This Writer's Diary
February 7, 2026
February 5th, it was snowing again. The witch of winter harrying much of eastern North America looked away for a day or two, but not for long; the next day’s forecast was for bitter temperatures again, and more snow.
But on February 6th, there were daffodils, and snowdrops, and hares and swans and roe deer in the fields, and it was 10C and the sun was shining for part of the day. We left Toronto late in the evening of the 5th, and landed at Gatwick on the morning of the 6th. From there, the train to Cambridge, the route passing through London and stopping with a view of the Thames and the Shard and the Eye and, best of all, St. Paul’s, and then on through suburbs and countryside. A 45 minutes wait in Cambridge, long enough for coffee and loos, and then the train to King’s Lynn, and the rental car to Dersingham and our holiday cottage. I slept a little on the plane, enough to stay awake all day. Right now, I’m just basking in the pleasure of being back in Norfolk.
I’m up at first light. I make a cup of tea, and go to stand at the open door to the garden, listening. A half-moon hangs in the sky. Jackdaws first, groups circling and chattering. Black-headed gulls, coming in off the Wash, scream their haunting call. A robin begins to sing, then a great tit. A greenfinch buzzes against the liquid song of a blackbird.
After breakfast we walk out towards the Wash, between a patchwork of winter cereals — wheat, from the colour — and unplanted, turned soil. The water in the ditches is high. The day has dawned sunny, but there is rain on the way, so we keep an eye on the clouds. Kestrels hover; marsh harriers glide, putting up a flock of lapwing. Wrens chitter in the reeds; a stonechat calls.
No deer, although there are tracks in the mud. No hares, either. Distantly, over the Wash itself, waders - knot? plover? - swirl. We’re not going that far today; this is a leg-stretch, to remind our internal clocks and our birding minds that we’re in England now. On the return trip, blue tits and great tits sing in the hedgerows, along with robins and dunnock. The notes of a pheasant that escaped the yearly slaughter sound sharply from out in the fields.
The rain arrives. The rest of the day is taken up with grocery shopping — the first shop every year is enormous, including all the staples needed for ten weeks — and after putting all that away, finishing the unpacking we were too tired for yesterday. Tomorrow is supposed to be lovely, and Roydon Common beckons.
An Unwise Prince is done. It isn’t, of course; the first draft is done: there are weeks and weeks of revisions and edits and copy edits and proof reading ahead. But the story is told, to a point, a pause, where all of my characters have found some peace, some brief happiness before the events of A Distant Obligation sweep them up into turmoil again. It now sits for several weeks before the revisions begin, to give me some distance from it.
I finished it about 12:30 pm on Monday February 2nd, about 23 months after I began what I knew was going to be the most challenging book I’d attempted, and minutes before my weekly lunch date with a friend — our usual toasted bagels with avacodo, but I added, in celebration, a non-alcoholic Guinness, and split a chocolate chip cookie with him. (This is what celebration looks like, at my age — and I was driving.) That night I slept more soundly than I have for weeks.
Then not much else happened in my writing life, bar playing around with a villanelle I haven’t finished, and my writing group on Tuesday. I was busy with lists and errands and arrangements for our 10 weeks in England. But now, sitting at the kitchen table that will be my writing desk until mid April, my mind is already turning to the work that awaits me: a short story on the theme of courage, for an anthology coming out later this year, a piece of flash fiction for my writing group (which continues via Zoom while I’m on the eastern side of the Atlantic).
The epigram for An Unwise Prince — or one of them, probably for Part IV, came to my attention in a roundabout way, from this song by Garnet Rogers, which is essentially the 1896 poem After All, by Australian Henry Lawson, put to music.
“The ghost of the man that I might have been is gone from my heart to-day…”
So here it is, out of my usual order for this diary. (Books are below)
I’m reading a fantasy novel — so completely different from my own fictional world I can read this one — by fellow Substacker Jane Dougherty, The Darkest Tide: (Ys Trilogy Book 1). A sundered land, a bound god; terrible, cruel overlords who search out marked children in a sea-girt, Celtic/Norse themed world — it has a familiar feel but is unique, and beautifully written. I’m a bit less than halfway through, and I will write a full review in time, but at this point I would say highly recommended. (Plus the cover is superb.)
Shifting Stages is the 5th in Karen Heenan’s Ava and Clare series, set in Philadephia in the middle of the last century. What started with the lives of two sisters is now following the lives of their children, each pursuing their own varying paths. Thelma, the youngest-but-one daughter, born into the poverty of a mining town, suffered from rickets as a child but dreamt of a career on the stage as a dancer. With her mother’s grit and determination channelled into a different dream, she’s made it — but at what physical and emotional price? I read this book in development, and enjoyed every word (even the ones that didn’t make it into the final draft!) Again, strongly recommended.
My Empire’s Legacy series can be found in e-book format only here:
https://scarletferret.com/authors/marian-l-thorpe
For paperbacks or other ebook retailers for all my books, follow this link to your favoured on-line store.