Or: How I think about writing my books, without words getting in the way This is a picture of Isolde. Or at least a version of Isolde. She doesn’t ride a cow at any point in Salt Lick. Making pictures like this helps me write my novels. Not so I know what characters or places... Continue Reading →
Ten Weeks and Three Score Years – the future is coming
It is ten weeks until my second novel Salt Lick is published. As we move towards that future date, I wanted to look at the path the story of Salt Lick takes into its own imagined future. It is set some years from now in a world that is in many ways easily recognisable. The... Continue Reading →
Oh England, my lionhearts*
I dreaded today. I dreaded a familiar feeling of disappointment and let-down, the longing for a new season to start so that with luck some of the grime of failure could be wiped away by a good season for my team. I dreaded a day trying to avoid belligerence and bitterness about what should clearly... Continue Reading →
Haturdays – final hat
I have been quiet on the Haturday front as I have been busy editing my book Salt Lick (I’m pleased to say it is now ready for publication on 16th September.) But I still have one more hat to make. It is to honour and remember the women killed in the time of lockdown and... Continue Reading →
On a Scale of One to Dead
I see the smiling face of a young woman, whose name will lodge uneasily in my memory, perhaps long after I remember that it is there because she was murdered. I wish I could do something, save her, hold her hand. There is no way to react that seems appropriate, there is no correct response. ... Continue Reading →
What is vandalism?
"I can’t think of anything more thuggish, more of an obtuse or deliberate act of vandalism that refusing to take down a statue to the glory of a slaver."
Fury – it’s making me sick.
One of the great bonuses of being an optimist is that I am often able to push difficulties aside, or wait them out, or do something to challenge them. When no solution is available, I think of the old favourite children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and the explanation that the woods, or... Continue Reading →
Flash Sale
We are having a clear-out and I have decided to not hang on to everything, so I am selling some work at knock-down prices and will put any money raised towards funding Salt Lick. There is a mix of Seventy Seven Seas products (my Etsy shop, where I sell recycled hand made art and objects)... Continue Reading →
Cows for pledgers
I have been experimenting with watercolour mono/lino prints. I cut the lino block a while ago and have been trying different ways of using it. I am very happy with these and will be sending one to anyone who pledges for Salt Lick, or anyone who upgrades or adds a donation to their pledge. Unbound... Continue Reading →
The Bonds That Separate
Patriot: Late 16th century: from French patriote, from late Latin patriota ‘fellow countryman’, from Greek patriōtēs, from patrios ‘of one's fathers’, from patris ‘fatherland’. Recently I read a thoughtful article by John Mitchinson on the subject of Englishness, the same morning as I was interrogating my reasons for setting my book Salt Lick in England,... Continue Reading →
Lulu Allison, contemporary fiction author 