The cold is here and I am happy to say we have a warm, enclosed fire going which as I write has been burning for four days. Momo my rescued little dog loves the fire and spends the day curled up on the softest chair nearby and in the evenings sometimes even gets up and…
Category: Quotidial
Working Together
One of the joys of writing for children is sending my work to painters and asking them if they want to illustrate the books. To ask another mind to read the story and do their thing, with no preconditions or preconceptions – and see what they create. It isn’t just another layer or some pretty…
Imagination
I was thinking about writing and the convoluted ways in which people go about ‘thinking’ over their plots and manipulating their characters pretentiously telling people that the ‘characters take over’, which is another way of saying you don’t know your own brain, when the whole concept of imagination made me leave writing all-together. People who…
A Political Animal
Years ago I remember listing to a man outside a party conference talking about a particular clause in the party’s governing instruments and what it meant and my mother saying, ‘Now he’s a political animal’. He was wholly immersed in the entire process of politics and knew it backwards from procedure to implementation. Political parties…
Fantasy Writing
I have always enjoyed writing children’s stories, in much the same was as I enjoyed reading them when I was child, because I never quite know what is going to happen next. Writing as I go along is not something everyone would wish to do but much the same way as I never understand people…
Learning By Infusion
Babies of all species have to learn from their parents and their peers. We used to simply have to learn the art of survival, which berries to eat, how to hunt, how to cook, where it was safe to sleep, but the learning experience has become far more sophisticated over the millenniums. Yet like all…
Opera
One of my children’s stories, actually one I am quite fond of, has a central character of a child whose singing is creative. Going back to the themes of innocence and times when people were closer to nature. And it was a strange story for me write because I don’t actually like singing very much….
When Nature Calls
It is of course wonderful to live in a place, if not the house, that one truly loves but sometimes when choosing one has to look beyond what one sees to what one suspects or even learns. I remember when digging out the back of the bank to get the soil away from the house,…
Writing In the Dark
Several people I know have asked me how and where I get my ideas and truth to tell if you do a lot of reading, most ideas seem pretty well grounded in human experience. A few seem to go beyond experience and expand upon what we know and a few are far reaches of pure…
Friendship
Rarely has an elegy to friendship been written better: Heraclitus They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed; I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky. And…