Love Life and Destiny

It's been quite a year. It started with a death sentence, followed by 2 operations, a period of recovery, the all clear, a decision to relocate back to Asia with an on rushing departure date on 22 November. To accomplish this I had a plan. Then I didn't have a plan. Then I had to devise a new plan, so here we are, more or less ready to go. The moral of the story? Life is sometimes unpredictable. Don't sweat the small stuff. Follow your instincts. Have no regrets. Just do it.

I am at that time in life when I am looking back at where I have come from, some of the people that I have met along the way, the impression that they made on me. One memory is that of Daphne Du Maurier, author of Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The Birds and other modern literary classics. My home was near to Menabilly House in Cornwall, the reputed inspiration for Manderley. I used to walk across the estate, a teenager in search of meaning, lost in my own fantasy land. Cornwall, the home of my fathers, a finger of land seemingly pointing westward towards the New World, is the perfect place to live if you are a writer. The softer south coast, facing the English Channel with the wilder, more rugged north coast hammered  by the harsh Atlantic ocean. You are never far from the sea, wherever you live, and the contrasts challenge you. The combination of low scudding cloud cast from the seas, crouched trees and the threat of rain always bring you back into the moment. When I first met ...

It’s sometimes easy to forget how incredibly brave it is to choose to be a writer. We can get so caught up in the negativity and worry - the writer’s block, the rejection, how much competition there is, how difficult it is to sell our books, that we can all too easily sidestep the fact that actually, we are doing something pretty amazing. Writers are: Resilient Writers are experts at ‘getting back in the saddle.’ Even the very best of us gets knocked down - by publishers, by agents, by critics, by trolls, by ourselves. But when we do we know that there is no point in scurrying away to a dark corner to lick our wounds but instead to learn, to get better and to just keep trying. Persistent Writers know all too well that they might never get the results they want from their work. But they keep trying anyway. If something doesn’t work, they’ll take another look at it or try another route. If someone tells them they are not good enough, they’ll keep searching, and hope that e...