Randi 
Her name was Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Born just before French Revolution, she lived at a time of great upheaval and hardship. However, like the best poets, she was able to spin her suffering into beauty, into poetry that still strikes the heart today. I discovered her while reading a little pocket book, sensibly titled French Poetry, several … Read more…
As Stephen King advised in his book On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” There’s great truth in this for fiction writers. To write well, you not only have to practice — to actually write — but you also have to … Read more…
Sometimes it’s possible to read too much. Not horizontally — that is, too often, or too widely — but vertically. By which I mean reading too many books at once. If you’re as excitable and easily distracted as I am, you know the pain. You start off reading one, maybe two books — a fiction and … Read more…
In the last Character Spotlight, we had a look at The Whitemaiden‘s protagonist and main POV, Catirna Elkela. Today you’ll meet the secondary POV — the young, cursed sage Axel Pavlekel. This would be the sage mentioned in the story blurb: When a young sage turns up in the woods, tortured and cursed, a disgraced healer must … Read more…
Three languages in one poem? Can you do that? It was one thing, perhaps, to encourage you to write in a foreign language … but that was just one. If you write in three at a time, who will understand you? I admit I asked myself the same question before writing today’s poem. In the end, … Read more…