Guardian review

A modest smidge of national attention for The Frogmore Papers this week, in the Guardian Review section. Link.

Meanwhile, I am actually writing! Poetry still not forthcoming, but this fiction lark is a doddle...

Oh and it's my 29th birthday today. Let's see if I can get a novel published before I'm 30.

Six months minus one day

I remember calculating once that I had earned less than £100 from poetry in my entire life. This total doesn't look like going up any time soon, so I'm giving serious thought to writing genre fiction in an attempt to boost our now alarmingly reduced income. Murder mysteries, maybe. I have no idea if I have the patience to write a novel, but it's got to be worth a try.

Six months minus three days

Today is my first day back at work. And despite the fact that I have intended all along to come back on this date, wanted to do it, and have had six months to prepare for it, it was still torture leaving Alice at home this morning.

So, to cheer myself up I've been thinking of the plus points:

1) I have a fighting chance of getting through the day without my clothes becoming covered in sicked up milk and half digested carrot (unless we have some REALLY ill-mannered students this year).

2) I might get some adult conversation instead of n repetitions of 'Row Row Row Your Boat'.

3) I don't have to think about routes avoiding steps whenever I go anywhere. And I can sit wherever I like on the train.

4) Nobody is likely to yank my hair out (it's not the searing agony that I mind so much as the alarming number of WHITE hairs that now end up being clutched triumphantly in a chubby fist...)

5) An actual lunch break, dictated by logic and preference rather than the whims of an infant.

6) Significantly less ear-splitting crying.

Five months and nineteen days

Alice just can't stop smiling at the moment!



(Except when she's sceraming blue murder that is, due to those pesky bottom teeth she's sporting so proudly.)

Lots I've been intending to write, no time to write it...