More than Writers

  Happy Christmas! It has been an absolute joy to have my blog date fall on Christmas Day. This is the 4th time I have blogged on this date, and it is the last. In fact this is the last regular More Than Writers blog that I am going to share. You may see my name from time to time, as an occasional guest blogger, but the time has come for me to step back and make room for some new voices. I have loved being a part of this blog and I want to thank every one of you who has read, liked and commented on my blogs. It has been a huge encouragement to me!  I was wondering what to write as a farewell blog. I wonder if you will indulge me, as I think I would like to write about the One whose birthday it is. None of us would be here without Him, and it is all about Him and for Him. The following is an extract from Christ Illuminated , my Advent Devotional based on the names of Jesus in the Bible. JESUS “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name  Je...

  A few years ago, I took up a new sport.   I’m not really a sporty person and young only at heart, but it was after the lock downs that my husband and I decided to give Stand up Paddle boarding a go. It was something different to do. I surprised myself by getting the hang of it and I really enjoyed myself. So last year we did a course to improve our skills and this year we purchased a couple of boards. Watching paddle boarders glide along the river makes it all looks pretty straight forward, but in truth things can become unstable very quickly. The secret to staying dry is to keep your feet in the same place and make sure your eyes are looking ahead. The paddle then helps you both move and balance. When conditions are good it is, I think, the closest thing to walking on water (without the walking of course!) I just love the feeling of stillness, gently wending my way along a river cocooned in nature. There are a few tips we can take from stand-up paddling that can help us b...

            Image Credit: Kittitee500-Fotolia Since my last monthly blog for ACW on July 02nd last year, I have finally retired. Having reached the age of 60 on October 02nd last year I began drawing on my occupational pension. This means that theoretically at least, I should have more time to devote to different writing projects now that earning an income is no longer of primary importance.  I recently updated my Linked-In profile to read as follows- Doting Grandad, Saracens RFC fanatic, posts the occassional blog. Likes books, music, theatre & anything Cornish esp the ale. Passionate campaigner for and supporter of those living with Motor Neurone Disease (MND). This pretty much sums up life as it currently stands. My eldest Grandson turned thirteen on August 25th which makes me feel my advancing years that little bit more but also knowing that, God willing, I should still be cognisant enough to buy him his first legal pint when he turns eigh...

  I was looking for inspiration for my personal blog  this month and I found myself ruminating on the title of the blog in general. It is great! Of course we are more than writers. We are here because we write, but that is not all we do. Some of us are parents, or spouses, or grandparents, or carers. Some of us volunteer, have other strings to our bows, serve in church, are involved in community life. Some of us even have to work – work that actually pays a decent wage! Sometimes it is hard to juggle all that we do, and writing often comes last in our list of priorities. Unless you are one of the very blessed people who does actually earn a decent income from their writing! But that isn’t just what More Than Writers means is it? Well not my interpretation of the title anyway. What connects us here is more than the fact that we love to write. What makes this space special is that we are connected by something much greater than even writing. We all profess a living faith in ...

Image by  Artur Pawlak  from  Pixabay Last month I asked the question, ‘ Who remembers your characters? ’ Thank you for all of your lovely comments, I am so glad that you found my muse helpful. In a similar vein, I would like to ask another question. How much thought do you give to the names of characters, places, objects, inventions, etc? In my ‘ Mimics ’ series, many of the characters and creatures are given Greek or Hebrew names. One of my Hebrew character names is ‘ Abaddon .’ I’ll leave you to figure out what that means.   Having recently moved house, I was keen to find out the meaning of where I live. The village is Kings Stanley . The ancient word for stoney or rocky ground is ‘stan’ and ‘leah’ means clearing. In the 13 th century, the local manor was a demesne of Henry III, hence the ‘Kings’ designation. My street name is ‘ Penn Lane ,’ originally spelt as ‘PEN.’ This seems rather fitting for an author don’t you think? The word ‘Lane’ is from the Germa...

                                                                                        Photo by  John Cameron  on  Unsplash I'll be honest. I struggled with what to write for my blog post this month. No idea came. Nothing. But there was a faint glimmer of light on the horizon. The Alpha season was starting again soon, surely that would provide an idea. And it did! Alpha writers is an email group that I'm part of, and this will be my forth season with them. Every three weeks, one of the group sets a writing challenge and we each have up to 300 words to write on it, and then we vote and comment, anonymously on each other's pieces.  The first challenge of this season is an interesting one - To write an internal monologue of a person stuck in a queue....

In about 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted a picture with a difference. It was called Self-Portrait as a Painter.* He didn’t just paint himself sitting or standing; he painted himself painting himself . The action he was doing was itself the subject: it was a mirror event; a reflexive or recursive activity. The Selfie: photographing oneself photographing oneself... Self-portraiture is one of a fairly limited set of things that can be done recursively. You can carve a carving of a carver carving. You could (I suppose) make a cake in the shape of a person baking. More usefully, if you were a blacksmith you could use your forge to make an instrument used in the forge. Among the things created on the first Sabbath eve, the ancient Rabbis listed ‘the tongs made with tongs’. It was an acknowledgement of the philosophical problem of recursiveness in the context of manufacturing: if to make tongs you need tongs, how were the first tongs made? But there is one realm in which recursi...

I’ve been listening to Andy Serkis’s #Hobbitathon, a live stream charity reading of the The Hobbit https://www.gofundme.com/f/thehobbitathoncovid19appeal . He’s spontaneously inventing accents and voices and song tunes. It’s unrehearsed and unedited, with the actor stumbling over sentences and sometimes losing his place. It’s no audiobook but it’s glorious. There’s something so magical about having a story read to you, isn’t there? I think back to primary school, sat on the floor in the corner of the classroom for Little Grey Rabbit or Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator - favourites for both children and teachers. How I loved to read to my own children. I can still quote the rhyming books – Hairy McClary, My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes, and of course Dr Seuss. Visiting Seuss Landing at Universal’s Islands of Adventure, my boys were unimpressed by the novelty of a green eggs and ham roll as they were so used to ours! I look back and wonder if these books seeded my younge...

It was our annual service review and my boss had set out the room in preparation: folders with agenda and business plan; water jugs alongside a cafetiere and cakes; and by each place a vase of daffodils with personalised photo. The reverse was left blank and we were asked, throughout the day, to add comments on what we valued most about our colleagues. It was only my second week back after extended sick leave and I was feeling more of a liability to the team. So I was moved to read what they wrote on mine. Here’s some: ‘always able to bring a new perspective’, ‘a great storyteller’, ‘very special to all of us’. Encouragement is such an important attribute, isn’t it? But often overlooked I think. I loved that Edmund Weiner recently drew our attention to: ‘A bruised reed He will not break; a smouldering wick He will not put out.’ ( http://morethanwriters.blogspot.com/2020/01/bruised-reeds-and-smouldering-wicks.html ) These are some of my favourite words in the Bi...

Tools of the trade In the early days of this year contributors to this blog brought us   entertainment , information, observations and more. Many have written about books they have read or their own work-in-progress. All of us start with a blank piece of paper or a blank space on a screen. Personally, I prefer to write using Word and then copy my piece into the blog before doing the final edits and revisions. I don’t always remember to update my original document with the final version as a back-up. So how do we decide what to write about? I can only speak for myself, although I am fairly sure that my experience is not completely different from that of other writers. What we read, where we go, what we look at, who we listen to and the memories, which might be triggered by our experiences, can all provide input to our writing. Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books has a wonderful magical device, which allows him to remove irrelevant thoughts from his mind wh...

For most of the past fortnight I’ve been fasting. Not from food, because I’m far too much of a wimp and being chronically ill with blood sugar issues, it would probably not be the best idea in the world. No, I’ve been on a writing fast. Most people go on retreats to write more, not less. But I found that I was putting a great deal of pressure on myself to write every day and whilst I was getting some done, it wasn’t flowing. It was starting to feel like a slog, like crossing something off a to-do list instead of something wonderful. So I just stopped. Over the course of the days I did not write, I realised some important things. I had been feeling for a while that I had lost the central focus for my work. Although I had a million* different, amazing, God-given projects, my heart wasn’t in it. It felt like a long, hard, slow, dirgeful trudge, with just the odd glimmer of grace here and there. I decided to let that go and start over. I prayed for the Lord to show me whether...

It’s the new TV season and some of my favourite shows are back: Strictly, Celebrity Masterchef, The Great British Bake Off. I love watching people demonstrate their developing skills to produce something wonderful. I’m a sucker for anything whose title starts ‘The Great…’ – Interior Design Challenge, Pottery Throw Down, Sewing Bee – let alone Sky Arts Portrait or Landscape Artists of the Year or The Victorian House of Arts and Crafts. I have a particular soft spot for judge, Keith Brymer Jones, for whom beautiful results reduce him to tears.  In America, 14 th September is designated Live Creative Day (it’s also National Filled Donut Day but that’s another story!). It’s a time to practise, share, and teach the creative arts, a day I feel that is made for writers and Christian writers in particular. Why? Well, for a start, the Bible is full to bursting with creativity.  There’s the overriding theme of God’s own creativity:   ‘O Lord , how ...