My Writing Process: Blog Tag Tour
So here we go, one of those writer’s tag games. The multi-versifying poet, performer, celebrant and sailor Sarah Hymas has asked me to share a little about my current writing project, and then pass the baton along. I’m going to keep this brief-ish, because really I ought to be working on my current writing project! Which is the second novel…
Or Daughter comes out to play
For a poet, used to fretting over lines and images for months, writing a novel in a year is a fascinating, not to say teeny-tiny bit terrifying challenge. I am enjoying it, though, and starting to really trust the process – there’s something immensely reassuring about the way the words flow onto the page, and one chapter springboards into another. …
A Small State in Hot Water
To conclude my travel research for my second novel, Astra, I visited Iceland for a week. Astra is set in Mesopotamia in a new nation called Is-Land, a small state formed in the aftermath of a global environmental and economic collapse (we all know it’s coming, don’t we?). In Icelandic, Iceland is called Ísland, but…
Between the Rivers
In our country a look a wave of the hand means the world In our country there are no terraces of paradise no rewards from ‘The North Gate’ Bejan Matur Wikipedia will give you all the background facts: 25 to 30 million Kurds inhabit the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a region known since antiquity as…
Land of Buttermilk and Daisies
So why Kurdistan? As readers of previous posts may have gathered, I am here location scouting for my second novel, Astra. Without giving too much of the plot away, the book is set a century from now, after global warming has rendered much of the planet unfit for human habitation and the survivors of the catastrophe are slowly trying to…
Step by Step to the Steppes
So, after two days in Istanbul – during which I discovered all the trains I wanted to take aren’t running – I’m packed and ready to fly to Diyarbakir tomorrow. This evening then, marks the end of the beginning of the first leg of my research trip to Kurdistan and Palestine. Does that make tonight the right ankle of my…