A writerly week

Didn’t get much writing done … but had a very nice writerly week nonetheless.

The last meeting of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club year was on Monday. The AGM followed by the prize-giving and a social event. I’ve been the membership secretary for rather a long time but I stepped down this year and was touched to be presented with these lovely flowers.

The Club year begins again on 24 September 2018, 7.30. Grosvenor Hilton Hotel, Grosvenor Street and meets every fortnight until the end of May. The 2018-19 programme will be up on the website towards the end of August. You can also find the Club on Facebook.

When I joined the Club I had never been published or even tried to be but I found people to be very friendly and helpful and it was so encouraging to get feedback in the competitions and from other members, and thus to think I might actually send a story out into the big wide publishing world.

Fourteen years on, although of course members have come and gone, the ethos of the Club is still the same – it’s a mix of published and unpublished writers who write in various genres (novels, short stories, poetry, drama, articles) but who come together in their shared love of the written word.

It is no exaggeration to say that joining Edinburgh Writers’ Club changed my life!

One of the encouraging members I met when I joined EWC was Anne Stenhouse. Now she and I and two other writers, Jennifer Young and Jane Riddell, all Edinburgh based, have come together as Capital Writers. The idea is to have a joint platform for promoting our writing. So we have a website, a Facebook page and are on Twitter @reekiewriters. We have produced a book of short stories, one from each of us, Capital Stories, as a taster of our work; a further anthology is in the pipeline for the end of the year.

And on Wednesday this week, Anne, Jane and myself (Jennifer was away) found ourselves on a writers’ panel at the Corstorphine Festival (Corstorphine is an area of Edinburgh), alongside crime writers Wendy H. Jones and Cecilia Peartree, and Ray Bell who was there to talk about his book Literary Corstorphine.

There was (almost) more panel than audience but what a lovely audience they were, really friendly and engaged and asking excellent questions. Capital Writers had a capital time and <hint> are available for similar events …

I have a story in the current issue (No 158) of The People’s Friend Special called What Would Jane Think?, my thirty-third for the PF. I do like the illustration they've had done for it.