NEWS TO DATE

Seems like a while since I posted anything here, so I thought I'd better bring things up to date.

Have been busy in lots of ways just recently and there is a new energy in my writing after a slow time... I say slow time, but I did lay down the first draft of two novels last year and won a couple of comps and got some nice other prizes... but it felt like it was hard work between those novels. Now it feels like fun again.

I think part of that might be to do with a change in my life. My wife has got me walking... miles and miles of walking... and it's been good for my physical health and for my state of mind, too. It seems to have given me a new energy and a new ambition and a new view of things.

This Easter my wife and I walked from the west coast of Scotland to the east. We did the canal walk, following thr Forth and Clyde canal from Bowling to Falkirk, and then hopping onto the Union canal at Falkirk and walking all the way into Edinburgh... then we tagged a little extra onto the walk by taking our sore feet down to where the water of Leith folds into the Forth... and there I dropped a stone I'd carried all the way from Bowling. It's only about 70 miles in total and we did it over 6 days, but it was our first long distance walk and, aside from the cushioned plasters, it felt like an achievement for us both.

And with the rest of the holiday, I laid down 50,000 words to the 12,000 I already had on a new novel project that feels fun and exciting and even relevent. We'll see what comes of that in due course. And I am writing every day, a small flash of some description, and that's a challenge I have set myself, and that is turning up some good pieces... might display them some day.

And there was some instability at work... all of us in our department having to apply for our own jobs and one of us unlucky enough to not get a job... but I am safe and so we move on... a change to what the job involves, but there's good and bad with that.

So, that's where I am at. I will give more news as and when it happens... and maybe I should post something creative up here soon as that has been absent a while, too... ok, as I write this, a target: to pen an extra flash and get it up here before the end of the week... just because I know there are a few of you reading this blog and I have three followers now... why not comment?

Best to you all.