Goodbye to a Decade
I originally shared this post on Facebook, but I think it’s worth sharing here on my blog, too. ~ It’s a new year and a new decade. (I won’t be a purist and mention that decades start at 1 and end at 10, because I accept we’re about to enter the 2020’s.) Ten...
Unworthiness: This is How It Starts
Earlier this year, my friend Denise Mills asked me if I’d write something for her blog about feeling ‘unworthy’. The topic is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about, having felt ‘unworthy’ for much of my life....
AN ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT MY MOTHER
I’ve tried to avoid doing this, hoping that by ignoring my mother’s attempts to intimidate and harass, she would stop. But it’s reached the point where I feel I must warn people about her. I also want to stand up for myself: Nothing I’ve...
Louise Allan: Music, Always
This is #65 in the series for Writers in the Attic and the final post for 2017. This series has been the most successful I’ve ever started on this blog, in terms of duration and readership. Each post has had well over 300 views and some over 2,000! It’s...
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...
A Letter to My 12-year-old Self and Having the Freedom to Imagine
This is a quick post to let everyone know where I’ve been writing this week: Jenn J McLeod invited me to be part of her series, ‘A Letter to My Younger Self’, so I wrote to my twelve-year-old self and, as it turned out,...
Some Thoughts on Death and Dying
There’s been a bit of an existential theme happening with my kids lately, and they’ve wanted to talk about death and dying and the universe. My older son wrote a poem about a child’s funeral. He came up and read it to me and,...
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...