Debi Alper

Thank you, Ath! That was a lovely surprise. The standard of the other entries was so high. Thank you to Terrie, Sandra and Seagreen for such evocative and immersive stories.

Thank you Ath, both for the competition and for your encouraging summing up. I certainly would’ve been hard-pressed to choose a winner, so congratulations and thanks to Libby, and also to Terrie and Seagreen.

Why do you always insist on making this difficult?

Terrie’s Plant Song is almost a poem to the language of flowers. Rich and ancient with a deadly heart. The melody, she writes, is intoxicating, and I can’t think of a better word for the whole piece. I said “anything floral” and it’s hard to imagine something more floral than this. A wonderfully…[Read more]

Phototropism

Suzy and I drank white wine while we sat in stiff, square garden chairs. I hadn’t met Suzy before and admired how she leant back, legs stretched out – lounging and confident. She wasn’t just overcoming the chair’s straight edges; she showed me she knew she had glamour. Her jeans and yellow cotton shirt were years old, threads loose…[Read more]

(This may well be missing the point)

The language of flowers not always sweet

Only after finding, (months later)  photographs other than the ones taken by fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Kally Logan that caused all the trouble did Luke Darbyshere register flowers had twice been fleetingly present on his wedding day. Much of the time he’d been su…[Read more]

Thank you, Seagreen, for the competition. Great, enticing stories from Ath, Sandra and Terrie. I enjoyed them all.

Sea, thank you for the useful challenge, especially because it helped me formulate my character as well as sparking such a brilliant range of responses; I wouldn’t’ve liked to choose a winner.

Seagreen, thanks so much. A brilliant prompt for April. Thanks also to my co-authors. There were some great pieces of writing.

To be fare, sometimes I don’t know the ending – or the story.

Stephen King, Ath? He’s said that he never knows what’s going to happen when he starts a novel, and he’s published nearly seventy of them.

Your method (if we can grace it with that name), Ath, sounds very much like mine: a rough idea of the story arc and the ending, and not much more. The nearest I ever got to planning was to write out the rather…[Read more]

I like the bugs analogy, Terrie.

Roughly I do something like this: I plan, though not in great detail – usually the ending and a couple of things along the way. When I start writing the plan doesn’t seem to work so I alter the order of events or cut events. After a bit I give up with the plan and hope the writing will suggest what I need to do…[Read more]

I’ve written three full length novels and two shorter ones, plus numerous short stories. I’ve never been able to bring any planning tools to bear on the process, either widely advocated or self-invented. Yes, it is extraordinarily difficult and a constant worry as the story progresses, since I am an inveterate seat-of-the-pants writer. Yes, I…[Read more]

It’s a while since the 1980s

And why come back? Why, exactly, limp along these corridors after decades, and stop to look at dormitory doors and classroom doors all shut for the summer holiday. There’s no one else in this building – a giant bungalow with many arms – except the senior school secretary who has shown me old records and left me…[Read more]

@sandradavies, yes indeed – transfer of information. The number of times I’ve come across a note I’ve scrawled down when all that’s left is an incomprehensible collection of words and a vague memory of myself thinking that I must find a way of using this brilliant insight. the very embodiment of having all the nuance but none of the original…[Read more]

Coordination: that’s exactly it. I can’t get coordinated with notebooks. I have one on my desk and it travels to my bedside table and back again. I admire people who use notebooks when they’re out – they seem more intuitive and open than I am. I think their minds flow more smoothly. They’re even Romantic with a capital R, with all the creativity…[Read more]