Candles and Christmas Trees

Christmas is almost here – racing up on me – every time I blink it’s a little bit closer. The school holidays are about to start. Let the festivities begin!


Looking back over my recent blog posts I see I haven’t been telling you very much about my writing. That’s probably because I don’t have anything big or exciting to report. I’ve spent the year rewriting, and rewriting. And between the rewriting I’ve been working on the WIP.

I have to have something on the boil in the background. Whenever I’m waiting to hear back about the first novel I can open the file and vanish into a different world, re-acquaint myself with a new set of characters, and stop worrying about what happens next.

And now here I am, as the year draws to a close, and I’ve just written those wonderful words – ‘The End’.

It’s a first draft – very rough I admit and I need to give it a thorough working over. But everything I’ve learned over the past year has gone into it – and you know what? I’m really quite excited about it.

Will it fly? Who knows? Will 2012 be the year? I hope so.

But for now I must mull wine and bake mince pies. I’d just like to wish all my blog readers a Merry Christmas and wish you all publishing success in 2012. Thank you for joining me on my journey.

The Rocks Beneath our Feet.

Everything tells a story, if you just know how to look.

I remember my very first Geology field trip, standing in an old quarry staring at a wall of rock – but what a story that ancient rock face told.

I saw an ancient beach. I saw the ebb and flow of the tides and the ripples that the waters left in the sand, now frozen in stone.

I saw how the seas receded and the vegetation flourished, plants taking root alongside a river channel – I saw millions of years pass by – and then…

Somewhere, not very far off a volcano erupted. One short cataclysm. The lava flooded my lush valley. Only the roots of the plants remained in their scorched soil, everything above ground destroyed by the molten flood.

There are stories all around us, in everything we see and hear, in the rocks beneath our feet and the landscape all around. We only have to know how to look.