Progress

17K words into third of trilogy - working title evolved from 'Luke's story' to 'Commission and Omission' - and far better-organised thanks to SE course.

Bloody Scotland had a hand in it too - the short story written for that will be expanded and incorporated, plus I am getting huge amounts of inspiration from reading and re-reading Chris Brookmyre's Jasmine Sharp trilogy! 

Obviously I'm very much looking forward to the workshop I'm doing with him in Stirling on the nineteenth of this month.

Growing a character

Ivo was born at a writing retreat – the fifth such – in a cabin in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. (Thanks to MH for the photo)

Seeded by a photo prompt; rooted more sturdily via a challenge to channel Hemingway, he pushed forth his first healthy shoots via an eleven-sentence exercise loosely based on Bob Thurber’s http://home.comcast.net/~bob-thurber/anatomy.html.

Next came an effortless and unexpected bloom:

'Ivo makes love like an alley cat. Skinny and slippy and quick. Ends with a grunt; an unsmiling appraisal of the woman beneath him who’s already forgiven him since she came at the moment he entered her; having feared that he’d leave her without.’

And rumour had it he teaches art ...

I've a place for Ivo. A barely-begun novel, the last of a trilogy, where I hope he'll bear much fruit, and
I’m waking earlier and earlier these days, needing to set down conversations.