Past, present, future

The house is quiet. Half of us are back to school today (teaching and being taught); the other half (including me) are still waiting for our jobs to re-open. Our local secondary school is having a phased return so all the kids can be tested before restarting their lessons, so the streets are still quiet. …

Distraction and procrastination

The beta reads for WIP 1 are coming back. The general consensus is it's good, messy, and stuff doesn't work (but not the same stuff for each reader, which is to be expected). And in response to their notes, I've made my own notes of what needs to change which doesn't even correspond to anyone …

Farewell, 2020

I've written three posts for today - varying themes and tones, not quite settling on what I want to say. In fact, I don't think I want to say anything - a bizarre state of affairs for a writer! But there are only so many times you can say the same thing. We've all suffered …

Stuck in Covid

I've got eleven days to write, edit, polish and submit a short story to a very prestigious short story competition, the Manchester Fiction Prize. Well, I've got something written, but I'm not sure it can actually be called a short story - it's currently a jumble of words with the Covid pandemic as its central …