Creativity

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

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).

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).

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?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

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’!

What’s The Incomer All About?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

The local women’s guild threatens to uncover what Rose is hiding. Who can she trust? Is it Sky who fears the guild? Or Rob who hates it?

As odd becomes sinister, Rose begins to wonder: does the Guild want them to leave…

or to die?

As a contemporary fantasy, ‘The Incomer’ may seem like a major diversion from murder mysteries, but if you’ve read some of my short stories, you’ll know that I have always had a fascination with the magical and mystical.

And while this book involves werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies (and a little romance), it is chiefly character driven as are all my books.

It is about what happens when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation. It is about brother and a sister coming to terms with and overcoming more than one grief. It is about fighting someone or something that is trying to destroy them. It’s about learning who you really are and starting again. And more importantly, perhaps, it’s about friendship.

I actually started it long before any of the characters in my other novels even popped into my head, and I thought you might like to know some of its background and how it reflects my writing – if not personal – journey. (Which, while it involves small towns, doesn’t – so far – involve werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies. As far as I know.)

Back in 2010, my husband gave me a laptop for my birthday. Up to that point, we’d shared a PC , but he knew how much I wanted to start writing again and this was his gift to make this happen.

I started a few stories, but one of those t I didn’t finish was called ‘Reverse’. It is now ‘The Incomer’.

It started much the same: Rose and her TV presenter brother Simon have moved to the Highlands to hide a secret. Simon has become a werewolf in an incident which killed Rose’s husband. There’s a possibility of a cure, but they need to keep their heads down for the time being.

Unfortunately no one will let them hide.

First Emmeline of the local women’s guild turns up, then a peculiar young woman called Sky who seems to fear Emmeline.

That’s as far as I got.

I realised that the story needed more space and I didn’t know what to do so it went in the cyber drawer and stayed there.

In 2016 I thought ‘Reverse’ might be a good project for Nanowrimo (a challenge to write a complete – if first draft – 50,000 novel in November). I got half way and… I can’t remember what got in the way at the time, but I stopped again.

Roll on five months. I’d taken leave from work to spend with my children during their Easter school holiday, but as teenagers they were more interested in hanging out with their friends (and of course, revising for that summer’s exams) than day trips with me.

I suddenly realised that I wasn’t remotely upset. On the contrary, I was ecstatic.

This was the first time for years when I’d have whole days to myself, to do what I wanted, without worrying about keeping other people entertained.

So I dusted off ‘Reverse’ and finished it. My husband came home from work on the Friday evening moments after I typed the last sentence.

It needed work and was way too long, but I was happy. In as much as I’d had a clue where it was heading in 2010, it had ended up somewhere much better.

The short story was going to be entirely about Simon and Sky with events seen through Rose’s eyes, with her in the background.

But as I wrote, Rose changed, and because she changed, so did the direction of the story.

The start is the same: Rose is a widow. She’s her brother’s PA and also his protector, because he’s not good at protecting himself. Simon is the extrovert celebrity. She is an introvert, perceived by others to be in his shadow.

But as I developed the story, Rose started pushing against other people’s perceptions and tackling the sinister things they’re facing by herself.

Suddenly the novel became as much about Rose and about her friendship with Sky as about anything else.

It wasn’t until I was reading the first chapter act to my writing group and discussing it afterwards, that it occurred to that Rose had changed, because I myself had changed.

When I started that short story in 2010, I was juggling a job and caring for primary school age children. I was lucky I found time to sit down at all let alone write. I wasn’t in the background in my job, yet I felt I was in my domestic life.

By 2017, my children were more independent. I was to, to a large extent, the good deal freer.

Also, I had joined a writers’ group, and ‘met’ writers on line. Many of these people are now my closest friends.

The creative side of me which had been stifled for a long time, was no longer in the shadows. I’d stopped worrying about trying to explain creative ideas, because I’d found a tribe who wouldn’t dismiss them as mad or stupid and laugh at me.

In fact, I had stopped being in the shadows and stopped letting life just happen. In the process, my characters had stopped being people who largely observe or suffer events, but instead take action even if their personality makes that hard.

Rose is still the introvert I imagined her to be. She is still a little shy. But she’ll fight for her brother, and she’ll fight for herself.

If I’ve whetted your appetite, you can pre-order the e-book here. It will come out on 1st July 2025. The paperback and hardback will be out on 30th June. Although there will be other books in the series, ‘The Incomer’ can be read as a standalone, so I hope you’ll give it a go.

And if you do, I hope you like it.

Words copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. Image created using Canva. Book cover by 100covers.

Sanctuary in Art?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I’ve often said that messing with art helps me de-stress and since perhaps you can tell from my previous blog post that the last few months have been stressful, you might wonder if I’ve been following my own advice?

The answer is: ish.

Every year Liz Hedgecock and I do a challenge for Lent, and this year we decided to try mixed media art. Unlike Liz who is a much better artist, and more disciplined, I apply the same approach to learning art as to learning most things: that is, I fiddle until I’ve figured it out, or something’s exploded.

This year, I wanted to experiment with a combination of watercolour, acrylic, fine liners, markers, and modelling paste. As I didn’t have modelling paste, I wondered if I could make some using stuff from home. Thanks to an internet ‘recipe’ I produced a sort of gloop using cornflour (cornstarch) and PVA glue. Did it work? Nope. So I bought some and started again.

It was well into Lent before I got going, and then I worked on it for thirty minutes a day until it was as finished as it was going to be.

Even though it’s not quite what’s in my head, and only one of the hares (yes, they’re supposed to be hares) looks like a hare (ish), the process was happy and positive, largely because I was enjoying messing with the colours, and experimenting without overthinking what I was doing. I think I might do it again to see if I can get closer to what I envisioned.

So that was April.

Some time in May I saw some prompts for a sketching challenge based on finding positivity in nature.

As a lonely, bullied child, I would find my peace, reassurance and grounding in the local woods or by the local river. There I discovered comfort in being part of something so big, that my problems seemed small, hidden in a beauty which made the ugliness of school life recede. Although I don’t do that sort of wandering as much as I should now, I do have a lovely garden in which the writing shed hides surrounded by greenery.

So with that in mind, I decided to create something from the first prompt, which was ‘Sanctuary’.

Time went by and I couldn’t even find half hour an to do anything, but after work on a particularly stressful day, I took some art stuff and a glass of wine down to the writing shed aiming to start a small simple watercolour painting.

However when I arrived at the shed, I set out my small selection of brushes, a little bottle of water and my glass of wine, but couldn’t find the little pallet of watercolour paints that I could’ve sworn I’d put in my bag. I went back to the house but couldn’t find them anywhere, so gave up, and using watercolour pencils instead, did what I could, periodically dipping brushes and pencils in my wine instead of the water (which doesn’t improve the flavour). By now, however, I was mentally in the wrong zone and don’t really know what I’m doing with watercolour pencils.

I was aiming for an image of myself in the writing shed being creative and happy as seen through the branches of our rather overgrown cherry tree.

This is what I ended up with.

Me, stuck in a birdcage in the middle of a jungle.

(Naturally as soon as I got back in the house, I found the little watercolour palette disguising itself against the black background of the basket which I called sac magique, in which I cart things around sometimes.)

I gave up trying for a bit.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I spent a few days in the Languedoc. I needed a break from writing and editing, but not creativity. So I took my travelling sketching kit.

My husband and I, despite both being city born, are country mice by nature, and usually rent places in the countryside. But this time, we stayed in a place with a balcony overlooking Place Carnot in Carcassonne. We enjoyed people watching and listening to the buzz of conversation from below, and wandering the area. Wherever we went I sketched little scenes from what I saw in front of me.

It was so freeing making myself capture something as best as I could quickly without working out composition or what the picture was trying to say. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story – or couldn’t be a story – behind each one, but I was simply having fun and resting my mind.

Last week turned out a good deal more intense than I anticipated when I wrote the previous blog, however everything on my rationalised to-do list got done, albeit a day behind schedule.

So afterwards, I thought, ‘Now I’m feeling calm, if tired, I’m going to the shed to try my sanctuary painting again’ and I did.

The result is below.

You can make of it what you will.

I showed photos of both ‘Sanctuary’ paintings to my oldest child’s partner, without any context.

He said ‘Pretty colours and shapes’ about the first until he spotted someone inside at which point he said ‘Ah – a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage all the same.’ He then looked at the other one, still no context. He said ‘The water droplet makes me think of freedom, free flowing. It seems peaceful. It’s a place of rest and safety not a cage.’

Now, it’s true that he has a psychology degree, but at this particular moment, he was squinting at my small phone in bright sun while drinking cocktails, and despite being very short-sighted, hadn’t brought his glasses. So his assessment possibly has the psychological robustness of a ‘What sort of boy will make my ideal partner’ quiz in a teenage girl’s magazine.

But I like it and I’m sticking with it.

What do you think?

All words and pictures copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. None must be reproduced without express permission or credit. No permission is given for any to be used to train artificial intelligence.

The Inker

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

Despite any number of other things competing for my attention in October, I decided to Inktober again. In case you don’t know, this is a challenge to draw something everyday in October using ink and following a prompt set up by Inktober on Instagram. There was also a suggestion of which might be coloured rather than monochrome if the artist fancied it.

There are some astonishing artists out there but I’m not one of them. I just like sketching as a relaxation tool as I’ve said before. It makes me take a few minutes out of my day and use a part of my brain that doesn’t get dusted off that often which helps reset the other bits of my brain that are on hamster wheels.

I’m not particularly competitive other than against myself, but I like a challenge if I think I can do it without exploding for no reason other than pride. I can beat myself up endlessly about my failures in a lot of areas, but art isn’t one of them.

Last year the prompts were pretty random. This year there was a theme – travel – with a couple of curve balls (‘rust’ and ‘violin’ being the ones most off topic) and several that were so similar as to be almost indistinguishable: ‘trek’, ‘hike’, roam’, ‘expedition’.

As the world currently seems to be often a scary and sad place, I decided that I wouldn’t try to have any hidden meanings in any of my sketches this year. I decided to attempt light humour. This also wasn’t always easy when following the prompt – a challenge in itself.

I’m pleased with some and less pleased with others. Some I will possibly draw again. Some days it was hard to find the time, energy or inspiration but overall it was fun. Two of the sketches are based on life: the pony trekking (6th) and camping in a gale with my father insisting on cooking breakfast (22nd). In other sketches, the little girls are also sort of me and my sister and the teddy is sort of her bear Freda (2nd, 7th, 24th). The dragons wouldn’t like to be left out of course and somehow a unicorn muscled its way in, ridden by a friend. It proves I can’t draw horses even when they’re magical but there you go.

Not being confident enough to simply start inking directly onto paper, I made a sketch first and then inked in the detail using fineliners and on a couple of occasions white board markers because I needed more ink. I didn’t use ink ink with a pen as I need to practise that and I didn’t think to use ink ink with a brush. But I might start to do some practising because it appeals – I was longing for my watercolours throughout.

Looking back, I realised I could have created a story using the prompts as the plot. It didn’t occur to me when I was looking at them and it would probably have added a layer of stress I didn’t want or need this year.

Next year though… maybe I will.

Let’s see what the 2025 prompts bring.

But without further ado, here are my thirty-one inktober efforts for 2024. Which (if any) is your favourite?

Words and picture Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. 

Of Corset’s Fun

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I was a little girl who felt as if she’d been born into the wrong era. This particularly applied to clothes. I longed for elegant colours, long, flouncy skirts, bodices, frilled petticoats and lacy gloves. I just knew that wearing them, I could swish down a sweeping staircase. (Important note – I wanted to live in a former age whilst also being rich.)

Alas, when I was a little girl fashion meant flares, bold day-glo polyester, tie-dye, A-line mini-dresses, jeans with patches on them, shiny boots, floppy hats if hats at all. Even if we’d had a sweeping staircase rather than the usual sort, one can’t swish down a staircase in any of that.

My first memories of dressing up was for school or Sunday school plays. Apart from a lovely Olde Englishe costume my mother made for me to wear in my role as an Olde Englishe Villager (I have no idea what the play was), most of what I had to wear ranged from unromantic to ridiculous, especially the rabbit costume. My sister meanwhile got to be a fairy or angel.

At home, we dressed up in Mum’s clothes from the late fifties– a full scratchy starched petticoat, silk covered dancing stilletos, a dirndl, a beautiful silk Chinese cheongsam which had originally been below Mum’s knees but then later tragically hacked off in the sixties to mini skirt level. We also annexed her wedding dress, the tiara that went with it, a hand-sewn Victorian cotton petticoat and a Victorian Paisley shawl. I’m not sure what we were trying to be, but we liked to think it was regal.

When I was about nine or ten, a much richer and slightly older cousin sent me some old party dresses. They were just up my street, made of pastel taffeta with sashes and flouncy skirts, but they definitely belonged to a different social set to the one which was inviting me to birthday parties and expecting me to wear something a good deal more fashionable and a lot less soppy.

Undismayed and ignoring my sister’s embarrassment I wore the dresses to church where I tried to look Victorian despite the modern hymns and bright surroundings. Then I asked my arty grandmother to paint me wearing one and make me look Victorian. She normally painted landscapes and hated painting people, so wasn’t too happy about it, and also unexpectedly commented ‘Goodness, I never knew your eyes were brown. I always thought they were green.’

Both of us hated the end result. She’d captured something of my day-dreaming self but hadn’t managed to make me look remotely Victorian. I looked like a 1970s girl playing dress-up with greeny-muddy eyes that were slightly cross (yes, she’d managed to capture my emerging resting b*tch face.) The portrait was surreptitiously put into the attic after a month and eventually disposed of by my mother. I hope it was painted over and isn’t haunting anyone (or isn’t haunting anyone despite being painted over).

My dad also liked dressing up. His go to costume was that of a tramp (hobo). I have no idea why. He was normally very smart and rarely without a tie, jacket or hat. (He never received the memo about the sixties and seventies.) Maybe it was the contrast.

When he discovered Science Fiction conventions, he embraced early Cosplay with joy. At the only one I was dragged to, I had to endure watching him and Mum parade dressed as the two main characters from a short-lived TV series called Kinvig in which Dad was the eponymous  hero – owner of a run-down electrical repair shop and Mum as a beautiful alien. I had thankfully left home by the time he dressed up as Ming the Merciless and painted his whole (mostly but not entirely) bald head green.

At uni, slim and young but still deluded, I’d go to fancy dress things as Cleopatra (plenty of excuse for all that eyeliner and cheap costume made from a sheet) or a black cat (more eyeliner and a slinky black dress). It was a few years after that when the photo of me as Miss Muffet below was taken. It was nearly the last time I went to a fancy dress party, my outfit constructed from a bridesmaid dress and my then boyfriend’s spider legs from stuffed tights.

Shortly afterwards (but not as a result), the spider and I broke up. A year or so after that, I met my husband who doesn’t do dressing up at all, except for the time when we went to a murder mystery dinner.

Husband had to be a smart playboy, so he just had to wear his wedding suit and best tie and drink wine in a rich man manner. So he was happy. I so wanted to be the glamorous elegant rich character or at least the slinky femme fatale character, but no, luck of the draw meant I was the girl from the wrong side of the tracks wearing most of the contents of my make-up bag plastered on my face and a garish blouse probably visible from space.

And that was that. Would I ever get to play dress up again?

Well… I now give talks at fairly regular intervals. They’re about the inspiration behind my books in the main – the real women, real events, weird and wonderful facts that I uncover when I’m researching. One of them ‘Dressed for Detection’ is about how Victorian and Edwardian women did while wearing what they wore.

The first time I gave this talk (I will be giving it again on Saturday 5th October 2024), it was at a fashion museum where I was surrounded by authentic clothes from the era I was talking about. I had a bit of a think and …

Was this a chance to dress up in elegant Edwardian clothes? Was it also a chance to rekindle my neglected sewing skills which used to give me so much pleasure (and buy some gadgets inspired by the Great British Sewing Bee)?

What do you think?

Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used without the author’s express permission.

How, What, When – Techniques

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I’m often asked four things:

1.     How long does it take to write a book?

2.     How do Liz and I co-write without killing each other?

3.     Re historical mysteries, does research come before plot or vice versa?

4.     When do I find time to write?

The simple answers are:

1.     The first draft of a 50,000 word book written with Liz is usually completed within a month. The first draft of a 90,000 book I write alone takes at least three months.

2.     We co-write without killing each other partly because we live too far apart to pop round and have a scrap.

3.     Historical accuracy is essential but ultimately it’s the character’s personal battles (and perhaps interaction with real events) which drives the plot.

4.     Theoretically between 9am and 2pm on days when I’m not doing the day job.

In more detail:

Liz and I are developing an online session on co-writing for the near future, so please keep an eye on the Hints, Tips and Masterclasses tab on this website to see when this will be available. But what I can share here is that one of the reasons why it’s quicker for me and Liz to write quickly is that we plot the books in minute detail in advance – a process more natural to Liz than I – and diarise a specific window of time to write in.

My own books are typically longer and I don’t plot in as much detail. I am not a pantster (someone who just starts with an idea and no idea of where they’re going till they get there). I know the character’s challenges, the main plot points, the middle and the end. I usually plot tightly up to the mid-point after which it’s a lot more vague. I aim to write at least one chapter a day, five days a week if I can. This theoretically takes seven weeks, but sometimes longer. While detailed plotting for co-writing makes my teeth itch, not being 100% sure what’s happening between chapter twenty and thirty-seven of my own books keeps me awake at night – I’m not joking. I almost always end up with a first draft that’s 40,000 words longer than it should be, so I have to revise the whole shebang, often moving or ditching whole segments. Sometimes those ditched segments (often ones I most enjoyed writing) get reused. Occasionally they are gone for good. Eventually it’s ready for the editor after which I will have more revisions. End to end, the whole thing (with various breaks) can take the best part of nine months.

Do I think one technique is better than another? No. What works well for me and Liz together, doesn’t work for me alone. I’ve tried it but still go off at a tangent. Maybe one day. I actually enjoy the revision more than the first draft. It’s where I start to ‘find’ the story.

As regards historical research: the historical context may be a backdrop or a major factor depending on the book. So for example, The Case of the Black Tulips is set in a world in which Katherine has a job meaning she travels alone, and Connie is sent out without an escort, meaning they meet each other and start investigating against a general backdrop of late Victorian fog, hansom cabs, music halls etc etc. The Treacherous Dead and Dying to be Heard on the other hand, are set against real events that occurred in 1912 and 1913 (and also 1900). It’s Margaret’s reaction to them which drives the plot.

Caster & Fleet are in 1890s London when opportunities for young women were expanding and when improvements in communications, transport and education were changing the world rapidly. We made use of that, but we didn’t tie anything to any specific historical event therefore what they’re dealing with is more important than who’s Prime Minister etc.

Likewise the Murder Britannica series is set in the late second century Britannia. There are a lot of political shenanigans going on and the emperor is, frankly, insane, but Rome is a long way off. Lucretia and Tryssa feel broadly safe straddling Roman and Celtic life, going with the flow to keep on the right side of the invaders but otherwise more interested in what’s happening right in front of them as it’s more ‘real’ to them than a distant emperor who thinks he’s Hercules.

The Margaret books are slightly different, because the backdrop is an essential part of the plot. Six books will cover the period June 1910 to August 1914. Threading through are: the build up to World War One; anarchist and revolutionaries; people arrested for spying in Britain and Germany; the fight for Irish independence; conflict in the Balkans; industrial unrest; the drive of the labour movement calling for safer working practices; increasingly militant suffragette activity.

I research real newspapers of the day to see what Margaret might be faced with every morning in terms of current affairs. The likelihood is that she’d read about suffragette activity and ‘the Irish question’ on the front page, but have to turn into the depths of the paper for anything on spying and war-mongering manoeuvres in mainland Europe. Was this deliberate on the part of the media – keeping people worried about the things the status quo wanted them to worry about and oblivious to other things that might ultimately be more problematic? Mmm.

But like most of us, Margaret is no different to Katherine aand Connie or Lucretia and Tryssa, and current affairs are not at the top of her things to worry about.  More often than not, she’s concerned about being a good wife/mother/sister/daughter/friend/pathologist (not necessarily in that order), wondering about bills and deciding what’s for dinner.

Which reminds me: should I wake my husband up from his Sunday afternoon sleep since it’s his turn to cook, or turn the oven on myself? Is the washing dry? Who’s visiting this week and what shall we eat?

Which leads me to the real answer to question four: how do I have time to write? Sometimes I have no idea!

Words (c) 2024 copyright Paula Harmon. Not to be reproduced or used without the author’s express permission. Image credit: Illustration 164663778 © Rassco | Dreamstime.com