More than Writers

March is a difficult month for me. Both my parents' anniversaries are in March, the daffodils are blooming, my mother's favourite flower. There's Mother's Day, and St Patrick's Day - two events I don't really get to celebrate far from home, with no children. It's also a month I find writing very difficult. Because I'm sad. All the sadder this year because I have never been parted from my beloved Ireland for this long before.  Lately when I have put pen to paper the stories have been melancholy. Even the prompt for my writing group this week, which I usually use for a funny anecdote, ended up being being a morose story. I used to push back against it. I would just stop writing. In fact I was looking at my post this blog from March 2020 and I was in a similar doldrum. This time last year I wasn't writing at all. Now I am. It's dull, but it's written. I will always find March hard. Depression is something I am learning to live with. I am slowly...

  Even in old age they will still produce fruit, they will remain vital and green. Psalm 92: 14 There’s not much green out there in the desert. Wide open spaces, and a train that howls in the night as it rides over hundreds of miles of track. Lights more bright on one side of town than another. I’ve stood on the view point looking down over El Paso, Texas into Juarez, Mexico and let myself be mesmerised by the stony hills and dusty roads. When I was growing up, this is where I would visit my aunt and uncle and cousins. Every family celebration meant crossing the Rio Grande that wasn’t but a strip of water, and head into that section of Juarez that had my uncle’s favourite restaurant, El Camino Real. Best arroz con pollo with music! Now days, there is this fence. There’s the violence and the drugs. Before my uncle passed away a couple of years ago, he hosted our last whole-family celebration gathered around a long table in a different restaurant. This restaurant went a little more o...

You can’t get much smaller than haiku, as an art form in writing. I’m going to use my blog spot this month to bang on about them all over again. In case you missed it, I did this back in August last year, when I had written a series of haiku, during what we now know to have been the first of several lockdowns. The haiku has been enjoying something of a renaissance in my writing again, in recent months, as I’ve joined in, sporadically, with the Rethink Creative Lent Challenge, which Joy Baker-Johnson sets up and spurs us on in, as soon as the pancakes have been eaten, each February (anyone can join in – do keep it in mind for next year if you’d like to give it a go).   For every day between Lent and Easter, there is a one-word prompt for participants to respond to creatively and then share with the group. For me, I find the thought of writing every day daunting, so the haiku becomes my go-to format.   Here’s the thing though – however hard I try to convince myself othe...

I have found myself writing more than one blog post on this subject; I think that’s reflective of where I am at – and many others of us too (when I opened Christian Writer after having written this, I saw editor James Prescott had written something similar).   Having researched and written an article on the emotional cost of lockdown , during the past week I have had an intense experience of it as my kids have struggled to readjust to being at school.   Initially being at home on my own was very strange – I missed them, but also lapped up the sense of space and freedom . I’ve loved singing at the top of my voice, not worrying about interrupting an online lesson, and have also got back to doing a bit of exercise before settling down to work.   But writing has still been difficult , even though many of the distractions are gone. I recognise exhaustion has been a big part of this, but nevertheless it took me by surprise.   With a short, intense deadline I’ve been fine, ...

The Healing - Image created with Canva + The 3D Cover Creator One of the things I appreciate most about ACW is the support and encouragement of fellow authors, and also the chance to read some amazing books I might not otherwise have come across. So as part of Joy Margett's book tour, today I am interviewing her here on the More Than Writers blog about her new book, The Healing . I've had the privilege of reading an advance copy, and for me it was like being immersed in the depths of peace as I followed Philip's journey through from physical and spiritual pain to healing and wholeness, with the help of Hywel, a character I really loved for his gentle nuanced wisdom and the way he brings truth to light with tenderness and kindness. It felt to me like a journey among friends, and I found the way Joy used description and lyrical prose really did evoke the time and setting of life in the 13th century. It almost felt like a pilgrimage I was taking part in myself, and at the end ...

Deborah Jenkins wrote a More than Writers blog the other day entitled ‘Wordplay’, with wonderful alternative meanings for medications. It fed into my recent thinking about the origins of the words we use. Also, I noticed a friend had a new Twitter handle consisting of the first two letters of her three names, which made me remember something from my childhood. When I was 10 we moved from a tiny, cosy terraced house to a scarcely-standing but massive crumbling Victorian house. I remember my sisters and I walking through the huge dusty rooms with chunks of plaster hanging off the walls, a terrible mouldy smell and rotten floorboards. My very pregnant mother described how lovely it would be when we all had our own bedrooms, gently telling us that for now everyone would sleep together in the study downstairs because the floorboards were unsafe everywhere else. I’m telling you the tale because this slightly scary time of my life was when we invented a word that evolved a little but has b...

  A Monday off work – hurray! As dozing dreams swirl into conscious waking thought, I smile as I remember that today I am going to be a Proper Writer. Husband forgot we both had the day off so has made plans to go out with Offspring No. 1., while Offspring No. 2 is deep in university studies. Boy’s Brigade plans made, promised knitting underway, gardening up to date. I have a whole day to finally make a start on a book project for the first time. Not a blog post, not a prayer, not a poem, not a Bible story rewritten for a youth group. No, by the end of the day I will be a Proper Writer with an actual WIP I can casually mention in conversation. But what does that mean? I need to plan this. How do I structure today? Do I need set start and finish times, a specific lunchbreak? Or should I have woken earlier to get a few hours in before breakfast? How do I fit in the other tasks that still need doing? The piles of laundry, the need for exercise, the actual blog post for ACW t...