Author Interview – Judy Astley

Posted on November 5, 2015 by vanessa

judyThe first Judy Astley book I read, aptly as it was her first novel, was Just For the Summer. Set in a largeish village on the Cornish coast it concerns itself with the comings and goings of the second-homers, arriving for a few weeks with their Volvos full of children and Waitrose carrier bags.

It struck a chord with me as I had spent so many childhood holidays in Fowey in Cornwall and we still go back there from time to time. One of the things that’s most noticeable now is that so many of the houses are second homes, empty for most of the year leaving it a ghost town and property prices are so high that local people on local salaries have no hope of buying a home in the town. And I am horribly aware that by staying a holiday cottage there I’m contributing to the problem. I thought that Just For The Summer might be depressing for that reason but Judy cleverly and wittily manages to be sympathetic, satirical and wry. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of Just For The Summer, Judy revisited her second home owners to update us on their lives. In between the literary bookends of those two books, Judy has written more than a dozen other books, all as witty, sharp and warm as each other.

Judy and I have been Facebook friends for years and I know her to be funny and caring. She also lives on the river Thames near Eel Pie Island and her husband Jon has produced some of the most iconic albums of the last 40 years. I love her writing – chick lit with an edge – and I was delighted to interview her.  Her latest book – A Merry Mistletoe Wedding – is just out and I’m saving it for Christmas when I’m flopped on the sofa after a surfeit of sherry and plum pudding.

Q. Why do you write?

Does “for money” sound grasping? I hope not, because for the past 25 years I’ve been lucky enough that writing has been the day-job so of course being paid is now a big part of the motive! Aside from that though, I love the feeling of having finished a story when it feels like a job well done, also the strange unexpected moments during the writing when you think, oh yes that’s the direction it should go. I’m an incessant chatterer too – so it’s probably a relief to most people that I communicate on the page rather than bugging them 100% of the time.

Q. Were you a childhood scribbler or was writing something you came to later in life?

I was a childhood scribbler – we had to be at my primary school. I think ‘Sir’ liked a bit of peace after lunch so most afternoons he’d set us a story to write. And then I remember being about nine and – in the holidays – putting together a magazine with my friend Jean. We had articles about local people and events and plenty of fiction.

Q. How did you get your big break?

I’d written my first novel, ‘Just for the Summer’ and had sent it to a few publishers who’d sounded enthusiastic but not keen enough to take it on. Transworld were running a novel competition, the Catherine Cookson Awards and I carefully packed the MS into a Liberty print folder and sent it off. A few people in the office there read it and liked it and one day I got that magic call that we all dream of, from editor Linda Evans, saying it hadn’t won but they wanted to publish it anyway. Linda was then my editor for the next 25 years till she retired last May.

Q. What’s your writing routine? Bustling café or silent solitude? Crack of dawn or midnight oil? Laptop or pen and paper?

I’m a great procrastinator so I tend to dawdle about doing absolutely everything but write until I can smell the deadline starting to burn nearby. This means that the first few chapters take a long, long time to get going, but once the halfway mark has been reached I can hurtle on to the end pretty fast.
I work at one of two desks in the house – either up in my bedroom, overlooking the Thames or down near the kitchen where I can see the green parakeets swinging upside down on the bird-feeder. I could never work in a café – I’d be concentrating on listening to other people’s conversations.
I work best in the mid-late afternoon when the guilt at earlier laziness gets the better of me. Also, although I might not have been sitting down and getting the words out, thoughts will have gathered themselves by that time of the day and tend to rattle out pretty fast.
I’ve got two Macs – the upstairs one is a biggish MacBook Pro and the downstairs one which I take with me if travelling anywhere is a little MacBook Air. I wish I’d bought another iMac instead of the Pro but the screen is quite big and easy to work with. I’m just not mad about the angle of viewing it and feel I’m getting a bit hunchy.

Q. Which writer do you most admire and what would you like to ask them?

The writers I most admire are sadly no longer with us. I love Nancy Mitford and Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym. As for questions, I’d probably ask them much the same ones you’re asking me!

Q. Which book do you most recommend to other people?

It varies. A few years ago I bought about 8 copies of ‘How I Live Now’ by Meg Rosoff to give to other people as I was so enthralled by it. Long term, I’d say Nancy Mitford’s, ‘The Pursuit of Love’.

Q. Which book would you most like to have written?

Apart from N. Mitford’s (see above) and possibly Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, I’d love to have written all Jilly Cooper’s books – they are such a joyous delight. But I know nothing of horses!

Q. Aside from writing, which skill or achievement are you most proud of?

The day the clothes I’d designed and made were in the window of Liberty’s on Regent Street was pretty special. I was never trained as a designer but somehow ended up making clothes for that wonderful store for several years.
Apart from that, having a painting of mine in the RA Summer Exhibition was terrific too.

Q. Where is your happy place?
Ugh – not a term I like! I’m a bit two-sided here. I am a town woman so if you put me on Portobello Road and let me wander, I’m very, very happy. But I also love being in Cornwall and on a warm summer day in our garden there, with no sound but the birds and the flutter of a breeze in the leaves, it is absolutely bliss.

Q. If you weren’t a writer, what would you do?

Hmm… not sure I’m suited to anything else. I’m actually quite good at doing nothing but didlding about in the garden, planting stuff.. I did recently start looking at the job vacancies in the local garden centre, thinking how it might be rather lovely to have a job that didn’t take up so much brain space in the middle of the night, something you could just leave at 5 pm, no deadlines and so on. But they wouldn’t just let me water the plants and chat to customers about the best time to plant tulips (November, in case you wonder – never much earlier or they risk getting diseased) etc. They’d make me lug bags of compost about and get in a muddle on the tills so I think I’m too old to change now!

Q. What aspect of the publishing industry would you like to change?

Tricky one this. At risk of foot/shooting, I’d like to see it possible for an emerging brilliant new writer to become a best-seller without publishers having to pay serious folding money to launch them. All chart-positions, supermarket shelf-space, window displays, entry into certain promotions – these have to be paid for and readers mostly don’t know anything about that – they think it’s simply the luck of the draw. Mostly (with a few internet sensation exceptions) it isn’t – it’s about expensive PR campaigns. I’d like to see rather less of that.

Q. What piece of advice would you give to writers?A Merry Mistletoe Wedding by Judy Astley

Find your own voice but if you want to write in a particular genre then read all the ‘opposition’ and be very familiar with it. If you’re looking for an agent or publisher, make sure you only apply to those who seek what you’re writing – otherwise you waste a lot of both your time and theirs.

Thanks Judy for your time and sharing your thoughts with us and readers – if you haven’t read Judy’s books yet, what are you waiting for?

Posted in Author interviews | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Author Interview – Judy Astley

October’s writing – write, delete, repeat.

Posted on November 2, 2015 by vanessa

typewriterBack at the end of September I mapped out my writing plans for October and was feeling pretty positive. You can already see that ‘but’ looming can’t you? The ‘but’ is that the cold I came down with in September lingered for weeks in the form of a rattly chest and a thick-headed weariness. I still feel a bit sluggish. And there are other things to deal with – Christmas is a busy time for Glenogle and Bell and we need to get organised for that, plus we’re looking at the possibility of moving house so have had a procession of estate agents trooping through with their opinions and pitches. None of this is conducive to writing. At least, not for me, the queen of procrastination and empress of displacement activity.

Mostly, it’s been that I haven’t had a clue what to do with the novel. Following some agent and editor feedback I’m reworking it to tighten the plot up which is fine and should be pretty straightforward but I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by the scale of it. And dismantling and rebuilding something that I’ve spent so long on feels like a retrograde step, bogging me down when I want to start with one of the other ideas waiting impatiently at the back of my mind.

I’ve been putting in the hours, mostly writing and deleting the same thousand words or so and not really making any progress. Last week I had a bit of a breakthrough and the answer to the ‘what to do’ problem came to me and now I’m feeling much better about what I’m doing, in control rather than chasing a plot that’s running away from me.

That moment of clarity happened when I was working in one of the cafes I favour for writing in and reminded me that I need to reestablish a routine – that lovely fizzing feeling when the words are flowing almost without effort comes along most reliably when I keep to good habits.

So October’s writing goal is to make sure that I do that. Mornings are the best time for me to write and so I’m going to make sure that I don’t allow the hundreds of things on my to-do list to niggle at me until I’ve spent a couple of hours doing just that whether in a coffee shop or at home with Freedom turned on.

Goal for October: first 20k words in a state where I can let other people see them and to make sure that I’ve made a detailed plan for the rest of it, tying up all the dangling loose ends. Writing that on the 1st November that feels very manageable. Let’s hope that when I check in on the 1st December I can tell you that I did it.

Posted in My Writing | Tagged , | Comments Off on October’s writing – write, delete, repeat.

Laptop and latte – the best cafes for writers, Edinburgh and beyond

Posted on October 30, 2015 by vanessa

Latte and laptop - all ready for writing in one of my favourite coffee shops. Click through for the list. JK Rowling famously wrote Harry Potter in Edinburgh cafes (although not in as many as claim to be the birthplace of Harry P. I suspect) while other writers can’t imagine in other than complete silence or away from their desk or without particular background music. I’m in both camps. I prefer to edit at my desk, ideally without anyone else in the house – the family are warned not to interrupt me unless bearing a cup of tea – and although I don’t need silence, I do tend to have some instrumental classical music (Bach or Tangerine Crush for preference) to block out the noise of other people, yapping dogs and the like. The downside of living in the city centre is that you’re never far from other people’s lives.

But for first drafts, I love to write in coffee shops. I’m a truly dreadful procrastinator and if the words aren’t flowing then I can always find something else, ignored for weeks but now suddenly vital, that I absolutely must do rather than stare at a blank screen, searching for words that stubbornly refuse to come. Writing in a cafe shuts me off from the world but also gives me the company of others, the white noise of conversation helps me concentrate and someone brings me coffee at regular intervals without expecting much in the way of social interaction. Perfect.

Obviously there are rules for the perfect writing spot. They must have enough people that I don’t feel conspicuous, the conversational hubbub must be a background buzz – if I can hear individual conversations then it’s really hard not to eavesdrop a little bit, especially if it sounds juicy. We don’t mean to be rude but writers are magpies by nature. Sometimes it takes tremendous will not to lean over and interrupt to ask ‘and then what did he do?’.

Nor can writing cafes have a wi-fi connection otherwise the procrastination urge kicks in and I check my email or Twitter, or I have a quick chat with my mother on Facebook or I see whether the parcel I’m expecting is on its way or I just Google to check a fact and disappear down a fascinating rabbit hole of 1920s fashion or the history of motor racing. If I can’t get peace at home to work because we’ve workmen doing something then I do sometimes escape to do those things elsewhere but that’s what Starbucks and their free wi-fi is for. Writing cafes must be connection-free.

So here’s a round-up of some of my favourites – hopefully my readership is low enough that I won’t find them swamped with other writers next time I venture in with my laptop and an idea fizzing around my brain.

Henri, Raeburn Place, Edinburgh. The perfect writing cafe - no wi-fi, no mobile reception and excellent coffeeTop of my list of Edinburgh cafes for writing in is Henri on Raeburn Place in Stockbridge, only ten minutes’ walk from home. The tables are tucked away at the back behind the deli counter – they are my very favourite place to buy cheese – and not only do they have no wi-fi, there’s scarcely any phone reception so it’s perfect for uninterrupted writing. Tables are spaced sufficiently that you aren’t overwhelmed by the conversation of others and besides, the ladies of Edinburgh do not shout when discussing their golf or their grandchildren. That would be utterly vulgar. The coffee is fantastic, the staff are friendly and efficient and if I’m there without having had breakfast then they do lovely croissants. Aside from morning coffee-and-writing sessions, they’re open late on Friday evenings and do huge plates of charcuterie and the aforementioned cheese with great bread. Choose a bottle of wine from the shop and pay a very reasonable corkage charge.

View from the window of the cafe at the Gallery of Modern Art, EdinburghOne of the other Edinburgh coffee shops that I favour is found in the basement of the Gallery of Modern Art. It’s perfect if I’m out and about running errands or if it’s stotting down – sadly not a rare occurrence here – as it has a car park and I can nip between the raindrops from car to cuppa in less than a minute. It’s not as quiet as Henri as it’s quite an echo-ey space but if I can get a corner table by the window, it’s a very nice spot to tap away for an hour or so. And if the words don’t come and I need inspiration I can go upstairs and look at paintings, especially my favourite Scottish Colourists. Or look at the artwork that contains my late brother-in-law’s name.

The Walled Garden at Archerfield Forty-five minutes or so outside the city, and where I’m writing this in fact, is The Walled Garden at Archerfield. Based in an old Victorian vegetable garden on the Archerfield estate, there’s now a bright modern space containing a cafe, bar, gift shop, farm deli and microbrewery. With reclaimed wooden tables and a mixture of wooden chairs and benches with comfy tweed cushions, I can always find somewhere to settle myself and get my back comfortable (truly I am a martyr to my lumbar vertebrae!) and a spell here usually results in a good couple of thousand words. Plus supper for the family if they’re lucky and I get side-tracked by the deli. It’s quite a distance just for coffee-and-writing but it’s out in the East Lothian countryside and M leaves me there while he spends an hour or two walking along the beach. We really need to get another dog…

The Biscuit Cafe, Culross, FifeEven further afield, but a coffee shop I wrote in often while M was renovating our rental property in Fife, is The Biscuit Cafe in the conservation village of Culross. Tucked away beside the 17th century Palace, owned by the National Trust for Scotland, this is a tiny place which combines its coffee-and-scone activities with a pottery. The coffee’s great and the cafe space is airy and great for writing but it’s also good for people-watching and I had the most amusing conversation with a couple of American Outlander fans who were visiting some of the filming locations (Culross stood in for the village of Cranesmuir) and who were disappointed by the lack of men in kilts. I had to let them down gently, explaining that as well as being unlikely to see that many kilts, they were also unlikely to see that many men who looked like Jamie Fraser…

Cole Coffee, Oakland CA. Perfect for people-watching if not for actual writing!Even further afield is Cole Coffee in Rockridge, Oakland, just across the Bay from San Francisco. We spent four weeks here in the summer, house-swapping with a couple of retired academics who were thrilled to be able to visit the Edinburgh Festival, and Cole Coffee is on the corner of their street. To be honest, it’s not a cafe where I’m at my most productive because their little pavement tables are such wonderful vantage points from which to people watch and eavesdrop from. Frat boys from Berkley cruising down College Avenue in their Jeep Wranglers; techies from SF flush with lucre and thrilled if they’re able to snap up a 1920s Craftsman house for less than a million dollars (seriously, I could write masses about the gentrification of this area) whilst they studiously ignore the homeless guy checking out the contents of the bin next to them; the local musicians, poets and street corner philosophers sharing their thoughts over their morning cup of Java. Truly, it’s somewhere I could sit all day although I’m not sure it would be great for my word count. And the sunshine… sitting outside a cafe in Edinburgh is an infrequent joy, and you need to get out of the wind. But 25 degrees of warm sun, shining from a cloudless blue sky is glorious and the wind is just the lightest of northern Californian breezes? Perfect.

So that’s five of my favourites if you need to find somewhere to settle in for an hour or two with your laptop. Do you have any recommendations?

Posted in My Writing, Places to go, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Laptop and latte – the best cafes for writers, Edinburgh and beyond

Author Interview – Lynn Shepherd, author of The Pierced Heart

Posted on October 27, 2015 by vanessa

“This book kept me wide awake on my last long-haul flight – a reimagining of the Dracula story. Tense, terrific.” Ian Rankin’s description of Lynn Shepherd‘s The Pierced Heart was what drew it to my attention – and that of many others I’m sure.

A Victorian crime novel with elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula sounded intriguing and when I finally found time to read it I loved it and reviewed it here. Reviewed it inadequately I’m sure as I didn’t want to give away any of the many plot twists and turns. Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to pin Lynn down for an interview.

After studying English at Oxford in the 1980s and working in business for 15 years, Lynn returned to Oxford to undertake a doctorate which she combined with writing – something else that she has in common with Ian Rankin who wrote his first novels while ostensibly writing a doctoral thesis on Muriel Spark. Her books combine elements of other novels, whether Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Murder at Mansfield Park) or Charles Dickens’ London (Tom-All-Alone’s) and A Treacherous Likeness – which I haven’t read yet and must – is a fictionalised version of the real lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley. On her website, Lynn says of this: “In writing a fictional version of the Shelley’s real lives I was scrupulous to remain faithful to the facts as we know them, but allowed myself the freedom to ‘fill the silences’, in an attempt to create a story that might explain the strange and dark aspects of the Shelley’s history that even their biographers can’t explain.”

Lynn’s books have been well-received – with all four novels having starred Kirkus reviews. In addition, Murder at Mansfield Park was a #1 Kindle bestseller in the UK, Tom-All-Alone’s was a 2012 crime novel of the year for both the Spectator and Sunday Express, and A Treacherous Likeness was a BBC History magazine top ten historical novel for 2013, and one of Kirkus Reviews’ top 100 novels of that year. Lynn Shepherd is an author who should be far better known than she is at present. Anyway, to our interview….

Q. Why do you write?

For lots of reasons! For the love of it, for the intellectual challenge, for fulfilment. Not for the money (though more of that would be nice) and not especially for recognition, though reading a great review that really understands what you’re trying to achieve is one of this job’s special pleasures.

Q. Were you a childhood scribbler or was writing something you came to later in life?

A bit of both. I did write a lot of stories and even some poetry as a child, but then you get into the exams-university-career cycle, and self-expression often gets pushed down the list. It’s about finding the time for it, as much as anything else. So it may not be a coincidence that I started writing my first novel only after I went freelance as a copywriter, and ended up with more control over my time.

Q. How did you get your big break?

I’m not sure I’ve ever had a ‘big’ break! Getting an agent is always a major moment for any writer, and getting published is (hopefully) the one that follows. But any writer will probably tell you that. I was lucky to be picked up by an American publisher with my first novel, and all four of them have appeared over there. It’s quite a different market from the UK, and you need an agent who understands how that works (which thankfully mine does). It does give you exposure to a potentially vast reading public, but there can be challenges too. For example, two of my books have different titles in the US (Tom-All-Alone’s is The Solitary House, and A Treacherous Likeness is A Fatal Likeness). That’s quite tough to manage, especially these days with the internet. And it can be a nightmare on social media – by the time you’ve tweeted both titles you’ve hardly any characters left to say anything!

Desk 2Q. What’s your writing routine? Bustling cafe or silent solitude? Crack of dawn or midnight oil? Laptop or pen and paper?

My novel-writing routine is exactly the same as my copywriting routine: gym first thing then at my desk at the PC by 8.30 to work through till about 5. I’m not an evening person and will move mountains to avoid working late into the evening – I almost always have to do it all again the next day, so it’s invariably a waste of time.

Q. What writer do you most admire and what would you like to ask them?

My favourite living writer is probably AS Byatt, though I do prefer her earlier works to the ones she’s done more recently. She’s an extremely intellectual writer, and yet manages to combine the richness of the ideas with a popular appeal. The Booker prize-winning Possession is probably the best example. If I ever met her, I think I would probably ask her about that.

Q. What book do you recommend most often to other people?

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. An absolutely enormous book (over a million words) but a forgotten 18th-century jewel and a masterpiece of European culture. I wrote my doctorate on Richardson, so he’s a special hero of mine. It was great fun being able to talk about him with Lucy Worsley for her new series on the evolution of the romantic novel, A Very British Romance.

Q. What book would you most like to have written?

Probably The Lord of the Rings (another favourite). How amazing to have been able to create something that’s caught the imagination of so many generations.

Q. Aside from writing, what skill or achievement are you most proud of?

When I was working for Guinness PLC in the 1990s, I created an environmental and humanitarian initiative called the Water of Life. More than a decade later, it’s still going strong, and has brought clean water to over five million people in the last five years alone. I am both proud and humbled that it all started with my idea.

Q. Where is your happy place?

Oxford has always been the city I’ve loved most, and I’m lucky that I now live there. My happy place is probably anywhere my cats are – they always make me smile!

Q. If you weren’t a writer what would you do?

I’d still be a writer! My ‘day job’ is writing for companies, so that’s what I’d be doing if I wasn’t doing novels as well. I’d like to do more broadcast work – I enjoy giving talks at festivals and the small amount of Radio and TV I’ve done has been a blast. I’d love to do more of that.

Q. What piece of advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Don’t give up! It’s a hard slog getting published, and talent is only a relatively small part of it. You need to work hard, keep working hard, and then work a bit harder. And then you might get lucky. But I firmly believe you have to earn your luck.

Thanks for finding time for this Lynn and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work

 

Posted in Author interviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Author Interview – Lynn Shepherd, author of The Pierced Heart

How I blog now.

Posted on October 26, 2015 by vanessa

How I began blogging, how it's evolved and how I blog now. After almost a decade of churning out words on the interwebz, I’ve been looking at how my personal style of blogging has changed.

I began way back in 2006, when LiveJournal was still relatively common for those who wanted to keep an online journal; when Facebook was barely even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye; when Bebo and My Space were the main social media sites, although lacking some of the social aspects that enabled Facebook to take over; before Twitter; before Snapchat or Vine or Instagram or Periscope or any of the many other ways that we interact, often with complete strangers, online today.

Blogging had been around for a few years by then – originally used by people in the tech world and then taken up by people writing about political issues and so on. In 2002, it became more mainstream when a blogger, Heather Armstrong, who writes the Dooce blog was fired from her job after some less than tactful comments about her employers, giving us a new verb, Dooce-ed – fired for what you write on your blog. Google Adsense was launched in 2003, enabling people to earn money from their personal sites and in 2005, the Huffington Post launched, acting as an aggregator of blog content, soon becoming one of the biggest sites of its type.

Blogging had gone mainstream and with increased awareness of user-friendly platforms such as Typepad, Blogger and WordPress, more and more people started blogging. One statistic I found estimated that in 2006 there were 35 million blogs worldwide; by 2011 this figured was estimated at over 170 million. Obviously, these are just guesstimates because so many blogs are whirling around in the ether, neglected and broken, abandoned after that first brave ‘hello world’ post.

I started my first blog in 2006 because I was setting up Fidra Books and I’d started reading a number of blogs by other small independent publishing companies, booksellers, readers, reviewers and so on. Adding a blog page to our website meant that I could interact with our customers and other people in the industry and add fresh content to our website on a regular basis which was good for SEO purposes.

The Fidra Blog is off-line at present and I’m not sure whether I’ll ever revisit that content publicly. I re-read some of it recently and I’m not sure how interesting anyone would now find the years-old musings of someone setting up a publishing house or wittering about some of the more arcane and illogical aspects of the booktrade. Or the panicking and obsessing of someone a few years later who was in the process of opening a bookshop.

The blog was popular – thousands, sometimes ten of thousands, of readers each week which was an awful lot back in those days – and was very useful in getting our books and our bookshop coverage in the mainstream media and talked about on other blogs. Gradually, my postings became less frequent as I had less time and after five years or so, I felt a bit been-there-done-that about blogging.

I also felt as though every single less-than-diplomatic thing I said had the potential to affect our business. So I set up State of Independents (see what I did there?) where I, and occasionally others, could write about independent bookselling and publishing in an environment less tied to our business. But that very separation meant that it wasn’t updated enough – it felt less relevant and although there are some good posts there which still ring true today and which I’ll probably dust down for a ‘from the archive’ series at some point.

The third, and current, incarnation of my blogging is this one. My own personal space where I write purely for myself and about the things that interest me. I set up this blog on my own domain in October 2012, just after we sold the bookshop and although for a while I wasn’t the most diligent blogger, it’s been nice to let it grow and see what I wanted to write about. Some days I have lots of readers and on others I think only my mum stops by. Stats showing lots of visitors are nice to look at but they’re not the be-all and end-all.

Mostly, I write about books – it’s my job at Fidra Books and The Glenogle & Bell Book Company, and it’s my passion. I review books, aiming for at least one review per week, although my reviews are not long-winded pronouncements but rather the sort of thing you’d find on a staff recommendation card in a bookshop – once a bookseller and all that. I also interview authors and bloggers and since winning Pitch Perfect at Bloody Scotland I also write about the novel I’m currently working on.

And I write about anything else I fancy or which I think may be of interest to my readers – now measured in the hundreds rather than the thousands. I don’t have a ‘brand’, I don’t carry any advertising and I don’t work with any companies to write sponsored posts. Mind you, if I was offered a fabulous trip somewhere gorgeous I could probably force myself to write about it! At a time when blogging seems to be getting ever more slick and glossy, I’m resolutely old-school. And I like that.

If you’re a blogger how has it evolved for you?

Posted in Blogging, Thoughts | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on How I blog now.