Some writers are linear. We’re very good at trying to place ourselves on a progression line. We adopt binaries, ‘a plotter or a pantser’, and in doing so, we adopt an identity in opposition to the creative practice of other writers. We become part of a school, a tribe, or we settle for the in-between ‘plantser’ that, in itself, is a tacit acknowledgement that a practice binary exists. Rather than writing outside it, we can only span it, borrowing originality of practice from each end of the extremes.

That’s not how writing and creativity works though. To be creative is to be spontaneous and sometimes it’s about leaving behind the boxes we happily inhabit. Even the most effective and efficient, structural, plot driven writer can find inspiration and extend their practice with a random notebook observation or a different free-writing experience where the characters write themselves. Even the writer that explores structure while they write not before can benefit from stepping into the discomfort of leading with the structural.

This Substack is an opportunity to share a window into my notebook where I drift without structure and explore writing for the joy of words that are just right together. I’m experimenting with inviting you into my process as well as my finished writing with these Substack pieces, which are a combination of the creative work itself and reflections on aspects of the creative process of writing it. As a writer, I have learned more from the creative evolution of other writers’ work than from a library of critique books. Some of these pieces are part of a larger whole. Some are complete in themselves. Some are fiction, and some creative non-fiction. Some are somewhere in between. ‘Monsters’ is the first of these.

These hybrid pieces are also a place to show you how my loose web of ideas and words translates through more disciplined work into complete pieces or parts of my current works-in-progress.

In that spirit, ‘Monsters’ is the first creative piece I’m sharing that is part of the ongoing process of working on my novel-length creative non-fiction book ‘Almanac of Lost Days’. ‘Almanac’ interweaves personal history with 11 reimagined conversations claiming back the 11 lost days of the 1752 calendar ‘reset’ when parliament decreed a jump from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. It grew from my own convoluted background of writing, science, history, and family.

Monsters

‘It’s the biggest ice cream in the world!’

You looked down at me and I received the offering reverentially. You knew you had me. Your eyes crinkled with mischief and, wrapping my free hand in yours, we walked towards the shingle. Wind whipped my unruly hair. Sea wind. Salty.

‘You can’t take it home with you!’

You knew I’d try. We had the same kind of stubborn in us, you and I.

Your feet outpaced mine.

‘Daddy!’ I stopped, my nose almost touching the carefully crafted frozen edifice. You watched my eyes expand with anticipation. The saliva that filled my mouth hid itself away. My hair refused to behave. The gusts played with it. Dancing strands. Tears dried on my cheeks and you knew you didn’t need to wipe them.

It was over in a moment. The wind snatched my prize and tossed it to the ground. There it lay. Shingle and ice. You knelt, your eyes meeting mine, and tried to stem the salty waves overflowing.

‘We’ll get another one, sweetheart.’

I knew though, that there are things we can’t replace.

Today, I sit typing this in my converted attic room, a warm blanket nurturing my feet, keeping the brutal December wind at bay - it finds its way into cracks that I didn’t know were there. Houses on hills are used to that. Mine is immune to the rain lashing its sides and beating against the window, overlooking fallow fields and the tantalising walled edge of the deer park. It knows that I will tolerate the buffeting, wrapping toes and gradually growing layers as the winter draws in, because I find it hard to give up the view. Houses on hills are known for their view. The horizon plays with perspective. The further out I look, the smaller it all seems. Even as things recede though, there are places that stand proud against the sky. These are my beacons.

A child of the 70s, I cut my writing teeth on an Olympia Portable Deluxe carefully extracted from its red-felt-lined box and placed on the small table in the front porch where I could type in the sun. It belonged to my mother. Cherished. The rounded indentations on the keys encouraged my small fingers to form words. My writing belonged to my father. I was born into a house of writing, the books lining the study walls never off-limits but always given the respect due to them. I was born into a house that wrote. Stories embossed on paper, each keystroke unleashing a hammer blow, leaving an indelible mark. Words had permanence. Sharing was a tactile act, accompanied by smudges of carbon paper, transmitted from hand to hand. We bore the marks on us too. It was unavoidable.

We talked about that day on the beach often. It became our litany as you sat by my side at night, keeping the monsters under the bed away.

‘Don’t think about what might be there. Let’s think about “The Biggest Ice Cream in the World”.’

‘I don’t like the noise.’

‘It’s just the wind, sweetheart, just the wind.’

I closed my eyes. Your voice rumbled and sometimes I thought I could hear the waves on the shingle. Sleep stole me. The monsters daren’t intrude. When I woke, you had always gone but I could still feel the ghost of your hand on mine.

It wasn’t until my daughter and I found our own litanies that I truly appreciated what it meant to grow up in a house built of words. I missed the moment in the years in-between when my hand became the large one and the stories became mine. She had new monsters for me to chase.

‘Mummy, Tom told me that one day the Sun will become a red giant and swallow the world. Everything will be gone.’

‘Not for a long while though. Not for longer than anyone has ever lived.’

‘But I don’t want to be gone.’

I know now that the Biggest Ice Cream in the World was really just an ice cream. I can’t tell her that one day we won’t be gone. Instead, I weave tales to transport her, building a shell around us as we snuggle together, hiding from monsters I know are there.

We hunted monsters one spring, you and I, in a loch village in Scotland. Seven-year olds still believe they can slay them. I was no different as I scanned the water’s edge, waiting for the promised beast to raise its serpentine head above the wavelets as I skimmed Scottish stones across the rippled surface. I could never make them travel as far as your practiced hand. It wasn’t until decades later, when I absorbed the lexicon of geology into my own, that I truly understood the magic I had held and cast away from me. Lewisian gneiss. Garnet mica schist. The poetry of rocks was tantalisingly beyond the grasp of my small hands. The static undulations and complex folds entombed in the stones drew me to them, nonetheless. The ripples crossing the loch threw back a distorted reflection and I held a moment of time in my fist. I remember the independence of footsteps where the wavelets broke. That small girl never looked back though, and now as I do, I see that she was never truly alone. That wasn’t a summer of ice creams and shingle, but of buzzards lifting upwards from heather-hued Highland slopes, of pebbles and lochs, and a cottage near the water’s edge.

The cottage held treasure. You knew as soon as we walked into the small study at the front of the house. Books! The owners had children slightly older than me. I dismissed you easily as I catalogued the large bookcase that covered the rear wall. It was the summer of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and of a dog called Max, tar-black and devoted to me, or so I thought. I drank in the stories and poured them out again in imagined worlds, certain that the mysterious lady of Mirror Bay would appear one morning floating across the loch.

One night, waiting for the ferry that brought us home, rain lashing around me, a kind man helped me put on my gloves. You watched us. I thought I could do it better. He smelt of whisky, oak-barrelled, aged. It was a scent of home, made strange by the Scottish wind.

Whisky and Old Spice. The scent still lingers.

The man on the boat had soft eyes and a Scottish lilt but he cared about my hands even if his own were shaking.

“Someone drove their car off the ferry into the loch.”

Your tone was matter-of-fact. You didn’t shield me. Country people understand impermanence. Perhaps I wondered why anyone would do that, or how sad they must have been. Now, I would consider their family, left behind to remake a thing that was broken. All I remember though, is the wind and the rain and the kind Scottish eyes smiling at me.

I still watch buzzards from my window, soaring above the arable land, calling to each other in the wind as they ride the updrafts. I tell myself that they find joy in flight but I can’t really understand them. We are all strangers.

The night the monsters came, wind lashed the windows, firing raindrops at them like bullets. I had never learnt to tame my hair. Strands stuck to my cheeks, channelling salty rivulets that I had carried across miles and years from that windy shoreline. You told me they didn’t exist. You lifted the covers and peered into the darkness for me. That night, I stood in a doorway, afraid to look back. I never realised that the monsters were coming for you.

My house on the hill is only a mile away from that doorway as the crow flies. In other ways, it’s a lifetime. I can no longer remember what it felt like before, when that house was my home and I trusted its walls to keep out the storm. It has been remade. The bricks are fragile.

Staring at the horizon now, I can see a young girl standing on the bottom step, peering round the corner. She can smell the chilli her mother is busy cooking in the galley kitchen at the back of the house. A hint of a smile touches her face as she looks at her father in his chair by the fire. Something in his expression though, tells her that this isn’t his idea of a crazy joke. Her mum drops the spoon.

“Call the doctor! Now!”

As she turns the dial on the now old-fashioned phone, her fingers are suddenly much larger than those that tapped out phrases on the old mechanical typewriter, she repeats in her head the words she will say when the phone is answered. The phone isn’t answered. Her fat fingers have failed to dial true and she is met only with the incessant monotone of a dead call. A hand takes the phone away and she is relieved. It isn’t her responsibility anymore. She shrinks back and becomes a child again. Only she will never be a child again.

I can’t place the moment when I began to see this in the third person. For years, I lived in first person. Screen memories. My smile. His face. The scent of onions. A dial tone. It was the 1980s and, in those days, children remade themselves, block by block, piece by piece, brick by brick. I remade myself with bricks formed from words that I had inherited from someone who no longer had use for them. The old typewriter has now been replaced with a modern laptop, somehow though the light touch of fingertip to symbol feels like I am giving words away too cheaply. I miss the solidity. The sense of permanence. In the second decade of the new millennium, I am still patching old holes with new bricks.

Gazing out across the hills from my window, I convince myself if I look back hard enough, I can see the sea, denying the impossibility. I know though, that somewhere on a windy coastline, alone in the dark, the Biggest Ice Cream in the World lies half-buried on a shingle shore, and I hold the echo of your palm in mine.

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A commentary on breaking rules

‘Monsters’ is a short piece that began as a self-contained piece of writing, but it has become part of ‘Almanac’ in a form that will eventually differ slightly as it’s incorporated in the longer work. I often find parts of my longer writing began as something else, but until I see the pattern of my writing over time, I don’t realise that I am actually exploring a bigger theme through shorter pieces that just won’t let me go. I learn about my writing headspace by natural recurrence. Longer form work becomes the only place I can fully articulate that. ‘Almanac’ is that kind of writing. It hasn’t come from structural planning. It grew from a story of myself that won’t let me go without telling it.

‘Monsters’ started in Bournemouth in the 1970s when I was faced with the greatest disappointment of my young life: the loss of the Biggest Ice Cream in the World. I also fell off a railing backwards and banged my head on the concrete that day. It was a challenge all round. Highs and lows. It was the ice cream that I remembered, though. I was writing as an exercise in reflection, in self-referential writing. I chose to layer myself into the piece as narrator and naratee. As writer and character.

I’m a strong believer in breaking ‘rules’ in writing, but breaking rules you have already learnt, with intention. I have worked with a lot of writers over time, feeding into their own journey of craft development. I may be a natural rule-breaker, in life and art, but in creative writing, I have respect for why the rules are taught. Some of the most frequent developmental feedback I give is where someone has drifted into a particular way of writing which isn’t doing justice to their intention for the work. Usually, this stems from a lack of understanding of the effect that patterns of writing and stylistic choices have on a reader. Some of the best writers I know understand these rules and purposefully break them exactly because they understand the selective power of doing that in the context of their work. Writing is a craft, and as with any craft, there are basic skills which give you the foundation to grow into a unique artist.

When I wrote ‘Monsters’ during my Creative Writing MA, I was pushing back against the teaching that short pieces should be anchored in short timescales, ‘slices of life’, vignettes. That they should be high-stakes and high impact. That if longer, they will only work with flashbacks and time jumps. I spent a lot of my MA study exploring how effectively I could subvert this, with varying degrees of success.

‘Monsters’ tells one arc of my character, but like a rainbow, really every character has multiple arcs in a lifetime. As writers, once we commit ourselves to the page, we become a character. We become something separate from the writing. The stories we tell about ourselves become just that, stories. They outlast us, and they are static in a way we can never achieve. In writing creative non-fiction, our stories become communal no matter how strongly we believe in exclusivity. When we share them, they become a hybrid creation that is ephemeral and exists only in the moment of reading, when they are passes from writer to reader. Then they move on. A reader never reads the same story twice, and a writer, no matter the personal connection to the moment, never tells a static tale from their life. I wanted to explore the character arc and see how I could use it to give the reader a lifetime in a moment in short-form. The writing advice for short stories is good advice. It’s there for a reason. Short fiction or creative non-fiction has impact because of its brevity not in spite of it. There are ways to make that brevity work for you.

I have noticed that my shorter work rarely follows the received wisdom of anchoring itself in short timescales, and I always want more than just a slice of life. In ‘Monsters’, I knew that there was an element of flashback but I didn’t want that to be a non-contiguous defining structure of the piece. I wanted the reader to feel like they had been taken on a continuous arc, not thrown from flashback to flashback whiplash-fast. Creating multiple self-characterisations was a means to do that. Introducing myself as a writer overtly and bringing the reader into the narrative. The timescale of the telling of the story gave me constraint without restricting the essence of the long arc I wanted to write. This is where understanding rules before you try and break them helps. I brought the reader into a covert and subconscious anchor timescale of the act of storytelling, in itself a construct as stories are written and rewritten over many versions before a final copy of them is let out into the reader’s world.

I’m a grammar fiend and I notice tenses. As a child, I learnt English grammar for fun on Saturday nights at my grandma’s house, from an old book of exercises I had found tucked away in the under-stairs cupboard behind my grandpa’s Masonic briefcase. This is why I notice tense in writing. Unintentional tense shifts are the first thing I pick up on when I look at other people’s drafts. One fairly solid rule is to choose your tense and then stay grammatically true to that tense, especially in a short piece of writing. Tense is integral to a story rooted in timeshifts in the way ‘Monsters’ is. We talked about this in a tutorial, the lecturer emphasising that writers should take care not to drift between tenses. That’s good advice … to a point. Learn the rules. Then break them for the effect you want. Be careful of how often you do because grammar is a thing of beauty.

When I wrote ‘Monsters’, I made a choice to retell in multiple tenses. Tense is powerful. It can foreshorten or extend the distance between the reader and the event. It can shape your writing in more than just temporal ways. It can change the reader’s perception of the distance between the writer and the text. Powerful things take energy. When used frivolously, the proximity of a present tense can tire a reader. When used carefully, it can create an emotional link between writer, story and reader. I chose to switch tenses between past and present without the advised delineation of a section change or (in a longer work) a chapter. I chose controlled drift because I wanted the tenses to take the reader with me on the drift through my memory-scape. Drift was integral. It was intentional. Tenses gave me the power to create an atmosphere that is received unconsciously. I trusted the reader to parse the shifts without needing a map. Tense was one of my most powerful tools in ‘Monsters’. As it reached its conclusion, there was one memory I chose to retell in present tense. I wanted to pull the reader in close to my experience. It was designed to jar them, stopping the gentle drift and bringing them into the living memory alongside me. Tense could do that.

In the end, ‘Monsters’ did break rules, but also, in trying to break them, I came to a different understanding of how to use them. It had an anchor point but that wasn’t temporal. It was the importance of a relationship in my life and my choice to retell that. It will change as I incorporate it into ‘Almanac’ and my anchor point for the book is still evolving as I write, but this is the core of one chapter, the kernel from which something bigger grows.

We write in motion until a piece of writing fledges and takes on a momentum of its own without us. ‘Monsters’ is starting to grow its wings.

I’m a writer and I’m ageing.

I’m ageing like a treasured first edition, leather bound. The pages are thick, slightly yellowed by the turning of many hands. The cracks and creases, a rich map of interactions, arguments and love affairs, conversations and journeys, each one leaving a scuff etched into the binding. When you open it, cracking the spine gently, it releases a hidden scent of old libraries and time. A flight of magic that transports me back to every lost moment and the richness they held. I wouldn’t change that.

To be ageing is a great gift. To peer into a world that is constant, where you are both young and old simultaneously. To see yourself reflected in the mirror of all you’ve seen, and all you’ve done. To hear the voices of those who no longer talk through the lines that connect you. This is a valuable thing.

Valuable things sometimes remain unrecognised.

Our world today has lost the appreciation of the value of age. We are quick to praise those achieving ‘late’ in life as if they have overcome so much just to be here, implying there is an optimum timescale or that you can be ‘early’, but creativity doesn’t work that way. This is a world that wants to remake old books into something modern, smooth-skinned and unblemished by experience.

Our society fears age. In the west, we live in a world where the fear is so great that rather than relish the scuffs of a life deeply lived, appreciating the age marks in the same way we appreciate a beautiful old book, we inject and plump, smooth and cut, trying to disguise a life fully lived because we fear our own reflections. In a starving world, we pathologise food. We immunise ourselves against desire. Like a warped Narcissus, we are consumed by our own reflections not because we see beauty mirrored back, but because we see faults and failure in every mark. Seeing the creases on the spine of an old book, I know that inside I will find a story of great worth, but modern eyes see only antiquity that defies conformity.

I don’t fear the mirror. I relish a stolen glance in the lens, age reflected back at me like an old friend. I wonder if society, in its fear, isn’t really being punished for that brief view into the forbidden holy of the beauty of age. Those of us who see only beauty in the natural, and only worth in the experiences it hints at, are privileged to see the holy in the earthbound. For those who hide from it, there are consequences. For Narcissus, it was a woodland pool where he found his ideal reflected back. In our world, the woodland pool’s smooth surface has been replaced by public opinion. We who defy the attraction of its smooth surface, also defy that modern-day deity. We refuse to lose the love of ourselves in the reflection, freeing us from the legacy of the compulsive Mesmer personified in the markers of age before us.

And what is writing if not a pathway to the hidden holy? Our ultimate reflection.

I’m not writing ‘late’, but I am writing as I age. I have no fear of that word, nor of all the associations it brings with it. Relative temporality has no place on my pages. The life richly lived that I recognise in my unaltered face as I pass mirror-pool after mirror-pool, is what I pour into the books I fill with my own words. This isn’t late. It’s exactly where it needs to be. I’m subverting Narcissus’s fate and taking control of more than the narrative on the page.

We pull and pin, inject and interject, pigeonhole and classify. The more we design to a universal blueprint or shape our words to a market opportunity, the more we fill-in what is interesting, obscuring what is unique and beautiful with what conforms. If we accept our fate, like Narcissus’s Echo our still-filled bodies and chattering tongues become just a parroted refrain of someone else’s creation. It’s the wrinkles we earned by experiencing the joy and pain of a genuine life that are our most valuable uniqueness. We are not replicas of someone else’s plastic design, on or off the page.

This fascination with self-image propagates damage outwards just as Narcissus’s absorption with his own ideal image ultimately harmed Echo. Echo’s fate was sealed not by the self-absorbed hunter trapped by his own reflection, though. Her lack of individuality was forced upon her by Juno as penance for transgression. As communities, we are equally guilty of punishing our own. The behaviour and appearance of women as they age is policed from within their own social walls. The gatekeepers of the literary community are most often those who hold the keys from within. In the writing community, the wealth and value of age is undermined by compliments dressed as motivation. ‘How amazing it is that she is doing this later in life.’ The phraseology of late recognition of creativity implies that if one so ‘late’ can become visible, there is hope for everyone. Really though, those with wrinkles-in-the-game are often the most interesting and it is because of the creases, not despite them.

Ultimately, Echo becomes only voice, as the entirety of her corporeal form shrivels and lithifies. Unloved. Isn’t independent voice the strongest tool we can wield, though? Should we, as writers and women, allow a Juno-like society to compel us to speak only in echoes of that which we have seen in others? In a society that values the plastic and disposable, can it really be that our only choice is between survival in the sound of the echo, or to fade like Narcissus, forever grasping at the fleeting phantom of a youth that is unattainable? After all, the fillings and toxins never really bring back even the veneer of youth, instead just creating a purgatory where we are neither old nor young, but simply plastic. The market forces that dictate which writing rises to public consciousness are equally restrictive, creating our own individual purgatory where we are compelled to echo simply that which has been spoken before.

Seamus Heaney wrote of the introspection of a writer in ‘Personal Helicon’, the concept of the draw of an empty page, of the act of writing. The compulsive need to peer into the shielded darkness, unsure of what is below. He faced the Narcissus we all carry within us. Heaney saw himself in his words, compelled to introspection as a more dignified act than peering into the darkness of springs in the woodland. As writers, we constantly recreate ourselves through language, building enduring facsimiles that will outlast our physical forms. We need to be cautious that we don’t recreate a modern-day golem, animated by someone else’s words. To defy Juno’s demand for repetition. We need to abandon Narcissus to his pool while we move loudly into the world, skipping from reflection to reflection, recognising the worth of our individuality.

We need to fill our shelves with creased first editions, each one carrying the unique scent of the lives we have lived.

I am a writer and I am aging, and I am not afraid of that.

June’s tried its best to melt me with extreme heat, but through the haze, it’s been a good month for creativity. June’s my restart month. I left academia and formal STEM work last October. Higher education in the UK wasn’t somewhere I recognised anymore. It has dramatically changed from the knowledge and learning-driven institution I started in over quarter of a century ago. I also transitioned through full-time caring, to the loss of my mother, and June was the anniversary of that particularly bleak period. So, on paper, June could have been a total bust.

The reality is, it was actually the first month my creativity woke up again. As the year began, I realised I had carried a lot of the things with me from a high pressure, not entirely non-toxic, university environment to my own workspace. And really, what’s the point of giving up a salary if I just replicate that workplace without recompense? So, I decided I was just going to put the brakes on everything. I decided to stop and read. No objective. No explanation. No justification.

From the ashes of a difficult year, I decided to start 2026 by reading.

Here we are in June, and I am writing again with purpose. Sometimes, you need to give yourself the grace to pick yourself up and mend the dented bits. June has been about picking up my current works-in-progress and focusing on the progress rather than seeing them as work. I look forward to sharing some excerpts with you as I write.

So, welcome to my first monthly round up. This is going to be a regular feature on my Substack and it gives me a chance to share with you some of the things that have been fuelling my creativity each month.

Books from the Basket

What I’m annotating this month

I annotate as a writer, to understand and have a dialogue with the texts I read, and inform my own writing practice. This month, I’ve been annotating these books for different reasons:

• The Night Alphabet by Joelle Taylor

  Joelle Taylor’s language is some of the richest I know, and in this fiction work, she brings metaphor and unusual twists on language across from her poetry. I’m exploring exactly how she finds the balance between metaphor saturation and the kind of unusual power that stops you in your tracks as you read without making you feel like someone has washed you away with a flood of the non-literal.

• Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

  I’m currently working on a creative non-fiction book that is very much centred in the landscape, both wild and constrained, so I have been choosing to look at how people’s relationships with gardens are treated in a range of books. I know the relationship I have with the natural in my writing, but reading that of others can sometimes illuminate ways I didn’t realise I was rooted in the ground.

Non-fiction on the Nightstand

This month’s reads are very much subject-driven for me:

• The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

  This is a really well-researched example of detailed writing that is anything but dry to read. It’s the hardest type of writing, to bring complexity to history but make it easy on the reader.

• How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 by Helen Garner

  I think these diaries are just exquisite vignettes of life, well-observed and beautifully written.

Escapism and fun

I’ve been completely in sci-fi mode this month:

• The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

  I’ve been saving this final volume in the Wayfarers series because I haven’t wanted to finish reading them for the first time. I love these books because they are quiet sci-fi with great world building and natural diversity of character. They are an example of how to tell a gentle story that is no less gripping for its kindness.

Ponder Point

I have a long form essay coming up on the Substack this week where I dive into the relationship between society, age and writing. In this month’s Ponder Point, I’d like you to consider how we use language around age in society, and what subtle and unspoken messages we send by the words we use, even as we consider ourselves age-blind. Are we really as unaffected by years lived as we profess to be?

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Prompt for the Month

Set aside 15 minutes with a timer and see where the prompt takes you:

Creatives I’ve Found in June

A massive amount of props to @AliceSockettAudio on Instagram for providing an immense amount of free content supporting people who want to learn how to be audiobook narrators. It’s not easy to break down barriers and really show people that something is open to them when they don’t see it as a possibility, and Alice does this so well. Check out her Instagram profile if you’re interested.

Signing Off for June

That’s a wrap! Look out for more writing-related shenanigans in July as I get this crazy Substack thing off the ground. If you feel inclined, do subscribe to the newsletter and share it with anyone who you think will appreciate it. Happy scribblings Booklings.

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