#WordWeavers: 11/3: Give an example of brilliant writing. What's special about it?
The description of the great flood in Dorothy L Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, which at different times captures both the violence and the strange stillness which flooding can bring.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 14/2: Share a short paragraph of raw prose.
Everyone: What’s the most prominent signature in this draft?
I don’t really do ‘raw’; I could blame my freelance experience, but mostly it’s just the way I am. You’d need telepathy to see the true raw material; it’s already had some polish before it first hits the paper/pixels. But try this, which at least hasn’t had further editing, from (potentially) Book 9 of The Shattered Moon.
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#WordWeavers 3/1: Share a vivid sensory description from your story. What was writing it like?
This is from the current WIP, Book 7. In writing about glaciers, I could draw on experience from my first sight of one (Briksdalbreen, Norway, over 50 years ago), to the Alps, Karakoram, and New Zealand.
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#WritersCoffeeClub 29/1: Which phrase, paragraph, or page are you most proud of writing this month?
I don’t exactly keep a scrapbook of favourite lines I’ve written, but I have enjoyed following the emergence of an MC’s younger sister as a character in her own right. Here’s a semi-random snippet.
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Just been cleaning up my phone.

#WritersCoffeeClub 24/1: Share something you’re proud of but had to cut from a work.
Going right back to Three Kinds of North, here’s a short passage that got left out, because I couldn’t quite find the place for it. Bit of a shame, really.
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#writerscoffeeclub 4/1: Share a tool of your trade.
Apart from the obvious (notebook, pen, laptop) I want to talk about Lightroom and Photoshop. Absolute mainstays when I was working regularly as a photographer, and still vital for cover design. I have, however, resisted ‘upgrading’ to Photoshop 2025 because I don’t want AI ‘features’ foisted on me.
Screenshot shows work on the cover of Book Seven of The Shattered Moon.
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