This Writer's Diary

October 18, 2025

Past the middle of October, and we still haven’t had a killing frost, just a few overnight hoarfrosts which melted away at the sun’s first touch. Still, I will consign the annuals to compost this weekend: they’re looking both dessicated and etiolated. Nor has it rained much. At the bird bath/drinking bowl on the deck, the goldfinches line up to use it (why? there’s lots of room around its rim). Juncos appear to be wary of it: they approach, but I haven’t seen one drink from it yet. The mourning doves stand in it (and worse, meaning I need to clean it daily.) Of course, the squirrels, both red and black, and the chipmunks, don’t know it’s a ‘bird’ bowl, so they help empty it too. I’ll need to plug it in soon: it’s heated, just enough to keep the water from freezing, and in the cold of winter it is, I think, more of an attraction to the wildlife than the feeders themselves.

I‘m just about done all but one of the projects that have kept me busy this last six weeks. Arboretum Press has (or will have, shortly) published three books this month: two collections of short stories and verse, and one novella.

The major formatting project I was working on is done, too, bar a few tweaks here and there, and I’m more than half-way through the line edit I’m doing for a historical fiction author. Even so, work on An Unwise Prince didn’t stop altogether, although it’s sometimes hard to see how my two principal protagonists are ever going to get the happy ending I’ve already written for them, as their lives get ever more complicated by politics and the threat of war. But I wrote that ending, and in eight books I’ve never changed one once it’s written: therefore, they must get there.

The critique group I organize had an excellent discussion this week about the sound of writing, and the importance of hearing work read aloud, not just for the mundane purpose of finding the mistakes of punctuation or word echo or missing words, but for cadence, for the poetry inherent in good prose. I’d had a question (or rather, a second-guessing of myself) in one line of An Unwise Prince:

‘He would become what he was thought to be: Kirthan del Candre de Guerdián en Leste, reprobate, adventurer, rogue.’

My question focussed on the last three words: were they in the right order? The consensus was yes. Definitely the hard, single syllable of ‘rogue’ at the end. Adventurer and reprobate? Harder to decide, and there are arguments both ways. For now, I’ll leave it as I wrote it. Your thoughts?

Sometimes I need what a friend calls a ‘head-cleaner’ book, something unrelated to what I’m writing or editing, and a story that is simply relaxing. I tend to return to old favourites when I’m in this mood, and so just now I’m reading Mary Wesley’s Not That Sort of Girl, whose protagonist, I discovered, is exactly the same age I am now, looking back on a life of apparent convention. The other book on the go is another re-read, of Dominic Couzen’s A Patch Made in Heaven, a diary of a year on his birding patch.

Newly arrived, now the Canadian postal strike is more-or-less over, are two more Blackwell’s orders: Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape, by Patrick Laurie, and Andy Bull’s Norfolk’s Pilgrim Routes. Both, for those who know me well, are unsurprising purchases: landscape, nature, landscape history, Norfolk, paths… there’s at least half my interests. (Obsessions, my husband would say.)

If you’re reading something you think fits my ‘obsessions’, please let me know!

For my character Kirt, who is a wanderer, and for my own predelictions for finding out what’s up a path, or down a road; here’s David Wilcox and ‘We Make the Way by Walking’.

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Writer graphic by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Book graphic by Colleen ODell from Pixabay

Music graphic by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

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Read my fiction in my Substack Story Archive

Find my historical fantasy/alternate world books at https://scarletferret.com/authors/marian-l-thorpe

or all my books via: https://arboretumpress.com/the-books-of-marian-l-thorpe/