Irritability and Jealousy. I don't have pet peeves; I have whole kennels of irritation. Whoopie Goldberg Irritability! Hardly a noble...

'Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.' Horace Bushnell It’s a tricky emotion guilt and it has a number of guises. You commit a crime, and...

Empathy is a much-used word these days. We know we should be less judgemental and more empathetic. We know it because it’s taught in...

This week’s emotions are contentment and doubt. ‘True contentment is not having everything but in being satisfied with everything you...

Last week I wrote about emotions providing a landscape for characters to exist in and made a half-serious suggestion that we give finding...

Writers create emotional landscapes where characters play out the gamut of human feelings. Those feelings need to be real and resonate...

For those of you who read the Lily O’Hara series it would be hard not to note that the titles all begin with the letter W. What Remains,...

Perhaps during the last two years of the pandemic lockdowns one might assume that this would have been the right time to write. Plenty of...

“There is nothing permanent except change.” -Heraclitus Written April 2020 This has not been the year I expected it to be. Although the...

Eulogy (noun: a tribute to someone who has just died) A thing that is so hard to write and deliver. And those not giving the eulogy will...

📷 I am a note keeper. I keep all sorts of notes. Writing ideas, names for characters, events that make me laugh or cry, recipes,...

📷 “Names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Dale Carnegie. A name is so important and I’m sure there are many...

It’s my mother’s birthday today and despite the fact that she died 15 years 3 months and 8 days ago when I started to talk about her to...

📷 When I work with young people who are miserable, angry or scared I ask them what they think the next day will be like, or the day...

📷 A recent trip to Melbourne made me think about the merits of walking without a destination in mind. It seemed that in the city centre...

📷 It’s hard to explain the sense of dread and grief that accompanies the end of one’s summer holidays. The end of January signifies the...

📷 Okay so only one of those is a real word! And the other is mine. Both have contributed to the festive world that exists for the week...

📷 It’s hard to believe that finishing writing a book is anything but a great relief. But there is a strange sense of sorrow in the...

📷 The art of over thinking a dozen different things at once; coupled with significant worrying about things over which I have no...

Some of us go through life thinking that at a certain age we will have all the answers and that there is little else we can discover...