Liz Williams's Blog, page 41

Messages from the gods

Came into Witchcraft Ltd this morning to find that Phineas the strange small cat has gleefully knocked all the business cards off the counter and spread them over the floor, in the manner of strange small cats first thing in the morning.

There is also a little bowl of 'goddess messages' on the counter (small slips of card with the name of a goddess and a one-line message for your day).

Phineas had not knocked the bowl over, but one of the cards was on the floor. When I picked it up, it read '...

Writing workshops - London

I'm running a 2 day workshops in London on the 20th-21st March (London).

This particular workshop is directed at people who are aiming at publication and covers the basics of:

- short story writing
- novel writing
- preparing work for publication
- marketing your work
- contacting agents and publishers
- genre as an industry

There are a maximum of 10 places and no entry criteria. We will not be doing a lot of writing during the workshop itself, though we will be doing some - the idea, which has pro...

Creative writing tutoring

As some of you know, I have been working for Adventures in Fiction, a creative writing mentoring programme based in London, which takes a limited number of apprentices each year for various genres. I am now offering this service privately, and hope to be able to offer it both online and in person (I met my previous student on a regular basis, but this is dependent on geographical location!).


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And after garden, kitchen.

I have a new cookbook: Tamasin Day-Lewis' Supper for a Song (she is one of those Day-Lewises and lives in Somerset). She's very much into the seasonal, organic, regional thing. There are some good recipes, including one for a honey and bay-leaf cake, which I will be having a crack at over the next few weeks. Will post results.

Stirred not shaken

A fine day, and a day off, so it has been all hands to the vegetable patch. I dug out the comfrey (OK, sort of dug it out) this morning and this afternoon, just as we were about to walk the dogs, A appeared with all manner of biodynamic paraphernalia (cows' horns, a singing bowl, valerian etc) and proposed that he was about to stir various elements into rainwater - which is what one does in BD to render one's land abundant. It is, basically, a spell.

So while A did this, we walked the dogs on...

March 1st

Hapus Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant! (I think that's right - happy St David's Day, anyway). I note that Cardiff is celebrating with a food festival.

45 today

...or yesterday, in fact. I was teaching but we went out to dinner in the evening, at the Manor House Inn at Ditcheat, which I highly recommend. T had lemon sole and the cheese board, and I had rabbit and turnip casserole, which was much nicer than it sounds, and a passion-fruit creme brulee.

Then we got outside and found that the car battery had gone flat, so went back into the pub and threw ourselves on its collective mercy. A very kind couple interrupted their evening and went to fetch jum...

The Wolfman

E and I have been to see this. Hmmm. Very 1960s, and completely lacking in 'comic' post-modern self referentiality, unless I missed something, which was actually refreshing. However, I was not whelmed by the FX and I also thought there was some dodgy racial stereotyping (of pretty much everyone).

I gather the house is Chatsworth, which brought up some rather odd images of the last Mitford sister suddenly popping up to feed her chickens in the middle of the movie.

Midweek: day off

Our days off are rare and erratic, but we had one today: a long walk across the fields outside Wells, then into the town itself for coffee and pastries, and the farmers' market. Afterwards, we went up onto the Mendips and a pub called the Slabhouse, which has a justified reputation for food: it's a big old place near West Horrington. I had belly of pork with apples and T had an exceptionally good steak (he ordered rump but 'the chef wasn't happy with the quality' and gave him a ribeye instead...

Have some owls

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253033/What-hoot-The-owls-heavenly-place-roost.html