I’ve finally finished my Chinese story. It’s been in gestation since February and while I’ve been able to have clear runs at it, much of it has come slowly and in relative pain. This is not a story that wrote itself. Chronologically, it follows the last Sherlock Holmes story that had the girls in Brussels…
I’m almost thirty thousand words into my latest story and finding it heavy going. The first twenty thousand words came relatively easy; we were at sea on a cruise boat heading to Papua New Guinea and I would take my laptop to the Champagne Bar [before it opened for business] and settle to write after…
Yesterday saw the official launch of the website. This is rather precious, perhaps, because the site has been up for two months but a great occasion all the same. I had made a general invitation at church as well as specific invitations to lots of old friends. The weather threatened to be unkind; we’ve had…
Friday 13 March 2015: I’m teaching again. I guess that the retirement was always going to be a contested zone but I didn’t expect it to puncture in quite this way. Here’s what happened. Just before Christmas, I received an email from a young Chinese teacher of English whom I had met during a visit…
It’s late February and my wife and I are on a cruise to the Eastern end of Papua New Guinea. It’s a very welcome break and although the cruise itinerary is not glamorous, there are whole days at sea in which I have time to write and think about the next story that has been…
I received the following Facebook post from my granddaughter, Emily. Emmy is one of the heroes of my stories. She’s a delightful young lady and in real life she is actually very like her character. She has a strong sense of justice, a very good heart and a strong dash of ginger. All of these…
There is a body of research literature around the whole idea of storytelling. Romantic writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century saw narrative as a way of exploring existential issues; the first form critics of the Bible text came to the same conclusions. Cultural anthropologists in the twentieth century have looked for the power…
My website has been up for just a week and I am still at the stage of checking frequently to see who has been visiting and -even more importantly- looking to see if anyone has respond with a comment. When the stories were in hard copy, it was relatively easy to control for reactions: I…