Do you have a writing place; a favourite corner, a quiet room? I do a lot of my short story writing in bed. In my pyjamas of course! What were you thinking?  

I don’t go to bed intending to write but once there and daytime distractions are gone my mind drifts to story plots. I have a recorder at my bedside to preserve ideas but rarely use it. I’m a bit old fashioned; it’s allowed, I’m a grandmother after all. Instead I have my favourite notebook, a ruled, bound, hard cover sporting a...

The question on the tip of any writer’s tongue is where do the ideas come from?  For me that can be almost anywhere; I’ll illustrate this with seven examples from my own writing.

1.      When my grandmother died I inherited her postcard collection which contained cards from around 1908 to 1918. I was intrigued with the letters and notes on these, the language of the times, the way they were used as conversational notes and to arrange get togethers. Also noticeable was the transition from...