About Me

 

THANK YOU FOR VISITING!

Write Enough is a ‘blogazine’ where I hope to capture and share my ‘right enough’ moments- those instances of recognition and insight that occur as I engage with the Arts, with nature, with politics and with life in general.  It will also ensure that I write enough to keep my own creative drive flowing. I hope you find posts to be interesting and thought-provoking – if so please comment,  subscribe and share. 

In this blog I hope to give readers a glimpse into my  life of reading, writing, working and surviving -  as I try to make sense of it one post at a time.  It’s no exaggeration when I say I write to keep sane and to stay alive. I love the written word – creating it and reading it. The ability to read is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me, developing my abilities as a writer is the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself. One of the sayings that I both love the most and so desperately want to be the most true is ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.

Subjects I blog about include the personal, the political and the cultural.

I have written and self-published one novel and am currently working on my second. I’m a regular contributor to the free bi-monthly e-zine for writers ‘Words with Jam’ http://www.wordswithjam.co.uk  I also write short stories for adults and children and have an outline in place for a  children’s novel.

I am an eclectic reader of fiction, non-fiction, novels, shorts, magazines and I’m intolerant of  the literary/commercial divide.

I am a fifty-something Scot, living in Skye, which is the largest of the Inner Hebridean islands, and is situated off the north-west coast of Scotland. It’s a beautiful place to live – its mountains and lochs mean that there is a spectacular view whatever way you look. I earn my living as a primary school teacher – 32 years in and still learning and getting a buzz when it goes right. I especially enjoy teaching writing. But if I was offered early retirement I’d probably go quietly. One of the highlights of my teaching career has organising a teacher exchange with colleagues in South Africa. I spent some time teaching in a township school in Cape Town – a life changing time.

I’ve done a fair bit of travelling in my life – Antarctica is the only continent I haven’t visited. The places that have left the biggest impressions – Israel, South Africa and Australia.

It’s my dream to earn at least part of my living from writing – but in the meantime, I scribble away in the evenings, at the weekends and in the holidays. It was following my diagnosis with ovarian cancer that I really took my writing seriously. The deal I did with the survival gods was ‘get me through this illness and I’ll stop procrastinating and get that novel written’. I survived and I wrote ‘Change of Life’.

When I can drag myself away from the word processor I enjoy long walks, gardening, music,art and, of course, reading. I also have a penchant for penguins… the birds not the biscuit.