-
A New Notebook: Beautiful or Intimidating?
A new notebook. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? The smell of it, the blinkingly bright white pages, the crisp swish as you flip through it for the first time. But it’s also so very daunting. Those fresh clean pages need something worthwhile written on them. They shouldn’t be wasted. Especially the first page. You…
|
-
Sixteen sneaky ways to get a reluctant reader reading
Reading is so important for children. Did you know the average reading age of adults in the UK is 9? 9! That means, naturally, that there is a large proportion of adults with a higher reading age, but there is also a large proportion with a reading age well below that too. Shocking, isn’t it?…
|
-
Winter woes
Living in Britain is a rollercoaster. Do you wonder why we spend so much time talking about the weather? Because it is different every bloody day. Sometimes several times a day. British people are ruled by the seasons. On our small island we are never more than 85 miles from the sea (and a hell…
|
-
Is honesty really the best policy?
A memory popped up on my facebook page recently. It was from about 8 years ago and I was having a little rant that my eldest had been awake all night having nightmares. I remember it distinctly as it was the beginning of an exhausting period of her life where she grew scared to go…
|
-
Letters
Letter writing was BIG in my family when we were kids. We wrote to penpals, to friends who had moved away, and we wrote thank you letters for presents. We wrote to magazines, we entered competitions by post and we wrote to our favourite celebrity fan clubs. I mean, we weren’t The Waltons. We weren’t…
|
-
Does your writing sing?
Writing is not just about grammar and spelling. It’s not just about ideas and twists and cliff-hangers. It’s not just about believable characters, well-constructed plots and vivid descriptions. And it’s not just about research, fact-checking or accurate quotes. I mean it is about those things, it’s about all those things. But also, and this is something I personally think…
|