If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know that I’m fascinated by the wide variety of cultures that have based some or all of their time measurements on the moon. Whilst some societies have imported these concepts from elsewhere (as the Romans probably based their first system on one or other of the earlier Greek […]
Having got his pictures, Jason is weaving his magic to turn raw images into the cover picture, and I need to decide on the words for the back of the book. You might have thought this would be straightforward – it’s writing, after all! But it’s not easy, to give a flavour of a whole […]
It is a fundamental characteristic of human nature to try to make sense of the world and the phenomena we notice within it. And yet, while watching the moon, in spite of my modern education, it’s not hard to strip away scientific explanations for the existence and movements of the objects I see, and […]
Once I made the decision to work towards Kindle-publishing a book, it became clear that I would have to learn more about modern technology. I investigated a number of blogs about writing and publishing, and found Catherine Ryan Howard’s both informative and entertaining (http://catherineryanhoward.com/), and so I bought her ebook, Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide […]
The trouble with deciding to self-publish a book is that it can load you up with a whole load of tasks that are not writing, and which are well outside my natural comfort zone.
I’m certainly not one of those writers who always knew that this was the career for them, who had six novels in their desk drawer by the age of ten, who wrote for their infants’ school newspaper, or had winning stories in junior magazines. Writing was something I did as and when necessary: essays for […]
Once upon a time, when life was perhaps less complicated, but certainly harder, troupes of travelling actors brought relief from the daily grind by performing plays in the courtyards of inns. The hostelry would have been built around the yard, so that people could watch the play from the windows of rooms, or from the […]
A week or so ago, I talked about the Roman calendar, but they were by no means the only ones who used the cyclic nature of the moon’s phases to measure time. In fact, as in many other fields of scientific endeavour, the Romans probably based their first calendar on one of the Greek ones. […]
In this sort of puzzle, the author is trying to muddle you. So focus on one fact at a time, and see what you can work out!
A long time ago, in the 1970s, my grandmother and I were chatting about kitchens. My husband and I had just purchased our first home, a tiny terraced house that was cheap because no work had been done on it since it was built about eighty years before. It had packed earth floors downstairs, no […]