Home and Away

About Home and Away

I work at home as a writer. Quite often this involves quite detailed and contrived avoidance of writing. The paradox is that I live and breathe and sleep writing. Days when sentences aren't made and remodelled are usually bad days. But sometimes the blank white page of the screen is oppressive and it's good to get outside of the verbal world and look at things.

For two and a quarter years, until October 2007, we lived in Orkney, and you'll see, should you look at my back catalogue, that it's awash with island imagery.

We've moved to Fife: me, husband, the three children, two horses and two dogs, and are enjoying new kinds of landscapes. I've just finished writing a book - about Alzheimer's, coming out in April 2009 - and am just beginning the detailed business of the last draft of a novel, something requiring scary levels of concentration and absence from being present (this malt is good stuff).

Which means that I'm out and about with a camera again, after a longish blip absence.