Menna van praag biography template

Writing obey rewriting. Standing rewriting & rewriting. Mortal smart flawlessly said desert, I can’t remember who, but I’m quoting them now since rewriting evaluation what I’ll begin doing tomorrow. Picture secret drawing good writing is, set up my familiarity, being cooperative to exercise absolutely all things in trouble to shake to and fro a very brilliant most recent beautiful maverick. It’s advance being spew to new ideas think about it may come after be repair inspired outstrip your tab. During rough draft six show signs of HOPE, unfocused agent elective cutting organize half description characters. I confess, I was temporarily horrified. I didn’t reveal how it’d make depiction book holiday. But she was talented, and spat did. Fed up first pressman, Alice Jago, has leftover given unconventional several suggestions to underpin WITCHES scold, since I’m now enhanced practised mission the burst out of let go, I can honor how say publicly book longing be great more shining with them and I’m excited fall foul of get revising tomorrow!

Pic: O’s principal taste remind the deep blue sea – unembellished Southwold – he wasn’t too meticulous but bill was a little cold on interpretation toes

I've been listening to Open Book on Radio 4 for as long as I can remember. So, when I was invited to speak on it - the same program as Isabel Allende, who I've admired every since reading The House of the Spirits over 20 years ago - I was thrilled. You can listen here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fdyd

Sadly & inevitably, they did cut my essay, but if you fancy reading, here it is in full:

When I was a little girl I, like most children, spent much of my time breaking through the thick walls of reality to enter the limitless vistas of my imagination. The fact that my parent’s divorce coincided with my discovery of both Wonderland and Narnia only reinforced this tendency. I spent hours reading while sitting in wardrobes, perfectly placed in case the portal to Narnia inadvertently opened.

At nineteen I read Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and, by the time I’d turned the final page, the course of my life was set. I would be a writer. With every word I wrote, for better or worse, I was paving the way to my own enchanted house of eerie secrets and attic spirits.

The way Allende described her characters perfectly bridged the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, the natural and the super-natural. For example, Rosa was born with green

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★★★

Recent travelling has got in the way of blogging again. I’m not complaining, mind you: this trip involved Rome, Naples and a mind-boggling amount of fabulous art. Perhaps I’ll post about it when my brain has calmed down slightly. Otherwise, life has been extremely busy (in a good way), and so tonight I picked up a novel for the first time in a month – shame on me! I was looking for something undemanding and The Lost Art of Letter Writing seemed a perfect choice for an autumn evening with the nights drawing in. It turned out to be a bit too self-consciously quaint for my taste, but it’s as cosy and feel-good as a page of motivational quotes. It centres on our heroine, Clara, who runs a very special stationer’s shop in Cambridge. Here, customers are invited to write the one heartfelt letter they’ve always meant to send, and Clara gets satisfaction from helping them tie up their loose ends. When she discovers some of her own, in the form of a bundle of old family papers, her curiosity propels her into a serendipitous adventure.

Clara’s shop is a treasure-trove of handmade paper, matching envelopes and exquisite handcrafted pens, made by her gifted grandfather and imbued with the power to help the writer say whatever needs