The back page in 'Living Spain' is named 'Final Call' and this issue has an article called 'A Week on the Camino de Santiago'I decided that space was to be my goal.

I've done my 'how to write magazine articles' homework, analysed the magazine in general and the 'Camino' piece in detail. There's an illustration but I took lots of photos in Zamora so that shouldn't be a problem. The word count is 1200, which could be.Maybe the scope of my piece is too wide.

The structure of the Camino piece more or less does itself - a narrative of the pilgrim's route. There's some dialogue, quite a lot of landscape description:

Almost as soon as we crossed the frontier, the lush greenness of the French Pyrenese gave way to a much rockier and starker countryside and the further we travelled down the valley towards Jaca, the drier and warmer everything became.

Later on;

We also saw all sorts of wildlife, including Griffon vultures, red kites and buzzards



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‘And the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin
His boots are cracking for t' want of blacking
And his old fusty coat is wanting mending
Until they send him to the Dardanelles’

In 1915, when this sang mildly satirical ditty was first heard, Sir Winston Churchill took up painting.


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My name is Susie. And I'm a blocked writer.

I'm even blocked for blogging. Sitting here in front of a square of empty screen, due to post tonight, and no ideas have come. This is scary and disconcerting, and it's the second time it's happened in a month.

The last time I worked on my novel was 18th January. I know, because I have a list of days and word-counts I kept to encourage me to keep going. So what happened?

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A behind-the-scenes look at a top literary agency.

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I've just agreed to write a story for an anthology which is being published by Glasshouse Books in July. It's called 33 because that's how many London boroughs there are, and it's one story for each borough. I'm doing Bexley, and since Londoners are no less parochial (arguably more parochial) than anyone else, even my London-based friends might need explaining that Bexley is fairly south and very east London: specifically, it's lined up along both sides of the bit of the A2 which you hope to whizz through on the way to Rochester and ultimately Dover and then France, and usually find you crawl through because there's an accident at the Danson Interchange and traffic backed up from the roadworks by the new Eurostar station at Ebbsfleet.

No, Bexley is neither the borough of my birth (Kensington & Chelsea) nor where I was at school (Hammersmith & Fulham) nor where I live, nor have lived (Lambeth), though I'm looking forward to reading other writers' take on my past and present stamping grounds. But, believe it or not, there's a Bexley story I've been wanting to write for ages. In researching A Secret Alchemy I spread outwards from Eltham Palace, which is an important setting for both medieval and modern strands, and found all sorts of other things. William Morris's Red House I would have been tempted by, but it, too, was refracted through the fictional prism, into The Chantry, and I haven't yet cycled back round to want to revisit that material. So it's neither of those: what it is would be telling...

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I'm not exactly bereft when it comes to 'How-to-Write' books - but what's this I read in Time Out? Best-selling crime-writer Elmore Leonard's giving out writing tips on TV!

It's a BBC programme called 'Culture', so forget helpful countdown numbers, as in 'The 20 Best Spats from Corrie''. Instead, close ups of the author's gaunt face wreathed in cigarette smoke, intercut with clips of John Travolta and Danny DeVito talking about writing in the 1995 film, 'Get Shorty'

As I'm also eating a pizza, and it's more an edited version of the writer's thoughts than 'tips' I note down only nine. Maybe there were more.


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We’ve all heard this quote many times (it’s actually a slight misquote from Albert Einstein), that creativity is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. For the most part, this feels like a truism to anyone who struggles to finish a poem, story, play, song, or novel. However, what about that one percent?

A question I’ve been asked a lot lately, since I just came out with a debut collection, is what inspires me as a writer? In other words, where does that one per cent arrive from? I never had to think so closely about the process before. In the past, I just waited or looked for inspiration, not giving much thought as to how it happens.

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Two years ago, in order to stimulate my limited reading preferences, I set up a book club. Our group, all friends of mine who would normally have met over dinner, have since fallen into a happy routine of meeting every six weeks to review a book. This gathering doesn’t involve dinner, just a few nibbles and strangely enough, at book club, we don’t over indulge in the wrath of grapes either. Book club has become a real forum for...er, books.

So, over the past twenty four months, I’ve read many different genres that otherwise I wouldn’t have touched with a proverbial bargepole. I’ve escaped the reading rut I was in, that of reading commercial beach fodder only. And though I’m still rather partial to a beach bonk-buster, with nine members of both sexes, the book club choices have forced me and others to reach past our self imposed comfort zones. Most of the times, I’ve liked the book. Some of the times, I’ve loathed the book and quite often, I’ve loved the book to the point of passion. I’ve wanted to shout from the rafters, any rafters, that everyone should read this book! The latest author to come under our scrutiny, Mr Markus Zusack, writer of the magnificent ‘’The Book Thief’ has provoked such emotions in me.



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‘How-to-write’ guides advise readers to analyse books they admire. I find the ones I don’t like are a more useful challenge. Some of the choices in my crime reading group are so hard to get into they drive me to scribbling names and events on post-it notes.


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My name is Steve, I'm 42, I'm a man and I'm almost divorced. I live on my own in Reading, work for a major software company and I drive a Ford Fiesta.

Anybody reading that sentence is almost certain to form preconceived notions about me. Some of the words or phrases that probably come to mind are: middle aged, geek, not affluent, bad at relationships, urban dweller, unimaginative, not romantic. And you'd be wrong about more than half of those.

But that's part of the power of words. The way you write also how you control the picture that you build up in people's minds. So writing is far more than just creating a grammatically correct sentence. It's more than just conveying action or description. It is fundamentally about painting a picture with words. The words you choose, the order in which you put them, have to create an image in the reader's mind just as vivid as if you showed them a photograph. And that's the challenge for me. Writing is easy. Telling a story is much, much harder.

So try again.

My name is Steve. I'm 42 and a refuge from the USA where I spent eight and a half years working as a senior engineer for the largest software company on the planet. And during those eight an a half years, we lived the American dream. We bought into credit, we filled the house with all manners of expensive goods, I drove a sports car and we ate out at the best restaurants in the city. For a long time, American Express regarded us as one of their top clients. And at work, I was flying high and scooping stock awards and bonuses every single year.

Then it all came crashing down.

Looking back, it isn't too hard to see where the fracture began. Microsoft builds and tears down product groups consistently, and after six years I found myself in a group that was torn apart and everybody scattered off to other divisions. I had a choice though. My general manager invited me over to his new group and managed to segue me into a role without all the interminable interviews needed.

But the new group was politically unstable. All manners of poor management and bad communication lead to our goals shifting one way and then the next, with no clear idea of what we were being brought together to create. And in the middle of all this, I became disillusioned. With myself. With everything around me. So I escaped it by spending more time in Europe on business trips. And while I was over there, I got to visit England again, and old friends and old families. I went traveling down to places where I used to live, and stood outside old homes where memories came flooding back. And, stripped bare, I suddenly realised that I lost sight of what I was. I wasn't really American. I wasn't really a high flyer. I had just gone along for the ride, fuelled by the high octane of illusionary easy credit. It works as long as you keep flying. But pause, slow down or stop and it all comes crashing down.

After two years trying to make the best of what was a truly bad job, I saw my marriage crumble and my attachment to the USA wither away in the cold winter of an increasingly oppressive social climate.

Then one day I saw an advert for an engineering job in the Reading arm of Microsoft. It was like a lifeline. I applied for the job, endured about 11 interviews total and came out of them feeling as if I was the dumbest person in the world. But to my surprise, the hiring manager called me back and offered me a job. And my old manager, who was already in despair at ever getting anything useful out of me, readily acquiesced to let me go.

And my wife, who saw little future for me in the USA, did the same.

I won't say it was easy parting. We were professional. We divided up, made lists and drew up schedules. Boxes appeared, were filled up, and were carted off. At night we slept uneasily. For a month the little pantomime went on and then we went to the airport together, hugged and I was on my way back.

Back in England, in a new job, a new apartment and a new life, the first thing I needed to do was rebuild the shattered pieces of my own confidence. It took two long years before I could feel as if I could look in shop windows at my own reflection. My apartment is basic, stripped of materialism and filled with space. That was my rebellion against the clutter and compact of my American lifestyle. I have no need of a sports car. Instead, I drive a simple, compact, car that gets me to where I need to be. Because it isn't how you get there that matters any more. It's just that you get there in the end.

So, start again.

I'm Steve. I'm 42 and I've had 42 amazing years on this earth and I hope to have 42 more of them. I'm still a senior engineer at the largest software company on the planet. I dress smartly and I look at my reflection in shop windows with approval and perhaps a little bit of conceit. I have a wide swathe of great friends around me, and I have the luxury of time. Perhaps I'm still romantic. And now I'm a writer. And although I live in Reading, close enough that I don't waste precious hours of my day commuting to and from work, I'm a country lad at heart. My dream is to retire to some little beach villa on the coast where I'll write, swim, sail in boats and play chess with an old fisherman who probably cheats when I'm not looking.

Hula!