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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 ...

  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,...

  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...

  On conducting research for my current book The Fisherwomen of Auchmithie , it’s been tough going finding information on the lives of fisherfolk in the 19th century. I began to read The Antiquary ( Walter Scott ), as cited on some websites. However there is but one description of the inside of a fisherman’s cottage. So from his descriptions I have learnt about the humble Scottish fisherman’s cottage that ·       * there is a fireplace/hearth inside (possibly coal lit, but this was from other description in another class of housing so might be incorrect) which is for heat, light and cooking ·       * wooden trenchers are used to prepare food ·       * which is fried, broiled and smoked fish, plus bannocks [Scottish cake made from oatmeal] and car-cakes [crumpets] ·        * mugs of beer [other sources mention ale] ·       * grandmother is found...