Nesta Tuomey's Blog: Nesta Tuomey author, page 7

When a broken ankle proved a blessing in disguise.

In every disadvantage there are the seeds of a greater advantage. Where have you heard that before?  Well, strangely enough it can be true, it was for me. . When in a fit of abstraction - bemused by a piece of prose by  Polly Devlin and, in particular, the irresistible sentence 'The loch was leached of light'  I walked off the stairs in a cafe ending up with a broken ankle, there wasn't a lot I could do but sit about until it healed.  With others doing the housework and he...

A good title is just as important as a good cover.

What you call your book is every bit as important as your cover. A catchy title that maybe suggests two meanings like 'Gone Girl' is clever and thought-provoking.  For my first novel about life in an Irish airline, conscious of how quickly air hostesses become engaged I played around  for a bit with the title 'Wings and Rings.'   But it wasn't a good title for my book which was not just a light romance but an airline novel written from the viewpoint of the pilots on the flight...

Country Banking moved slowly in the Sixties.

When I joined the bank and went to work in the country I found it very different to life in the city, it moved at a slower pace, there was an unhurried way of doing business.  The porter, an invaluable member of the staff, was the particular friend of the lady bank official, obligingly bringing her jackets to the cleaners or calling to the flat to deliver groceries or  unblock drains. In icy weather when the pipes froze and it was necessary to take a bath in the bank house before th...

Life above the clouds..

When I joined Aer Lingus and started training to be an air hostess I had never been in an aircraft of any description before. Our training flight was my first flight and I wasn't the only one, it was first time flying for most of the others too. That day two girls were selected by our training officer to serve the rest of us snack trays, tea/coffee/sandwiches and we all sat back and enjoyed the ride. A quick trip around the Eastcoast of Ireland and then back home again to the airport. It was...

Where does writing inspiration come from.

When I started writing my brother used say, 'Use your experiences, it's all grist to the mill!'  How true, for a writer everything is valuable. If someone passes your gate wearing a yellow hat replace the brown hat your character is wearing with that yellow one.  For the yellow hat is real and believable, haven't you just seen someone wearing it passing your gate? In my childhood my best friend's mother used call us in from play to give us cups of milk.She was kindly and motherly an...

House-owning obsession or dream?

It's only natural wanting to own your own home, everyone can identify with that. Some people spend their whole lives planning and saving for it but it never happens. Or else, it comes too late for them to be able to enjoy it. Some people search for their dream house until it becomes an obsession but that's another story now.  Growing up, our rented house was a bone of contention between my parents and in later years it was a story I felt compelled to write, giving it, simply enough, the...

Can life imitate art?.

Can life imitate art is a question that is sometimes posed?  In my experience it sometimes can although I wasn't the one who witnessed it in action. Rather, it was my long-suffering, saintly husband who used to regularly do the 'Monica Run' - as we'd got in the habit of calling it - the drive across the city to collect my mother from the elderly people's home she resided in and bring her back to spend the day with us. As the short story was my first love and I'd already had some success...

The Forest for the Trees.

I have been reading Betsy Lerner's 'The Forest for the Trees' on and off over the months and will read it several more times before I finally put it down. This is an honestly written humorous, insightful and engaging read. Lerner sees into the hearts of writers and has a built-in humbug detector. No one sits down to write a modest success, she tells us, rather every writer wants to write words that inflame the readers' minds and hearts. How true. There's no denying it. Whether its a runaway success like Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the Wind' or Patrick White's Nobel prize-winning 'Tree of Man' every writer secretly hopes his or her next work will be the major opus, the great one! I enjoyed Lerner's anecdotes about writers, some of them were very quirky characters indeed, needing to engage in certain rituals before being able to start their day's work. Dame Edith Sitwell reputedly lay in a coffin at the start of her day no doubt to get her in the sober enough mood to begin. Hemingway felt the need to sharpen twenty pencils before the muse joined him and Truman Capote always typed the third draft of the novel on very special yellow paper. For the famous writers all these ritualistic behaviours become known as their 'process' - what made them tick. The problem is this is not writing, Lerner points out, this is just stalling! And the more you indulge any neurotic notions about a set of necessary conditions that will enable you to write, the colder the trail will get. This book is a real treat for those who write, who want to write and enjoy nothing so much as reading about the art of writing and what motivates other writers. Would highly recommend it.



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Dawn flights and strong black coffee!

http://nestatuomey.blogspot.ie/2014/0...

Dawn flights and strong black coffee.

My first awareness of Dawn London flights in my teens was the roar of the Viscount passing over our house, on the city northside, as I lay warm and snug in bed.  Sometimes I felt a slight unease though - the engines sounded so loud, the aircraft so low in the sky  - that I feared it would land in the back garden as I had dreamed on more than one occasion. But I was determined to become an air hostess and knew I needed to rid myself of such notions. When the time came and I became on...