Women Writers Through The Lens

Surrey life did you say?

It's only 4.30pm and the sky outside is a petrified black colour, raindrops dance across the windowpanes and already the curtains need to be drawn otherwise it's like sitting in a fish bowl with the lights on and everyone can see exactly who is home and how they are at home.

An article titled 'Women writers through the lens', refers to Ruby Ayres who admitted to a newspaper in 1955 that she wrote an average of 20,000 words a day. Enid Blyton could produce a children's book in five days. This is sufficient to put us 'writing gals' to shame alright. It took alot of effort and work to research and write a 2,000 word article for a cyprus magazine - for a certain destination in which I was not living and not all that au fait.

And yet, what is it exactly that is so terribly and wonderfully, all at the same time, enticing about spilling words across a page and inventing characters in some time-gone-by period which we were never a part of, not once, or ever. I'm currently working on a historical fiction novel that perhaps may warrant this sentence.

Surrey, of course, is the perfect place for such writerly habits - what with the weather and the people - there is plently of space, time and opportunity for such antics. Saturday, today, has rained and been pretty bleak, if we were to talk about the weather, which of course we never do. The gardening man has been out there, in that weather, with his usual green raincoat on whilst he works and then left early. He enjoys a hot 'mug' of tea when he works on the week-ends and I don't blame him. Children In Need has been on and it always amazes me how charitable everyone actually is and how much money England manages to raise and for such justifiable and philanthropic causes. We really are able to make a difference when we get together. I was wondering, as I attempt to do this myself, has anyone actually read 'Catch-22 by Joseph Heller', or does everyone in Surrey simply keep it lining the bookshelf. Sometimes rhetoric is a very good thing.