Writer's Gramps

I'm a country boy, and despite being from Glasgow, my wife was a country girl. When she was growing up, the next streets were fields. Those fields are now high rise flats and housing schemes. Initially the new schemes were dry and Friday and Saturday nights saw Billy Connolly's rubber men waiting for the bus home in George Square. However, one of my mother-in-law's friends father owned one of the pubs - had made enough money droving sheep from the Highlands to buy the place. I heard enough about his days droving to make it sound interesting and I did a bit of research and found it had, at one time, been a major source of income for the north with enough anecdotal information to make a decent story. Hence the novel Drover. One of the things I found was that the bad publicity given to the Highland Clearances was not entirely deserved. There were atrocities and great hardship but mixed with it were stories of landlords paying for crofter's fares to Canada and priests gath...

I don't know how you feel about coincidence but over the years I've grown to wonder if there really is such a thing, especially after watching a thing about Einstein's problem and how two particles from the same source yet distances apart, develop the same characteristics when they are looked at. I didn't really understand it but it set me thinking that maybe we are joined in some way we don't realise or understand. It suggests a science fiction tale but its not really my genre. However, it reminded me that despite coming from entirely different backgrounds and living thirty miles apart, in the days before WW1 my wife's uncle bought pigs from my grandfather. The initial link came through a miner from Gramp's village moving to work for my wife's grandad as a gardener and goes on from there. What I am going to do is to make it a family saga but in a series of short stories as it would play out in real life. In a way, it has started with the story in the we...

The new Writers' Journal hasn't come but I must be patient and wait for O'Reilly's dilema to be published there before I can add it to the web page. I enjoyed writing it and it's what the Sullatober Dalton brand is about - country life and humour. There are several books under that Nom de Plume that I want to rewrite but then issue them under Clarke Kennedy so that people are not misled by the name and get disappointed and annoyed when it's not what they expected. I can always provide a link between blogs. NNow to short stories. The latest competition in Writing Magazine is for a tale told in dialogue. I've tried in and it's not easy. It's necessary to get into the mind set of listening to a conversation or being part of a conversation. I find it almost impossible to maintain a single point of view, hence the listener idea. I've written one where the narrator was being interviewed by his prospective father-in-law and, even then, the f-i-l took...

www.sullatoberdalton.com/pen-sullatober Now that the festive season is over, it's time to reignite the muse. The first piece of news is that a short story of mine has won second prize in the Writers' Journal competition.I'm rather pleased about that. I was going to say over the moon but one does not want to enthuse vulgarly, does one? I'll put it on the website but I thought rather let it appear in print first. I'm struggling with my historical novel based on the 1820 uprising in Scotland but it is looking good. I'm struggling because I didn't plot and do enough detailed planning in the first place and I'm now playing catch up. I normally have each scene laid out with what it should feel like and what emotional response I want to create but I rushed into this trying to have it done in plenty of time for the anniversary on the 1st April this year. It would have been quicker to do it by the standard method. My aim is to get it done and off to a litera...