New Year, new submissions

Hello to 2016 - you've snuck up from nowhere, haven't you?

The New Year has brought but one resolution for me - write more. I have neglected my fiction for a long time due to various time constraints and work commitments, but this is now the time to strike and tap away at the keyboard like a caffeinated, tap-dancing mouse.


NB: Blog post edited 21/1/16.

I'm working on a few pieces currently, a series of shorts for the lovely Mslexia - for all women who write. Choices at the moment include poetry, fiction, non-fiction and confessions. My other current work is a new piece on Dreams for the wonderful and much-lauded Are You Sitting Comfortably? by White Rabbit and a few other bits and bobs. I may even dig out my novel this year - not my first work in progress, which is now more of a harddrive entity than a novel - but my second and main WIP.

With my CV landing in the inboxes of various agencies as we speak, I have to find something engaging to do in the long, unemployed winter afternoons. So I dance. Like Mickey.

"The time has come", the walrus said, "to speak of many things"

It’s no great mystery that I’ve been living and working in Truro, (Cornwall, UK) for the last two and a bit years. My full-time job is the one that brought me down here, and having left it is my reason to leave.
It’s finally time to pursue my passion for writing, so this rite is about how writing got me here, and how writing has scooped me back out.
I intend to do freelance copywriting and chase creativity whenever I have the chance.

I have always loved Cornwall. My family and I visited south Cornwall for years on holidays, year in and year out, nothing would change except sometimes the village we visited, or the four-seasons-in-one-day weather. The beauty drew us back year on year, so when a job came up I jumped at the chance to live in such a beautiful and timeless place.

My job was in retail – after five years using the past tense sounds mad – and I was lucky enough to manage an excellent shop filled with wonderful people. I have grown. Not up – I will never grow up – but lots of useful things have been learnt, both the easy way and the hard way.

Writing has remained a pillar of calm and relative normality. Having spent the bulk of time here alone, it has acted as a constant reminder that I can escape loneliness, albeit through the page. I’ve had short fiction read and recorded, written an ad script and made some decent headway into my novel.

Now I am able to fight writer's block with no distractions. This piece doesn’t really have an ending. It’s a new start and a new chapter. Stick with me, it'll be fun.