Author | Writer | Photographer
Having met up with friends in Much Wenlock this morning, I decided that on my way home I would stop off somewhere along Wenlock Edge to do my daily walk.
What Wenlock Edge does well is tantalising views. New trees, mainly ash and some silver birch, are thriving, and the good paths along the edge weave their way between them, which means that the vista across west Shropshire is good, but it doesn’t quite work as a photograph (your photo looks more like a view with a barcode in front of it!)
Donald drummed his fingers against the steering wheel of his Ford Focus, his eyes fixed on the school entrance.
Any minute now, those doors would fly open and hundreds of happy kids would stream out, overjoyed at their freedom. Then he would see his Suzie emerge, alone and despondent from the challenges she’d had to cope with today.
His stomach cramped as if someone had pushed their hand inside him, wrapped their fingers around his intestines and then squeezed.
Fingers. Everything was about fingers. Ever since that day three months ago.
Once a year, authors receive their PLR statements. For those of you who don’t know, PLR stands for Public Lending Right and is a payment to authors in recompense for the loss of sales due to people borrowing their books from a library.
While we receive a royalty for each copy of our book bought by the library service (as we would from any other book buyer), PLR recognises the fact that that single copy is then borrowed many times over.
Found a hoar frost on the summit of Ragleth Hill this morning. Snapped a photo too, which Louise Lear used on the national forecast on BBC1 this lunchtime.
Remember the plans for quarterly tax returns? Simon Whaley finds out what writers need to do now, in preparation.
If there’s one piece of writing most of us detest it’s completing our tax return. So when George Osborne announced in November 2015 the Making Tax Digital scheme, whereby self-employed people, such as writers, may need to complete quarterly tax returns, many feared the worst. How much of our future writing time would be gobbled up by the need to be creative with numbers?
However, plans for this were dropped from the Finance Bill that went through parliament just prior to last year’s general election. But this tax story hasn’t been buried like a murder writer’s latest victim. It’s simply sleeping, ready to reawaken in the near future. As writers, we need to start taking steps now.
Here in the Welsh Borders, we’ve had a lot of weather, recently. Well, I say a lot of weather, but, of course, what I really mean is a change in the weather.
Just before I moved to Shropshire from the London suburbs, my urban neighbours would say, “Shropshire? Ooh, you’ll get a lot of weather up there!” And they were right, sort of. We do get a lot of weather up here. But we get just as much as anyone else. It’s merely that ours tends to be a little more varied.
After all the snow we’ve had, a chance to capture some sunshine and green fields!
Decided to stop as I was passing Stokesay Castle today, to take a photo. I thought it looked gorgeous in the early morning sunshine. Turns out it was a good …
It’s a dangerous game coming to the Welsh Borders to give an author talk. If you don’t believe me, ask archaeologist and historian Dr Alex Langlands, who’s a friend of this area thanks to the popular BBC2 Victorian Farm television series.
