I've been writing for the last 3 years or so. I run a website for WAHMs (work at home moms) and I began writing to provide content for the site. I fell in love with writing and have been working to learn the craft since.

Just this week I learned that I'd sold my first non-fiction article to a magazine. YAY!

More to come....

Jill
xxx

Busy morning today – rushed around doing lots of glorious copy-typing (I really do love it – you can take the girl out of the typing pool, but you can’t take the typing pool out of the girl …) and hardly noticed when the Magical Monday Time of 12noon appeared. Astonishing! I also discovered that the boss’s wife has much better handwriting than the boss, and so documents she’s commented on are far easier to read. I did suggest that he might like to think of dictating his thoughts to the wife (a la Milton dictating to his daughter) so I could understand them in the future, but I’m not sure that suggestion will be taken up. Thank goodness I’m the right side of review time, eh!

Meanwhile, Ruth is having strange dreams about gutting fish on a fish farm. Does this say something about our student care approach? The mind indeed boggles …

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Torpid in mind this weekend apart from a spurt yesterday. On Friday, while washing my poor father, I poured conditioner over his head! The reason? Thoughts raced through a story line. And I had to judge the Flash Fiction. But it's done. This early morning, outside with my cuppa, watching the stars, I heard an owl. Saw her drift above the Silver Birch. She's a frequent visitor but no one hears her because they're in bed still fast asleep. Before dawn is my favourite time of day. As the day grows, I feel it becomes abused by some sights and unwanted sounds.

Lord H and I were organised enough to attend the Remembrance Service at St Mary's today. I took two extra poppies in case there was a disaster, but the original two held firm and all was well. I shall have to add them to the growing poppy mountain in the drawer after tonight. God but I'm anal. Anyway, the service was very good, and the sermon particularly moving. Jenny (the vicar - or one of them) mentioned one of the verses of the old hymn, "Oh Valiant Hearts", and made the point that, after the crucifixion, God linked himself to all suffering of all people, for all time. Certainly an interesting point - one I've heard before, but well worth the retelling. I also enjoyed the fact that after the service, we walked outside to the War Memorial in Shackleford and had the actual Remembrance Service there. Sometimes it's good for the traffic to be held up for a while, I think. Another good thing - which I haven't experienced before - was the fact that they handed out small crosses with the names on of all the people from Shackleford who'd died in the two world wars and, as each name was read out, the person holding the particular named cross walked up and planted it in the soil near the memorial. Highly appropriate indeed ...

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Just finished Steph Swainston's No Present Like Time and am eager to get my hands on the next volume in the Castle series The Modern World. These books have seriously impressed me. Absorbing myself in the world of Swainston's immortals has equalled how I felt when reading Stephen Donaldson's Covenant series for the first time. Boy, does Swainston know how to write - it's quite formidable!

I'm currently reading some more Lovecraft, another noted favourite. I find Lovecraft highly inspirational in terms of my own writing, at least in the sense that he has the uncanny power to motivate me to write, and I always appreciate authors who can do that.

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I'm about half way through this rewrite (10,500 words out of a little under 20,000) and as such I don't have all that much to report.

(Actually I wanted to blog about receiving my copy of Cover the Mirrors by Faye L Booth, how much I appreciated her sending me a bookplate and how much I loved reading the prologue but I'm just not going to have time.)

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Spent this morning editing for Goldenford and I'm now up to Chapter 23 of Jackie's upcoming novel. The plot continues to thicken indeed!

Have also just finished the marvellous Unrequited by James Bennett, which I thought was hugely enjoyable. If you like gay psychological thrillers, it's the book for you!...

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Struggled round the golf course with Marian today - not so much due to the standard of our game (which was better than last weekend), but we were flummoxed by leaves. Hmm, there might be a poem title there somewhere, but I'll have to think about it. I do love the word "flummoxed". Anyway, because of last night's wind (careful, people ...), there were so many leaves all over the place on the course that it was virtually impossible to find your ball once you'd hit it. Yes, yes, I know the non-golfers out there will be thinking: what? Golden leaves and white balls - you must be joking!! But with the winter light as it is and half the leaves showing the white undersides, you have to be standing on your ball (careful, again ...) before you can see it. At one point, in the hunt for Marian's ball - which had ended up in a ditch stuffed full of autumn leaves - I found myself hitting the leaves with my club and snarling, "Don't worry, Marian, I'm going to beat the damn ball to death which will save you having to hit it", whilst giggling helplessly. Never say I am not a supportive and professional golf partner ...

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It's been my week for metaphors. We think of them as sophisticated, a step further than a simile in literary cleverness, something we have to explain before children see them in their English set texts. Anna in The Mathematics of Love is intelligent and articulate, but young and not highly educated or well read. I decided in finding her voice that she doesn't use metaphors but similes, where the disjuncture between the actual object and the image is made clear: 'the light was like gold and blue velvet,' she says, not 'the velvet light.'

But in Music and the Mind Anthony Storr talks about how metaphorical language perhaps came before objective, scientific ways of describing things:: "When human beings [first] looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjectve, physical experience". Hence 'the mouth of the river', 'a neck of land', 'veins of minerals', 'murmuring waves'.

And then I heard Ros Barber talking at Goldsmiths about the novel she's writing...

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The Short Review is a week old. And what a week it has been. I am overwhelmed at the response. Stats so far: 544 hits to the site… and counting. Hits from the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Israel, Japan, the Phillipines, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. Seems like there are a lot of people hungry for reviews of short story collections. I’m so glad - for years we’ve been hearing that the short story is dead, that no-one wants to read them let alone buy them. I’ve never believed this, and our stats this week seem to bear that out. Thank goodness!....

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