Every now and then I post one of the texts I’ve transcribed as part of my continuing research into the life and work of Georgiana Molloy. Some of the things on my mind lately have been the connections between us all – Georgiana and me and you – that transcend time and place. A conversation […]
Each time I visit Fairlawn, the home where Georgiana Molloy spent the last few years of her short life, I’m drawn to the garden, for obvious reasons. One tree in particular, a Black mulberry, always pulls me to gaze up at the sky through its lichen-laced branches or to touch its gnarly trunk. Although the […]
This image is a photograph of a letter seen through the magnifying lens of the Reading Room camera at the Battye Library. I chose this one because I wanted to write today about different ways of looking and different ways of thinking. I’ve been bent over my keyboard for weeks trying to complete some writing […]
It was just an evening walk along the beach so I was a bit surprised to see myself caught on camera trying to get a signal on my iPad. I’ve been a bit obsessed lately with research for a new book and it turns out that when I’m doing one thing I’m often (usually?) still […]
I write this on the day I heard the sad news that Ursula K Le Guin has died and, once again, I think of journeys. She told us it’s ‘the journey that matters, in the end’ (The Left hand of Darkness 1969) and I’ve reflected on that many times over the years. When I was […]
This is the story of a protagonist and how he found his way into my imagination. In late 2014, I had the bare bones of a new book, the themes and basic structure. I had the main characters too, but I still knew very little about them. I was really challenging myself when I suddenly […]
The writing has been going slowly during the last couple of weeks, not because I’ve been slacking but because I’ve been researching more than usual as I write. It’s a reminder that research, for a writer, is so much more than checking names and dates and background events when drafting the plot. I’ve been reading […]
It’s been happening again, that thing. I’m sitting at my keyboard, thinking I’m writing a novel and doing what authors do. Managing the plot. Creating characters. Making things happen. Deciding who does what and why. After all, it’s fiction. Then, even as I type the words, I become an observer. Forced to stop my silly […]
I’ve been thinking lately about the many different ways that research contributes to my own writing. There’s been a lot on the social media landscape about the ways other writers use research. In reality, it can be a very expensive process and can seem problematic or impossible if it involves travel. I gave a talk […]
In a blog about writing and being a writer, it’s well past the time for saying something about READING and being a reader. It must be thirty years since I first heard the phrase ‘the reader within the writer’ and I used it often as a teacher of writing but it began to feel like […]