More than Writers

  As I pulled out of my driveway early one morning, I heard a crash and a searing metallic scrape. I stopped quickly, jumped out of the car and surveyed the damage. I’d managed to turn slightly too sharply out of my driveway and catch the edge of a low lying wall on my passenger side. Pieces of wall lay scattered over the end of my drive. That was an unpleasant and expensive start to my day! It has got me thinking about walls though. Not the walls of separation and division that we see all over the place and which are often difficult to tear down, but walls of construction. I’m sure most of you have seen a dry-stone wall. They divide fields in patchwork patterns, especially in the north of the country. These walls take skill to build and last for many years. They have good foundations and are made using a variety of stones. Each stone is handled by the wall builder and distributed with care and precision throughout the wall. These walls are not held together by mortar but ea...

  Where would be without words? I don’t know.   Perhaps we’d all be painters, ceramicists or sculptors, channelling our creativity into visual pieces to either display to the world or to hide in the back of the cupboard depending on our personality, outlook, connectedness and opportunities. As it is, for writers, words are our tool of choice and my head is full of them for most of the day. Perhaps that’s why these art works caught my eye on display at a South African winery last year. Their creator, Maurice Mbikayi was born in the Congo in 1974, gained his BA in Kinshasa and his MA in Cape Town.   According to his website he ‘interrogates the proliferation of technological commerce in our geopolitical system.’ Quite. He’s intent on making the point that resources for twenty-first century technology have required the sort of mining in Africa that has benefited multi-national companies and big corporates but done very little for local communities.   By using discarded ...

Welcome to Mothers’ Day I am writing this after a few days full of making craft activities for all ages, to be used in today’s service. Finally I have five baskets set up, each with five different activities for five tables of 8 or so people.  This puts my first task this week - completing the final edits to my manuscript - into perspective. These edits are adjustments following the reader’s remarks. The reader is the one from the publisher. The trouble is that altering one thing creates an effect on everything that follows. I suspect I’m not the only writer who turns around after submitting the very final edit to find that the house has become a chaotic mess, self-care has gone out of the window so that hair has grown wildly and fingernails clatter even on electronic screens. Curtains are hanging off rails where curtain hooks are broken, Zooms have been missed and phone call messages left unanswered. The washing pile has morphed into a mountain.  Meanwhile, there are al...

 I genuinely feel that if you have put in all the work required to complete and novel (congratulations) it is a shame if it wastes away in your cupboard or on your computer. Therefore, I happily share the routes to publication with you in the hope it will help gain your book a larger audience. I previously dealt with vanity press, hybrid press and self-publishing. Now let’s look at traditional and independent publishers.               When people talk about traditional publishers, they are referring to the established system of getting a book deal. This involves submitting to agents, (usually with enough rejections to paper your lavatory walls) before/if you get accepted. The accepting agent will then edit your book.   The next gatekeeper is the publisher. Your agent will submit your manuscript to publishers. Again, many of these may reject your manuscript. If the agent finds one who accepts your work, a cont...

      Superstition has it that hammering a coin into a felled or fallen ancient tree and making a wish can rid you of illness and bring you fortune. The image at the top of this post, photographed on a walk, is from one such tree. It lies on the ground near the ancient clapper bridge, Tarr Steps, which crosses the River Barle in Somerset. When I took the photo, God’s name stood out in sharp relief from the other coins. It made me wonder whether the person who hammered in that particular coin did so with hope, with faith — or perhaps with both. Hope and faith are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Faith is rooted in trust — trust in the character of God. It rests in who He is, regardless of circumstances. Faith says: God is good. God is present. God is faithful — even when we cannot yet see how things will unfold. Hope, by contrast, leans toward tomorrow. It carries expectation. It looks ahead to the fulfilment of what has been promised. If faith i...

 As I’m subbing in on the MTW blog today, I thought I’d share what might be an unpopular opinion. :) I’m pro AI. Now, before anyone starts lobbing rotten vegetables in my direction, let me clarify a few things. I don’t think it’s okay to produce and sell an eBook generated by AI in fifteen minutes. I don’t think it’s right to submit articles or research papers that have simply been spat out by AI. I don’t think it’s okay to send marketing emails (see Paul Kerensa’s recent Facebook post) claiming you’ve read someone’s work when it was actually AI that read it. And I’m not entirely convinced about the idea of having an AI executive assistant either. (Someone I know has just “hired” one.) But I also don’t believe the problem is AI. I believe the problem is people. There will always be people willing to take shortcuts. People happy to claim credit for work they haven’t done themselves. People willing to cut corners and publish shoddy work. And that’s not new. Like most technological ad...