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,...
For Fathers’ Day
I wrote this piece a couple of years’ ago. It’s some of my early writing so please forgive the errors and simplicity! It was one of the first pieces I wrote in my own ‘voice’ and was published in the OOTA anthology, ‘Jukebox’,...
(Un)Happy Mothers’ Day
What do you do when you dread ‘Mothers’ Day’ coming around each year? When those words cause your insides to shrivel because all they do is remind you of the Mothers’ Days of your childhood, when you hid in your bedroom, while your mother stood...
Making Medical Mistakes — a Letter to My Daughter
This ‘Letter to My Daughter’ first appeared in a recent issue of a medical journal. My daughter had just finished first year Medicine, so I wrote to her telling her about one of the pitfalls of being a doctor—making mistakes....