January, the month for setting goals and intentions. The new year brings opportunity – thoughts, ideas, plans. I’ve always struggled with new year resolutions, of committing myself to targets that feel contrived and anchored to a sense of scarcity. Resolutions seem to involve giving up on things or pledging to do things I don’t enjoy.…
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Back in January, I posted about my writing plans for the year (generally, I find, a good way to engender some sort of personal accountability around intentions). December feels like a good time to revisit some of those intentions – if only to remind myself that I’ve probably achieved more than I might think. 2022…
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Towards the end of each year, I tend to write a round-up of my ten favourite books from the twelve or so months preceding. However, 2022 has been a different sort of year for me in terms of blogging – a new job and changing domestic arrangements have meant that many of my old blogging…
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Earlier this summer, my husband and I made an evening visit to the harbour at Dunbeath on our way back to Caithness after a day of appointments. In the preceding days, I had been reading Neil M. Gunn’s Highland River and wanted to reacquaint myself with the information boards on Gunn – who was born…
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In 2021, Isla, a student of creative writing at the University of the Highlands and Islands, asked me to share my experiences of writing my first novel Castles of Steel and Thunder in this author interview. I’m happy to say that Isla also seemed to enjoy the follow-up book, Pieces of Sky and Stone, and…
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Earlier this month, myself and fellow writers Andrea Wotherspoon, Ian Leith and Charlotte Platt launched new book Finn and Friends at John O’Groats – A Collection of Verse and Stories. The launch marked the culmination of almost a year’s worth of work, which started with us meeting at John O’Groats to discuss how three new…
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I’ve written a lot about stories, how they shape and define places. Here in the north Highlands, it can sometimes feel that our stories are being written (or perhaps, rewritten) for us – a landscape of wilderness in which we not appear. I was comforted recently reading The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks’ beautiful account of…
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This summer, I wrote a piece about living on the popular ‘North Coast 500’ route through the lens of my own experience as a resident of Caithness. Entitled ‘Poo, Potholes and Park-Ups – Why Highlanders are Tired of Scotland’s North Coast 500 Route,’ the article was probably more even-handed than the alliterated headline might suggest.…
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It’s been some time since I shared a reading post on the blog, the result of a slowing-down of my motivation for putting finger to keyboard and sending words out into the blogosphere. In the background, I’ve been absorbing the words of other authors, and it’s rare for a day to pass without me picking…
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Years ago, when I had a ‘proper’ job, I was a participant in a set of development centre activities for graduates. It was standard development centre stuff, including participation in group activities and receiving feedback on performance by an assigned observer who monitored the tasks. In one such exercise, I was observed in a team…
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