Philippa East

Energy and shame

Understanding is a difficult word sometimes. We say, ‘I understand her,’ meaning that we know her reasons for doing something or other. It was as expected. Electricity feels rather different. Do I understand it? I mean, what is it? I was taught a load of rubbish at school about the movement of charged electrons. That isn’t elect…[Read more]

Electricity and us

Electricity has played a considerable part in directing  the path our lives have travelled, from the instant (if only sensory) flash of knowledge, at the end of our first date, that “This man is who I can safely be ME with!” to our fifty years of living in the North East.

At that time (5th April 1963) he worked for a comp…[Read more]

Thanks for the comp, Ath! Another opportunity to stretch myself ☺️

And congratulations to Libby for winning, and the rest of us for giving it a go ????

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]

THE GATEKEEPER  

They closed the Winter Gardens. Lack of funding or resources or some other bullshit excuse. Redundancy notices for the gardeners who’d been there for years, and redeployment to grass-cutting duties for the young apprentices who still didn’t know their aquilegia from their allium. They stored the tools in the old stable buil…[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]

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.

I love to plan. That’s why nothing ever gets written.

Honestly, I’m sorry this has taken me so long…

All the entries left me wishing I’d given you more words to play with since each of them teased with hidden depths.

Ath – so easy to read (as ever!) Engaging, apparently effortless writing, but so many questions! Who was this man? Where did he come from and where would he end up?  More importan…[Read more]

Sorry! I haven’t forgotten, just waiting for a break in the clouds.
If I don’t have time tonight, then results will definitely be posted tomorrow when I’m off.
Thank you for your patience.

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’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]

@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]