More than Writers

Attrib MIKI Yoshihito (Creative Commons)  As you cannot avoid noticing, today is 31 October, Halloween.  Are you getting spooked up?  If you are hoping to read something about tacky ghosts, black plastic spiders and pumpkins, I suggest you close More Than Writers immediately and move on. You may be enjoying a quick cup of tea/coffee with your phone after spending the weekend making a Halloween costume for your child or grandchild to wear in school today.   It amazes me how educational establishments which pride themselves on being… oh so terribly… secular and too cool to include God in their harvest festival, celebrate Halloween.   What is there to celebrate, exactly? Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is a contraction of ‘All Hallows evening’, the day before All Saints Day (1 November) - not to be confused with All Souls Day on 2 November, when we remember the departed.   The tradition originates from the pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhai...

  Tomorrow it is Reformation Day, at least that is what we remember on the 31 st . Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, we had a visiting speaker for our special Service. During his wonderful sermon/talk, I envisioned a lot of less godly ideas for my characters. One of his main points was that the Reformation released or unleashed the written Word of God. It was no longer in Latin only, or preserved for a few special people only. With the Renaissance came other opportunities for study as well, making written words more important. I started on book 3 of the Elabi Chronicles in April, then ended up with puppy brain. With November and therefore NaNoWriMo nearly here, I can feel my excitement building, as I’m determined to see the book finished by the end of November. For a few weeks now, I have imagined trouble and mayhem for my poor, unsuspecting characters. They have arrived in a little village and are just getting familiar, trying to settle in. No idea that there are so many obstacle...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos We all have favourite characters. I love Sam Gamgee from The Lord of The Rings . He’s a quietly understated hero. I love characters like that.  I love Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice for not caving into expectations when she rejected the odious Mr Collins. It would’ve been  much easier for her to just do what her family wanted. It’s hard to say who my overall favourite character is but a strong contender is Sam Vimes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.  Over several books, Sam Vimes develops from being an alcoholic loser to becoming a brave, honourable man. Not perfect by any means but there is a decent man here and it is a joy to see this played out.  If you want to examine great characterisation, he is a fabulous one to follow. Start with Guards! Guards! and work your way through. Have fun! What can we learn from our favourite characters? Firstly, we can look at how the authors por...

  I was recently inspired by Liz Manning’s post on ‘LIVING THE WRITER’S DREAM’.   The re was the picture of a dainty writer’s study with a vintage singer sewing machine table holding her laptop and all her various writing stationery. From her study, she can hear the sea and be so inspired without moving from her home! She can from her bed watch the boats coming and going from the harbour! That is a writer’s dream for some of us!   Other dreams are seeing our books being filmed, receiving over a thousand glorious reviews and writing glorious books, the world hankers for!     I made a list of all my writing goals:         Get a tripod stand /cameras for my YouTube posts, etc             Put my latest books on the ACW Bookshop           Browse the ACW Website for my benefit            Attend free courses on self-publishing[KDP]        ...

 Do you believe in the sacredness of place? Have you any that are holy or special to you? As a loner, in my teens I would tramp the fields behind out house. Outdoors in beautiful countryside was a great start, but there were also particular places. Like underneath the twisted tree that overhung the brook, or the view of the distant village from the hill below the woods. In the early morning my companions were deer, badgers, foxes, rabbits and birds. Human contact tended to break the spell. Those places are still so special to me decades later. But things were the other way round in the official sacred space of the village church. I discovered, through several abortive attempts to practise the organ there alone, that it scared the absolute hell out of me! Fortunately my grandfather was happy to sit out those sessions with me. Perhaps it was the gloomy tombs, the feeling of dust and neglect – or relics like the decaying flag and disintegrating shirt of a long dead knight held high on...

It is now only 9 days until the first ever Book Blest, a Christian book festival in Stroud.   This is the time when I can become jittery, with a combination of excitement and nervousness.  Why do I put myself through this (I don’t like to call it stress)?  As writers, we all do it, every time we make our work public, either by submitting it to a publisher or an actual book launch.  Why do we do it? For me, it's a simple matter of obedience .  God clearly told me, that despite multiple and complex health issues, He hasn’t finished with me yet.  To cut a longish story short, He told me to write, so I do, out of obedience.  Why do you write?  What or who inspired you?  My mum was one of my inspirations. Now, on top of all of the usual stress (there, I said it) I took on the task of starting this Christian book festival and the reason is the same, in obedience.  In the book of Joel 2:28 we read that young men see visions and old men dream ...

  ‘How long have you been a writer?’ Have you ever been asked that question? I have. And I have found myself fumbling for an answer. If the person asking is enquiring as to how long I have been a published author, that is easy. ‘Not long!’ If they are asking how long have I been writing with the aim to being published, again the answer is, ‘not long'.    I came to writing fiction late in life, and having had my work published came as a real shock. An unexpected blessing. I know my story is not typical, and for many reading this you have been writing and looking to publish for a very long time. Or you have had your writing published for many years. I must admit I still feel a bit of a fraud calling myself a writer. And yet here I am – writing this! Words that you and many others are reading. And I have had the joy of having two and a half books published. The truth is that I have been a writer for almost all my life. Since I discovered story writing at school. I loved ...

  At the age of nine or so, I wanted to be a writer. I was a wannabe writer. I was captivated by the story of Daisy Ashford, who at nine years old wrote a novel The Young Visiters [so spelt] which was later published to great acclaim. I loved the idea of one’s own book, with its cover inscribed with the title and one’s name, all those pages inside, the smell of paper and glue, the ingenious story, the engaging characters. And of course, I tried doing it. The attempts were mostly imitative of what I had just read: so it was Daisy Ashford to start with, then in teenage years, Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien. The results were not terribly inspired and sometimes downright embarrassing. And I did not go on from there to be a proper writer. I did not morph into the desired state. Wanting to be a writer did not make me a writer. Learning the craft of writing (in so far as I have learnt it) came as a necessity. At school, and university, one could only study an arts subject by writing e...

                            Writers in Community by Rebecca Seaton                                                   Some of the East London ACW group     Writing can feel a lonely task but over the years, I have discovered plenty of opportunities to find and develop community. The obvious one is ACW: I can’t remember exactly how many years it is now since I’ve joined. For a long time I was happy interacting at a local level before taking the plunge and going to conferences. As a teacher, I’ve also belonged to different school communities. Then there’s the local area itself. I wasn’t born here, but have lived and taught here for almost twenty-five years now, go to church and have, to my great surprise, become a small part of the local traders’ community. My local and writing worlds ...

  Free Images on Unsplash (ALT: A red book with 'Thank You' on the cover, in gold. There is a fountain pen beside the book.) ‘It makes me so happy to think ACW could include you in writers’ days.’ This is part of an email I received after the ACW Writer’s Day on 7 th October. I’d hoped to attend the event in person, but when it was moved online, I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I’m deaf, so obviously wouldn’t be able to hear the speaker, and I find lipreading easier in person then onscreen. Usually, in Zoom meetings, I use auto captions (subtitles) to follow what is being said but, in order for the captions to work, the host Zoom account must have the ‘caption’ option selected. Would the ACW account have captions enabled? I didn’t know.  I emailed Jane Brocklehurst to ask. Despite all that moving the event online probably meant for the organiser, Jane found time to reply to me. She didn’t know about the captions, and suggested I ask Dan Cooke, who does the...

"God is faithful (reliable, trustworthy, and therefore ever true to His promise, and He can be depended on); by Him you were called into companionship and participation with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord."                                                             1 Cor. 1:9       For all of us Covid halted our lives in March 2020 with two brief resumptions of normality. For me, we’d barely left that when I had my second cancer diagnosis.   By March this year, the world began to be shaken by the Ukraine invasion, which has brought into jeopardy energy sources across the world.    At home our Parliament has been, and still is in chaos now with new Prime Minister, a financial fiasco where the Chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to resign, and she might be going the same ...