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Yoto player for little book lovers
I know I said I’d do this soon and, surprise, I’ve actually caught up with my to-do list just once, so here I am. We’ve only had our Yoto for about a week, but I’m already in love with it. I don’t say that because I want you to buy one either – I do, and here’s a wee affiliate link for the player we have – but I’m telling you, you’ll want to regardless. So I refused to buy a Yoto (or a Tonie for that matter) for years, because I figured it’d be ignored. I thought it was a newfangled, expensive cassette player and that my kids would…
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Your own brand of bravery and my ‘secret’ book project
I’ll share more about my project in a minute, but I’ve been wanting to write about the topic of bravery for a good while. You see for years I’ve considered myself to be really quite wimpy. I’ve done a few things in my life that others would label as ‘brave’, for example moving country six times, moving house innumerable times more, and taking chances on people and things with very little planning. But there are things that completely terrify me. Pregnancy comes to mind. As some of you will know by now, I’m currently pregnant with twins. At time of writing I’m sitting around 12/13 weeks. We’re super excited for…
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Oysters
Here we have another story I wrote some time ago. See what you think: Oysters.As she glanced across the shiny plate that had been dropped in front of her by self-important hands, her nose wrinkled in dismay. There it sat, the oyster, bedded onruby-red leaves of whatever lettuce, and sparkled with fleur de sel diamonds. It wasinoffensive looking – really – glistening like a wobbly, dead tongue in its sapphireshell.She looked across at him, and thought much of the same.Inoffensive was fine, that was what you wanted, and what you got used to. Whenyou swallowed the delicate, grey meat along with the fear, you were bound to love itsurely. That…
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Musings on faith, L.M. Montgomery, and my own history
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about adding some sort of faith-based content to my work. Please don’t lose me straight off the bat: I, like many of you, used to be a kind of dabbling agnostic. I believed in *something*, but I rarely went to church and didn’t investigate my faith further at all. Then in 2015 I became ill. It’s still weird for me to look back at, because it felt like it happened over night. You see I’ve always had slight OCD tendencies (not the cleaning one, but rubbish thoughts entering my head, having to double and tripe check things, getting up at night and smelling…
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Ramblings on a rainy day
Today has started off as a slow day. My husband’s working from home, meaning I didn’t have to do either school or nursery run, and I got to avoid the rain. It began its noisy splattering on our windows when the July baby* and I were upstairs, playing. Now I’m sat under a cosy blanket catching up on my work. I have a little design project to do today, and I’m waiting for a client to send on the next pieces she wants written for her literary blog. In the meantime, I’m admin-ing and, it would seem, blogging. I’ve not yet worked out 100% how I want to share my…
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The Purple Suitcase
Here is a story I wrote when I attended a Cambridge University course in writing short fiction back in 2013. It was hugely by my professor at the time, and I still really like it today. I dare say it was about the potential scenario of marrying an old boyfriend. I’ve not re-edited it, so it’s exactly as it was over 10 years ago. Let me know what you think about it. —– She dragged the heavy purple suitcase behind her as they rushed towards the train. She heard the whistles blowing and the slow chug-chugging of the engines, and already she felt out of breath. “Can you hurry up?”…
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From near(ish) the Highlands to the World
I wanted to share a bit about what I like to call a ‘literary lifestyle.’ Not ‘how to fit more time into my schedule to read books’ (books find YOU, not the other way around.) Let me start by saying that this isn’t my first shindig. It may not be the most exciting way to introduce a new website, but trust me – it’s an exciting way to introduce your last website. Why last? Because I’ve been writing for well over 20 years now (sometimes people even pay me), and at the tender age of 37 I’m finally quite happy with my style, use of language, and generally what I…
