It can be a lonely road, pursuing your art. Most artists and writers that I know work alone. For my best work, I need the peace and quiet of no distractions to help me drop into that inner space where the ideas start to flow.
That’s why I chose this little house in Throop, down near the river. No one’s ever passing through or stopping by on their way to somewhere else. It’s a secluded spot, away from the bustle of town.
My desk faces the window, and I look out across my small back garden to the little village green, with a line of stately oaks across the road, behind the old white house where they have the noisy parties on saturday nights in summer. It’s a pretty good spot for a writer, if you don’t mind being kept awake a little now and then, and I don’t.
Read more »
“I have an irrational fear of commas,” he said, and I smiled.
It doesn’t seem so strange to me, the poor old little comma. I have used it and abused it much over the years. And as a former English teacher, I have a better idea than most ordinary folk about when to stick it in or leave it out.
Besides, fear of making a few mistakes here and there is not going to get in the way of pursuing my goal of mastery as a writer. There really is no choice but to embrace fear of failure, and plod on. Or plot on (joke)… (groan, I know).
Read more »
“You need an adventure,” he said to me, and I knew he was write.
(OK, he was ‘right’. But I meant the word in both senses of how it sounds when spoken.)
Does an apparent mistake like that make you uncomfortable when you read it?
Poets use these kind of auditory puns all the time because they help create rhyme and scan. But I love it when a writer helps me challenge my expectations a little by throwing in an outrageously cheap pun like that.
Read more »
The other day, I said something about the tonne of dull and tedious tripe that gets published everyday on hundreds of blogs all over the web.
It’s not that I feel I need to read it all. It’s just that I get so despondent, flicking through my daily feed for something that might fire me up, excite me, make me think.
Read more »
I fell into running a business when I became a holistic therapist. I really wasn’t interested in business itself. I just wanted to do my therapies and help people feel better.
I was naive. An idealist, for sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I loved what I did and I thought that was enough. But it’s not and it rarely ever is.
Read more »
