Bear Faced Bloggery

  This is the week when the book documenting my first year of grief goes live, and it is a bittersweet experience. As those few hardy individuals who follow this occasional blog will know, It takes the form of transcriptions of my thoughts and feelings - originally set down on my phone's voice recorder - throughout those first awful twelve months, accompanied by a commentary of sorts, observations written with the hindsight afforded by revisiting the recordings as that first year drew to a close. What it has become is the memoir that I never dreamed I would have to write.  It was never meant for public consumption but rather formed part of my ongoing therapy, and as such is about as raw and honest an account as you could ever hope to find. It pulls no punches, and tears my soul each time I read it back. Yet I made the decision to publish for three reasons:  Firstly, many of the books on grief that I read throughout this period (and there were plenty) felt somewhat sanitis...

  So, the little book on grief that I spoke about in my last blog post is all but finished (as far as these things ever can be...). It's been an incredibly tough 18 months since my devastating bereavement, during which time I have taken part in 2 bereavement courses, had two rounds of counselling/therapy, read countless books on the subject, have been supported throughout by a wonderful peer support worker, and am booked onto a grief 'retreat' this coming November... so no one can say I haven't grabbed hold of every bit of help and support that I've been offered. And yes, things have improved, but I am no nearer being able to function as I used to, am still floundering through what passes for my life, and still searching for answers that I will probably never find. I'm afraid that I'm having to come to terms with the fact that I am no longer the same person as I was pre-bereavement, and that life, to use a well-worn cliché, will never be the same. However, d...

Sound the trumpets! Hoist the flags! Pop the champagne! My second novel is finished! (Or as finished as it can be, given that the lot of the writer is constantly to edit, tweak, substitute words, rearrange sentences, cut bits and add bits... for goodness sake, why can't we just let it go?) I am well aware, of course, that my first novel is still doing the rounds, trying to find a publisher, but we can't let a little thing like that stop us from forging ahead with other projects, now can we? To give it its due, this current manuscript should rightly be referred to as the first, as the early part of it was written a good many years before its younger sibling, but way back then it was, at 45,000 words, novella length. I sent it to an agent who liked it, but asked for substantial rewrites which I felt I simply did not have the time to do, what with trying to forge a career in the theatre and everything. So it got shelved, something that now, of course, I bitterly regret, as had ...

Patience is a virtue, they say... and they could well be right, but having just been through an extremely busy period in what for want of a better phrase might be termed my 'day job', I have been unable to do any writing for several weeks and that, as anyone who feels the compulsion to write will appreciate, is a BAD THING. In fact, as I look back over the busy-ness of these past few weeks, I find myself musing on the way in which time evaporates and weeks rocket past, lost amidst the whirlwind of everyday life. All my life I have worked in what might be described as the 'Creative Industries', and as I take a swerve into yet another, i.e. the world of the fledgling writer, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that we who 'create' for a living are held in an almost continual state of anticipation. Once a piece is finished (and I use the term loosely... there is an argument to be had over whether a piece is ever truly completed) we offer it up to whichever pe...