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Elle Carter Neal

Sparks of Inspiration

Photograph by g_kat26

Photograph by g_kat26

A week or so ago I had one of those sparks of inspiration that usually stop me short as I backtrack in amazement to work out how my brain cobbled together something that seems so, well, inspired. I was tidying up (yes, housework), putting some books back on a shelf, when I noticed that the author of one of the books had the same name as a character from my work-in-progress. I thought nothing of it at the time, but about half an hour later I found myself mulling over what I remembered of a Wikipedia entry I’d read a year ago, that had a connection to a plot strand involving this same character. Suddenly the phrase “everything’s connected” popped into my head, and an element of the Wikipedia entry that I hadn’t considered important before wound up being the thread that tied an entire dangling subplot back into the main plot. I was so blown away I just had to sit there for a moment with my mouth open. Read More »Sparks of Inspiration

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Open Book Gateway

Open Book Gateway, Photograph by Jacky Oh Yeah

The long awaited update post. I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl in December – another easy homebirth, but another silent reflux baby. She hasn’t yet fully outgrown the reflux, but she started crawling at six months and is now pulling herself up to stand at eight months. Her brother hasn’t coped very well with the addition of a constantly crying baby to his life, and turning three didn’t help, either. We have had to take several steps back and re-group often. But now that the doldrums of winter are finally beginning to shift into spring, we are all feeling a little bit lighter-hearted.

A month after my baby was born, my mother died. Read More »End of a Chapter