THE CAMERA NEVER LIES. HASHTAGS, RATHER MORE OFTEN!

I take lots of photos these days with my faithful ultrazoom bridge camera.

Even on days when I'm too ill to venture far, there's always something swanking into shot, flaunting its best profile, posing for its spotlight moment, framed by my lens.

Birds. Such remarkable characters, always up to some busy business!

The Moon. I try to capture her in all her moody magnificence.

Clouds. A member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and a BBC Weatherwatcher, I aim to keep one eye on the sky.

Trees. Flowers. Fungi. Every one inspirational and unique.

Planes. Pipers with their sleek lines and their ankle socks aka in less anthropomorphic style, their wheel fairings or spats. Cessnas with those jaunty struts bracing up their wings. Taildraggers. Show-offs phuttering over my rooftop.

Anything that makes my imagination do a creative somersault.

I upload my snapshots to Flickr (other photo clouds are available!)
Flickr has its own puzzling range of bewildering tags. Even when you've tagged your own images with the appropriate search terms. Sometimes I find my crescent moon's been labelled "FULL MOON" or even worse "PIZZA" or just "FOOD".

Flickr once labelled my image of a Pheasant as "DOG" and a Wood Pigeon recently metamorphosed via Flickr tag into an "EAGLE". Though I never was quite sure what kind of crossbreeding they imagined was going on, or what they'd been drinking!

Then there are clouds that Flickr insists are "MOUNTAINS" "SEA" or "SNOW". Local upland fields here in northern England it calls "PLAINS" as if they've been transplanted into the New World. Often the Flickr bots throw up their hands and attach perplexing tags like "ABSTRACT" "MINIMALIST" and (even when it isn't) "MONOCHROME".

I often marvel at how Flickr manages to transform birdwatchers like me into unwitting soft porn peddlers! No sooner have I tagged a Great Tit, Blue Tit, Coal Tit or Long-tailed Tit than my view count soars up into the hundreds overnight! Last week when I tagged the catkins of Salix caprea, Goat or Pussy Willow, my view count skyrocketed and kept on climbing off the scale.

Just imagine the droves of disappointed users clicking and salivating in anticipation of extracurricular thrills, only to be frustrated by my innocent picture of a tree in springtime!

If you've ever had hilariously inappropriate tags added to your photos, please share your laughs by leaving a comment below.

If you fancy exploring my Flickr, ditch your dirty raincoat, grab a cuppa and join me over at:
Joyce's Flickr

APRIL DAWN

Feathersmiths swim through friable cloud

Dunk wings as wafers at lips of the wood

Caw still hangs in the dazzling air

Through her fan of rays Sun

 Sifts gold and blood

No-one has spoken though thousands sing

Earth submerged in her tidal Spring

ATTIC

When I was little, I dreamed of writing in a magical attic.

I dreamed of just having an attic!

Back then, in Railway Cottages, painted Railway Green with Railway-regulation paint, we didn't have one. No attic to go writing and dreaming in. Only a dusty cockloft where my dad would store those once-a-year, just-in-case household items, reachable only by adults, only by ladder. Only an outside loo and a coal-shed of similar compact dimensions in our little yard, where the zinc bath hung from the brickwork, the bath we filled with kettle-and-panfuls of boiling water the night before school.

But I wrote all the time. On the dining table. On the three-legged tipsy stool my granddad made. On the dressing table surrounded by scary mirrors that made you look every which way into the shadows in the corners in the fading lemon light. On my lap. On the couch in the front room with the big light on before tea. In my bedroom. In the garden, where steam trains whooshed by and sometimes sizzled to a stop at our branch line station, spiriting my imagination away to wondrous unknown horizons beyond our valley.

I was writing my world a word at a time but still I would dream of my writing attic. Was it out there, lonely, waiting for me?

I dreamed the Moon would peep in through the little window set into the roof, peeking encouragingly at my scribblings. The sparrows would twitter in their cosy nests under the eaves, urging me on to tell them stories.

I've lived in many houses, many manses, flats, digs and dives since those dreams first melted into maybe.

Then one day, illness sneaked up, smacked my hands off the wheel of working, dismantled my strength, drained my batteries, clogged my muscles and bones with rubbery uneven pain, fogged my clarity, burgled me of my old whirlwind of energy, pickled my possibilities.

I moved here, forcibly retired with half my life still not written.

A little rented house in a village where woods, streams, fields and wandery ways have crept close enough for me to visit them on my better days. A garden full of flowers that imagine themselves into colourful calendars of the passing seasons. Eaves laden with sparrows and a clear southern view to track the Moon sashaying her catwalk arc towards the west.

And guess what else was waiting here for me?

My attic.

My writing space. My rooftop chamber of dreams.

I feel so blessed. I feel its joy, its sigh of relief surrounding me as I write.

I hope I was as worth its wait!

ONE INTROVERTED MIDDLE-AGED SINGLETON'S TAKE ON VALENTINE'S DAY

What does it mean to me to be an introvert, middle-aged and single on Valentine's Day? Much the same as it feels to be the above on any other day of the year to be honest! I'm not one for labels!

Maybe a few years ago when I still had a functional womb, I had a few wistful wonderings. What about my unborn children and grandchildren I will never meet?

 I would have liked my mum to know what it would have been like to have had grandchildren and great-grandchildren to gather round her as she grows older. I know how blessed they would all have been to know her. How her wisdom and good sense would have made them stop and think when they were making life's tough decisions. How her dependable faithfulness would have lightened their lives whenever they talked with her. I know they would have met love in her company, because I do. That mother/daughter relationship, my best and most trustworthy friend, to me is something of more enduring influence in my life than the intense but too often briefly burning flames of romance and passion. 

I know many who have lost children they adored, others who have never met the beloved little one they were waiting for, or who have endured the heartache of not bearing the children they lovingly planned. Compared to their acute pain, my musings are just what-ifs and maybes. I constantly remind myself just how fortunate I am.

Now, this side of menopausal, I am at peace with my inner singleton. Not just given the conclusion that this is a dark world into which to bring brave new lives. No – because I still love this quirky, unbelievably beautiful, precious and fragile world. I hope if I had met my Valentine, we would have been able to share wonder and hope with our children, gathered them close to watch the Sparrows in the hedge, the sunlight bouncing off frosty fields, to recognise the music of the chittering outrageous Dunnock, to love and value the comical antics of Magpie and Squirrel and become champions for those who can't stand up so easily for themselves. To help them know their indoor from their outdoor voices, to treat others with loving respect, courtesy, compassion and empathy as a given, whoever they meet.

I have met my Valentine in a way. 

He's been hidden in my heart all my life. 

I've had the privilege of introducing him to family, friends, readers, the world beyond my heart. 

He is Bram the kindly, tender wildlife-whispering marshman in my books. Bram embodies everything I would have loved in a partner, and to me he is as real as flesh and blood. Not without faults, not without weaknesses, but a beautiful soul, that is my Bram. Thirza in my books is the personification of my genes and ancestry, myself embracing the other. In some ways Bram is her temperamental opposite yet her soulmate on life's journey. They are both aspects of my own spirit. That is my Valentine coupling in the realm of imagination. It is my joy to be able to share them with the wider world through words that offer their reality robed in fiction and fantasy.

Sometimes it's lonely to be uncoupled. 

I am the shadow that walks unlinked. 

But I rarely if ever feel lonely unless I glimpse myself as others do. If we glimpsed ourselves constantly that way, I suspect it would often end in tears (or giggles!) even though Burns averred it would be a gift to see ourselves as others see us! I try to focus my love and caring where I can to wide circles of friends, family and strangers. My relationships as a singleton are the kind that don't really need one day a year to trumpet them. They are beautiful background noise that lullabies and strengthens. 

The worst mauling you will ever get from me is a nip from my inner pedant, my geeky nerdish knowledge of relatively useless facts and words. But I will always endeavour with my peaceful Enneagram Type 9 empathy to make sure you don't feel bested, belittled or patronised, even though I sometimes can't resist my Enneagram wing 1 impulse to challenge you subtly when I think you're factually wrong, or if you're ungenerous with somebody you perceive as different or lesser that you.

It's sometimes unnerving to have to think through things when my compass is instinctual rather than reasoning and the ability to ask for help is never the first option for me. I do learn a lot, though, that way. Not always as quickly and seamlessly as I'd like. Mistakes are powerful teachers, even if we squirm at the embarrassment of making them. I mask and move through that embarrassment by laughter, getting safely alongside those who, left to their own devices, might have turned those blunderings against me. Even at school, nobody could bully me for long. My smile and self-deprecating gentleness gave the bullies no way to get a satisfying grip or a rise out of my reactions. In the long years since the schoolyard, my learning curve has risen by fits and starts, as I strive to find ways of being bold enough, courageous enough to speak out and stand up for every underdog with whom I can readily identify.

Often I'm flooded with a momentary feeling of being alone in a confusing, frighteningly hard world of people. Some days I feel my creativity is simply "peopled" out of me. A profoundly introverted soul who has made a living of challenging my introversion, I often find myself "all peopled out." 

A woman once startled me by saying, after a presentation I had done:

“Where do you get all your self-confidence?”

The fact I remember her words shows how hilariously far that lady was from comprehending my true inclination to hermithood! 

No. It's a weak excuse to say my creativity is "peopled" out of me. It's an aspect of writer's block that has been much discussed in literature about creativity, including Julia Cameron in her excellent "The Artist's Way". I can and do regularly overcome it. What is true, for me, though, is that doing the people thing takes an enormous amount of energy out of me. My first thought in almost every situation where I am meeting other people, even if I know them well, is 'where is the endgame here? When can I escape and be by myself again?' Nobody ever guesses, so I tend to find myself even more "peopled"!

In my youth, I did most of my writing at the dead of night, when people were kept at bay by sleep. More recently, chronic autoimmune illness means I'm denied the luxury of burning the midnight candle without consequences. I am mystified by those who feel bereft when they can't be chattering with people. My own deep heart-joy is when I am alone, preferably with nature, or when I am writing, with books, music or learning some new thing that stimulates my thoughts and my ability to weave these new insights into my words.

So is my ideal Valentine really myself? 

The old song says: "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world." I do need people, very much so, but maybe not in indigestibly mammoth portions! 

It doesn't always come easily to love myself, essential as that is. I have struggled with this in the past as so many of us do, not least those walking through life as a faith journey. As I mature into middle age, I find myself less and less able to gulp down platitudes and alienating ways of seeing others, or to tick the box of unbending doctrines like some nodding dog. It makes me feel diminished to try to shrink this messy marvellous world and cram it into a straitjacket with sharp unyielding seams. The upside to that so-called disillusionment is that it leaves healthy room for new perspectives that may prove nearer to the truth. The truth of love is even more important to me, as vital as breathing. It leaves more sweet space for supporting and valuing other people without tumbling over the tripwires of bigotry.

So these are my introverted middle-aged singleton's reflections on the day dedicated by history and card shops to Valentine. On social media, people are either embracing the heart and flower memes that abound at this time of year, or angrily rejecting them as smacking of stereotypes and shallowness. Meanwhile this unique oddball's here trying to spread the ripples of a calm pool of love in which anyone and everyone can bathe without drowning. That's me and maybe one of my missions in life. To help people see they are all special, truly loved in ways they haven't even dreamed, but yearn to discover.

In the end, writing this, I see more clearly just how much I am loved too as the earth caresses me in its cloak of serendipity and shadowy sunshine. That reassurance will last so much longer than a bunch of wilted roses on this day that celebrates the ways of the heart.

Hush your mouth, inner critic monster!

Every day as I plot, plan, daydream, research and write, I find myself battling that pesky inner critic. 

You know it well. 

We all know it, because it talks to each one of us in our own distinctive voice. It trips us with our own artfully devised stumbling blocks. It gloats mockingly back at us, wearing ludicrous hats, from the mirror of our own mind. It knows our doubts and hang-ups.  It devises procrastinating distractions from our own delights. It plays on the weaknesses only we see in ourselves. It knows our secrets and harps on every fear. 

Every day I do battle with that inner critic monster, just to kick off its leaden boots so I can swim down into the joy of free-fall risky writing. Some days I go paws up, frozen, timid, poorer; those days are sad because I let it win. 

Love and thanks to all those in my life who have faith in me to be the best writer I was born to be. So, hush your mouth, inner critic monster. We are too strong for you and your smug blank page.

Strength and solidarity to all those who muffle and silence their inner doubts and dithering to bring us their beautiful words, craft, images and reflections from the precious depths of their creative souls.

We are writers when we write. We win.

Dribbles and Dabbles with Drabbles

Dribbles? Drabbles?

Not altogether gobbledygook if you bear with me!

When you're writing, "dribbles" often describes the fragmented way the storytelling progresses: a dribble of inspiration here, a dribble of frantic scribbling there, seasoned with a dribble of banging your head on the keyboard!

"Drabbles" on the other hand, are a method I find useful to help pull my "dribbles" of creativity together along the writing journey. I hope this idea may help you, too. Sometimes when those "dribbles" seem to be drying up, a "drabble" or two can prime the pump and get your story-brain refreshed, released and ready to weave those words into gold.

I'm reaching the tipping point of my new novel. The research is done. The plot is arced. The procrastinating side-projects are frustratingly complete. The blind alleys of my storyland are cordoned off with Hi-Vis "Do Not Enter" tape. The characters are alive in my head. I can hear what they'd say and picture the situations they're about to get themselves into. The sense of place just off the Yorkshire Coast is so real to me I can smell the seaweed and feel the spray stinging my characters' skin and the change of light before dusk. I've chalk under my nails from clinging onto the sheer cliffs in my imagination. I'm raring to go! My first draft is beckoning me to plunge over the edge of those risky still-blank pages and swim for dear life to the shore at the end of the tale.

So, when your dribbles run dry, maybe it's time for a dabble with a drabble!

The wiki says: Drabble: A drabble is a short work of fiction of around one hundred words in length, not necessarily including the title. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

In other words, flash fiction. For me, it's just a great way of getting my writing flowing whenever it stalls. If I have a scene from the novel that's in my mind for later, getting in the way of the current plotline, a "drabble" dealing with that character, that plot twist, that conflict, that setting, is a way of getting creative instead of blocked. Maybe the seeds from the drabble will be grist to the mill of a new story, an unexpected turn, a deepening of some exchange within the book. It doesn't even have to be connected. A drabble can get you writing again when you're overwhelmed. It's non-threatening, expendable, achievable almost anywhere, anytime. It's that blank page clothed in purpose, colour, forward motion.

It can even become a part of your work in progress. It can ignite a dormant creative spark. It can be your own private pool of light-bulb moments. It can be a short holiday break for your imagination to go exploring again before coming home rejuvenated to the work in hand. It can be just what you need it to be!

Wishing you joy and word-woven blessings, whether you're a fellow writer, reader, a fan of GOATSUCKER HARVEST or you've just wandered in to do a bit of procrastination from your own personal challenges today! Welcome!

"Tropical Storm Zeta 2005" by NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center 

Here's a quick 102-word drabble I've written which may or may not get its seat at the banquet in my WIP:



Waves roll upside down, sucking the sky beneath through lips like a dolphin's. Head spinning now.
A guillemot skittles out of a cliff-face inverted inches from her nose. A vortex of fish oil tang closes her throat. 
"Did you see it? Careful! Sit down, you'll have us overboard!"
Disembodied voices far above.
"Below, I mean..." Trying to correct herself, steady herself. The strap creaks. Too much give in it.
Blood-singing, suffocating closeness all around, yet the salt spray's icy, flinging itself down in an arc and falling back upwards into stormclouds.
The scream seems to be her own as the sea explodes.

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HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY!

HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY to my friends and readers everywhere!

Overjoyed to say that reactions and reviews for my debut novel "Goatsucker Harvest" have been going from strength to strength since the publication of the Kindle Version on Christmas Eve and the launch of the title in paperback in January. You can read the UK reviews on Amazon here and Australian reviews here. All your feedback is SO much appreciated & helps future readers choose to dive into unknown waters confidently! Thank you!

While researching my second novel, set on the North Sea Coast of Yorkshire, this week I had an amazing dream involving characters from both books. This dream planted some fantastic seeds in my imagination and helped to give a whole new spin on the plot that will twist it in some unexpected directions that I hope will delight and intrigue my readers. They blew me away, so that's a good start!

I always find it fascinating to discover what my favourite writers are reading. After all, keeping the wells of our imaginations primed with incredible imput is precious creative lifeblood.

So here are some books I've been enjoying in the past month or so, which I'd recommend if they appeal to you:

"Alias Grace" by Margaret Attwood (fictionalised account of a 19thc female murder accused.)

"The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell (mesmerising off-the-wall fantasy following the life of one girl from teenage years to maturity in the near future, told in a series of five very distinctive first person narratives. Often laugh-out-loud hilarious, sometimes disturbing, with extra-terrestrial good and evil struggles and including a closing vision of the world as it might well be if humanity carries on consuming and manipulating creation at the current pace.)

"Elizabeth is Missing" by Emma Healey (mystery narrated by an octogenarian woman with Alzheimer's - an incredible read, recommended to anybody dealing with dementia, which might include any of us at any time.)

"The Miniaturist" by Jessie Burton (thriller set in 17thc Amsterdam - mouthwatering literary fiction with a magical realism vibe.)

"Waterlog" by Roger Deakin (I just wanted to pack my bags and swim in all the secret watery places, the rivers, streams. spas, lakes and lidos Deakin explores in this beautiful journey through Britain. Haunting and unforgettable.)

I'll stop there for now! For many like me, with relapsing/remitting autoimmune diseases, brainfog and bone-crunching exhaustion sometimes means reading (and writing) can become almost impossible for wilderness months at a stretch. So when I'm having a relatively healthy period these days, I try to pack in as much as I can, whenever I can!

Whatever you read, or write, I hope you enjoy it, and celebrate it and share it!
Books help us dip through into different universes, timeframes and lives, so every moment we're breathing, we can live a life less limited. What a joy and a privilege, eh?

GOATSUCKER HARVEST (for UK readers)

GOATSUCKER HARVEST (for US readers)

GOATSUCKER HARVEST (for AUS readers)

Feather Canyons Everywhere

Joni* sang them bittersweet
Pinned her passions to those sunny stacks
Sixties summer clouds in fleet
Cathedrals of confessions

Vapour can't be cabined quaint
Clouds reinvent themselves by stealth
Beyond our metaphor power to paint
Squish or squeeze into boxy verses

They rephrase us and resketch
We gaze into their radiant rhythms
We squint and shade, crick-necked
While they risk to juggle rainbows

Between their fingers hold air blue,
Sunsets of apricot, bent birds homing,
Letting the wind think itself Picasso
Serendipity into symbol smudging.



If you love clouds as I do, you can join with others who feel the same here> The Cloud Appreciation Society

*Joni Mitchell, Canadian singer, songwriter, painter and musician who wrote the song "Both Sides Now" (1970, which won her a Grammy) from which my poem's title is taken. You can listen to it here>  Joni Mitchell sings "Both Sides Now" (1970)

Next Year's Words

"Looking at God's creation, it is pretty clear that the creator itself did not know when to stop. There is not one pink flower, or even fifty pink flowers, but hundreds. Snowflakes, of course, are the ultimate exercise in sheer creative glee. No two alike. This creator looks suspiciously like someone who just might send us support for our creative ventures." - Julia Cameron 'The Artist's Way'

New Year's Day presents itself as an open-faced virgin page. It waits for lives to live themselves in its playground of possibilities. For me and writers everywhere, the blank page is both a place of breathtaking expectation and a wilderness of dithering dilemmas, even fear and block.

New Years' Resolutions are often broken before I have time to put pen to paper or, these days, fingertip to key. A writer's not a writer unless they are writing. So I go on writing and never look back, unless to face down shadows that need to pour themselves into prose or poetry, or to gather half-forgotten scents and scenes and pin them to the page. This year, as every year, this is my resolution.

T.S.Eliot wrote the following lines in "Little Gidding" from his "Four Quartets":

"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice."

Better not keep them waiting, then! What on earth or in heaven would we be waiting for?

Flag waving - confessions of an imaginative only child!

A lovely friend of mine brought this to my attention through Facebook today.

I've led worship in the past where children and young folks have danced like this with flags or even long strips of silky material to express their joy and praise and love of God in a different way. Expressing that thankfulness in a way that's filled with playfulness, colour, motion, texture and pattern. It needs no formal words. It takes no learning. The dancer just listens to their heart, moves and gives their whole self to God in the moment.

I was pleased to see people are still having fun, a laugh, a ball, expressing themselves in this simple way across all cultures, like whirling Dervishes, caught up in the moment, scribbling and painting in air with their own bodies, extended through the flags.

Whirling Dervishes

It also made me remember with a twinge of longing something I've not done since I was a little child.

When I was little, I used to love what my parents' used to call my "flag waving". I didn't learn it. It came from nowhere but my fertile imagination, love of storytelling, making up songs and worlds of my own. An only child, low maintenance as many Ennea 9-type introverts often are, I'd disappear into the fields that ran from our back garden to the railway line where my dad worked as a shunter. Every summer evening I'd be there, or up in my bedroom when the nights drew in again in autumn. Flag-waving.

It wasn't anything I could really describe to anybody else. It came as naturally to me as the synaesthesia that made burning leaves "taste" like caramel to my senses, or petrol "taste" like apricot when neither had been anywhere near my lips! I was an "imaginative" child, back in those days when we made our own entertainment (and I confess I preferred it that way most of the time!). Happy in my own company. Never bored.

This 'flag-waving' went on for years, before adulthood made it seem a bit embarrassing and best left in the nursery. I'd choose and strip the lower leaves from a slim stalk of rose-bay willow herb (known as fireweed, or, on railway properties like my home in a little valley in South Yorkshire, "railway weed") leaving only a few waggly leaves at the top to nod and twirl.

Then I would watch it, shaking and twirling it in front of me while I told stories, or made up elaborate narratives with imaginary places, people, animals all with wonderful names that tripped off my tongue. I'd make up songs and rhymes and nonsense that made my heart soar with wonder as I felt completely at one with the earth and my Maker. In that state of peace and exhilaration, you could really notice things.

The "flag" didn't have to be willow herb. It could be anything that shook and flowed and painted patterns and shapes at the end of a stalk or stick. It could become a dragon's tail, a flowing head of hair on the characters in my story, a horse's tail - anything! I had an old silk head scarf given as a present one Christmas. I fed the thin end of this scarf  through a slot in a toy golf stick with the mallet end removed, painted black, from some childhood game. Then I could hold the wand of the stick and make the scarf wave as I wove my wonders in words that became my passion as I grew older and could fashion them onto paper in some form. I kept that flag till the scarf part was worn and tattered.

Over the course of my childhood, I used stems of common wild plants, fallen twigs, old chiffon remnants, grasses, sparklers - you name it. I loved every minute. Some of my best ideas and plots were dreamed up that way with a "flag" in my hand in some private space where nobody would laugh or watch!

My "flags" were nowhere near as huge as these ones used in the video. Or in any pictures of "flag dancing" I can find on the net! I wasn't copying anybody else I'd ever seen. My movements weren't as expansive. My "flags" were often nothing more than switches of greenery or diaphanous swatches of scrap fabrics. The flag stayed in front of me, and my eyes never left it as I whispered the stories and words the sight inspired me to create. Every moment was joy, all stress relieved.

I miss the "flag-waving" hours of my youth! I've always been a private dancer. At the moment my health makes it so much harder to stand rapt for ages or dance even with nobody watching. But in my heart I thank God for making us each unique, for His lack of concern with formality and ritual. The freedom He inspires to whirl us up into private heavens, bringing joy to His heart, I pray, as He surely brings joy into mine!

Rose Bay Willow Herb or "Railway Weed" - my number one "flag" of choice as a child!

Plots are...like live flamingo mallets

  

John Tenniel illustration, coloured by Fritz Kredel

The plot of my current short story keeps squirming around like the live flamingo mallets in that croquet game in "Alice in Wonderland". Very provoking, as Alice herself might have said.

This story began as a humorous short dealing with a young man coming to terms with the increasingly confused behaviour of an elderly relative. As I wrote on, the plot started subtly remoulding and contorting itself, like the flamingo's neck twisting to look Alice in the face with an expression of puzzlement.

The plot looked back quizzically into my own face and demanded  a detour into the undergrowth! The reassuring humour gradually leeched out in twists of more savage irony. Then the characters started to jockey for new positions within this adjusted panorama. I kept coming up to high hedges in the maze of my original idea and then turning to see a stunning new horizon for which I hadn't thought to pack a map, let alone sandwiches.

As I tried, like Alice, to adjust my grip so as to take control again, tucking the body of the plot firmly under my armpit with its legs hanging down, it would spring back into another attitude and skip off down an alleyway I hadn't foreseen.

Sitting back with a coffee at "half-time",  I replotted for some pace and drive within the new focus of the plot. I set off again, determined to finish before fluttering around editing my words, stalling and second guessing the finished story.

So far I've found the plot path has changed from springy turf and warm meanders round sunlit bends to a stark gothic stairwell falling away into a bleak gulley between terror and tenderness.

Flipping heck! I've just got to hunker down and finish it now; then lay it aside for a while until it's uncurled its tatty toenails for trimming and see how I can polish it till it bowls through the home hoop and into the reader's life.

Wordling with genealogy puzzles

Family history is complex. Wordle wordmaps it all into art! A dazzling chunk of ancestral fragments crystallize into a stained glass panel of possibilities. Freeing the fat and flour into muffins with the tips of your fingers. Crumbling the soil so the blooms can breathe colour into the scented air. The past is shimmering into future opportunities. Lapped in love, how can we fail to be seized by the Spirit?