The Reading List, week 5: McVety, Konig, James

Right now my reading material consists mainly of kitchen brochures, legal house-moving gumph and internet research on macerator toilets and whether you need planning permission to change a window on the rear of a building. So the antidote is of course a splash of poetry. ‘Splash’ being the right word, I think, consider the amount ofRead more ⟶

The Road Not Taken & FOMO

Just the other day Don Share posted on Twitter a link to a recording of Robert Frost reading ‘The Road Not Taken’. How wonderful to hear it in the poet’s voice. Here it is on YouTube: Matthew Hollis, in his 2011 biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, tells of Thomas’s distress atRead more ⟶

The Reading List, week 4: Heaney, O’Brien, Williams

  As promised, The Reading List continues … District & Circle, Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2006) Everything you’d expect from a Heaney collection: poignant but unsentimental recollections of the past, images you can’t get out of your head days later, a familiar strangeness, the ghosts of various characters from Edward Thomas and Dorothy Wordsworth to HarryRead more ⟶

Post-holiday news, blues and beginnings

Back from holiday less than a week and plenty has happened. While I was away I received three rejections (boo!) and one ‘long listing’ (hurray!), so now I’m faced with a big hole in my sending out schedule. I haven’t written anything new for a while and am about to go into another busy periodRead more ⟶

Different ways of promoting your blog posts on social media (reblogged from Social Media for Writers)

This is the last of my re-blogs from ‘Social Media for Writers’ while I’m on my hols. Please do still leave comments, which I love reading, although I won’t be able to reply immediately. Social media can be a big time-suck, if you let it. So it’s worth knowing about automation – what tools areRead more ⟶

Making the most of Twitter lists (from Social Media for Writers blog)

This is the second of my re-blogs while I’m on my hols and trying to take a break from the internet! My ‘Social Media for Writers’ blog has many useful articles on it but I’ve never gotten around to promoting it much, which is a bit of a waste, and I’m not proud of the admission! Please doRead more ⟶