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Read about my journey into becoming a creative freelancer, interviews and reviews with great authors, and advice on writing and creative living.

If there's something you'd like advice on or a book you'd like me to take a look at, do get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.

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Nov 11, 2020
4 min

The Power of Perspective

I just watched Nikita Gill perform some of her work, Maidens, Myths and Monsters and her novel in prose The Girl and the Goddess at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. The piece she performed (beautifully) was about Hera, the jealous and fiery-tempered goddess who cursed many and caused suffering to countless gods and mortals. Yet we see her at the start of her life. Consumed by her own father, raped by her own brother. Gill’s words are lyrical, lamenting the fear and distrus

Nov 5, 2020
3 min

How I’m Coping With Calamity

Like most people I know, I’m in a state of pre-panic. Just because the awful reality of lockdown and a Trump presidency have happened before, it doesn’t make them seem any better. I wonder if, knowing everything we went through the last time, they might even be worse. Looking up can help me notice things don’t look so bad. This was also a good place to try and catch falling leaves and find interesting sticks. There’s always something to make you smile if you look for it. And

Oct 7, 2020
4 min

Playing For Ideas

There’s something strange about expectations. I find that positive ones are far worse than negative. Let me explain. If I’m worried about teaching a tricky class, making an awkward phone call or running a difficult distance, negative expectations can be a good thing. Invariably I get so worked up about how terrible it’s going to be, the actual thing itself is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. But the reverse has proved itself annoyingly true. Returning home after li

Sep 10, 2020
1 min

Lightbox Originals

You can now view my piece on using the natural world to inspire your writing. Do check out their site as there are loads of pieces on inspiring your writing and generally living a creative life. #creativeliving #inspiration #mywriting #publication

May 17, 2020
3 min

Celebrating Amazing People #3

Ok, the gap between two and three is all you need to know about coping with online teaching and toddler management during lockdown! Better late than never. This one is inspired by the rather brilliant Simone Segouin (codename Nicole Minet. I wish I had a codename) who joined the French resistance at 17. She received an International Award from the British charity Soldiering On in 2017, to honour her part in the war. She still lives in an old people’s home in Chartres. Why Giv

Apr 5, 2020
5 min

Celebrating Amazing People #2

Much more lighthearted and unusual this week. I was reading the introduction to Cathy Newman’s book Bloody Brilliant Women and I came across an nun from the 10th century who wore golden gowns and argued with the male clergy. I loved the idea of a celebrity culture existing back then around kings and bishops, and thought she was just too interesting not to delve into a little more. Hope you enjoy it. Pride Comes in Many Guises The two thralls slopped through the mud. After a h

Mar 27, 2020
6 min

Celebrating Amazing People #1

Like most people at the moment, I don’t know what to do. Scrolling through endless feeds and WhatsApp messages bring a strange feeling into my gut – helplessness. So many people working hard to help others, while I spend the day checking in online for my students or finding ways to amuse my toddler. Somehow, in the general scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like enough. In an effort to help out, I thought I’d turn my hand to providing some light relief. But what do people want

Feb 1, 2020
3 min

Thickening My Skin

You may have noticed a large gap since I last wrote a blog. I certainly have. I’m currently working my way (very slowly, baby/job/rest of life permitting) through The Artist’s Way. It’s a wonderful book that is forcing me to stop and look at when I really stopped writing, stopped believing I could do it. For me, creative things have always been a hobby. A nice little thing you do on the side to make your day a bit brighter but certainly not something that should substitute ‘r

Oct 22, 2018
3 min

Finding My Voice

Over the past few weeks, something strange has happened. In the tiny bubbles of time I get between work and baby, I’ve started to write again. At first, it wasn’t much. A few scenes that barely reached 300 words. Some thoughts, a memory, nothing substantial. But it was something. I opened up ‘stickies’ on my laptop. Down the right side of the screen is one giant note with all the days of the week, with enough for two months’ worth. I get to the end of the day and log how many

Jul 29, 2018
3 min

Hanging It Up

It dangles at the end of the bed. The plastic clips rattle against the bed frame when I walk past it. The straps have yielded to the stretch of my baby’s changing size, the buckles clasped around me in snow, wind and sun. It’s been left there like a forgotten thing – the sling that we used to carry her round in every single day. Now we are home, a pram is providing her transport. It’s much easier for many reasons. We don’t have to carry the weight of her all the time, there’s

Jul 9, 2018
5 min

In the Thick of It

With one week to go, the nature of our trip has changed a lot. We’ve gone from itinerant dwellers and lone travellers to cohabiters with a group of four others in a flat in LA for an entire week. No more quiet meals and being in bed by 9pm. We’ve been chatting around the table over food and staying up far later than is sensible with a small one. It’s official, we’re here. After our arrival, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Once we realised that not having a car in LA was like

Feb 11, 2018
3 min

Big Moments, Little Moments

Moments of consequence only become so after they have passed. Once you have enough distance to appreciate their magnitude. Sitting on a plane, the world shrunk to a line of glass circles, the only thing I have in my head is a string of lyrics to an inane pop song. At some point I will look back on it and realise its significance. That I was leaving my home, my friends and family, not returning for half a year. And taking my tiny daughter with me. I was hoping her ears wouldn’

Nov 15, 2017
2 min

How to have a Magical Time – Reading or Writing

We al love the idea of leaving the dreary hum of normality behind. Magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, call it what you like, almost everyone can think of an example that has transported them to a new world and made them come back to earth with something lingering in the back of their mind. Yet if you get them to explain the story, you’d think that it was the background world, the places and events that things happen in, that make them special. In fact, it’s very often

Oct 26, 2017
3 min

Non-Fiction (like pie) is your Friend

My shelf is in danger of falling down. We put it up to replace the bedside tables, so it hovers above our heads, laden with all the stuff I used to cram into those drawers. A basket filled with far too many tubes of half-finished hand cream, assorted earphones, toe separators, the tiny glass pig I brought back from China years ago. And, of course, books. At the moment I’m reading six. There are a couple of literary magazines, one novel, and four non-fiction books. Herein lies

Oct 13, 2017
3 min

Mental Maintenance

Recently, I’ve found myself with more time on my hands. This freakish turn of events has led to all sorts of developments. There are things in drawers and cupboards that haven’t seen the light of day since I moved house that have been turfed out and ruthlessly chucked out. I’m actually up to date on my marking and my ‘News in Slow French’ podcast. I’ve been swimming twice this week. I’ve even *gasp* managed to keep on top of my writing and produced a fair trot of words. What

Oct 6, 2017
2 min

What Does Progress Look Like?

Everyone loves to feel like they’re progressing. The problem is, for some things, outcomes are not quite as tangible as we’d like. If I were an aspiring baker, I’d continue to work on my crumb texture, or perfect the proving of my bread (I only know these words because of Bake Off). As a runner, that’s also an easy one. I do a slightly longer run, I get a quicker time, I manage to do one more speed interval or hill run without feeling like I’m going to die, and there it is: a

Oct 2, 2017
3 min

All Change (Shift Your Focus to Re-Energise Writing)

The leaves on the tree outside my window are dying. But they are so beautiful in their death. Near the top, they still have green hearts, tinged with an acid-bright red. Towards the bottom, they’ve faded to yellow, as if dipped in custard. Every year this tree stands for months with naked branches. Not until March will I see the blossom falling like snow on the road outside my house. It’s not the only thing to have changed. My desk is now in a different room – the living room

Sep 8, 2017
3 min

The Dangers of Over-Plotting

The results are in. After months of worrying over the impact the new English GCSE would have on our students, we’ve found that, thankfully, they’ve done about as well as we expected. Look a little closer, and you could see the particular issues this new system has thrown up. Unsurprisingly, in English Language, the question they struggled the most with was about structure. It works something like this: They get an unseen passage of a text, they have to respond to it. From int

Aug 30, 2017
3 min

Give Yourself Credit

I’ll be honest, it hasn’t been a great summer for the word count. Finding myself at the end of a mammoth edit for one novel and fiddling around with ideas for a new one has not exactly led to an outpouring of sentences. Always a bit of a ‘should-er,’ I find myself getting a little grumpy about this, feeling like a failure, why don’t I go back to the full-time day job, the same old doubting voice that threatens to topple me from my perch. In the spirit of the freakishly warm b

Aug 18, 2017
3 min

When Writing Seems Impossible

One of my favourite reactions to the question ‘why do you write’ came from Lisa McInerney when I saw her at the Emerald Street Literary Festival last year. She’d just won the Bailey’s Prize for fiction (you can see my thoughts on the book here), so she had reasons to be cheerful. Her answer was something along the lines of ‘I hate myself less when I’m writing than when I’m not.’ Having heard many replies from writers that made it sound like they leapt out of bed each morning,

Sarah Scribbles

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