The writer – my first short story
The writer Lenutsa’s right hand moved smoothly in a small arc, its shadow – pale and indistinct in the light of a solitary oil lamp – gliding over the surface of the dark, ugly thing grasped lightly in...
View ArticlePhone. A short story
“Phone!” Eyes glint, sunk in a sea of black. A mean nose pricks the air, piercing the swirling, breathless, grey clouds erupting from the dark slit beneath, from which the single syllable had come. A...
View ArticleA fairy tale for Fairy Tale Day; ‘Miorita’– the little ewe lamb
Today – 26 February – is Fairy Tale Day so I thought I’d try to tell you a fairy tale. Although it is Romanian, called Miorita (I don’t have the Romanian characters but it’s pronounced mee-oh-ree-tsa),...
View ArticlePlaying the trout – a 75 word story for Paragraph Planet
Playing the trout. In the hot June sun, the fly arches towards a cooler spot, suspended for a moment then alighting, still yet ominous. Only the midges bite, swooping again and again on bare skin. The...
View ArticleOn stage at the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe – wow!
We did it! An exciting night with a lovely bunch of people: Writing on the Wharfe writers’ club – and our audience of course – at the Ilkley Literature Festival ‘Fringe’ . Petronela and I did intend to...
View ArticleAnticipating Halloween
Another ‘health’ item added to my diet Fortunately I live in a flat so generally can avoid the horrible little trick or treaters and, worse, their parents. This Halloween money-making scam for the...
View ArticleHallow’morrow
A couple of posts ago I said that we had been set the theme ‘Halloween‘ to write a short story or poem for yesterday’s meeting of our writers’ club, Writing on the Wharfe. Here’s my offering: ∞ ∞ ∞ I...
View ArticlePerforming again! A tanka and a short story
She’s done it again: our local writers’ club (Writing on the Wharfe) ‘leader’ has set us up to do another performance – spoken short stories or poetry and music. Even more ‘intimate’ than last time,...
View ArticleShort stories, poems and song live in the library
A wonderful end to the year on Saturday afternoon for our local (usually Menston based) writers’ club, Writing on the Wharfe, ‘performing’ with short stories, songs and poems in the intimate setting of...
View ArticleFive reflections plus one
It’s been quite a while since I posted here, one of the problems resulting from running other websites/blogs of one sort or another. To keep the pot boiling (no, this is not one of my cookery/food...
View ArticleWhy I’m going to take advantage of Cristian’s reblog facility
Breakfast, Christmas 2016 I’ve been following Cristian Mihai’s blog almost since I began blogging approaching five years ago. I was first attracted to it because of the excellent writing in English by...
View ArticleWriting – in silence, to music, or prompted by Anne Brontë?
Drawing by blogger ‘mopana’, see below Recently I began a story which currently stands at over 17,000 words. That’s a big jump from the maximum of around the 1,000, more usually a few hundred, I...
View Article‘On stage’ again – Spring/Easter stories for children
Following what we deemed to be the ‘success’ of our winter story-telling in Ilkley Library last year we (our writers’ club, Writing on the Wharfe) repeated the exercise last Saturday but with...
View ArticleA thank you with several reservations – The Blogger Recognition Award
I was recently nominated for ‘The blogger recognition award‘; I have never ‘accepted’ such awards because I’ve seen they can get out of hand and usually require ‘inflicting’ them on a number of other...
View ArticleThe thrill of seeing your writing in print
The ever enthusiastic, hard-working Romanian founder and leader of our writers’ club Writing on the Wharfe, Ruxandra, always pushing us into new ventures, recently agreed with a local free magazine,...
View ArticleIlkley Literature Festival ‘Fringe’– we’re on again. Suggestions please.
The trees are just beginning to colour for autumn; the rowan berries are ready for the birds. Pictured today from our sitting room window She’s done it again: Ruxandra, the wonderful leader of our...
View ArticleA ‘fairy story’ for the Ilkley Literature Festival
I’m not going to tell you a story here, just hopefully to wet your appetite for a post soon after the 14th October. That’s the day on which the writers’ club of which I am a member, Writing on the...
View ArticleAutumn fairy story &“something completely different”– tanka
Last evening our writers’ club Writing on the Wharfe was ‘performing’ in the Ilkley Literature Festival ‘Fringe’ with the title Every leaf tells a story. I had intended to read my first attempt at a...
View ArticleShort story: The Girl in Block 18
Way back at the beginning of September our writers’ club was, as usual, given a theme to write on: ‘After four failed marriages, the world’s tallest woman …”; there was more which I won’t bother you...
View ArticleDancing with words to a Dansette – story writing
The ‘Dansette’ in the shop window I set out this morning with the intention of resuming work on my ‘long short story’, yesterday having been taken up largely by ‘chores’. On the two or three hundred...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....