Bread upon the waters by Sue Russell
Like, I suspect, many of the readers of this blog, I am prone to discouragement. I have probably complained before (these things don't go away) that the writer's life involves hard work while offering little visible fruit, but is also a compulsion that can only be resisted at the price of misery. It feels like Hobson's choice - which, I find, originated from a horse-keeper in Cambridge who would lend out the horse nearest to the stable door or no horse at all. So I have to keep on doing it, (and trying to get better at it, and making efforts to reach a wider readership), or else give it up as a waste of time and suffer. Sometimes, though, there comes a tiny insight that leavens the general gloom: nothing very profound, indeed, probably quite hackneyed - but often enough a cliche is a cliche because it strikes a lot of people as true. On a shopping trip recently with my good friend and writing buddy Claire (C.F.Dunn, author of the acclaimed series The Secret of the Journ...