Family holidays

Apr 092013

IWC Beth andMichelle

One of the joys of the Itinerant Writers Club is the glimpses one gets into other writers’ lives. Our monthly assignment 11, “A family holiday” produced some emotive and characterful writing. With instructions for this exercise to “pare down” the prose, to keep it tight, we were asked to remove all adjectives and adverbs then replace only those which were essential. Two of the essays struck me as particularly good, so I am sharing them here.

If you would like to see the rest of the essays, click Itinerant Writers Club or use the tab at the top of this page and scroll through to assignment 11. While you are there, you might like to wander through some of the other exercises.

A 24-hour expedition including a curious discovery

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Oct 252012

Every month I select one of the stories from our Itinerant Writers Club assignments to highlight on lizcleere.com. Each story must be written to a deadline and to a maximum word count. The theme for September was “A day out”. Here Helen Watson shows us what she found just an hour from Edinburgh.
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Hi my love. Wildcamping in the mountains. Tea on campfire. Fantastic road today & sunshine. Thinking of u xxx

Glad u r having a good time. Work busy and p**ing it down here so feeling a bit sorry for myself. xxx & wish I was with u.

It’s summer, let’s enjoy a beach holiday in London!

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Jul 272012

“To swim, perchance to drown, is an undeniable human right. The Port of London Authority should take a running jump into the Thames – only they’ve just made it illegal,” wrote Boris Johnson in the Telegraph. Calm down, dear, there are still plenty of places to enjoy all the fun of the water in our capital city.

We’ve only had a few days of sun so far, but be brave and be positive my friends, London has so much to offer the enthusiastic water lover even if the weather isn’t always clement: swimming, sailing, rowing or fishing, it’s all there. There’s also plenty of waterside sun-bathing and drinking available to the enthusiastic hedonist. Continue reading »

A beach in Tenerife

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Jul 082012

Every month I select one of the stories from our Itinerant Writers Club assignments to highlight on the blog. Each story must be no more than 500 words and must follow a theme. The theme for May was “The beach”. Here Jean Ashbury gives us a new perspective on Tenerife.

Los Cristianos sleeps in Mt. Chayofita’s brooding embrace. A lemon sherbet sunrise wakes up the sky but the sea slumbers under a blue blanket ruffled by “white horses”. The umbrellas are furled, the sun loungers folded, the sand rests. Cafes are shuttered. The hawkers and touts of dive and dolphin tours are at home practising their patter. Continue reading »

An introduction to Kochi from the Guardian

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May 302012

It just goes to show that a little persistence can (sort of) pay off. I’ve been bombarding the poor old Guardian for months with tips, opinions and comments. I’ve managed to get a few pieces in Saturday’s newspaper (but none of them has made it to ‘tip of the week’ and netted me that elusive camera … yet). I was lucky enough to have two of my longer essays spotlighted in “Readers’ blogs”. This week I’m stoked to say they chose my piece for their on-line introduction to Kochi (name credit an’all). Here it is, fresh from the Guardian website: Continue reading »