My Mother’s Secret – Location
There’s a thin band of cream silhouetting the cranes that hover over the half-built office blocks in the city centre. I head home, below an… Read More »My Mother’s Secret – Location
Lake District
My Mother’s Secret: Stories within the Book
I’m delighted to welcome Tasha Locke to my blog this week. Tasha graduated from Bristol University this year with a degree in English Literature. I… Read More »My Mother’s Secret: Stories within the Book
In a thriller, nowhere is safe…
This is a blog post I wrote on the importance of setting for The Asian Writer, and I thought would be most appropriate as I’ve… Read More »In a thriller, nowhere is safe…
Hiking for writing II
Happy Earth Day! Today, we’re celebrating our extraordinary planet, and trying to end plastic pollution. In a month I’ll be heading to one of my… Read More »Hiking for writing II
Party like a writer!
I’d love you to come to my book launch party if you can make it! It’s 7 p.m. Friday 11 May at Waterstones, Bristol. There’ll… Read More »Party like a writer!
Hiking for Writing I
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve just got back from a long weekend hiking in the Lake District. We were blessed with amazingly beautiful weather for the start of April and climbed Scafell Pike. Not content with that challenge, we zipped up Scafell…and then had quite a long walk with achey knees down a scree slope to get back to Wast Water.
I love walking – whether it’s up a mountain, round a lake, popping to the shops, or up and down Bristol’s steepest hills. So I was interested to read Mark’s Daily Apple blog on Why These Nine Famous Thinkers Walked So Much. William Wordsworth, who famously climbed many of the hills in the Lakes, used his walks to compose his poems – the act of walking was ‘indivisible’ from the act of writing. Charles Dickens found writing quite difficult and used to walk 20-30 miles a day to get some relief from his work. Soren Kierkegaard deliberately used walking to help him mentally compose paragraphs and think through new ideas. He said: