Sunshine and Showers

If you love both gardening and writing much is dependent on the weather. Autumn, even with a small garden, is a time for tidying and bulb planting, but also refreshing with as much colour as you can bring back from the garden centre. If the sun is shining after a night of rain, it is a treat to the senses to be digging and watching bees buzzing round late summer flowers, but your writer demon is tapping on your shoulder.

Wouldn’t you like it to pour with rain so you can get back to your computer. You haven’t touched your novel, your website is weary and you haven’t LIKED the posts of your fellow authors on Facebook…

But I have found time to dust and vacuum my website so do visit http://www.ccsidewriter.co.uk where the sun is always shining.

Return and Reboot

We have arrived home from our 24 days away to find the house still standing and unburgled. But I could not access my Command Control Centre (computer in the bedroom); due to my insistence on unplugging everything electrical while we were away lest lightning strike the house. Strange white messages appeared on a black screen, pressing F1 was not enough and long suffering Cyberspouse had to reset the computer’s body clock and re-boot it. But I still stand by my sensible precaution as our local area did have a dramatic storm while we were away. We also have the electrician in this week leading to more switching off and rebooting. But today I can get down to some writing as housework is out of the question with the electrician working in every room.

September brought a very hot late summer especially in Kent and there was only one rainy hotel afternoon when I actually got out my notepad. The rest of the holiday was spent with family or visiting interesting places and spotting ( and sneakly photographing) fascinating people. So I have returned with no progress on my novel, but plenty of ideas for more stories.

Pens, Paper and Preparation

Holiday preparation for an author? Packing notepads of various sizes and some pens is not enough. I have been busy working my way through reams of scribble for my current novel. I like writing in long hand first, but I can’t actually read my writing, hence the need to quickly transfer from microscrap paper and macrosoft brain to Microsoft Word. Then edit and put on several memory sticks in case a burglar steals my computer, or worse, the whole house blows up while we are away.

In the meantime there is work to do in the ether; refreshing my website so it looks as if I have visited it recently and am not dead, blogs to write…. just in case the various portable electronic gadgets we are taking with us do not connect to the internet. And where are we going? Find out in the next blog.

 

People and Places

When friends or family members move to a new part of the country my first thought is A new place to write about and send my characters to. My second thought Wonder what their new home is like? Setting for a short story, inspiration for my novel?

I wasn’t disappointed this weekend. The young couple are living inside a World Heritage Site in a delightful cottage. The whole area abounds with history and they took us to visit a ‘Victorian Town’ so we could legitimately nose into other people’s homes; fun, even though the original inhabitants were no longer present and their humble dwellings had been moved brick by brick from their original settings…. or perhaps the people we met were not dressed up volunteers….

The Times and Tides of a Beachwriter

Writers and readers, we’re all floating around in the ether, but somehow connecting with each other. Fun on Facebook, words on websites, forming forums. I have a website, I write a blog on Goodreads, but everyone except me seemed to be on WordPress, so I decided to join in, come here for my coffee break and hopefully others will too. Nothing too intense just a few jottings on what I’m jotting.

I’m writing my fifth novel ‘At The Seaside Nobody Hears You Scream’; the opening is inspired by the Valentine’s Night  storm of 2014. I’m also putting together my third anthology which will be called Times and Tides. Are you sensing a maritime theme? We live by the sea now, but I have also lived in a variety of places and write about anything and everything.

Now it’s time I went off to see how The Olympics are going.

Janet Gogerty