03. September 2019
Endings are tough to land; every story writer knows that. Beginnings? Most lines are a beginning of sorts. Many workshops or competitions might give out a starting line and soon you’ll have as many stories as there are imaginations. Quite often for me, a beginning is an intersection, a juncture, a convergence of ideas or places that might be experienced years apart. The point of intersection is where the story blooms, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a heartbeat.
06. May 2019
I ‘sailed’ with my family on a sixty-five-foot canal boat over Easter, starting out from Rugby. We’d done a couple of weekends in the past, but this was the first time I was brave enough to try a tunnel, the two km long Braunston Tunnel on the Grand Union. We motored into the maw and out of the reach of the spring sunshine at, I would conservatively say, about two knots. That’s still too fast a speed to enter the underworld, maybe two knots too fast, and it was so much darker than I’d...
20. March 2017
Last week was Christmas; at least it was for me. I had a UPS package number and I wasn’t afraid to use it. It was like Christmas Eve when you can go on-line and follow Santa’s flight around the world. I’d ordered the first proof copy of my novel, Whirligig, and was tracking it as the internet god that we all are these days.