Awake at dawn again, I made a cup of coffee, took it back to bed and started working on my WIP, but ended up drifting off. I was happy with how the interaction between my main protagonist and another key character was going when I must have drifted back to sleep. I dreamt very vividly …
It’s dawn, and I throw back the curtains, to be greeted by a spectacular sunrise. It takes my breath away. The sun bursts above the horizon. A radiant, luminous glow of deep orange and flame red, spreading an inspirational light on a darkened world and heralding endless possibilities for new beginnings. I never wanted an …
We are like family now. Bound together by an invisible thread, our stories intricately woven together, ad infinitum. I know everything about each and every one of them. I uncovered secrets from their past that I know they would have wanted to let lie. It doesn’t make them bad people. The sins of their past only make them human, fragile, vulnerable. We all make mistakes and, I believe, the truth has set them free.
I was flirting with fiction earlier this week, only as it turned out it wasn’t fiction at all. It was an article written by a young man. He believes that people of a ‘certain age’ writing a novel for the first time and thinking they can get it published, are deluded. Why? Because they are, apparently, …
I am grateful for many things in my life, but if I have learned anything during the first four months of 2020, it is that the material things in my life matter less. Our own home and a car, are things that many of us take for granted, but we have worked hard to get …
Thank you, Ben Huberman and Discover Prompts for today’s title prompt, Focus. My inability to do just that has been a problem during recent weeks, and I’ve even just eaten my last biscuit without noticing. As the Coronavirus pandemic started to take hold, Discover Prompts decided to post daily prompts throughout April to help us all …
This time last week, my self-confidence was at an all-time low.
A sense of impending doom washed over me. An out of control falling flat on my face feeling, and a conviction that the grip on my 2020 goal of joining the world’s army of wonderful, witty women as a low-ranking recruit, was slipping through my fingers.
During the week that President Trump advocated swallowing bleach to get shot of Coronavirus , I struggled with re-working the humour that stitches together one of my 92,000-word works-in-progress.
I was searching for a little light relief to come from somewhere, anywhere. Something, anything, to crack me up, and I eventually found it with Sindhu Vee, Live at the Apollo, on catch-up TV last night.
The human race has come a long way in the last 200,000 years. We have the innate ability to adapt to change, and now we are currently facing the most significant changes we will ever have to make. Climate change, overpopulation, pollution, and on top these three serious contenders, COVID-19 is raining down on us all.
With the help of the global scientific community, we will survive this cataclysmic period in our history but, then what?
When you fall off a bicycle or a horse, you get straight back on again, and writing is like that. There will always be knockbacks, but you can’t let them get to you. There will always be negatives, but they are just the potholes on the road to achieving your goals.
Whatever it is you want to accomplish in life, you’ve got to bite into it hard and, like a terrier, refuse to let go. Hone your craft, until you get it right.
In May 2000, I took three months out and went on a much overdue sabbatical. We were travelling light, although my Yamaha keyboard found its way into the boot. I still believed in my abilities as a songwriter in those days. On the back seat of the Mazda, was the ultimate in carefree holiday accessories, P’s fourteen-month-old daughter, G, whose favourite toys were the talking Teletubbies, La La and Dipsy.
“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair” Mary Heaton Vorse. Congratulations to all you wonderful witty women! You all inspire me to better apply the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair. 👏 https://www.comedywomeninprint.co.uk
I’ve never trusted anybody who comes over as having had a sense of humour bypass. When chatting to someone new at a party or, these days, at a virtual social soiree, you unleash your best one-liner. As your voice trails away into cyberspace, together with the sound of a damp squib, it’s time to mute yourself, and go and chat to someone else.
In response to WordPress Discover Prompts, Day 18: New, I started this piece in philosophic mode, again. It really doesn’t suit me. I’m a humorist, not Eckhart Tolle. It’s all very well trying something new, in my case, writing in a different style but, not if it’s going leave me looking like I’ve just slapped a pie in my face.
What would we do without photographs? Sometime around 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured the first fuzzy photo. What a long way we have come since then! We are constantly snapping away on our phones and posting the resulting images on Social Media. Visual images unite us when we can’t be together. No more so, while we are in Lockdown.
There was always a distinct chill inside the cottage, which was responsible for the black clusters of mould marching across its walls like aggressive armies of Unsullied. It was impossible to heat. She ran the tips of her fingers across the top of the old storage heater in the kitchen. It had only just come on so she would keep her coat on a little longer and there was no point in lighting the fire in the living room as she was going out later. No significant other, so no candlelight dinner, but a night out with the girls, which would inevitably end up being pretty wild.
This morning, I woke up feeling like a bit of limp lettuce. The last time I felt like a Butterhead, was after I had run 5 kilometres.
I was having such an incredible dream. It was the start of a long haul flight, I’ve no idea where I was going, but my excitement was as effervescent as the fizz I was sipping. I tipped my head back, savouring the moment. Waiting for someone to whisper sweet nothings in my ear, when the deep-throated moan of a hungry Burmese cat, demanding to be fed, blasted my eardrum.
‘Just let me sleep!’ Not quite all the words I used, but this is a family show.
We can’t let C-19 steal our creativity. No more daily gloom and doom journals from me. Diaries are supposed to be private anyway, aren’t they? Drowning myself in a thousand words a day about where we are with C-19 locally, in the UK in general, as well as globally, is swamping the creative part of my brain. There’s a reason, I’ve been limiting myself to one news catch-up a day.
So creatives, stop Christina from hulking-out and do what you do best, unleash your creative beast and write through the storm.
When I was young and slim , I loved granary bread. I bought it fresh from the local baker on the way home from work and demolished it before burning off its calorific content in the gym.
One day, my love for granary came to an abrupt, crunching end. I enthusiastically bit into a soft slice, excited for the nutty, rich taste to flood my taste buds and bit down onto something hard. A piece of wire wool.
The trauma was too much to bear, and I’ve never eaten granary bread again.
