The Story Behind the Story: My Great-Grandmother
In the lead-up to publication of my novel, I want to write a few posts about the inspiration for my story. Last year, I wrote about my grandfather in ‘The Story Behind the Story’. In that post, I talked about how as soon I started writing my novel, my...
The Story Behind My Story: My Grandfather
In the lead up to publication of my novel, I’d like to write more about the ‘The Story Behind the Story’: the genesis of my novel, and the people and places that inspired it. My Grandfather My paternal grandfather was...
What I Want to Write About …
Lately, each time I’ve sat at my computer the words haven’t come and I’ve ended up faffing. Yet my mind is overflowing with ideas and things I want to write about. So, in the end, I pulled out my notebook and pen and...
On Not Giving Up
This post could also be called On Failure, or On Working Hard, or On Learning Life’s Lessons the Hard Way. When I was young, I spent most of each summer in our above-ground pool, swimming and jumping and tumbling and doing laps of its 20-foot length. I...
Talking to Teenagers: How I Turned My Relationship With My Daughter Around: Parenting Reflection #2
In a blog post last year, I said I’d write a post about my second daughter and how, through her, I learnt to be a better mother. That was easier said than done, believe me. Once kids reach a certain age, it’s difficult to write about them...
The Story Behind the Story
ON WRITING ‘THE SISTERS’ SONG’ My novel, ‘The Sisters’ Song’, has evolved and that’s the only way to describe how it came into being. It’s nothing at all like what I set out to write, and this draft, Final Draft 3.0, is very different to...
What Not to Say to Young Women
Last week, our seventeen-year-old daughter sang at an Eisteddfod. She’s in Year Twelve and hopes to pursue classical singing after school. She always takes care with how she presents herself for a performance, and for this item,...
Why I Chose to be Motherless – Part 1
I recently read an essay, Motherless By Choice by Katie Naum, and felt awed by its honesty, its sincerity and its wisdom. It struck a chord with me and spurred me to tell my own story. As always happens when I write stories from my childhood,...
Bottling the Kids
There’s been a lot going on this year—mostly good, but not all of it. Normally, I cope. Normally, I feel good about the good things, but I’ve had trouble feeling good at all this year, about anything. I think I’ve worked out why: I don’t like...
My Journey to Writing
If someone had asked me a decade ago what I would be doing in ten years’ time, writing a novel would not have been on the list, nor on the horizon. It wasn’t even on the planet. I’d always thought of myself as Maths/Science orientated as I...