• 9th February

    The end… or is it? A short and sweet one from me today – and an early one – today I BLOT (Blog on Thursday) as opposed to BOG (Blog on Friday)! This week, I have finished my first YA work in progress … well, I say ‘finished’ – first draft is completed and I’m having a…

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  • 3rd February

    A Poem Sometimes writing – what I think of as ‘proper writing’ goes a bit awol.  It happens to the best of us I think… life gets in the way, we’re tired, distracted, anxious, or all of these.  Sometimes we have to push through this and there’s no doubt in my mind that writing is…

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  • 27th January

    In the real world I remembered something this weekend, something I’d forgotten… how important it is to retain a sense of equilibrium in this rather surreal 21st century world that we live in.  As a writer, it is easy to become so involved in our stories, our creations, that we shut out everything else.  I…

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  • 20th January

    2 in the morning This wasn’t the post I had lined up for today, but sometimes stuff happens, and at 2am yesterday morning, I woke up with a bright new shiny idea in my head.  It was an idea for an adult novel, brought about by a sequence of events that have happened over the…

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  • 13th January

    Let me tell you about gates… Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a poetry writing workshop hosted by Derbyshire County Council.  They do quite a lot of these types of workshops – always enjoyable and a great opportunity to meet fellow writers and have a good chin-wag about writerly kind of things.  This particular one…

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  • 6th January 2011

    The Plot Planner I’ve mentioned my plot planner in one or two posts now and it’s generated a bit of interest, curiosity and intrigue among other writers, and, apparently, some squinting as certain tweeps (you know who you are) have attempted to work out, from my last post, what the heck I was up to! …

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  • 30th December

    The Book of 2012! I can’t believe 2012 is almost here – where did 2011 go? I remember, as a child, my mum saying how time flew as you got older.  It seems such a bizarre concept when you’re young, that the speed of time could vary according to your age.  Those six week summers seemed more…

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  • 28th December

    The Santa Box You know when you have an idea, and it grows, and then it becomes reality? (a bit like writing a book as it happens), well, that’s what happened with The Santa Box.  It started with a bit of crazy twitter chatter between myself and my lovely, now dear friend, Julia Martin http://twitter.com/wordsxo…

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  • 23rd December

    A Santa with a wobbly nose? Twiglets? Whatever next? Those Christmas traditions – we love them and we hate them, don’t we? There are the sparkly ones, the ones of our choosing, the ones we inherited and hung on to because they were our favourites, and the ones we started ourselves.  Then there are the grotty ones,…

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  • 16th December

    The Jewish Quarter When I think about what sparks my writing and what sparks other people’s, it’s astonishing how diverse the influences are.  I often find that there are so many triggers that I end up with more ideas and notes in notepads and scribbled on to random bits of paper, than time to explore them.  I’m sure a…

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