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How to anchor your creative endeavor while juggling work, study and family with writing.
What is it like to try to pursue writing with a full-time job – (I work in Dlr Libraries) while doing a Masters (Library and Information Management with the University of Ulster – Distance Learning) , not to mention guiding and looking out for four teenagers/young adults and keeping connected with extended family, friends and
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Novel Tips for a Sustainable #NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo is the phenomenon that encourages people to put 50,000 words on the page in the month of November. I’ve completed it before and blogged about it. (I’ll post some links at the end) My experiences have ranged from joyful completion and the ultimate self-publishing of a comedy feelgood novel about saving the universe to
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Creative resilience in writing : positive, realistic values and aims
In the last post we looked at how you can build a better attitude towards the substance and quality of your own work. Some of the approaches we looked at such as progress recording and taking a class were very practical. Others were more psychological and value driven such as honouring your background and identifying
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Creative resilience in the face of self-doubt
I’ve wanted to restart this blog with a specific focus on creative resilience. There are so many things that can stop us – a world pandemic, climate crisis, tiredness, overwork, confusion, conflicting demands and that old perennial self-doubt. To endeavour in the face of all those mega obstacles you need to have a reason. Once
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Creative resilience in the face of chaos
In the past this blog has focussed on how to keep going in difficult times during periods of upheaval, overload, uncertainty, loss and grief and in 2020 during the time of the Covid19 pandemic we have all these together. If we have not lost a loved one, we know of someone who has, we have
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Never give up – The Exhibit of Held Breaths goes to Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair
In 2010 I began scribbling in a notebook, imagining a decrepit museum-gallery “I’m writing to tell you about a place where I worked many years ago and a particular exhibit – the Exhibit of Held Breaths. I recently revisited the museum-gallery after an interval of ages. It’s a grim place now; dust shored up in
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The long writing road to a finished novel (Eat!)
When I finish this post I will start work on some final edits and tweaks to my novel Eat! I’ve just begun to submit (very systematically this time) to agents and this is my blurb. Consumption becomes medicine for Anise Fish from the Big House who – feeling responsible for her mother’s death – runs
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Publication and pondering: There’s a café in this story
Dear reader, I’m knee deep, waist deep, actually head under water in my monster novel of 140,000 words. No – as I keep saying – not an actual novel about monsters but the more I say that the more I want to write a novel about monsters. My novel is based on a flash fiction
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Ever ask yourself if you should give up writing?
Writing is an endurance test, especially where the novel is concerned and it requires sacrifice and a great deal of time and effort. In the face of the publishing industry’s vagaries, conflicts between the time we need and what we can do alongside our other responsibilities and in light of our own lack of confidence,
Welcome to my Head above Water blog! I’m Alison, writer, mother and public librarian with a background in Communication Studies and Psychology. I have a particular interest in creative resilience, motivation and how nature and wonder can restore us. In my day job I run book clubs and creative events for children and adults.
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Alison Wells Author 