Month: Feb 2024

Notebooks

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Various notebooks – the orange one for some reason I really don’t like using.

I know right? Not the most interesting thing to talk about but I love a good notebook, sometimes when I find a really special one, I get a funny sort of feeling that this new notebook might be the one to sort my life out. I have stacks of them on my desk, some bought because I liked the covers, others because I liked the feel of the book.

Some are full of roughly written notes, in my horribly indecipherable handwriting, others are stuffed with printed pictures, notes on things I have overheard or read, newspaper cuttings, magazine articles and doodles. Sometimes I just stick things I like inside them, more like a scrapbook, but I vaguely try to follow a theme in order to tease a story out. On some occasions this pays off and a story grows from those pages. One of those stories is The Drowned, which is included in the book Wayside which I put together with Janet and Shabs.

Page which became my short story The Drowned.

When someone first explained to me the value of keeping a writer’s notebook, I was really dismissive of this idea. But I shouldn’t have been, I’m a magpie, I have boxes of pictures, cards, notes, and items that I have been drawn to, notebooks are just a slightly more ordered way to store these things. Notebooks are a vague way to order my thoughts and perhaps tidy my desk which is always in danger of being buried alive. Now if I could find a way to stick all the stones I pick up whilst out walking my dogs into my notebooks I would be delighted! For now, these just pile up around my front door.

Trying to piece together a theme/feeling which may lead to a story, I haven’t figured out these pages yet, but I know there is a story here.

The Long Way Round

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I started writing – ok – trying to write back in 2010 when I moved to the Netherlands and found myself unemployed. I wrote a lot, but none of it was very good, to be honest I don’t ever feel what I write has any worth. But I do enjoy writing.

Fast forward a few years and I was in the U.A.E where I joined a writing workshop, The Write Stuff. I loved this group, it was inspirational, so many different people from all over the world writing and creating. It rekindled my desire to write. This time I focused on short stories but kept the dream of a novel alive. I had a few stories published, including one in a collection put together by The Write Stuff.

Then parenthood came crashing in, and it brought complications. The next few years where a game of survival in many ways and it wasn’t until 2022 that I actually started to write again. I did a couple of courses with The National Centre for Writing, both of which were excellent and here I met Janet and Shabs.

When our course finished, we continued to meet via zoom (something I never wanted to use again after Covid), we talked books and writing. We shared prompts and inspirational things we found, we sometimes wrote together, we reviewed each other’s stories and though it took us a very long time … we eventually assembled some of those stories into a small collection … which we published today on Amazon, named Wayside, a title taken from one of Janet Armstrong’s stories. It’s a strange feeling self-publishing, I don’t like attention, I don’t like standing up and shouting look at what I have done. It makes me entirely to uncomfortable. But this is me trying to shake of that sense of discomfort … so yes Wayside, by Janet Armstrong, Juliet Robinson and Shabs Rajan. An eclectic collection of short stories which has been incredibly fun to work on, because I got to do it with friends.

Wayside – Janet Armstrong, Juliet Robinson and Shabs Rajan. In the Kindle Store and in print form from Amazon.