Short stories help

There are so many things to write about. Thank you, first, for all your lovely comments on my post about Cleo, and for your wonderful emails too. It gets a little easier each day. And short stories help me, as they always do. I just read The River Nemunas from Anthony Doerr's astonishingly wonderful collection, Memory Wall. I didn't know the story would be about death and grief, and it tackles these so lightly yet so powerfully, and it felt absolutely true, absolutely right to me, now, even though it is about a 15-year-old American orphan living in Lithuania with her grandfather. That is the power of fiction, isn't it?

I am busy preparing for ShortStoryVille on Saturday, for the session I am chairing on reading short stories. Is there anything you would like me to ask our three panel members, Scott Pack, David Hebblethwaite and Clare Hey, all of whom are readers but not short story writers? I have quite a list of questions myself, but more are welcome, leave a comment here. A whole day of short stories is definitely keeping me going right now, I love nothing more than talking about them and spending time with other people who love nothing more than talking about them. I'm also reading later, together with some other wonderful local authors, and haven't decided yet what to read. I will leave that til the last minute. Something older, something new, perhaps something with a cat in it, but then there's the risk I will blubber, so perhaps not.

I will write about my time at Hawthornden soon, but here are a few pics as tasters until then:

Bye for a while

There's no time, there's never enough time - to tell you what an astonishingly good week I had last week tutoring my first Arvon course with Sarah Salway! To tell you how much I learned... how much fun we had. I'm off now to the Hawthornden Castle Writers Retreat in Scotland for 4 weeks, with very very very little Internet access (maybe the odd dribble of it) - taking no fiction with me to read at all, a "short story fast"  -  wish me luck! See you all back here at the end of June, happy writing!