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Showing posts from July, 2011

Blue Notes, Green Fuse

Tom created this epainting sitting in bed the other morning, looking down at the blue pool of hydrangeas beneath our window. In March, when we moved in, there were no clues about colour in the withered husks of last year’s flower-heads. Now, in a few short months, here they are in full bloom, purple from a distance but blue as you draw close. Looking at these flowers, I’ve often been reminded of lines from D H Lawrence’s ‘Bavarian Gentians’ written when Lawrence was so aware of his own mortality. The ‘darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness’. A poem suffused with beauty and sadness. There’s been too much sadness in the news this week, too many young lives curtailed. Locally too, the community is coming to terms with the death of a fifteen year old boy struck by a car when concerns about an unexploded WW2 shell diverted school children from their usual routes home and onto a main road. It’s all the lost potential that makes me despair. This week, a hard-to-

Congratulations to Liz Fielding

I’ve dragged myself up at Crack of Doom for the electrician, my unwashed hair’s been piled up into a bun and the plug could be pulled on the power at any moment, but despite all this I’m at a party! I’m over at my Welsh neighbour’s (well, we’re in next-door counties), award-winning romance writer, Liz Fielding. Liz and I are members of the Carmarthen Chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and were also flatmates at the recent RNA Summer Conference. Not only has Liz been very generous in her support to me as a newly-published writer, but I can tell you that she’s very generous with yummy biscuits too! Liz is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of signing her first contract for Mills and Boon for her novel, An Image of You and she’s just completed her – gulp! - sixtieth book for them, Flirting with Italian , which is out in December. How’s that for hard work and discipline? I’ve just finished reading her latest book, Tempted by Trouble featuring the delectable Sean M

Of Mice, Romantic Novelists, Gok and a Cabbage

It’s 7a.m. on Day One of the home improvements at Hotel H and there is a cry of disbelief from upstairs. The electrician has opened the first of the old sockets – in our bedroom – to discover two dead mice curled up behind it. Downstairs, the heating engineer is flushing out the radiators and declares it to be his Filthiest Ever Flush. Nice. Having only returned from the Romantic Novelists’ Association Summer Conference the previous evening, it’s all a bit of a rude awakening. Rather than doing something about all the writing ideas vying for attention after some very inspiring conference sessions, I’m dodging bits of ceiling – ‘You are replacing these, aren’t you?’ - choking on dust and supplying lashings of ginger beer, the workmen’s tipple of choice. I have to admit that I wasn’t especially looking forwards to the RNA Conference, too afraid, I suppose, of being a Lonely Baloney*. In the event, I don’t know what I was worried about as I was met with warmth and kindness and s

Get it while it's £1.72!

Blimey! Turning the Tide 's available on Kindle at the truly bargainous price of £1.72 today. Don't those lovely folks at Amazon realise I have a plumber and electrician to pay? Ah, what the heck? Get it whilst it's hot and have a read in the sunshine.