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Autumn dreams

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  Why dream when autumn is this great ... Cover update! I commissioned a new one for A Friendship of Thistles and have updated the description on Amazon to help people find it. Seems to be working as immediately had six sales and a new review. I shared news on Facebook about the new 4-star book review. October has been a great month, writing-wise. First, I won second place in the Just Imagine Short Story Competition with A Traveller’s Daughter . You can read it for free if you sign up to my mailing list here . I was impressed by the entries in the children’s and young adult category, enjoyed reading out an extract of my story, and chatting to the winner, Angela, afterwards for the refreshments portion of the evening. Second, I won first place in a beta-reading contest from @everything.writing on Instagram for my forthcoming book Clashmaeclavers and Fisherlassies. Here is the blurb for my new book Can you tell lies from truths? We’ll see. Scotland, 1815. After her mother’s
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New Publication! A Friendship of Thistles

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I'm clearly not focused on self-promotion, as my newest book was published in May and I haven't posted here about it yet! I am also offering a giveaway here . Or get your paperback/ebook copy here for the US , and here for the UK . About the book ‘Where have you been?’ Hector asked. He unfisted a crumpled sheet of test results. Heather said, ‘You’re all bones.’ ‘Fran, threw me out.’ ‘And?’ she asked. Two women. Multiple secrets. The question is: how to forgive your best friend with a heart full of thistles? Read with a friend! A Friendship of Thistles is THE book to read with your closest friend, or group of friends. With great discussion points for a book group. With that said, it’s also for you if you’ve never had a friend nor sustained a thirty-year friendship, or fallen out with a friend and are wondering how to repair the damage done. The story of Heather and Fran brings Edinburgh alive, during lockdown from 2019 to 2020. From a working-class perspective, Parfitt
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Location: Lanark ML11, UK
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How a sentence can tell a story

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I was stopped in my tracks today by this humble sentence about a character’s eyes from Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways :   “They made me think of the heart of a glacier, of how, even when you touch dry ice with your bare skin, you cannot let go even if you try.” (p.18)   She’d already won me over at this stage with her depictions of Egyptian hieroglyphs and history and references to IndianaJones . What I love about this sentence is the sensory and emotional experience. I’m sick of reading she/he had green or grey eyes when the majority of people have brown, followed by blue (in certain cultural contexts). So blue eyes, check, while avoiding the cliche’s of a lake, the sky, etc. Double check! We instead get treated to ice reflecting the sky in its centre in a form of a glacier, making me feel the character's cold disinterest in me. Then she choses the word ‘dry’ reinforcing this lack of life, and yet ‘with your bare skin’ brings to mind the sensual. Exactly. The women
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Elephant Tusks

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  Inspired from the above photograph Rainbow by Helen Patience from the Hold Still digital exhibition , I wrote the following poem. The Duchess of Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery revealed the winners in 2020, which featured 100 portraits from 31,598 submissions during the project’s six-week entry period. The images aimed to record of our shared and individual experiences during lockdown, and have been exbitited in Times Square in London.    Elephant tusks   Grey, What of grey? A rainbow window. A little girl. Upturning the gravel of her mind. A lassie’s sunflowered Macintosh waves from a distance bending towards her ma’s swan neck cocooned in a tartan scarf. Amber, turquiose and carmene are easy to understand, but what about grey? A woven net of grey weaves infront of her eyes, danglng on a stick. Pencil on paper the girl composes a list: scaffolding, TV aerials, paperclips, guitar strings, tins of peaches, hubs on the car, water pipes, e
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Research, research, research!

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  Based on the initial research I have done into the lives of gypsies in the UK and fisherfolk in Auchmithie, to get a sense of their lives and challenges, I have begun to draft my early scenes in my new noval ( The Fisherwomen of Auchmithie ). I can’t wait till the museums reopen to visit the local area and the Lighthouse Museum again. Thanks to the website Auchmithie Roots , and their historians, I found mention of Auchmithie in The Country of Scott . Including the following description of the inside of one of the fisherman’s cottages. He let me take a photograph of the interior of the cottage, where a single room served for bedroom, breakfast-room, kitchen, and numerous other purposes. (p.157) So not adding much information to what I had already guessed or discovered, though I'd love to chat to an expert in working-class women's lives in the early 1800s. The text also mentions policemen referred to as constables and ‘a picturesque old fishwife’: A picturesque old fis
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