Three featured blogs – writing and ‘X’

It’s funny how writing often goes together with a second passion or skill, and the ingenuity of bloggers in combining them in just one blog is often surprising and interesting. This week’s three featured blogs are to do with writing  & gardening, writing & swimming, and writing & animals.

OK so I’m not a great gardener. I used to love looking through my mum’s gardening magazines but mainly for the garden plans. Planning (on paper) was my thing. Nurturing living plants and learning their names has never worked for me. I don’t know what that makes me: a virtual gardener? However I’m very happy visiting or sitting in a lovely garden. More a garden reader than a writer.

But that’s not true of the first of this week’s bloggers.

Sarah Salway was the Canterbury Poet Laureate last year and is famous for her photographs of benches, among many other things! Living in Kent, the ‘garden of England’, she has an appropriate love of gardens. So much so that her recent project is Writer in the Garden, which she calls ‘an idiosyncratic literary tour around the gardens of England.’

Sarah’s enthusiasm and energy are wonderful and her adventures in gardens are clearly a strong creative inspiration.

The second ‘Writing and X’ blog is the simply named Writing and Swimming by someone calling herself rather coyly ‘Aquamarina’. Dear Acquamarina, I couldn’t find your real name anywhere on your blog, so if you want to make yourself known to me please leave a note in the comments, thanks!

Aquamarina’s sidebar is a clever compilation of ‘Books featuring swimming’, ‘Films I like with a watery feel’ and even ‘3 swimming poems by Sharon Olds’. Clearly the blog’s author is a poet, and her watery writing-related posts are entertaining. (I was reminded of poet Clare Best‘s recent fundraising swimathon – maybe the swimming-poetry connection isn’t so unusual?)

Sheila Boneham is a prolific author “best known for her writing about dogs and cats for the past fifteen years”  as well as an experienced creative writing tutor. Her blog, Write here, write now, features guest posts, writing prompts, author interviews and all manner of musings and articles of interest to writers and/or animal lovers.

A quick search brought up some quirky blog posts, such as an article on photographing dogs and another about  New Year writing goals. My only quibble with Sheila’s blog is the navigation – most of the main menu links take you to her main website and away from the blog, and within the blog each time you click on a new post or search result a new window opens, so I ended up with rather a lot of tabs on my browser. But hey! That’s just the website pedant in me I suppose. I was interested enough in the content to keep clicking around, and that’s pretty important. Plus there were all those cute kitties.

if you’re interested in writing the odd guest blog post (great idea if you’re a writer looking to build your reach on the social web) then you may be interested in guesting on Sheila’s blog. Submission guidelines are here.