters) had made a comment, but I assumed no one had. I might think I’m the center of the universe, but it’s rather outlandish to expect others to agree. This evening my friend Jen e-mailed me and asked me why her comments kept disappearing into the ether. That was shock! I was getting comments and they weren’t showing up? It was like one of those nightmares where you find you’re back in high school…you don’t know what class you’re supposed to be in and you’re…naked. Screams of horror fill your ears from nearby teenagers at the sight… [Read more…] about Green eggs and spam…

Are you the sort of person who reads books and enjoys finding songs or music that fit a particular character or story? Here’s great blog with like minded people waiting for you! They’ve interviewed me for the latest post. (I know both sisters. They’re book’o’holics as well as great writers.) If you’re curious to know how I use music when I write or what songs other people think of when they read various books have a look!