‘You want me just to talk, then? OK. Well, when I met Michael, the very first thing he said was that he’d had testicular cancer, which I thought was strange because we’d been e-mailing for about two months by then. Huh, cancer reappeared a few months later, but I’ll try and keep this in order.

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The Linnet's Wings is closely associated with The Poetry Group here at WW and this time round I have an editorial about the poems of Vernon Watkins and James Graham is there again with two poems first seen here.

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Following on from last month’s post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m marking World Mental Health Day on Annecdotal this weekend. The 2015 theme is dignity, so I’m highlighting sympathetic portrayals of mental health issues in fiction. I’ve blogged elsewhere about the mental health themes in my own novel, Sugar and Snails

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Every Success has a Beginning - the Official blogsite of Bob Curby, write, editor and publisher. Here you will find excepts from existing books, notes about future books and links to buy my books from AMAZON, paperback or digital for the Kindle readers.

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Whether you've got a deadline to meet or not, the act of sitting down and writing every day isn't the easiest of routines to stick to. And while the reasons we come up with for not working on that novel/play/story/poem are pretty much limitless, there are a few that always seem like a good excuse:

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As all writers know, one of the major things you have to do to succeed as a Writer is to write. All the time. Every day. But as many of us (in the real world) also have 'proper' jobs that we sort of have to do in order to stay alive, making time to write every day isn't always easy.

So here's a few ideas that might help:


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When I first came across this book, browsing in the National Portrait Gallery shop, I loved the idea behind it.

Take fourteen of the gallery’s 16th and 17th century portraits, and ask eight renowned authors to write about the individuals portrayed. Afterall, the portrait (in literary terms) is a written description or analysis of something or someone.

What makes this project more intriguing, and gives a free reign to the authors, is that these paintings - acquired for the collection between 1858 and 1971 as identified people - have since all proved not to be portraits of those named individuals.

Interestingly, the face on the cover of the book - given originally as Mary, Queen of Scots is still being used with that attribution - see a recent article in History Extra on the 9 worst monarchs in history.

As the art historian Tarnya Cooper points out in her essay in the book ‘Did my hero look like that? Identifying sitters in historic British portraits’:
Once a picture loses its link with a family collection or an identifying label, the stitching of those details back together proves virtually impossible.


So each of these sitters in the portraits are now unknown, mystery people.

Perhaps the portrait is the only document which remains of a past life.

All we are left with is the picture within the frame.

An individual presenting a pose, their face and expression, what the sitter is wearing, which in these examples are the fashion of the 16th and 17th centuries.


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Right now, I am in writers’ limbo, a land where I must seek and wait. So far I can report that I have received some very nice comments from agents, but as yet no offers of representation. I know the drill: don’t take anything to heart;

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My most recent intreview and some interesting links to follow

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