New beginnings, help for your creative endeavours, inspiring reads, and we are horsing again

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Happy new year! I hope you had a restorative holiday and are now glimmering with new dawns and bursting with possibilities. Dave and I have enjoyed the chance to make proper time for family and friends. And as you'll see from the last item in this newsletter, we've welcomed a surprise new family member. (In case your thoughts are taking you in wild and fecund directions, here's a clue. He has a tail.)

I've been reading ...

I gobbled several books in the Christmas downtime, but here are two that stood out. What Makes This Book So Great, by novelist Jo Walton, is mostly a personal reaction to favourite works of science fiction and fantasy. She's worth reading for that alone, but occasionally she swerves out of genre and discusses Dorothy L Sayers's Gaudy Night, or Iain Banks's The Crow Road (some of my favourite books). Never academic or dry, it's like a gutsy, unpretentious conversation with a well-read friend.

I also devoured this memoir by novelist Alan Garner, most famous for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Garner grew up in the village of Alderley Edge, as I did, and his fiction vibrates with a sense of ancientness in the landscape. He lived there in the 1940s and I was there in the 1970s.

Reading this book was like a dialogue back through time. The mysterious carvings in the rocks on the Edge, which young Garner found just as spellbinding as young Morris. The air-raid siren on the roof of the hotel opposite my school - in my day, it went off during lessons for no apparent reason, as if howling out of the past. Thirty years earlier in Garner's time, the siren had just been installed, for a real and serious purpose.

If you like Garner's fiction you'll love this book, and experiencing his Alderley has sent me back to my diary - hence all the markers. It might well be the start of - dare I say it - a second Not Quite Lost. No promises about that yet, though. I have people who will lynch me if the next book isn't Ever Rest. But after that, who knows?

Which brings me to...

Work in progress

Noveling... Ever Rest is shuffled onto the back burner in January ... because...
Editing and mentoring.... I'm currently working on a manuscript by a writer of science and futurism books. We were originally scheduled to work together in November but our diaries drifted out of whack. However, I'm delighted we've managed to align after all... and I'm about to dive in.

For YOUR work in progress!
If you've made some writing resolutions this year, here's a discreet reminder about my Nail Your Novel books. Take book 1 if you need guidance to draft and revise. Take book two to troubleshoot your characters and book three to pep up your plot.

And have you ever considered...
If you're a seasoned writer looking for new opportunities in 2019, have you thought of ghostwriting? I can teach you how. Check out my professional ghostwriting course.

On the blog

Last month I had a piece about keeping in touch with your work when you have reduced writing time. I know; these holidays are now behind us but there are bound to be other times when other commitments push our soul projects to the back of the cupboard. (Like me with Ever Rest above.) So here's how to let them go dormant and wake them up successfully.

A tail to tell

Well well well, who is this?
I did promise you more horsey adventures. But even I didn't expect I'd be introducing you to a new family member so soon.
When I wrote my last newsletter, just over a month ago, I didn't know this chap even existed. But barely a month after I said goodbye to my amazing friend Byron, I was tipped off by an instructor who knew this horse. I tried him, liked him. My instructor liked him and the vet did too... and here he is.

Nine years old. Sixteen hands. Irish. Not yet used to selfies with me - we're working on that. Not used to many of our local hazards either - he snorts like a dragon.
He has a passport name that is, well, ridiculous. But his stable name is adorable. Meet Val.

Til next time
R xxx

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