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Dock-walloping with Cicely Fox-Smith

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‘We’ve waited for a cargo and we’ve waited for a crew, And last we’ve waited for a tide, and now the waiting’s through. O don’t you hear the deep-sea wind and smell the deep-sea foam, Out beyond the harbour on the long road home?’ The Complete Poetry of Cicely Fox Smith edited by Charles Ipcar and James Saville I asked my friend, the artist, writer and musician, Claudia Myatt. what she knew of the poet Cicely Fox Smith (1882-1954). She was immediately able to point me to a recording of ‘Rosario’, sung by her own Quaynotes group in Suffolk. She used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many people, outside the UK and US folk scenes, have heard of Cicely Fox-Smith today. It’s one of those questions where one hopes to be shouted down by an indignant roar of people; Of course I have, how can you have been so ignorant? But, with the zeal of the convert, I’m going ahead anyway. I’ve had Charles Incar and James Savi

Back to work!

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 Sometimes, things happen in life and then all of a sudden, you realise that you've lost a month - just like that! I'm not sure what happened to October but it disappeared under the weight of hospital trips, two operations and now a long recovery period for my husband. Writing wasn't on my agenda at all. However, I need to get back to it. I was on a roll before and was powering through the soggy middle of the book. Unfortunately, having stopped for a month, I think I'll be wading through treacle when I restart. Will I get to the end of my book by my next post in December? I'll let you know! In the meantime, I do have something to look forward to. I run author events at my local library with the help of the Friends of West Barnes Library and w e have an absolute treat for you this November! Janice Hallett and Joanna Wallace will be joining us on Tuesday 19th Nov at 7.30pm. Janice's debut, 'The Appeal', turned normal prose on its head as the story is cleve

Debbie Bennett is a Legend! Allegedly ...

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A blonde, a brunette and a redhead walked into a bar. They really did. I was the brunette.  It’s November 1991 (I think – give or take a year – it was a long time ago) and we’re in Earl’s Court, London at a fantasy convention. I’d met the blonde (Jan) and the redhead (Lindsey) six months or so earlier at a writers’ conference – we were among the dozen or so writers whose work wouldn’t be pigeonholed into romance, or memoirs or even thrillers. We were fantasy, science fiction and horror writers and affectionately dubbed the weirdos by the late and lovely editor Carolyn Caughey , who took us under her wing! Carolyn was a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton and she made an effort to keep in touch with me over the years – even as far as making sure I got an invitation to the Stephen King party in London in the late 90s (Storm Constantine and I asking Mr King to dance is a whole other story …)  Jan and Lindsey knew each other already, and I lived only 20 miles or so away, so we formed

My Favourite Mistakes (Cecilia Peartree)

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Just to clarify things, these are my favourite, or at least most frequent writing mistakes. If I started on the other mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, it would turn into a book and would be entitled ‘What Was She Thinking?’, my preferred title for an autobiography. I present the top five list here in no particular order.                  1.      Every day a Tuesday Not usually a month of Sundays but sometimes several Mondays one after the other, or a very long week at work for my characters, with no weekend to look forward to at the end of it. This kind of thing often strikes me when I do the very first read-through after getting to the end of a draft, and it’s why I write down a chapter-by-chapter outline at this stage and add the day of the week to each chapter heading, trying to iron out discrepancies as I go along.   2.      Overuse of gestures / facial expressions My characters tend to recycle the same gestures to such an extent that they could be in danger

Time for a whinge by Sarah Nicholson

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I’ve finally made the jump from what was formally Twitter to Threads. I do feel it is putting all my eggs in one big Meta basket, but I quite like the way it cross posts between platforms. We could debate the merits or downsides of social media all day, but as writers it is one of the best ways to build and connect with potential readers, which in turn hopefully leads to some sales, maybe reviews and thereby more sales… this writing lark is such a merry-go-round, when does anyone find time to write? I’ll address that one next month. I have tried to fill my threads timeline with mostly writers and creatives, I’m not following so many pollical accounts. All is calm and soothing – ish. You get the odd thread of how do you pronounce a certain word and how it freaks Americans out the way we say some things in the UK. I confess I tumble down a few of those rabbit holes, but somehow, they go in small circles. I get that sense of déjà vu and remind myself this is immaterial in the grand scheme

Only Connect, Part Two by Peter Leyland

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Only Connect, Part Two                                                                 The Woodlanders                                                                   It could have been a change of medication or my final retirement from a long-cherished teaching role, or it may have been simply that I was getting older. Whatever the cause, I was  struck down soon after my last birthday by the most awful bout of insomnia linked to the anxiety that I had so often suffered from. I had tried a number of remedies – lots of exercise, further medication, daily sessions of yoga nidra, counselling - even rereading favourite novels in search of the bibliotherapy that had aided me in the past - but none of this seemed to work. Apart from an hour or two each night, I lay awake, finding sleep impossible to come by. It was as though for some reason of its own my mind was refusing to allow me to switch off. At length, buoyed up by the optimism that had served me so well in the past, I decided to go

Halloween: the Festival That Dares Not Speak Its Name

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What does BBC Radio 4’s long-running, much-loved soap opera about Everyday Farming Folk have against Hallowe’en? BBC Radio 4's The Archers The Archers began on 1st January 1951, as a 15-minute daily serial intended to spread the word about new developments in farming. It centred on 3 or 4 farming families, most of whom were called Archer, with the addition of the Aldridges at the posh end of the scale, balanced by the Grundys and Horrobins at the other. The characters took off, and a wealth of other storylines got woven in, some for comic effect, some for their gripping dramatic pull, but most as vehicles for messages about Good Social Behaviour. No one is ever racist, for instance, except in a clumsy way, because unless one of the villagers says something objectionable (and, needless to say, quite out of character), how are we, the listeners, to grasp that a newcomer to the Ambridge village is from an ethnic minority? Halloween pumpkins... at least they're not plastic. Photo