Category: Creativity
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The joy of logistics
The only way I could consolidate all our scrap metal was to carry things into a staging area in front of our sheds. But the stacked row of vehicles in front of the pile, and additionally the small host of additional vehicles that have accreted around our place, posed a different challenge: how might the…
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Learning new things . . .
Embarrassed as I am to have been writing earnestly for the past three years and only now discovering a wonderful editing tool, I’m delighted at the same time. I’ve been fortunate to join a specialist writing group: five would-be novelists working in the science fiction genre, who have begun to share their work together. As…
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Something about slippers . . .
When there’s really nothing better to do than to wonder what sort of brick/block pattern the wall was built in, in the easy shade of a tiny garden, it can feel like a gentle peace has descended. The labours of the day (such as they are, in these senior times) are completed, and a time…
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Conscientious reading today
Today, although there’s some driving ahead, mostly my job is to read and to think. Read conscientiously, looking at submissions from the lovely Writers Groups I belong to, thinking and reflecting on the turn of phrase, the development of the creative effort. I may snuggle down into reading for pleasure as sleep beckons, but mostly…
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The shock of discovery
I often find myself dropping down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole on my various researches. Sometimes I’m shocked, and that shock brings, I must confess, a frisson of delight. Wow, I think to myself in the idiom of my early adolescence, that’s amazing! Or scary! Or embarrassing! Whatever, it’s the shock that stimulates. Today…
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The joy of building on criticism . . .
Let’s face it: nobody really enjoys criticism, but most of us suffer it with a pained expression. That’s to say, how could you not find my most recent contribution supremely edifying, wonderful and a sheer delight? But since you mention it, I shall try to understand what you’re saying. Before discarding your unwelcome contribution to…
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Reclusive eccentricity . . .
I believe that I have Florence Trevelyan’s odd and lasting legacy to thank for my renewed interest in creative writing. We visited Taormina in 2012, a rare holiday, where we discovered the public gardens that she left to posterity. A plain, rather forbidding woman, she made her life in Sicily after a Grand Tour of…
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The character revealed by what isn’t said
We didn’t stop in to the high mill tower on the bank of the River Nith to view Dumfries through the camera obscura, the other day. But then again, it was closed so we’d not have been able to gain admission anyway. When it re-opens, we shall have to make another, better-timed bus trip to…
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The tyranny of history?
We ambled along the same routes that Robert Burns would have taken two hundred and fifty years ago, as we twirled around the town of Dumfries yesterday on our busman’s holiday*. We visited the imposing mausoleum erected some thirty years after his death, that replaced the original simple stone slab marking his burial site. We…
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The things you miss . . .
Our walks over the past two days have been intriguing more for the things we didn’t immediately see than for those we clocked with only a casual glance. Within the beautiful cluster of aquilegias, growing wild beside the storm drain, a bumble bee was busy, searching for nectar inside the wrinkled blossoms. I wouldn’t have…
Roads to Joy 