Home Thoughts Weekly

Many thanks to my charming and entertaining guest, Toni Sands, for visiting Home Thoughts Weekly. Actually, you had quite a long stay, Toni… I hope you managed to find the coffee and biscuits whilst you were here.  The reason I’ve been such a poor hostess is that my normally rude health took a battering from the most debilitating sinus infection and industrial-strength antibiotics, both of which have left me feeling pretty wrung out. Home Thoughts? Mainly, ‘Ooooh, I feel soooo ill.' It’s lucky, then , that new Twitter friend @voula  invited me to join in a game for writers, published and unpublished. The instructions for Lucky 7 are: Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript  Go to line 7  Post on your blog the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating  Tag 7 other authors to do the same  ‘Current manuscript ’, for me at the moment, could apply to the several levains fermenting on my desktop, including a novella and my t...

By way of a very refreshing change, I’m delighted to welcome as my guest this week fellow Carmarthen RNA member Toni Sands , an accomplished short story writer, whose debut e-novel Orchid Pink  has recently been published by Xcite Books… oo-er! Here’s Toni sharing her thoughts about writing romantic fiction and why you don’t necessarily need to wear six-inch stilettos and black velvet to write erotica! My mother regularly borrowed Mills and Boon romances from the library. For me, an inquisitive pre-teen, these books sparked an interest in love and relationships that still hooks me. But after my father found me engrossed in a sizzling story about a landlady and her lodger, I had to make do with the Chalet School books for a while. My own writing progressed from boarding school tales to romance and gentle supernatural stories, some of which appeared in women’s magazines. Years later, at the first writers’ group I joined, the organiser told me he recognised a sensuous quality in ...

Look at these beauties!    When my daughters were little, I used to collect odds and ends of china. Some of it was given to me and some, like a pair of very beautiful ’thirties vegetable tureens, I had to save very hard for. Then life took a difficult turn and I had to part with some of my treasures and I lost heart in my collection.  When Tom and I set up home, I was about to put what remained of my china safely in the back of a cupboard when Tom said, ‘why don’t we just use it?’ Use it? Once I’d got over the shock, I realised what an utter joy it is to use beautiful things rather than look at them. Yes, sometimes they get broken, but at least they’ve had a life rather sitting unused where no one ever sees them. It was for that reason, at the weekend, that MiL presented me with this incredibly pretty tea set that’s been stored in her loft for too long. There’s six of everything, except for a missing cup and, since I also have a bit of a tea fetish - esp...

At the start of the Easter holiday, I'm over at Choc Lit Author's Corner  today, blogging about getting away from it all. Do come and tell me about what makes a perfect break for you.