Elaina James

I love the idea of Santa Claus. As a child, the excitement of going to bed on Christmas Eve was often too much to bear, knowing that this great jolly fellow was travelling across the world giving presents to every little girl and boy. Soon he would be in my house, leaving presents under my tree. It was the stuff of fairy tales; magic, flying reindeer and a sleigh big enough for millions of presents and as children we lapped it up. I love the lengths parents will go to purely to keep this magic alive for their children. Once, when I was little, I left a note out for Santa on Christmas Eve, along with the obligatory glass of sherry and a carrot, asking Santa to tell me the names of all his reindeer. That night, as everyone settled down for Christmas Eve TV, or ran around in the last minute madness of Christmas meal preparations, my Mum and Dad were ringing round everyone they knew to try to find out the blasted names of some imaginary reindeers. Remember this was pre Google, if y...

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that in the new year I will be taking up a 3 month residency as a guest blogger for Mslexia At this point I feel I should apologise to anyone who knows me and has already heard this news multiple times in the last few hours.  Usually in a high pitched, sing-song voice whilst I jump up and down.  Common sense and maturity will prevail at some point I promise... But I make no promises as to when that might be. My guest blog will be looking at the writing process from the slightly different view point of a lyricist with stage fright. Whilst I write short stories and novels, my love of writing started with writing lyrics. This is still the form I am most passionate, and yet most secretive about. I'll be looking back at my journey from a disastrous debut performance as a singer songwriter,  through years of confining my dreams to secret notebooks, to finally finding the courage to enter a song writing contest.  I hope that by...

Wendy Clarke - Biography Wendy Clarke is a full time writer of women's fiction. Since starting writing three years ago, she has sold over a hundred short stories and her work regularly appears in national women's magazines such as The People's Friend, Take a Break Fiction Feast and Woman's Weekly. She has also written serials and a number of non-fiction magazine articles. Room in Your Heart and The Last Rose are Wendy’s two collections of short stories. She has just finished her first novel. Moving on from Short Story to Novel When lovely Elaina invited me onto her blog, I thought long and hard about what I could write that might be useful or interesting. I thought I could write about my journey to becoming a writer, how to write a magazine story or even just talk about my typical writing day. I soon realised, though, as I sat with my fingers poised over the keyboard, that I’ve covered all these topics before in other guest posts. What I wanted to share was somet...

Based on Jorge Luis Borges – “Borges and I”, this week’s task was to consider our relationship with our writing self.  So let me introduce you to my writing self: She lives in my head as a constant distraction.  I’m working on spreadsheets while she’s dictating dialogue.  She won’t be hushed or ignored. She requires immediate attention. She’s far more demanding than I would ever dare to be.  In the end I surrender and scribble down her words.  I know she’ll just keep repeating them until I obey.  Her fear of forgetting a theme or a phrase is more overpowering than my own task at hand. While I would be content to drift through life in my own little bubble, she watches and listens to everything around her.  She analyses it all, remembers it and stores it away.  Sometime later it’ll re-emerge as a new work of fiction.  It’s origins now completely indistinguishable. She can put into writing the things that I could never say....

This week I'm delighted to welcome Emma Davies, author of Letting In Light and Merry Mistletoe to the blog.  Over to you Emma... The Wonderful World of Words Thank you so much for inviting me as a guest to your blog Elaina. It’s always hard to know what to post about, particularly when you have a new book out. You don’t want every post to be a slight variation on the last that people have seen countless times before. So, as we’re now in November and approaching the end of what, for me, has been a very momentous year, I thought I would take the opportunity to share some of my experiences from the year, or, what is essentially things I have learnt about the wonderful world of words. The first thing I would like to share, in fact I want to underline it in thick black permanent Sharpie is the wonderful people that there are in this world of words. The bookish community has to be one of the most friendly, supportive and generous communities around. Everyone I’ve come across h...