Fancy some Hallowe'en tales to get you in the mood for tonight? Tune to 7 Waves Radio on 92.1 FM (if you live on the Wirral peninsula) or listen via the station's website on http://7waves.co.uk/live-across-wirral/ at 1pm (GMT). Along with fellow Riverside Writers members Tim Hulme, Carol Falaki, Peter Hurd and Peter Caton, I will be taking part in a live radio broadcast on Cath Bore's Lunchtime Forum, when we will be entertaining listeners with seasonal spooky tales. You can send messages to the show while we're on air via 7 Waves Radio's "Shout Out" box found on their website. Emails and texts can also be sent - see the website for details. I hope you'll listen in!

The rain has now stopped, but I'm home now anyway... This morning I had to go into the village to pay a few bills and buy some incense as I'm totally out. Out of incense at this time of the year..!!! I wanted frankincense and myrrh--myrrh blended with dragon's blood is one of my favourites--but all that was on offer was insipid junk with names like Angel Fluff and Pickled Pixie (exaggerate, moi?) Hmm...it looks like a quick trip into Birkenhead is in order ASAP. No writing done today; the sunshine coaxed me to tackle some of the wildly overgrown shrubs and roses in the back garden. My dogs helped. Mostly this meant them running off with the pruned branches I'd put in a tidy pile, which means our patio is now sprinkled with mangled twigs. I'd brush up but the brush-head fell off the pole. Again. Besides, it was time for a cuppa. Have you read anything by Paolo Coelho ? I've just finished  The Witch of Portobello: A Novel (P.S.) , which was entertaining. I lik...

At 50,000 words into writing the first draft of Bethany Rose , I realise that while I love her character, I absolutely hate the plot. To scrap two and a half months' work is no small thing. But the story is simply not going where I want it to. Better to halt this version now than expend more time on something which I know can only become a major thorn in my side. Rain all day, but never mind. This gave me the perfect reason not to find more excuses to avoid starting a new short Sci-Fi story. Well, I did start it--and though I wrote all of 1 ½ pages of it, due to ceaseless distractions* at least a start was made. *Remember that film with Jack Nicholson , where he’s got his family holed up in some miles-from-nowhere hotel and he eventually kills them all with an axe? Well, there’s a scene a scene before he totally loses his sanity, where he’s trying to write and his wife keeps “helping” by bringing him coffee and sandwiches and other stuff he doesn’t want, and he ends up scream...

Our area is being fitted with new gas pipes, both the mains pipes and those running into individual houses’ gas metres. Yesterday a man knocked on the door to ask what time it would be convenient for them to have access to our metre cupboard today. Knowing our usually-hectic Monday morning schedule, I said 12 noon and a note was duly made on the gas man’s list on his clipboard. At 7.45am this morning, there was a racket directly outside our front door as a section of our block paving was ripped up and a hole dug. The soil from the hole was flung on top of my new plants, completely burying them. The loose bricks were hurled against the base of a shrub. “There weren’t any plants there,” was the first response to Richard when he flew out to complain. “Well my wife didn’t plant invisible plants, did she!” growled hubby. “Oh, we didn’t see them,” came the next lame excuse. When the spade-wielding man scraped back the soil, the somewhat squashed remains of my three new heuchera...

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A good article on turn-offs for lit agents: http://www.writersdigest.com/article/what-agents-hate/ The turn-out for the writers’ workshop broke all Riverside Writers’ previous records. There weren’t enough printed handouts to go round, unfortunately. So much for my guess-work! Among the crowd was Sci-Fi author Colin P Davies , who visited our group as a speaker some years ago. http://www.colinpdavies.com/index.htm Anyway, the workshop on constructive criticism - which I'd organised - generated a healthy amount of group discussion, which was one of my intentions. The practical exercise I’d prepared brought some levity. I read one page of what was supposed to be the start of a novel, which was written awfully on purpose, and people had to pretend that a member of the writers circle had presented this in all seriousness. How, then, would the group offer constructive criticism? Once they’d all stopped laughing, I pointed out that if they were to laugh at fellow writer’s efforts,...