This comes hot on the heels of my notes about what I read at the cottage, so expect some duplication! FICTION The Feast, Margaret Kennedy I started listening to a podcast called “Backlisted” and even though I was listening to episodes about books I had already read, somehow NEW books kept sneaking on to my […]

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For various reasons, rather less reading got done this year, though much fun was had despite that. I only read/finished/started 9 books. In my defense, several of them were long! Several of my faves below. Fiction: Fellowship Point, Alice Elliott Dark. I ended up liking this rather more than I expected. The prose was lovely […]

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I spent some time digging through old storage boxes in an attempt to find the cache of my old lyrics, written in my teens and early twenties when I wanted to be in a band. My hope was that were would be something decent enough to pass on to my husband to use in one […]

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And one of my dearest friends. David Keyes is a gifted musician, artist, writer, poet, cocktail concocter, gentleman, scholar, cat lover, and all-round wonderful human. He created this gorgeous video for one of his wisest poems. I hope you like it. P.S. You can get his writing and the forgotten classics of magic and mystery […]

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Status update #1: still no title! Before we went away to Spain, I sent the latest draft to a freelance editor (a friend of a friend, just starting out) to get some feedback from a fresh pair of eyes with no ties to me. She came back with some very helpful comments and suggestions. In […]

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I actually did a fair bit of reading on the trip (or listening, in the case of my major audiobook project). There’s not much else to do on the plane and even I can only look out a train window for so long. Here’s the best of what I read. FICTION MIddlemarch, by George Eliot. […]

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I’m the type of person who starts my stories about Barcelona by saying “well, I didn’t get pickpocketed, so that’s good.” I was pickpocketed in the metro in Rome (my own fault) so I spent a fair bit of time researching ways to avoid it. My current travel purse has a wallet chained into it! […]

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We took the train from Granada to Sevilla, arriving in the early afternoon with some time for exploring the old city before heading to an excellent dinner at El Disparate (I still dream about that Iberian pork shoulder ….). On the agenda over the next few days: And best of all, no hills!

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We only had two and a half days in Granada but we tried to make the most of it. On the night of our arrival, a fellow writer and her husband took us to their favourite bars for vermouth, wine, and tapas. This is not something we would ever do alone – we’re much more […]

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We had a trip planned to Spain for our 30th wedding anniversary. In May 2020. Yeah, that didn’t happen. So this year, we decided to celebrate our 35th there instead. We added a few days to the original plan, added an additional city, and just after my flamenco adventures were wrapped up, off we went. […]

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