Naming my characters is one of my most favorite parts of being a writer. You get to pick out the names of your best friends! (Some would say imaginary friends, but we know better 😉
Category: On Being a Writer
The Things that Inspire Me: Bookshelves
I have always loved bookshelves. Partly because of the treasures they hold in the form of the books on their shelves, but also because of the beautiful way they beckon to explore other worlds.
Literary Foods: A Cottage Picnic on the Moors
“From that time the exercises were part of the day’s duties as much as the Magic was. It became possible for both Colin and Mary to do more of them each time they tried, and such appetites were the results that but for the basket Dickon put down behind the bush each morning when he arrived they would have been lost.
But the little oven in the hollow and Mrs. Sowerby’s bounties were so satisfying that Mrs. Medlock and the nurse and Dr. Craven became mystified again. You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner if you are full to the brim with roasted eggs and potatoes and richly frothed new milk and oat-cakes and buns and heather honey and clotted cream.”
The Secret Garden, Chapter 24
I don’t know about you, but roasted potatoes with butter, oat-cakes and buns with clotted cream and honey and with milk to drink sounds like a wonderful picnic to me! Perhaps a breakfast picnic. Especially on the windswept, foggy moors of an English manor house.
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A Few Minutes or an Hour?
How much time should you spend writing each day? That question is something that I have asked myself over and over again so often. Finally, it got to be where it wasn’t funny anymore and I needed an answer to that annoying little question.
You see, several years ago, I was only working part time and so I had several hours on my hands each day to plot, write, dream and research. I wrote my first full length novel during that time and though it still sits as a rough draft, I actually wrote it all in about two years time. (I am not including the year or so that I spent outlining and telling myself that, yes, you can do this!)
Whispers of Spring
“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
The Writer’s Tea Chest
Writers and tea go together like bread and butter. Or maybe cream and sugar?
Famous authors down through the ages have had their favorite drink to keep their imaginations fueled as they wrote. Everything from beer and wine, to lemonade and cocktails found their into the heart of writers and sometimes into their writing.
The Story in the Picture…
Some times all I need is a picture to help my imagination run wild…
Legends and Roses 