Author: Paula Harmon

Getting Unstuck?

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

It’s been three months since I last posted a blog post. I’m very sorry. Life has been unexpectedly sticky.

Nothing major, you understand.

The last book in the Margaret Demeray series came out in September, and I’m still suffering book bereavement. On the other hand, since then several readers have written to ask me to continue the series, so I’m thinking about that and Margaret and Fox may have to put up with the inside of my brain again sooner than they’d thought.

Then, I retired from my long career in October.

The plan, such as it was, was that once I had my involvement in a local literary festival was over I would concentrate on writing, scheduling more talks and working more effectively on the business side of both. I had a novel to finish which I’d started in early 2025 and which had been interrupted on and off for months. But I’d plenty of time now didn’t I?

Best laid plans, as Robert Burns would say, gang aft agley. My involvement took a lot more out of my time (and me) than I’d anticipated, and then, of course, came Christmas.

Christmas meant the arrival for several days of children plus one of their friends, my in-laws and my mother (although my mother doesn’t have to stay overnight). Complicating matters in terms of space, sometime in the summer, my husband started to redecorate the hall, which meant moving the piano, shoe racks, bureau, wine rack into another room where they are blocking a bookcase and various things I periodically want. He promised the decorating would be done by Christmas. I probably should have specified which Christmas he meant. It clearly wasn’t 2025.

Around about mid-December, there’s always a part of me that wonders why on earth I’m cooking yet another Christmas dinner for lots of people, having done it most years since about 1981. This feeling usually wears off by Boxing Day when we’re happily eating cold cuts and contemplating a Turkey Curry for the 27th. Next year, perhaps I will hand the whole lot over to my children and hope they clear up after themselves. (Flying pigs may assist them.)

Through all this, the work in progress stopped and started until the whole thing got stuck. It feels as if the book doesn’t quite know what it wants to be – a murder mystery? A straight historical novel? This is the most muddled ‘first draft’ I think I’ve ever created, and that’s saying something.

The third book in the Lulmouth Bay series will hopefully be out this Spring. I also want to start the sequel to The Incomer soon if not Margaret 7. But somehow despite the fact that I now have more days to write in, all this seems overwhelming.

I feel mentally stuck. Part of this is possibly Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s been dark and miserable in my part of the world for what seems like years rather than on and off for months, but could part of it being to do with no longer working in the ‘day job’ and finding a new rhythm for my life in which writing isn’t ‘as well as’ but the main focus?

I never thought that I would miss my job, and truthfully, I don’t.  I don’t think there’s been a moment that I’ve regretted retiring, but there have been several days when at nine a.m, I half want to join a daily team catch up to talk about goals and challenges for the day and have a general chat about what everyone’s watching on TV or their family dramas.

I even dream about my former job and colleagues and supposedly, that means I’m yearning for something about who I was when I was working. Is this true? If so, what is it I’m missing?

I never felt defined by my job, and I am up to my ears with things to fill my time now. But maybe I’m missing the validation which a paid job with an employer gave me.

It’s hard to explain that what I’m doing now is work and takes up as much if not more of my time as my job did. People tend to think that writers divide their time between talking intellectual nonsense in cafés with other authors, wandering with the Muse in meadows and pouring deathless prose onto paper. But for myself I spend very little time in cafés, and conversation with authors is most likely to be despairing over deadlines and edits. As for the Muse, she’s frequently AWOL or providing too many contradictory and/or nonsensical ideas at once.  ‘But you enjoy writing!’ people say. Not always. Sometimes even housework seems more appealing.

As I once wrote in ‘Feeling Failure’ the most useful course I ever took was on the change curve. I knew retiring would be a change, but it was a change I’d been looking forward to for a long time and I didn’t expect to feel much in the way of loss, and I’m not sure I do. But I do feel a little discombobulated and a little stuck, which is, in fact the bottom part of the change curve. I know from experience this needn’t be where I stay. Even writing this down and admitting to it helps me remember that maybe I just need to let my mind process things in its own sweet, peculiar way until I climb out.

I have to remind myself that while I don’t have a daily team meeting, I have people to talk to about the little things, and I have at least one good writer friend to whinge at regularly about writing (poor woman – you know who you are and thank you) and others less regularly.

And I think my characters will forgive me eventually. They too are navigating change. And, if they don’t change the plot too much in edits, they’ve a murder to solve too. So all three of us had better get a move on.

Words Copyright (c) 2026 Paula Harmon. All rights reserved. Not to be used without the author’s permission. Not to be used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI). Image credit: ID 330921518 © Antonio Solano | Dreamstime.com

Connectedness

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned it before, but once I had a vivid dream in which every single person I’d ever known was taking part in a football match while riding bicycles.

My overriding (pardon the pun) subconscious thought was not ‘How can you play football while riding a bicycle?’ but ‘Oh no! How can I have all those people together? They have nothing in common! Some of them wouldn’t agree on anything!’ Then I realised: ‘Oh. They have me in common. How dull.’

Since team sports fill me with overwhelming dread, I assume dreaming about a field of crazed cyclists was probably stress related and the people were incidentals, but maybe there was something else about my connectedness with others which was relevant at the time.

It’s highly unlikely that those people will ever all be in the same room, though I’d like to think that they’d find something other than me in common if they did.

Maybe I would be in the centre of one group (not my favourite place to be) but equally, each of those people would be in the centre of their own, with a  set of connections. Some would include me and others wouldn’t. Ultimately, there’d be a massive network of people all of whose connections would probably cross and interlink and double-back.

Family trees are even more of a tangle. I’m in the process of working out mine. As I’m half Scottish, I’ve got two databases to research in (and I haven’t even attempted the Irish side), so this is quite slow, but things are becoming clearer.

I’ve got clerks, shoemakers, farmers, servants, launderers, laundry owners, hoteliers (small), accountants and even a writer or two in the mix. But no one gets excited about being descended  from ordinary people so it’s fun to relate that my mother’s great-aunt stated with absolute certainty they were directly descended from the Scottish royal family (albeit ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’).

On my father’s side, one of my great-grandfathers was a genealogist whose book is still used as source material, and I can’t remember if there’s allegedly royal blood in my smaller pool of English genes in my branch (though I recall someone allegedly knighted for fishing a whale off London Bridge).

Possibly I need to look again since around 25% of British people can trace ancestry back to the Plantagenets and maybe that includes me. As an even higher proportion of Scots can allegedly trace their ancestry back to the Stuarts, if Great-great Aunt Annie was right, could I be sort of royal?

Lineage (unlikely or otherwise) aside, working out what connects you to someone else or to a group is part of being human. However knowing how to do it is something that some – including me – find difficult. I’ve learned some skills over the years, but I still fear that when meeting new people I exude either an air of desperation or of disinterest. It’s actually panic. Will I be able to think of anything interesting to say? Will they ask me something impossible to answer? Will I come across as weird and/or boring and/or needy? I can’t remember a time when that wasn’t my starting point.

Networks can be a blessing or a curse or downright manipulated. In the latter camp, there’s ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’ and the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ for getting on in life. I’ve even heard people who’ve sent children to private schools admit that the child might get a better education in a good state school, but they wouldn’t make the connections which will help them get on in life. The tragedy is that they’re sometimes right.

Then there’s finding out you have something in common with someone and joining a group where you feel safe, comfortable, certain, protected. So far so good.

But what if the group can’t be challenged? What if by disagreeing  with other members, or behaving in a way which breaks ‘the rules’ you risk breaking your connection and ultimately finding yourself suddenly on the outside.

It happened to me. Knowing tethering lines had snapped and wondering if I’d ever find anywhere to retie them was necessary to my growth as a human being and becoming my authentic self, but it was terrifying, upsetting and difficult at the time.

We don’t need connections which stop us from being honest about what we really feel or believe for fear of rejection, which ultimately create cliques and divisions in society.

We do need connections which challenge as well as comfort, which enlighten, which let us be ourselves, and which ultimately create bridges and healing in society.

There is a word Ubuntu in, I believe, the Nguni language which is extremely difficult to translate into English but relates to a positive concept of what human connectedness should mean. Broadly, if you behave in a way in which the whole community benefits, then you are exhibiting what human behaviour should be and thereby become whole. If you want to know more, here’s an article.

Inasmuch as I understand it, the concept seems a much better connectedness than the Old Boys’ Network or the smothering safety of a clique.

If we spent more time recognising the needs we hold in common for safety, love, shelter, justice, freedom, rather than fearing the things we don’t have in common, the stronger the human network would be and the easier it would be to improve things for all humanity. I know it’s not that simple, but it’s surely a starting point.

It’s certainly a good deal more useful than working out whether you’re royal or not.

Apart from the fact that the ‘real’ heir to the throne may actually be an Australian, I’m not sure any supposed royal DNA in my blood counts for much.

After all, humans are supposed to share 50% of DNA with bananas and daffodils, and some may say I, personally, share even more.

 No one is going to crown me anytime soon.

Thank heavens for that.

[UPDATE: did some more family research with my mother and discovered some bigwigs back in the 17th C. Haven’t got back as far as royalty though, and it clearly all went horribly wrong somewhere around then! Or right of course – I expect the clerks, shoemakers and servants were more interesting really.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Technical Network Abstract Background Stock Vector – Illustration of design, overlapping: 63068618

Notebooks – The Conundrum

~ Paula Harmon ~ 4 Comments

I recently read an article by Jason McBride about the importance, and indeed joy, of keeping ‘ugly notebooks’. If you want to read it, here’s the link.

I have to say that I find Jason’s notebooks anything but ugly, which is more than can be said for mine, but that’s because I use mine in a different sort of way.

It’s hard to remember the first writing notebook I specifically bought, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s still in a drawer or box somewhere, still untouched, because it was too pretty to write in.

I imagine I’d planned to simply write stories, novels and poems in some sort of logical fluid way. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t know where to start exactly meant that I left it pristine, and carried on writing on scraps of paper or cheaper notebooks instead, and even pressed school exercise books into play.

Below, you can see my Latin revision book, and a selection of other notebooks I used for probably fifteen years from mid teens on when I was trying to get something actually finished.

I bought the blue and green ring-binder aged seventeen, aiming to be organised, putting different things in different sections and moving stuff around as necessary. I took it to university, planning to finish a novel which had a potential publisher, although I never did and it’s still mostly in my head.

Anyone who knew me then thought my writing was bad, but people who know me now will surely attest that it was a lot better than it is now. The notebooks and the ring binder are full of stories, novel concepts and first chapters, all handwritten. But as you can see they’re also full of planning. I have absolutely zero idea who these characters are, or what any of the code in red means after all this time, but note to my long-suffering editor who sometimes thinks I have a loose idea of plotting, at least you can see I have always tried. I also, as you can see, sketched out my thoughts about what characters looked like.

There was then a sort of creative pause of nearly twenty years in which I drew and painted some, but wrote very very little, until a series of events got me going again.

After that, I started to use notebooks again. Some of those the second image were bought by me (just because) and some were gifts. If you’re someone who’s gifted me one and it’s not there, don’t worry, it’ll be somewhere in the house or writing shed, shielding its contents.

The thing is, I now use notebooks differently.

I find writing stories by hand very hard now. I can genuinely type faster. I find reading what I’ve written even harder. But I do sometimes take one to a writing course and do the exercises in it, and occasionally, I write poems or pen pictures by hand as it uses a different part of my creative mind.

As before, I use the notebooks for:

  • Plotting
  • Working out characters’ ages and interrelationships.

But now, I also use them for:

  • To do lists for the business of writing
  • Blue-sky thinking/brainstorming with myself when I’m stuck to work out what the problem is and how to overcome it.
  • Jotting down notes about things I mustn’t forget to include at some point, but not now.
  • Asking myself questions that I realise I need to answer when I’m editing ‘Where has X gone?’, ‘What did Y do exactly?’ or, as you can see, ‘When was Crippen exactly?’

Another person might use notebooks in some sort of order – one for each book, or for each time of mental activity, not starting a new one till an old one is full. But despite being quite sensible and usually organised, for some reason, I don’t. I pick up whichever notebook is closest when I’m thinking about something, or perhaps the one with a cover that ‘calls to me’ that particular day and use it.

There are minuses and pluses to this. It can take a while to find what I remember noting, but, it can also be a joy when I come across something I’d forgotten.

So yes, my notebooks (on the inside) are pretty ugly and would make very little sense to anyone else.

I rarely draw characters now (although you can see a red story-board for a possible promo video below). My sketches (of other things entirely) are chiefly in sketchbooks which I don’t think are ugly at all (even if the sketch didn’t work out).

Perhaps I should start something hybrid like others do, sticking in physical prompts – leaves, postcards, pictures – and responding in sketches or writing. It’s worth thinking about.

Of course, journals and diaries are something else. Below is a drawing I did for last year’s Inktober to the prompt ‘Journal’. I have a couple of old journals from my late teen/early twenties too which are something else altogether and probably need to be ‘lost’ before someone reads about my young adult angst. I’d much rather they were like my drawing.

But at the moment, I quite like my different books: my sketchbooks for an outlet of creativity with no particular purpose and my notebooks for effectively talking with myself as I work out the plots to my books.

What about you?

Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

An Interview with Rose Henderson

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This is from an online challenge imagining your characters being interviewed by a self-absorbed, somewhat sexist, not especially bright media person called Vic. I thought I’d share this one – an interview with Rose, the main character in The Incomer. It’s not part of the book, but may give you a bit of an insight into Rose’s situation and what she’s dealing with as the story starts…

Vic:       So [drinks coffee and checks reflection in mirror], what’s the story with you then?

Rose:   Are you sure you haven’t just invited me to ask about my brother Simon?

Vic [chuckles]: Of course not! I don’t need to ask about a TV presenter, I know all about him and his rather arty programmes. I’m sure if he were here, he’d be asking me for tips on how to fend off his fanbase [flicks hair]. No, no, this interview is all about you, Rita.

Rose:   Rose. My name’s Rose.

Vic [coy smile]: Just teasing, Rosie, so tell me all about yourself. What was it like growing up as Simon’s little sister?

Rose:   Well he made me lug the family video recorder around while he made films with our toy animals. I got my own back by—

Vic:       Of course, the camera angle, I’d forgotten. Your husband David was his intrepid camera man, wasn’t he, Ramona? Of course, it’s a bit like always the bridesmaid, never the bride, a camera man – no offence Charlie on camera 1 – but being a presenter is a unique skill requiring charisma, sexual magnetism, brains; whereas waving a camera about: well it’s mostly brute force.

Rose: David won awards for his work.

Vic [suddenly sombre, dropping voice]: Of course, I should say how sorry I am for your loss. Roz.

Rose:   Thank you. But my name is Rose.

Vic [still serious]: Tell me more about the impact of that terrible accident. I understand your brother Simon is still recovering. PMT I expect.

Rose:    I think you mean PTSD.

Vic:       Trust me dear, all these acronyms are hard to remember, I’ve interviewed more medical specialists than you’ve had roast dinners.

Rose:   Probably, because I’m a vegetarian. But weren’t they your cosmetic surgeons? Anyway, I thought you wanted to ask about me.

Vic:       Well, yes, I wanted to know how you’re coping. I gather you’re looking after Simon as he recuperates and pulls together the tattered remains of his career.

Rose:   The series he was filming when the accident happened is about to air and he’s got a new series lined up with even more funding and he’s generally quite well. He just has… episodes… when he has to tune out a little. As for me—

Vic:       I can’t imagine what it’s like living in the shadows Rani.

Rose:   Rose. I was in an orchestra when I met David. I’m sort of investigating new music now, doing a bit of composing and –

Vic:       Oh so David was filming your band back in the day and that’s how you met.

Rose:   No, he was a wildlife photographer. Simon is a naturalist remember, one with a PhD (that’s not a disease by the way). You don’t tend to find much wildlife in an orchestra. Except possibly in the timpani section. I met David in a pub on Simon’s 30th birthday. It was only five years ago but since the accident last year when David died, it seems…

Vic:       Well time’s a great healer Roxy. Plenty more fish in the sea for an attractive girl like you [adjusts tie and waggles eyebrows]. But maybe you should have stayed in the city. I gather you and Simon have moved into the middle of nowhere. Whatever do you do with your time? I suppose you’ve joined the local ladies’ guild or whatever they have out in turnip country.

Rose:   I’m trying to avoid those women like the plague, but they won’t leave me alone. They’re up to something, I’m just not sure what, but I’m pretty sure it’s not knitting they do in the wee small hours. Anyway, I’ve got enough on my plate trying to work out why this girl keeps turning up naked, borrowing my clothes and running away. It was more peaceful in the city, I swear.

Vic [sitting up with mouth open]: Naked? Tell me more…

Rose:   You’ve got a bit of toothpaste on your cheek and you missed a bit when you shaved. Oh and the naked girl is one of Simon’s fans. Haven’t you got one like that? Anyway, I’ll see myself out, Vince.

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. Image credit ID 382477802 © Nadezhda Kurbatova | Dreamstime.com  These are not to be used without the authors’ express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Forever Autumn

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

September

Gone are the aromas of hot earth and barbecues, lollipop-coloured clothes, other people’s lives audible through open doors and windows, sunshine warming bare legs, iced drinks sweet and herby.

As Summer tips into Autumn, there’s the scent of apples; hedgerows bejewelled with garnet and obsidian and ruby berries; the skip-whine-trudge of children going to school; bare legs encased; steaming drinks warming and spiced.

Conkers peek through spiky eyelashes from tree and pavement. What were you supposed to do to harden them? Oven? Vinegar? I can’t recall. Did I ever beat anyone? I can’t recall that either.

But I remember the first day of the school year when I was fifteen, far too sophisticated for conkers, walking down the hill to collect my friend, ignoring my mother’s plea to wear a coat. It’s still too warm, Mum, and it’s not going to rain.

I was ready for Autumn. I always was. Tired of the heat – or more often – the disappointment because there was none, tired of a lack of pattern, I was happy when primary colours became muted and freedom became something earned at the end of the day. Albeit briefly, I even looked forward to school.

We walk the mile to school wearing our freshly ironed shirts, knotted ties, dark skirts and jumpers. The uniform is supposed to make us look the same but never can. Short, tall, curvy, uncurvy, maturing at different ages into different shapes, we are ourselves, pushing the rules about skirt lengths and shoe styles and make-up to make uniform individual.

We pass the path to the waterfall, cross over the bridge over the river which will run slow into the bigger one for a few weeks yet and under the narrow gauge railway.

On every deciduous tree around us, the leaves are still green but they whisper in the breeze to each other ‘When shall we change? What will be the tipping point?’

I barely notice, too busy wondering if this year’s set texts in English will be good and what stories I’ll be asked to write and thinking as I’ve thought before:

Surely this year at last, school will be fun, the teachers will be inspiring, the bullies will have lost interest, and the boy will finally see me properly and fall in love…

October

By October, leaves are red and gold and orange.

My wedding day was in October. All the days leading up to it had been grey and drizzly. Early in the morning of that day, I heard a pattering on the roof. No one had planned for rain.

My father, the tee-total, brings me a Bucks-Fizz, saying ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ to help me stop worrying about what will happen if it doesn’t stop.

Then we’re caught up in a flurry. I’m too busy with hair and make-up and unfamiliar hooped petticoats to notice what is happening outside. When my mother and sister have gone ahead, Dad and I wait with nothing to say, because what can be said? I am doing something irrevocable – going from single to married, from daughter to wife. I’m aware of myself teetering on the edge of change, while my father is muttering the words he will shortly need to say.

Who giveth this woman?

Her mother and I do.

I hadn’t lived with my parents for ten years by then and I was never my father’s chattel anyway, and he never thought I was. But I was his beloved, stepping into a new stage of life.

Once he’d held my hand as I learned to walk, and later held the bicycle steady as I learned to ride and then… both times, he’d let go to see how I managed alone. Now, as I teetered, he was trusting once more that once he let go, I’d keep my balance.

And then the car arrives to take us to the church and Dad and I walk towards the entrance, late guests scurrying past.

Arm in arm for the last yards we pause and look up.

Above us in the churchyard, trees bow heads crowned with golden leaves, and above those leaves is a canopy of the deepest, clearest, most beautiful azure sky.

I am ready.

November

November is sometimes a drowning month when wind drives the last leaves from every tree to skitter angrily across grey skies before rain drums them into the mud.

Even if it doesn’t rain, the skies are dull, the night encroaching on day at either side, crushing it slowly hour by hour towards Solstice. Frosts start, snow may fall.

For a day or so, fireworks stud the grey night, rockets going up, up, up and balancing in the darkness before… Hoom! They fall in showers of impossible brightness. Bonfires scent our hair and clothes with woodsmoke. Our hands are warmed by hot dogs and steaming chocolate, before waving sparklers in defiance against the black night.

I remember a firework display when my children were very small. My baby daughter puts hands over her ears and buries her nose in my shoulder, sobbing. It’s too overwhelming for her. Not for my toddler son who tries to out-jump and out-shriek the fireworks then… losing both wellies in the mud, steps forward in his socks and…then falls flat. Just as well the noise blots out what my husband is saying as he picks that muddy figure up.

When the fireworks are over, November becomes dull again until Christmas fills the town with lights and gifts and sparkle.

In the countryside, a few brown leaves cling moistureless for a few more days, then fall to crunch under feet before turning into earth at the foot of their tree.

In three months, they’ve gone from green to … dead?

Maybe not exactly. Because they’ve fallen, mushrooms can grow. Under them animals seek food or store it. A hidden world is revealed by bare branches: the last of the berries, bark, fungus, hedgehogs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the curious, mischievous fox – russet, red, fawn, silver, orange.

Those Autumn leaves have transformed, every one holding a memory of eons of leaves that once emerged green then turned gold then faded so something else could grow and live. Another tree, a fungus, a creature.

Everything fades but nothing ever truly disappears. It changes. It feeds. It makes something new possible.

Everything is a matter of timing and balance.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Revisiting

~ Paula Harmon ~ 6 Comments

Last week I met a friend in the town where we first met as students. Apart from attending an open day with my children once, I hadn’t returned in decades.

Walking up from the station, I expected to be filled with hiraeth, an untranslatable Welsh word which, like the Portuguese Saudade, broadly means a kind of melancholy nostalgia.

As a student I made the mile and a half walk from station to college many times. It was often very late at night and, not having money for a taxi, I would walk very fast through town and across the college fields hoping to avoid any ne’er do wells. (My parents never knew and I’m not sure I’ve ever told them.)

Despite my anticipation however, I walked up that once familiar street and felt no hiraeth whatsoever.

I passed the place where I think I went to for my twenty-first birthday meal with my college friends. It was an Italian restaurant then. It’s a music venue now. There’s something incongruous about this half-timbered, wattle-and-daub building which was then draped with artificial grapes and is now advertising open mic opportunities.

Temptation in the form of bookshops, antique shops and independent shops full of pretty things slowed me down. Then… was that where my dentist was? Was that building once my hairdresser’s? Surely that was once Woolworths? And wasn’t that once the Athena shop where I used to buy posters for my bedroom wall?

Quite possibly I was wrong about them all. It didn’t really matter.

Apart from my former bank, the only things I recognised were things that have been there for centuries without materially changing: the Cathedral and the Cross.

I walked a little further and met my friend rushing the other way. We hadn’t met in the flesh since before Covid so there was a risk we wouldn’t recognise each other, but we did, and we went to have lunch and catch up on what had happened in the last few years that we didn’t already know.

 ‘Do you remember…?’ said my friend about a series of places in town which I’d entirely forgotten.

‘Didn’t you spend much time in town?’ she asked when I shook my head.

The thing was that I did. But I also went for cycle rides, on my own or with another friend who’d wanted to join us but couldn’t, or with my then boyfriend. I climbed the local hillfort, I visited the Harbour. Once, at least, I cycled to Southampton. I went on train trips to see my gran or my parents or school friends who were in different universities.

Mostly I wandered around in town too, only the finer details evade me completely now.

My friend and I visited the cathedral which we both remembered well, not least because we both sang in the choir and took part in Christmas concerts there.

‘I remember this aisle being a lot longer,’ she said.

‘We were in long skirts, carrying candles and singing slowly,’ I said.

‘True.’

Perhaps my lack of nostalgia is partly because I’ve (so far) never put roots down anywhere longer than twenty years. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many places I’ve lived in and to feel nostalgic about them all would be overwhelming. Each of them has left something with me, I remember most with fondness, but take me back to any of them and I feel like a visitor.

On reflection, I don’t mind.

I may not recall the teashops and pubs, but I remember the friends I was with. I can’t remember what we talked about, or even really what we looked like. But when I looked in my friend’s eyes, her essential lovely soul was the same. Physical changes that years have made disappear when you look in someone’s eyes. And despite all the setbacks and heartbreaks the last few years have brought her, at heart I know the essential her is still there in the process of healing. I was glad to hug her and listen to her and talk not just of a distant past we can’t really remember, or of a recent one which holds pain for her, but of a future that will help her lovely soul to blossom as it should.

No I don’t remember the finer details of those days, but I remember who we were.

I remember choosing posters and books that portrayed who I wanted to be rather than who I was. I remember sitting in pubs with my then boyfriend (poor chap) tying his brain in knots with my assertions of black and white certainties I am no longer certain of. I remember cycling to the lazy south coast because I was lonely for the wilder Gower waves. I remember getting lost with my other friend walking through fields of yellow on the way back from the hill fort. I remember the Christmas procession down the candlelit cathedral aisle. I remember being young and doubtful and foolish and confused and impetuous and illogical and angry and sad and happy and in love and heartbroken.

If I felt any hiraeth at all, it was perhaps for the girls that we were, including the friend who couldn’t join us. All three of us were shy and out of synch with our own generation.

We were the first drafts of people we are still becoming.

And that’s what I remembered and recognised and saluted, not with nostalgia but simply with acknowledgement. That was then. This is now, but the goods and bads of then, have helped to form now and are worth a raised glass (or cup of tea as we were both driving – then or later).

Rather than feel nostalgia, I felt a warm, fuzzy, joy to be back somewhere where I was once very happy and to be meeting one of two people who made it happy.

We were first drafts of ourselves then. Who knows what draft we are now. But one day, we will be masterpieces.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Stirring

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

After breakfast, I sit with my tea next to an old fireplace in a renovated ancient cottage.

The small log burner under the chimney is redundant on a summer day. Once, I muse, there would have been an open fire for heating and cooking. A kettle and pot would have hung from trammel hooks over the flames, a small oven might have stood to the side.

It’s hard to imagine this tiny house with more than two people inside. Downstairs, there’s barely room for a table, two chairs, two armchairs, a dresser, a two burner hob, fridge (with microwave atop) and large sink. A large, low double bed fills the attic upstairs. A pleasant shower room has been built, adjoining the lower floor.

My husband and I, our laptops, tablets, phones, leads and books fill the place.

I sip tea, and scroll through reels on social media, musing. This cottage would have been home to a poor family once. Now it’s for holiday makers. Where I sat idle in an Ikea armchair, a woman would have bent, stirring the pot in the fireplace, sweating because even in August, food still needed to be prepared, a family still needed to be fed.

Surely she’d only have had a dresser, table and chairs. No armchairs, no labour-saving devices, no sink. Apart from the river, where was her water supply? A long early morning walk perhaps? Maybe she cared for an elderly relation who watched as she worked with children at her feet, a baby in her belly while a husband waited to be fed.

I scroll and come across a video.

Someone is reconstructing ‘mud cookies’ also called ‘bonbon tè’. I unmute my phone. It’s a Haitian famine recipe made of mineral-laden mud mixed with salt and a little fat then baked in the sun.

Appalled, I watch the maker taste them.

‘They’re so salty,’ she says. ‘They suck all the moisture out of your mouth.’

The fireplace rattles.

I look at it. Nothing is moving. But the noise is there.

Shaking myself, I scroll on and come across a thread about secrets. Some are appalling. Some need reporting. One says ‘My husband works all the hours but doesn’t make enough to feed us all. I pretend I’ve eaten when we have dinner. I don’t want to make him feel a failure. Sometimes I’ve had nothing to eat but toast and black coffee all day.’

How can it be that a woman in a developed country in 2025 is doing what women did a hundred years ago and more – try to survive on next to nothing so that her husband, children and dependent elders can eat?

The fireplace rattles again.

There is no wind to come down the chimney. There is no traffic on the narrow country road to vibrate the house.

There is just an old fireplace and the ghosts of women who stirred the pot in the fireplace beside me while their stomachs rumbled.

And they have not forgotten.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

A Tale of Tea & Dragons – Out Now – The Background

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago, a scene popped into my mind and I wrote it down. This happens quite a lot, and often these ‘snippets’ are just mental exercises which will never turn into anything. But this one was different.

In those five hundred words, a young woman with magical ability who’s suffering from unrequited love is asked to do something she’s not sure about and needs to decide whether to or not.

I knew the ‘snippet’ wanted to become a contemporary fantasy novel, but I also knew it wanted to be a romance. That was where I started to struggle. All my books have elements of romance in them to a lesser or greater degree, however I’d never written a straight romance and I didn’t really feel confident to try.

A year or so later Liz Hedgecock and I were talking about starting a new co-writing project to add to our others and began batting ideas about.

We both thought it would be nice to try a different genre, maybe fantasy, maybe romance, and we sat down with a large piece of paper and some post-its and jotted down ideas. At this point I mentioned my ‘snippet’ (which Liz had read) and wondered if it could be a prompt. Liz had already written some contemporary fantasy novels (The Magical Bookshop Series) and some rom-com novellas (Tales of Meadley), so had a much better idea than I did about how to proceed.

Several conversations later, we’d fleshed out the main characters and developed a skeleton plot and A Tale of Tea and Dragons was born.

As usual, we have taken a character each to feature in alternative chapters. This time however, one character is female and one is male, rather than both female. And the familiar (to me) plot beats of a murder mystery, have been replaced with the (new to me) plot beats of a romance.

In the end, with Liz’s expertise, we got there.

We had lots of fun writing A Tale of Tea and Dragons. Disappearing into it was a lovely contrast to current affairs.

It’s set in a world that’s ours yet not ours.

Some people have magic powers and some don’t. Some towns are ancient towns dripping in magic, others have no magic in them at all (I’m sure you can make your own list of which might be which). Both are populated by a mixture of magical and non-magical people.

Magical people may or may not have familiars (in this world they’re magical creatures who are part-protector, part-voice-of-conscience for the person they’re assigned to). Magical people will have a range of potential power which needs to be honed and trained – but are there enough skilled teachers left to help?

As it’s a modern world, it’s full of cynics.

Non-magical people from non-magical towns might visit magical towns for a kind of theme-park experience, but they may view magical people are viewed as at best charlatans and at worst suspect and needing to be kept under control. Magical people, especially in non-magical towns, may feel that they’re better hiding their abilities.

Against this background we start in Lulmouth Bay – an ancient magical town, but also a modern seaside resort.

Living there is Hannah, owner/manager of the teashop her grandmother left her along with more magical recipes than she’s prepared to use. She’s fed up, frustrated and pining for a man who keeps friend-zoning her.

Arriving from the extremely non-magical town of Mundingham is Max, magical but cynical, burnt from a failed romance. He’s also feeling trapped by his job, but he’s ready to get rich so he’s free.

Will either of them try to get what they want even when the cost may be too high?

Will anyone find love?

Come and visit us in Lulmouth Bay by clicking here – the sea’s warm, the tea’s sparking, and the magic’s lovely!

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. Cover image created by German Creative 2025. These are not to be used without the authors’ express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

A Glimpse into Inspiration?

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This was recorded a few weeks ago on a very hot day and I arrived flustered thinking I was late when in fact I was early! Once I calmed down though, this was a great interview. I had little prior knowledge of the questions, so this is all from the heart (and mind) and I didn’t even know some of it was there! (And no, I have no idea why I tend to stare at the ceiling while being video’d. I’ll have to stop that in case I ever become ‘A Lady Writer on the TV’!

It’s All on the Board

An image of board games and a card game:
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Do you like or loathe board games? We love them.

In our house, games come out for family get togethers, or when we have friends staying. It’s something we all (with the possible exception of my father-in-law) look forward to. Yes, my adult children play video games too, but when they’re home, they even bring their own friends round to play board games with us sometimes. There is nothing like a board game to foster, um, healthy interaction and um… Let’s have a think shall we?

Contraband

Contraband was my parents’ and dates back (as you can probably tell) to the 1950’s or 1960s. It’s a bluffing game in which you take it in turns to be a traveller passing through customs, or the customs officer.

Like most bluffing games, the fun is trying to keep a straight face when you’re smuggling stuff or pretending you have the diplomatic bag when you don’t or trying to look guilty when you’re innocent to tempt the customs officer to make a false accusation and have to pay compensation.

My dad made a brilliant customs officer. He’d stare menacingly into your eyes then do something like waggle his eyebrows to make you confess all. I developed quite a good poker face (even if I’ve rarely used it to play poker, and then never for money).

Scrabble

When I was about sixteen and went to visit my German penfriend, we played Scrabble. My penfriend tried making English words while I made German words. However, my vocabulary was tiny, and while her English was very good, the letter selection was designed for the German language, so the ratio wasn’t right. We gave up quite quickly.

My husband can’t spell, but loves Scrabble. Playing it with him is a very long-winded process as the options are (eventually) to tell him how to spell something, or let him use a dictionary.

One pre-internet summer we went on a three-week trailer-tent trip in northern Spain. It rained solidly for the last fortnight, a quagmire forming under the ground sheet. We were a long way from town, so we spent some of our evenings playing Scrabble. It took him so long to play his turns, that I managed to read most of Lord of the Rings during the games we played.

Monopoly

I couldn’t picture Monopoly because it’s in the attic somewhere with Rummikub, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit and Skirrid. (I like to think that the friendly household ghost (who makes odd noises around the house) and our timid household elf (who moves stuff about) spend their evenings playing them and will be upset when we’ve moved enough clutter to find them.)

I was rather a goody-two-shoes child, but I confess that when my friend and I played Monopoly with our little sisters, a determination to win at all costs possessed both of us.

‘If you give me Mayfair, I’ll give you Old Kent Road and Whitechapel,’ one of us would say, making the most of our younger sisters’ slim grasp on finance. ‘Of course it’s a fair swap!’ Then we’d bankrupt them.

They cottoned on in the end of course, and my sister still complains about it. I feel little shame. It was revenge for all the times she got out of chores by being cute.

Cluedo/Clue

She can’t accuse me of cheating at Cluedo since it’s barely possible, but even as an adult my sister finds it baffling. After playing one Christmas a few years ago, I found a clue sheets on which she’d written ‘Have you got any idea what’s going on?’ and my brother-in-law had written in reply: ‘Nope’.

When the children were little, we bought a French version while holidaying in France. Then we realised that the board had a different layout and extra rules. My French wasn’t up to working them out, so it’s actually never been used.

The layout change wasn’t so bad. That’s happened on and off since it was invented as you can read about here. But ever since that holiday, our family has called Colonel Mustard ‘Colonel Moutarde’ with a bad French accent.

Articulate

Articulate starts the most arguments. You have to describe something on a card to your team mate and if they get it right, you move to the next card, getting as many right as possible until the time is up. The key is being on the same wavelength as your partner. My husband and I usually are which means we’re sometimes not allowed to be in a team. But we’re not always.

There are photos of people crying with laughter while in another team, A shouts at B because B’s suggested something ridiculous as the answer to a perfectly ‘obvious’ clue and B shouts that A is incomprehensible and obtuse. Insults fly and divorce and/or murder is threatened. It makes no odds – we all (with the exception of my father-in-law) still love it.

Winning exchange:

‘You know Shakespeare’s play where they killed a king?’

‘Er…’

‘OK, so the burger place that sells burgers that’s not Burger King? The first half.’

‘Er… Mac?’

‘Yup. Um… the beer that Homer Simpson drinks?’

‘Duff? Oh! MacDuff.’

‘Yes!’

Losing exchange:

‘You know the man who fell out of the tree?’

‘Er…’

‘He was a scientist. What did he discover?’

‘Aspirin?’

What do boardgames teach?

Chess and Backgammon teach strategy (and so does ‘Ticket to Ride’ which I haven’t described as we’ve only played it twice), but the other board games above?

Reading through this list makes me wonder. Monopoly was originally invented to teach about the evils of capitalism, but during a game, almost everyone turns into an evil capitalist. Clearly I was no better than any of them once.

The others might be accused of encouraging lying, manipulating and arguing. Perhaps. Or maybe they just help you let off steam.

Despite a lifetime playing board games, I grew up to be the upstanding moral citizen.

And let’s be honest, they’re great fun.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).