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).
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 do you do when you have unexpected free time?
As a child, I wandered about in nature. I daydreamed and I wrote stories and poems. I read and read and read. I crafted things of little use and nil longevity.
I’m not sure when this changed, but motherhood didn’t help. All of a sudden my days involved keeping someone else alive and maintaining shreds of my sanity. Later there were school deadlines, afterschool clubs, sports events – an endless set of things to remember, to chivvy about, to attend, to plan.
Then the children left home, and all of a sudden, for the first time in twenty years, I was sometimes free.
For a while, I found I’d lost the knack to do nothing, but now I’m finally getting the hang of it again.
Option One: Do Nothing while Doing Something
I used to work with someone who couldn’t see the point of reading. In our one hour lunchbreak, I would buy my lunch, have a potter round town, then come back and read. My colleague ate her packed lunch and then sit in silence until 2pm. I know people who can’t see the point of reading unless it’s ‘improving’ or religious books. Me, I’d read a bus ticket if it was all that was available. While I read plenty of non-fiction, my favourite ‘waste of time’ is fiction including children’s fiction. Do I always learn something? Who cares.
Art doesn’t normally count, but in 2023, Liz Hedgecock and I did a Louise Fletcher ‘Find Your Joy’ taster course. Its aim (broadly) was to free your mind from all its preconceptions as you played with abstract.
The first exercise was to dissect a large piece of paper with masking tape, select five colours, paint at random then removed the masking tape to reveal the result. This was my effort:
But I hadn’t played by the rules. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to waste paint on something pointless, and wanted it to represent something. (Can you tell what I was aiming for?)
Then I read some of the heartbreaking comments people posted in the accompanying social media group, struggling because all they could hear in their heads was someone (often a mother or mother-in-law) saying they shouldn’t be wasting time when they had homes and husbands to look after. At first, I felt a combination of sorrow and anger, then I realised that I myself had decided to give that the first exercise meaning because I was obviously listening to some internal voice (probably my own). After that, I did the exercises without planning and if I learned nothing else, it was to mute that inner critic.
(Today, in the interests of experiment, I did that first exercise again without any plan. This is the result, which has no meaning whatsoever but I somehow prefer).
Option Two: Really Do Nothing
Are you good at being still, maybe sitting/lying in nature watching trees or looking for shapes in clouds or staring into an open fire watching the flames flicker?
As a fidget with a butterfly brain I am terrible at it, unless I’m staring at the sea or a river. My mind wanders or I’ll amble off to do something else. But a couple of Christmases ago, exhausted, I had the chance to try out a Virtual Reality headset where I could ‘stare at the stars’. I put on some ambient music, lay back on the sofa and inhabited that non-existent space for half an hour, emerging unbelievably refreshed.
Is Idleness Wrong?
Some feel that spare time should be filled with learning if nothing else, because doing something without a purpose is a waste of time. It’s perhaps a throw back to a fear that ‘the devil will find work for idle hands’ and that a bored unoccupied person is at best of no use and at worst potentially evil.
Personally I never feel like I have to educate myself if I don’t want to. While on holiday for example, I’m happy soaking up the atmosphere and people-watching. To me, this ‘doing nothing’ is highly valuable, not just as a writer, but as a human. To observe people makes them real and not abstract.
And think of all those ‘idlers’ who changed the world for the better. Admittedly a lot of them were wealthy and someone else was doing the laundry, childcare and dinner prep, but all the same – they sat and observed, they experimented, they wrote down ideas and we ended up with novels, art, steam engines, radio etc etc.
In her novel ‘Early in Orcadia’, Naomi Mitchison imagines the discovery of the Orkney Islands by a group of pre-historic people. It starts with an old (by their reckoning) man who has survived so many challenges that he is honoured with the right to do nothing. Because he has the time to sit and think as he watches the sea, he realises there is something out there to investigate. In the same group is a woman who is so constantly busy with keeping her family alive that she never ‘does nothing’. Once in a blue moon she looks at wads of wool picked off thorn bushes, convinced that there must be something useful to do with it, but has no time to figure it out.
One discovers something by ‘doing nothing’. The other will only discover how to weave if one day she able to ‘do nothing’.
Yes, evil can come from idle hands, but so can creativity. Our world is absurdly busy and increasingly stressful and we need to rest to cope with it.
So don’t listen to a voice that tells you something joyful or restful is pointless. Don’t be afraid to do nothing. It will always be ‘something’ really and your mind and spirit will thank you for it.
(PS – if you want to see Liz’s art website, click here)
(PPS – don’t panic, the people in the sketch below are alive and well – they were doing yoga!)
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).
When my sister and I were teenagers, our parents went away for the weekend leaving us to our own devices.
Is this a tale of wild parties? Nope. We were far too boring.
Instead, we started a two day super low calorie diet.
Started.
The first meal was a raw egg beaten into orange juice.
One sip was enough for both of us. We’d been brought up not to waste food, but…down the sink it went and the diet went in the bin.
At the time, my sister and I were slim, healthy and fit, but we were both self-conscious about our busty figures. ‘You’re an inverted triangle shape,’ the magazines told us (apparently is a carrot shape now). We could have been apples or pears or hourglasses. We didn’t want to be any of them. We wanted to be like the girls on TV.
The negative body imagery I grew up with was not simply through media and peer-pressure (then nowhere near as bad as it is nowadays) but from years of little comments (made as if we weren’t there) by the extended family:
‘He’s rather a trencherman isn’t he?’ (*)
‘Her feet are large – I imagine she’ll grow up to be big.’ (She didn’t.)
‘You’re not as thin as you used to be.’ (I’d just had a baby.)
‘Isn’t that dress is a little tight/low cut/short?’ (No.)
‘Their busts must be from their Polish great-great-great-grandmother.’ (She wasn’t Polish and no one knew what she looked like.)
(*In case you don’t know, a ‘trencherman’ is an old-fashioned term which suggests someone who’d not only eat their meal but what it was served in (a trencher originally being a piece of stale bread used as a plate).)
One of my earliest memories was hearing someone say Dad ought to lose weight and being upset because I thought he was lovely and cuddly. It wasn’t till much later that I realised the risks to his health.
He really did try.
He started every fad diet going, and what Dad ate, the whole family ate. Luckily for us the diets only lasted as long as Dad could bear them (generally about two days).
He kept a complicated graph on which noted his weight daily down to the quarter pound. When later quizzed as to why, he said it was because of a diet he’d been on which had worked. Was he still on the diet? No. He’d just kept the graph habit. My sister and I rolled our eyes. We didn’t understand the genetic element of the situation nor the psychological one.
I had a different battle at eighteen. A combination of negative body image, a broken heart and struggling with my A levels meant that my life felt out of control, so I controlled the one thing I could: eating.
I wasn’t trying to make myself ill. I’d had a friend who became anorexic and was taken out of school a few years earlier. But caught up in my own misery, I couldn’t see I was risking the same.
There was little recognition of eating disorders then. They were seen as a lack of self-control rather than a psychological issue. The parents of the friend with anorexia initially insisted she was just losing puppy fat. But she’d told me she’d started cutting out food because bullying from boys at school and feeling second best to her brother had become too much. I hope she got the treatment she needed. The parents completely cut her off from her former friends and I never found out.
I myself didn’t become anorexic because Dad spotted how thin I’d become and said so. I realised it must be bad if he noticed and started to change what I was eating.
It was a struggle to get back to normal, not least because shortly afterwards I went to university (despite duffing up my A levels) and was too shy to go to the refectory to eat with strangers. I fundamentally lived on crackers and soup until I made lifelong friends and started reaching a sensible weight.
You might not believe that if you saw me now. A combination of menopause, medication, genes (perhaps) and a sedentary job mean I’m no longer a carrot but an apple and need to lose several pounds.
Proffered help is sometimes trying.
A (male) doctor said ‘It’s so easy for post-menopausal women to gain weight but so hard to lose it.’ Little chuckle. ‘My wife’s forever complaining when I tell her she can’t eat carbs!’
How humorous.
I drink wine and I don’t exercise near enough, but I prefer healthy food. I’ve never been a comfort eater, but I am a boredom eater.
I explained all this to the doctor, who said that my ideal diet was poached chicken, poached eggs, lentils and no carbs. Thinking I’d infinitely prefer to give up wine than pasta, I got off the call with a desperate urge to make a massive bowl of macaroni cheese.
Instead I cooked eggs. (Poached, with no orange juice in sight.)
My paternal grandmother despaired over her post-menopausal but quite average weight and her greying hair and her soft face. I loved all of it and couldn’t see the reason for her distress then. But I understand now.
I’d like to be thinner not just – or even – because it would be healthier, but because deep down I still want to look like women on TV, even though they’re the middle-aged ones not the teenage ones.
Is that a society thing or a me thing? Dad and his daily weight graph is no different to me and my weight-loss apps which are only relevant if I’m eating less and exercising more.
Part of me wants to say ‘Come back next week and see if I’ve rejoined the gym and lost some weight.’
The bigger part knows ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I need to love myself as I am either way.’
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.
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.
This is a virtual hug for anyone who’s been in a state of utter overwhelm.
And it’s an apology in the unlikely event that anyone out there has missed my random ramblings.
I had heaps of things I intended to blog about after I posted the last on 4th November 2024. Then my mother was offered the chance to move from an upstairs maisonette to a ground floor maisonette and while it was something we wanted to happen, it was somehow the trigger for my life to spiral down an Alice in Wonderland style rabbit hole, passing paint pots, books, carpets, laptops and online forms, without ever seeming to land.
The problem wasn’t the move itself, but the time-frame. Everything I had to organise, including redecorating and recarpeting the new place, had to take place between mid November and mid December. Fair play to local firms: the carpet people, a decorator and a removal company all stepped up and made it happen.
And after twelve years, Mum had finally decided she was ready to part with some of the stuff she’d brought with her when she left the place she’d lived with Dad. So cue days of decluttering while also packing. (A blog post in itself.)
In the midst of this, Liz and I published Death in a Dinner Jacket (the last, so far, of the Booker & Fitch series), and I was supposed to be publicising A Justified Death (book 5 in the Margaret Demeray series), while trying to finish work on the final (so far) Margaret Demeray Book.
On the personal front, my day job part-time project role was finally coming to an end and I had to decide whether to apply for another internal role or let the HR gods decide where to redeploy me (went for the former), and I needed to plan for a family Christmas – catering for seven people for four days at least.
Generally, I don’t mind change as I have a low boredom threshold, but not when there’s too much all at once. Six plus months later, I’m still traumatised by those packed (sorry) weeks of house moving – made worse by two days of heavy snow – and then Christmas itself, which was lovely except for my back deciding to ‘go’ after all the box-lugging just when I needed to do a lot of standing in the kitchen.
It really didn’t help that it was midwinter too, when the short dark days add (if you suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder as I do to some extent) an extra layer of gloom and general fog.
I thought I’d manage to get a grip in January, then February, then… you get the picture. At work, my former team disbanded at the end of March – much emotion all round as we were very close – and I started a new job on 1st April. As that was a Tuesday, it was a very odd week.
It wasn’t until May that I started to feel back on top of things a bit, but between my last blog post and now, the following have somehow happened and looking back, I’m not quite sure how:
DP Publishers took on the publishing of the Margaret series apart from the audiobooks. They have republished all the ebooks with new covers, and will ultimately republish all the paperbacks with new covers.
I finished the sixth Margaret book and handed it off to DP. It will come out hopefully on 18th September and be available for pre-order hopefully from 16th July – and I will actually do a post about it, because in theory, book six is the last in the series unless of course, readers want more (tell me if you’re one of them in the comments)!
I moved all my audiobooks from exclusivity with Amazon/Audible and i-Tunes to a wider range of audiobook outlets, and just to let you know that the first three Margaret audiobooks are on 60% reduction until tomorrow (10th June 2025) at Kobo, LibroFM, GooglePlay and Nook. Madeleine Brolly, my narrator, is currently working on Murder Saturnalia. If you want to know about my audiobooks then check them out here.
I started writing a new mystery series set in the 1920s – not Margaret related at all – and somewhat inspired by one of the postcards in Postcard Whisperers.
Liz and I finished the first book in a COMPLETELY new project – a cozy romcom set in a world just like ours, only in which there’s also some magic. We had HUGE fun writing it and really missed the characters when it was finished. Needless to say, I miss the dragons the most. One in particular. More info soon and out hopefully this summer.
And finally, I decided to publish a book which has been finished and waiting for me to do something with it for a very long time. It’s called The Incomer and will be out on 1st July. Again, this is something completely different – a world like this one with paranormal elements, albeit not cozy. I’ll write separately about it soon because there’s something of a story behind the writing of it but perhaps a taster of the story rounds this blog off nicely. The main character’s world has overwhelmed her, so she’s moved to hide away as much as she can – but the locals have other ideas, and she has to fight back.
And so shall I.
I am still inundated with deadlines and pressures (some self-imposed) and as you no doubt are too, overwhelmed by helplessness in the face of current affairs. But I looked at my June ‘to do’ list yesterday, and after a moment of panic, broke it down into:
Must be done
Can wait
Outside my control
and re-wrote a manageable list which made me feel a whole lot better.
If you’re feeling like everything has got on top of you, I hope you can do the same.
After all, as someone once said in an office meeting (stopping the conversation dead for a few moments) ‘You have to eat the elephant in the corner a bit at a time’.
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.
In the last few months, life has been busy, hence getting out of the habit of blogging.
I’ve been working on A Justified Death (Margaret Demeray 5), and with Liz on Death in a Dinner Jacket (Booker and Fitch book 6). Both are now available for pre-order. That’s on top of a day job which is pretty trying (apply your knowledge of British understatement here); adult child wrangling; elderly parent/in-law wrangling; sad news from friends; talks; current global affairs.
Perhaps because I’m smouldering a bit at the edges, my eyes were recently drawn to a list of suggestions to counteract burnout. One took me right back to being six years old and Trixie and Trina:
Perhaps a year or so before I was six, my father read me an unabridged version of Alice Through The Looking-Glass and I loved it. To a girl who hated trousers and climbed trees in skirts; who got into trouble for backchat; who talked to animals, Alice was a kindred spirit, a role model and an inspiration.
Do we need trousers to have adventures? No! We can do it in frilly dresses.
Here’s a talking rabbit asking us to follow him. Let’s go!
Here’s a looking-glass we can step through. Let’s do it!
If I could have followed Alice through that mirror, I would have.
Perhaps that’s why I met/invented Trixie and Trina.
I’d recently moved school and my friend-making skills were terrible, so to begin with I was lonely and the target of older boys who’d threaten me, chase me and call me names. I reported it, but the teachers gave the standard response of the time: ‘Just keep away from them’.
I tried. I found a place to hide away: a corner by a glass door which was slightly shadowed, so I could see my reflection. In the absence of any other friend, I named my mirror self Trixie and my physical self Trina (or maybe the other way round). I decided we were twins who’d been forcibly separated and were stuck on either side of the reflection, desperate to rejoin each other.
We’d chat about bullies and loneliness and how we could be reunited. At least I think we did. I can’t really remember more than the names and sitting there talking to my reflection.
Eventually the bullies found me – clearly proving them right about how weird I was – and yanked me up by my anorak hood, nearly strangling me. I like to think a teacher spotted it and they were punished but can’t recall that either. I just knew it wasn’t safe to hide out of sight any more.
I started to make friends… and then after a couple of years moved schools again, which is another story. For a while, illogically, I felt guilty that I’d never gone back to visit Trixie/Trina before I left, that I never said goodbye. I half wondered if she remained trapped. Or if I had. After all, who’s to say which of us was stuck behind a reflection?
At nine years old, in a different place entirely, I forgot her and became fascinated by looking for ways into other worlds through the countryside near my new home. This was probably partly inspired Alan Garner’s books, but I like to think was partly instinctive as my ancestry comes chiefly from (in alphabetical not percentage order) Eire, England, Scotland and Wales.
It isn’t a good idea to cross into the realms of the Sidhe/Elves/Seelie/Tylwyth Teg nor to let them cross into ours. That’s why there are festivals and traditions around solstices and equinoxes, and an eerie edge to dawn and dusk when the wall between worlds is thin and the danger to humans is highest. But I didn’t realise that then.
Well before I heard of quantum physics, I sensed another world was just out of reach and all I had to do was find a way in. Was this because there really are other universes running alongside ours and I somehow knew it instinctively, or because I wanted to escape my reality? I don’t know, but I looked in the woods and the river for another couple of years without thinking of looking in mirrors instead.
By thirteen, the main ‘other’ world I yearned for was adulthood where I’d be in control, and mirrors were only for despairing over what I looked like in. While waiting for magical adulthood, I created alternative universes in my head and wrote about them: time-slips, fairy courts, aliens, ghosts. Of course, adult life didn’t turn out quite as controllable as I’d expected and I wish I still had the face and figure I used to about, but what teenager realises they’ll ever feel like that?
Then last week, when I was looking for something cheerful to counteract global politics, and read about avoiding burn-out by swapping places with one’s mirror self, I suddenly remembered Trixie/Trina and wondered what would happen if I sought her out to exchange realities.
When the bullies hauled her away from her side of the glass what happened next? I wondered. Is her world better or worse? Has she changed or stayed the same?
I remembered her as a small thin six year old with blonde hair, scabby knees and an anxious, serious, worried expression.
Now presumably, she’d be middle-aged, plump, greying with a pragmatic smile and sense of her own ridiculousness.
But what if she was no longer be my exact reflection but a different person after all these years of separation?
What if she were no longer there at all?
I looked at the news again, then the list of suggestions, then back at the news. We live in a world where everything – not just me – seems to be burning out.
IfI could climb onto a mantelpiece and enter a mirror and risk what was on the other side of the reflection, I thought, would I?
Would you?
(Actually, if you do it, can you pull me up? I’m not sure my knees could manage climbing onto a mantlepiece any more.)
Words copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. All rights reserved. Not to be copied or used without express permission.
Am I alone in seeing stories everywhere? I can’t remember when I didn’t think ‘what’s their story?’, ‘what if X happened next?’, ‘why are they/is this/am I like this? What led them/it/me here?’
I dealt with long boring journeys by imagining the lives of the people we passed in the car, or what might be behind a high wall/hedge (lots of Cornish trips), or why a castle was in ruins. I coped with bullying by imagining situations in which I managed to express my feelings and the bullies changed their ways (biggest fiction exercise of my life). I enjoyed subjects where there was a story (English, History, RE), or patterns (Maths, Physics) or a challenge deciphering a pattern (Maths, Languages). If I’d spotted the stories in Geography and patterns in Chemistry, I might have enjoyed much them more than I did. If I’d been taught art differently, perhaps I’d have got to grips with that at school too. I stopped taking art at fourteen, in what was then called the Third Year, and is now called Year Nine, and in both eras called ‘Options Year’. This was when you study a million subjects at exactly the point of adolescence when you have become really truculent and know all adults are idiots, yet have to decide what you’re going to do for your first set of public exams (in my case, O levels). Long story short, I dropped art at fourteen.
Ever since I could create a word, I have been by nature a writer. But Liz Hedgecock has been encouraging me for some months to do art challenges with her giving me the chance to play catch-up on those art lessons I put to one side. I’ve found it really freeing, tapping into the part of me that writes short stories rather than novels. It’s a chance to try a narrative in a few lines rather than huge number of words. When she suggested we try Inktober, I was happy to give it a go. But when I looked at the prompts, I knew almost immediately that at my skill level I was definitely going to look for a ‘story’ for each one, not only to cover up my inadequate skills but to keep me motivated.
I think that largely Liz did the same, although with a different approach. You can see what Liz did here. But if you don’t follow me on Instagram – here is what I came up with and a summary of the background behind the stories that came into my head. to help me make sense of the prompts.
Dream, Spiders, Path, Dodge, Map
To start with I dug out a bottle of ink I’ve had forever and a lovely fancy glass ink dipping pen and did what I could with them.
I used the ink and pen for the first three and found myself sketching in a fluid, free-form way which tapped into my subconscious quite nicely.
As a vivid dreamer, it was hard to know where to stop for Dream. I included all my recurring dreams and nightmares but tried to make sure my bed was heading into happiness, even though I remembered too late that pictures should read left to right, not right to left. Ho hum.
I don’t like hurting Spiders, but prefer them at a distance, so looking at photos of them to draw from made me feel queasy. I decided to turn our treatment of them on its head which sort of coincided with our daughter (home for a break during peak house-spider season) talking to us through the Ring doorbell in a husky voice ‘Hello! I’m Simon the Spider. I just want to be friends. Please let me in.’
Path – the last I drew with ink and dipping pen for a bit, depicts me at some point in my life in my early twenties, deciding between the risky route of chasing my creative dreams where the dragons were (left) and the sensible career route (right). I picked the latter but am now in a position to go back to that fork in the path and change direction.
However, that’s not to say it’s all easy running and Dodge, the first one I drew with a fineliner (can’t remember why I changed, but it changed how the drawings turned out) has me trying to get to my happy place while being attacked by household duties, work/writing deadlines and to-do lists.
By the time I was drawing Map, I was away from home and had a mini art kit, so it was drawn with a fineliner and is perhaps the last one digging into my subconscious for all the things that prompt or hinder creativity. I wasn’t terribly happy with Map, but that’s how it goes. On the other hand I was an avid map drawer as a child, so it was good fun and I just wish I’d had a bigger piece of paper and fewer distractions.
Golden, Drop, Toad, Bounce, Fortune, Wander
A dragon was the first thing that sprung to mind for the prompt Golden. I went straight back to being six and the teacher reading from the Hobbit about Smaug the dragon in class, though my dragon of course is less murderous and mostly understood. I’ve always wanted to draw a dragon but thought I couldn’t, but I decided to give it a go anyway and found all those scales rather therapeutic to draw.
Drop – I regret to say that the word ‘drop’ just made me think of a running nose, so I had to do a bit of lateral thinking. I knew what I wanted to draw for Toad, so it seemed logical to draw what happened before… It nearly ended up with being a potion to turn a man back INTO a toad after a regretable spell. You’ll just have to decide whether it’s his fault for dabbling or the soup-maker has a naughty intent.
As for Bounce – I thought of the bounciest thing I could think of and tried not to remember the Spacehopper my father ran over when I was seven. I was very fond of it, and it never recovered. It gave my Dad a fright though.
Fortune was difficult for a number of reasons. I couldn’t think what to draw at all – or rather I could, but it was too complicated. It was difficult day at work and I wasn’t really in the mood that evening. I decided to go back to the ink and dipping pen and then regretted it. Everything went wrong! But what I was aiming for was the idea that there’s definitely a rich man in the seeker’s life but it’s at her expense. No idea if that comes across.
Wander was easier and is based on two photos of my daughter in different forests in different years, wondering which way to go next. (Bless her, my daughter ended up as an unwitting model and doesn’t look anything like the way I’ve portrayed her but I’m pleased that she’s braver at trying different routes than I was at the same age.)
Spicy, Rise, Castle, Dagger, Angel, Demon.
I could have drawn my husband’s numerous chilli plants for Spicy, or the contents of our spice cupboard, but of course ‘spicy’ has another meaning and I decided to have fun and go down that route as well! It took me four attempts to write ‘chipotle’. I could type it, but I couldn’t write it with a pen. This is one that I’m planning to do again and/or colour.
Likewise Rise – I suppose I could have saved this idea for Fire, but a phoenix rising with hope from disappointment and fear of failure seemed apt that particular day.
By the time I was drawing Castle, I was away from home again, and trying to deal with the intricacies of a real castle didn’t appeal. A sandcastle while more manageable felt a bit dull, so guess what – a story came to mind. My daughter loves octopuses and in a story world, one would come to her rescue if she needed it. (in reality she’d probably just biff anyone stomped on her sandcastle).
Despite writing murder mysteries which occasionally involve daggers etc, and despite thinking that daggers can be very beautiful and nearly drawing the one from Murder Dunovaria, the news being what it is, I didn’t fancy drawing a Dagger. The phrase ‘beating swords into ploughshares’ came to mind so I decided to draw (not very well as you can tell from my having to redraw the hammer) daggers being turned into doves.
The Angels in the nativity play come from the disappointment of never having been one as I described in Advent Calendar and also from remembering when my son was a shepherd in a nativity play aged five. He had his crook confiscated after rehearsals because he kept tripping up the primmest angel. When the day of the public performance came however, somehow he’d managed to get hold of a crook again and guess what he did? The primmest angel flat on her face as she walked down the aisle. He swore it was curiosity not malice but… I was the one dealing with her cross mum.
I didn’t want to draw a Demon for a number of reasons, so decided to do the sort of thing I’d have done at school and re-interpret the brief. So instead of demon, we have demonise. It was close to National Black Cat Day apparently, so that’s what I went for. Poor black cats. They don’t deserve the bad press. It’s time for them to fight back.
Away from home again with a simple art kit, I was wondering what on earth to do for Saddle, then remembered a story I had in Weird & Peculiar Tales, itself prompted by a dream, in which a hapless goblin cross breeds a werewolf with a chihuahua and went from there. (Admittedly my husband asked why I’d drawn a chicken being put on a dog, but hey.)
Plump coincided with the launch of Booker & Fitch omnibus of books 1-3 so here I am being plump (I’m plumper in real life) plumped down on plump cushions in Hazeby-on-Wyvern reading the book.
Frost was easy in theory, although I was in a very hot place at the time, so it was hard to imagine, and I found it hard to draw with black on white and wished I were home with black paper and white or silver pen, but I wasn’t. So here I am as a child, when I didn’t have a radiator in my bedroom with the view of mountains from my window obscured by frost as happened quite often.
Chains was a horse who was waiting, poor thing, to cart tourists around in a sort of cab in 30+ degrees Centigrade (86+ Fahrenheit). It didn’t seem too bothered, but it was happily chewing on the chain attaching it to a railing. I don’t think it was trying to get away, but it was hard not to imagine it (I would have been).
Scratchy – this is the cat we had when I was a little girl, scratching on a piece of wood which we’d brought back from the New Forest after a camping trip. Why? Because I’d spent several days pretending it was my motorbike (give me a break, I was about four or five years old) and I talked my dad round into bringing it home (Mum was not so keen). At home, the magic dispersed and it became the cat’s scratching post. But I like to think she was clever enough to know it was a motorbike really.
Shallow – again, I had something quite ‘deep’ in mind, but didn’t have the skills (or time) to draw it, so instead, here is a nod to all those summers when I (or later my children) thought they’d actually catch something in a rock pool but never did because the creatures were too clever to be caught.
And Celestial (by now I was back at home with black paper and silver pen) speaks for itself – or does it? All astronomists should look away, but there are the Pegasus and Draco constellations together (possibly unlikely) waiting for me to fly amongst them.
Dangerous, Remove, Beast, Sparkle, Massive, Rush, Fire
Finally we’re into the last week of October/Inktober. By now I was getting tired of working out what to draw, and was, once more, away for a couple of days (it really was that sort of month). By now, the prompts seems even harder to draw. Even though I’d taken photos to help me, it turned out they didn’t. So I had to dig down a bit.
For Dangerous, I remembered when my husband bought a Shun knife and kept telling me (the person who does most of the cooking), every time I cooked (e.g. generally) how sharp it was. One evening, while considering that he should be glad I wasn’t seeing how sharp it was on something other than onions, I rolled my eyes… and sliced into the end of my finger. Glad to say that it healed up fine. Sorry to say that onions aren’t improved by being pink. Will honestly say that my husband and I do not look this young although the expressions are broadly accurate.
Remove was tricky. I had a few ideas including someone removing hate from their heart and being ready to replace it with love, and someone pinching a piece of someone’s jigsaw just as they were about to finish it (sorry – that’s my brain – goes from sentimental to mischievous in the blink of an eye) and then remembered I was going to be drawing while on a train and I couldn’t face trying to draw a jigsaw. Something someone said made me think of masks or make-up and that’s what I decided to draw. I don’t wear much make-up and certainly haven’t worn this much for years, but am really fascinated by make-up artists’ skills and occasionally wonder if they could improve me. Sadly though, at the end of the day it would come off and the real me would be there underneath. The train-ride wasn’t exactly smooth and that’s my excuse for any errors (cough).
Beast was potentially as hard to draw as Demon, but by this point in the challenge, both Liz and I had decided that hands were ‘a beast’ to draw and so I went for the image above. In the pencil sketch I have the right number of finger joints. Somehow when drawing in fine liner, I added one in. This proves the point about drawing hands.
I knew from the outset that I wanted to draw my lovely daughter’s lovely eyes for Sparkle. I categorically didn’t do either the exercise or my daughter justice, but will definitely try it again. I was, by this point, really missing the opportunity to use watercolours or acrylics to add colour, or just use various pencils, but there you go. It’s all a learning curve and I’m glad I can do it without a teacher marking my efforts.
Massive was another where I didn’t quite know what to draw, then we passed a group of tourists queuing to have a birds of prey experience. The birds of prey looked as bored as the horse waiting to cart tourists around (though the temperature was more manageable where I was then). I wondered if they were thinking ‘why do the tourists get all the fun? What if we were big enough to carry them instead of the other way around?’
I had some photos of people on the underground to use as inspiration for Rush, but then thought back to when I was a child and spent time watching nature – the driven clouds, the busy insects, the running river, the the little creatures in the river marching about, oblivious (thankfully) to the adult world of being so head down rushing from A to B. Somewhen I stopped doing that, and am only just starting again.
Finally, for Fire, this is another from Weird & Peculiar Tales – or rather it’s what might happen one day. I have a sort of myth-story in there about when dragons and humans were friends – the humans providing friendship, the dragon providing warmth and protection. Then, because humans are involved, it all goes wrong. This is imagining a future which I think we’d all love – -when we stop fighting and pointing fingers and just sit down together and enjoy friendship and warmth.
So there you have it – a bit of my soul laid bare. As I said before, I’m proud of some of my drawings, not proud of others at all, may retry some, may not with others. But I had a go. It’s back to the writing now, but I’m not going to stop the art. I’m going to keep doing it. Tapping into that part of my brain that likes to tell a quick story and isn’t worrying about judgment feels like going back to a freer, less disciplined me. And that’s not a bad place to visit now and again.
Words and Images (c) Paula Harmon 2023 – not to be used without the author’s express consent.
_(14779323804).jpg){kind=link}