Six Sentence Sunday

Six more sentences from ‘Changing the Future’. For those who have been following my previous excerpts, we’re now three chapters before the end. Lisa has discovered that Paul was one of the scientists at the observation post on Mount Lakuda when it erupted and caused a huge rockslide. Now the television news report is broadcasting the last recording from the post before contact was lost.

 

She stared at the picture of Mount Lakuda on the screen, while a slightly distorted voice said, “This could be the big one—five point six and it’s still shaking, but no change yet from—”

 

Another voice broke in from somewhere in the background. “Avalanche! Paul, get inside—oh, my God—”

 

There was a roar, static crackling, and then silence.

 

Lisa stared wide-eyed at Millie, but no words would come, only a horrifying vision in her mind of a steel trailer being crushed under hundreds of rock boulders.

'Changing the Future' is available at $3.99 on Amazon
 

Many thanks for all your comments each week!
And this is where we leave Lisa and Paul (yes, I’m really mean, aren’t I?)

Next week I shall start to tease you with some excerpts from my November release, ‘Her Only Option’, a contemporary romance set in Egypt.

 

Read more 6 sentence excerpts from the other Six Sentence Sunday authors here.

 

 

Blogfest 2012 - Are you living your dream?

Today’s host for Blogfest 2012 is Corinne at http://everydaygyaan.com  The writing prompt for today is:

 

Are you living your dream?

 

This is a good one for this weekend, as I am gearing up to having a decorator here for the next two weeks, repainting all my upstairs rooms, plus the hallway, stairs and landing. In addition, once the decorating is done, I am getting a new carpet for my study. So for the next few weeks, my life will be total chaos, as I have to clear clutter from each room in turn so that the decorator can actually get to the walls. Even worse will be emptying my study in readiness for the carpet fitter –I have so much stuff in here, I have no idea where I am going to put it all!

 

If I was living my dream, I’d hand the house key to the decorator and take a long holiday preferably somewhere nice and warm, where I could sit out on a terrace with an ice-cold drink and preferably a view of the ocean – somewhere like Florida would be perfect, or maybe the Bahamas, or even Cyprus or Crete. And then I’d come home to find everything done and dusted, and some fairy godmother would have waved a wand to get everything straight and tidy in my study (as well as all the cables back into my computer!).

 

Hmm, that’s not going to happen, is it?

 

 

This post is part of the BlogFEST 2012 which is taking place each day in October (except Sundays). Every day a different blogger will act as the host and will post the topic for blogging that day, so you can look forward to a wide variety of topics to read and enjoy.

 

You can find the links to all the other blogs here https://www.facebook.com/pages/BlogFEST-2012/508934629122385

 

If you want to join in, post your blog on the topic of the day and leave your blogpost URL on this Facebook page, so that others can visit your blog. Don’t forget to ‘like’ the page too!

Blogfest 2012 - Online Courses?

Today’s host for Blogfest 2102 is Toni Lynn Ferro-Cloutier at www.tonilynncloutier.com and the topic is:

Online Courses

An intriguing topic today – and one I’ve never really thought about before. I’ve never taken any online courses, in writing or anything else. I once went (in real life) to a 6 week ‘Creative writing’ course about twelve years ago, but didn’t find it very useful, unless you wanted to write pretty adjective-laden descriptions of sunsets or flash-fiction about some fairly useless topic like ‘The day I lost my shoe’.

But back to online courses, and here I'm referring to 'writing courses' rather than any other kind of course. Would I sign up for one? No, probably not. Why not? Well, one reason is that there are masses of articles online about every aspect of writing (some of which I agree with, some I don’t.) There’s plenty out there, for free, so I don’t see the point of paying for something when you don’t need to!

I consider myself a fairly proficient writer. That’s not to say I know everything about it. I don’t, and I’m always willing to listen to others’ advice and opinions, or to check things out on the internet. I find, too, that I learn something new with every book I write. 

What about new writers? Personally, I tend to think that the best ‘training’ for new writers is firstly to read, read, read, and secondly to write! Read all you can in your preferred genre (and maybe in other genres too) to see what you like and what you don’t like about the author’s style, characters and plot. And then write! Maybe find a couple of critique partners, too, who will give you honest feedback and constructive criticism. That, to me, is probably more valuable than any online course.

This post is for BlogFEST 2012 which is taking place each day in October (except Sundays). Every day a different blogger will act as the host and will post the topic for blogging that day, so you can look forward to a wide variety of topics to read and enjoy.

 

You can find the links to all the other blogs here https://www.facebook.com/pages/BlogFEST-2012/508934629122385

 

If you want to join in, post your blog on the topic of the day and leave your blogpost URL on this Facebook page, so that others can visit your blog. Don’t forget to ‘like’ the page too!

Thursday Tour of NW England - the village of Wycoller

Wycoller is a small village a few miles from Colne in East Lancashire, very near to the Yorkshire border. Its name comes from the Anglo-Saxon Wic-Air, meaning a dairy farm among the alder trees.

 

In the past, it was a sheep farming community, with a cluster of small stone houses where handloom weavers worked. My 4 x great-grandfather lived in Wycoller as a child in the late 18th century and became a weaver. The invention of the powerloom, however, led to the end of the cottage industry, and families moved to live nearer to the weaving mills. The next four generations of my family worked in the mills in Trawden and Winewall.

 

The village was virtually abandoned for almost a century but was brought back to life by a volunteer group, “The Friends of Wycoller”. The old stone houses have now been restored, and are highly sought after, and the area around the village has been developed into Wycoller Country Park, with trails and walks, and a wildlife trust.

 

The stream or ‘beck’ which runs through Wycoller has seven bridges, including an ancient packhorse bridge. There is also a Clapper Bridge which dates from the 18th century. This photo shows my great-grandfather (in the centre of the bridge) with his brother-in-law at Wycoller sometime during the first decade of the 20th century.

 

Here’s a modern photo of the two bridges nearest to the centre of the village.

 

Wycoller Hall, built by the Hartley family in the 16th century and passing by marriage to the Cunliffe family, is said to have been the inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’. Haworth, the home of the Brontes, is not far from Wycoller and the Bronte sisters probably visited the village on their walks. By the late 1900’s, however, the hall was unoccupied and stones were removed to be used for other properties including some of the cotton mills in Trawden. Restoration work has been undertaken during the last 50 years by the Friends.

 

For those who like ghost stories, Wycoller Hall has several, including a phantom horseman. The story is that Simon Cunliffe, the squire, was pursuing a fox which ran upstairs and into his wife’s chamber. He followed on his horse and , on finding his terrified wife cowering in the corner, raised his whip as if to strike her. She dropped dead out of fright. The squire can still be seen returning to the hall. His horse’s hooves clatter over the bridge and into the hall, and these sounds are followed by a woman’s scream. The ghost then returns the way he has come. He’s supposed to appear once a year, after dark during stormy weather. The woman, wearing a long black dress, has also been ‘seen’ by several people.

This is the last of my Thursday Tour of NW England posts, as I've drawn a blank on X, Y and Z! for the rest of October, I shall be concentrating on posts for the Blogfest 2012  (and Six Sentence Sunday, too, of course).  Many thanks to all who've joined me on this tour!

Photos licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

 

Blogfest 2012 - Make a Wish

Today’s host for Blogfest 2012 is Tree Girly. The writing prompt for today is: Make a wish - what talent would you wish for?

I’ve always wished I could sing and act! In my younger days, I did try some acting, but I wasn’t very good, and as for my singing – well, forget it! Instead, I diverted my energies into directing musical shows, and encouraging/helping others who did have these talents. I directed a dozen or so shows with young people and it was so good to see them blossom from nervous ten-year-olds, who tucked themselves at the back of the chorus, into confident mid-teens taking leading roles in the shows. A couple of them even went on into the professional theatre.

As for me, well, I carry on dreaming of being Calamity Jane, Maria in The Sound of Music, Ensign Nelly Forbush in South Pacific), or Eponine in Les Mis!

Maybe my 'frustrated dream' is one of the reasons why the heroines in my two of my novels have been actresses! Jess in 'Hs Leading Lady' was an accomplished amateur actress/singer who was thrust onto the professional stage in London's West End, and found the fulfilment of her dream (as well as her dream man of course). In contract, Abbey in 'Fragrance of Violets' was suffering a crisis of confidence after failing to get the role of her dreams, but then finds out there was a reason for that ...

 

If you could play a part in any musical show, who would you like to play?

 

This post is part of the BlogFEST 2012 which is taking place each day in October (except Sundays). Every day a different blogger will act as the host and will post the topic for blogging that day, so you can look forward to a wide variety of topics to read and enjoy.

 

You can find the links to all the other blogs here https://www.facebook.com/pages/BlogFEST-2012/508934629122385

 

If you want to join in, post your blog on the topic of the day and leave your blogpost URL on this Facebook page, so that others can visit your blog. Don’t forget to ‘like’ the page too! 

Blogfest 2012 - Insomnia?

Today’s host for Blogfest 2012 is Susan at Today’s Working Woman. The writing prompt for today is “When was the last time you couldn’t sleep and why? What was the reason for not sleeping? What did you do to overcome it?”

I had insomnia trying to think what to write for this topic! No, only kidding!

I never have any problems getting to sleep at home, although I sometimes have problems waking up! Even away from home, I can usually sleep well, as long as the bed’s not too hard or too soft.

Once I’m asleep, I always say the world could end and I wouldn’t know it. I’ve slept through thunderstorms, gales, rain battering against the window – and I didn’t even wake up one night when my house was burgled. Actually, I’m quite glad about that. If I HAD heard any sounds from downstairs, I’d probably have had a heart attack from sheer fright. Fortunately he/they didn’t venture upstairs or I really would have had a heart attack! The police said afterwards they were looking for cheque books and cheque cards, and as I’d left my handbag downstairs, that was all they took. Inconvenient, but not life-threatening!

The only time I recall having ‘insomnia’ was when I was sharing a hotel room with a friend who started to snore the minute she dozed off – and continued to snore for the rest of the night! I lost count of the times I trotted across to the other bed in the room to poke or shake her. The snoring stopped until I got back into my own bed, and then started again!

 

 

This is my post for today's BlogFEST 2012 which takes place each day in October (except Sundays). Every day a different blogger will act as the host and will post the topic for blogging that day, so you can look forward to a wide variety of topics to read and enjoy.

 

You can find the links to all the other blogs here https://www.facebook.com/pages/BlogFEST-2012/508934629122385

 

If you want to join in, post your blog on the topic of the day and leave your blogpost URL on this Facebook page, so that others can visit your blog. Don’t forget to ‘like’ the page too!

Blogfest 2012 - Let's have a party!

I’m taking part in the BlogFEST 2012 which takes place each day in October (except Sundays). Every day a different blogger will act as the host and will post the topic for blogging that day, so you can look forward to a wide variety of topics to read and enjoy.

 

You can find the links to all the other blogs here https://www.facebook.com/pages/BlogFEST-2012/508934629122385

 

If you want to join in, post your blog on the topic of the day and leave your blogpost URL on this Facebook page, so that others can visit your blog. Don’t forget to ‘like’ the page too!

 

Today’s topic is Parties – and the question, ‘Are you the life of the party or do you like to sit back and be entertained? Share a party story.’

 

Hmm, this isn’t an easy one for me as it’s years since I’ve been to a party. My generation doesn’t throw parties like we did when we were younger and quite honestly I can’t really remember the last one I went to, apart from a couple of wedding parties, and my grandson’s 18th party last month (the one at home, not the one at the pub with all his mates!)

 

I think the last party at my house was when my younger daughter was 21 – and she’s now in her 40’s!!

 

The main thing I recall about parties is the contrast – the before and after! Before – everything is tidy and in its place, buffet laid out and looking good, and glasses, bottles and cans all neatly lined up. Great to sit down and relax with a drink before everyone arrived. But afterwards? Eek! Plates and glasses everywhere (some with remains of food or drink), crumbs all over the carpet and maybe a squashed sausage roll or pizza slice under the chair… But who really cared when it had been a good party?

 

I used to be somewhere in between the ‘life and soul’ type and the ‘sit-back-in-the-corner’ type. The worst party I ever remember was when someone spiked my gin and orange drink with vodka. I don’t remember much about the party but I do remember how ill I was afterwards! I’ve never been able to drink gin or vodka since then, and can't even stand the smell of them. And before anyway tells me that vodka doesn't smell, believe me, I can smell it!