Tag: writing

  • 10th December 2013

    Everything’s a draft! As I sat in the car the other day waiting to pick the kids up from school, I pondered, as I often do. This is good pondering time for me, that is, if I manage to stay awake – pondering time has often become napping time! Not that I’m knocking napping time…

  • 26th July 2013

    Mapping out my latest novel There’s always plenty of chat in the writerly world  about whether we should plot or plan, which works best, which we prefer, or whether we do a bit of both. One of the wonderful things about any creative pursuit though, is that we can do it exactly the way we want. I…

  • 29th May 2013

    A Writing Routine A writing routine – three little words… it sounds so easy, doesn’t it?  And sometimes it is – for a while it can be.   But there’s the rub.  A writing routine is not always easy to stick at unless it is your day job and you have solitude and time in which…

  • 16th May 2013

    Through the keyhole ~ Writing Spaces About a year or so ago, I put together a post on writer’s spaces (this is mine by the way, also operating as a planning literacy sessions, eating lunch, marking, editing, watching ‘Pointless’ and ‘Grand Designs’, dreaming and painting space… oh, and napping!) The cushion really has taken on…

  • 21st December 2012

    A Very Sunny Blog Post I’m delighted to say that my wee Musings & Mutterings (Previously known as my BOF – Blog on Friday) has been nominated for the ‘Sunshine Award’ (YAY!) and as I like sunshine and sunflowers, I am doubly happy to accept it. The Sunshine Award is ‘given and passed on to bloggers who positively…

  • 11th December 2012

    A writer or a story maker? There’s a slight irony about the title of this week’s blog post, given that my now completed co-written novel is indeed called ‘The Story Maker’.  It’s easy at times, I think, to get submerged in all the writing malarkey that now exists, the marketing, the networking… and so on, and…

  • 26th October 2012

    Breaking my Blog and Blogging about my Break! I have decided to have a blog break for a while, and have been kind of putting off this post as I didn’t really want to.  After almost a year and a half of weekly blogging, breaking off from it felt like taking a step backwards somehow. …

  • 5th October 2012

    Diary of an ending As I write, it’s 10pm, Wednesday eve, 3rd October.  I have just written the last word of my co-written adult novel WIP.  I wrote it accompanied by Ane Brun, ‘These Days’, which you can listen to here, a track which Dean Harkness (@Deanus on Twitter) posted on Facebook while I was in…

  • 28th September 2012

    A Blade of Grass What is it that guides our choices as a writer? I don’t just mean regarding genre choice, I mean subject matter, theme, characterisation, dialogue, setting, the way we want our writing to feel, the tone.  Do we want it to be realistic and grounded or do we want to create something…

  • 21st September 2012

    Some time in early July Fourteen years ago (and two months to be precise) I discovered I was pregnant.  It was early days so I hadn’t had a scan and had no idea at this point that I was carrying a wee little boy.  It was the beginning of something very special, but also the start of a very…