I turned forty-one last year in the middle of lockdown, alert level 4, and it was one of the best birthdays I’d ever had...
Notebooks
Writing in a new notebook feels like a strange parallel to your life. The first page, of course, will always be the best; the cleanest and neatest, the one with the most promise.
Evolution of an Idea — Craft & Design
Sometimes I get ideas for things from totally random places, other times they come from things I have seen or read or heard. I want to share with you the process of one of my recent ideas – just to show how long it can take from my having the original idea for a piece, until it becomes real.
So You Think You Want To Be A Writer?
A dear friend of mine who has been writing since the 1980s once told me that there are no rules when it comes to writing. "A writer only writes for themselves and does their best to create the books they want to read."
The Battle for the Best Movie Ever Made
I started 2021 with an online feud, one which had been brewing for a while. It began as an innocent and innocuous tweet, as these things often do, as to which movie was the better one: Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) or RoboCop? (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
Life Journaling
As pretty much everyone else has said in their yearly roundups and reviews, 2020 was, to put it mildly, a bit rubbish. One of the best things I did this year was to start outlining monthly goals and tracking data with a Life Journal.
2020 Round Up
I had big plans for 2020. Yeah, I know, me and everybody else, right? But I really did... And then… everything went to Hell in a hand basket.
A Regular, Normal Christmas
My final story of 2020: DIE HARD meets Hallmark (kinda) in this crazy, tongue-in-cheek holiday mashup. Content warning: contains profanities, PG13.
THE WAR ON BLANK-PAGE TERROR: a personal approach to scriptwriting by Jamie Delano
All writers must confront that blank-page terror. Daily. Unless they’re soulless hacks content to shovel junk food. Feed undiscerning appetites with fast-fiction plotted by committee. At least I assume they do. I speak only from my own experience. - Jamie Delano
New Release – Poetry Chapbook
Around this time last year I released RISE, a collection of poems about motherhood, family, old friends, spiritual journeys and the sea. This year is the turn of BEACH GLASS & OLD BONES, poems with a strong focus on belonging, becoming and mental health. Both ePubs are, and always will be, free on Smashwords. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tabathawood