My collection varies in length from 1300 for the shortest story to over 5000 words for the longest.

One of my favourites is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a wonderful book that helps us to understand the very complex central character, Christopher.

Although it does not explicitly state a location in the story, I get a feel of the county in the agricultural landscape described. My Summer Solstice story is set in my home county of Warwickshire and I feel really echoes the landscape when I read it again.

Another way of writing in a short but meaningful form is to start crafting prayers which you can use for specifically spiritual work. Like the seasonal tales, these words are meant to be read aloud but begin on the page, so that you can craft them and work with them until you are confident enough to release them to the universe.

Here you can see that there is some sense of character to the writing; the narrative voice it is written in is not my voice. I deliberately made is more poetic, trying to make it more transcendent, to sound like an old storyteller. There is a character to the voice but it is not a character who forces themselves into the story. They are simply narr

So much writing today is designed to shock and offend others. We seem to have stooped to a new low where people feel they need to be rude to others and close down dissent, rather than engage in considered and constructive debate.

I have another journal which I write in more occasionally. This is my spiritual journal and is where I write more about my spiritual development. This tends to happen more in fits and starts rather than on an everyday basis. I reflect on ceremonies and gatherings in this notebook, explore readings from oracle and tarot cards, or write my way throug

He kept a commonplace book where he noted down phrases he found in other writers’ works which he liked and he went on to integrate them into his plays. Today he would probably be prosecuted for plagiarism and theft of intellectual property but it is certainly an interesting approach and one we can adapt to our work in the spring!

Picking the most potent images can often be useful to engage listeners and readers. George Orwell wrote, in his essay Politics and the English Language, urged writers to, ‘Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’4 He suggested this as it can make readers switch off and not really think about wha