Chapter 4 Finished! Now a New Idea...

Chapter 4 is finally finished and posted. See the sidebar if you still have any interest in my snail’s progress through antiquity to the shores of America, and the backwoods of RI where fact and fiction meld in a tandem drift, moment to moment, day to day, month to month, memory to make-believe.

I have had a new idea, thanks to Niamh Boyce, a writer who blogs at Words A Day. She wrote a piece about her intent to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It is a challenge to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in the month of November. I was so excited … what a wonderful plan for procrastinators like me! The caveat to which you are asked to agree, however, is that you must start a novel from scratch at the beginning of the month, although outlines are OK. Hmmm…a problem.

Well, maybe not. I have learned in my side trips into the world of poetry that sometimes poems are made better by deleting even favorite lines…nothing should be sacred. So, what if I start a novel from the juncture I have reached at the end of Chapter 4 of Written In Stone, a working title I had already intended to change anyway. I have been feeling that I am patiently filling in background details to get to the real story. Rationalization perhaps, but I’ll give it some more thought and decide if I want to accept this new challenge of frantic writing every day, at least 1,667 words each day, or five to six pages (double/triple that if you have a life on the side, need to feed people, do the laundry and so forth.) I have two weeks to decide for sure.

Here is the link to the NaNoWriMo website. I have already optimistically established my account! Leave a comment here if you decide to try it yourself.

Words and Music



The Writing Game

at Bishop FM Radio, Bishop Auckland, County Durham, UK 



Many thanks

to authors Wendy Robertson and Avril Joy for spotlighting my poetry and novel on Wendy's community radio program, The Writing Game, a monthly, hour long, radio program aimed at both writers and readers, broadcast on community radio station 105.9 Bishop FM, County Durham, UK.

I met Avril online in January, 2011 as we participated in "The River of Stones" project on our respective blogs. Avril, author of The Sweet Track, presents writing workshops in Durham County, England and is co-hostess on Wendy's community radio program. I was thrilled when she proposed reading some of my work on The Writing Game. If you'd like to listen to Avril's reading, the podcast of the program can be heard here at :

Words and Music,

Episode 13 of The Writing Game*

* Avril's reading of my poetry is the last item on the podcast:

she has chosen "Capture" and "A Place Apart"

and from Notes on my blog, The English Laundress,

"So Far Away"



So Far Away

I'm so far away from the Laundress in these early, snowy days of spring in Rhode Island that I fear I can never return here. I have strayed into the deep waters of poetry in Knot-In-Line. I think I'm drowning. I don't know what I'm doing, or why I'm pressing forward on a path I never intended to take. It's a detour that threatens to suck me into a tunnel of no return.

How is it that a novel seems to have become a confessional. What is there to tell? That is truly the question here. I am stuck in my own laundry room today, washing for others, listening to the drone of the huge wood chipper outside - the grind and spit of the trunks that met their death to bring us light, relieve the heavy darkness of our white pine canopy.

I tap my fingers so quick and lightly across the keyboard, back and forth, unthinking, yet perhaps praying the letters to tell me a story on their own - like a song on piano keys. No, they don't know her any better than I do. The best I can promise myself now is to keep her name in the side-bar of Knot-In-Line --- for now --- until ---