About

Hello there virtual voyager. Welcome to my creative den, which started out as a haiku-only blog in December 2011 and grew, to embrace tanka poetry, photography, flash fiction,  interviews, guest posts, book reviews, and updates about my novel-writing.

Whatever I blog about, my aim is to uplift rather than depress my fellow bloggers. It’s a tough world out there and I like to see this blog as a place of refuge to rest awhile, recharge your batteries, and find inspiration. My Monday Morning Haiku series, in particular, is designed to provide people with something positive to reflect upon at the start of each week.

I live on the south coast of England with my musician husband, adult son, and chocolate Labrador. None of us have a 9-5 job; even the dog doesn’t have one. It’s an eccentric household full of books and musical instruments. Shouting is outlawed, and we’re very old-fashioned in that we sit around a table and eat civilised meals, rather than slobbing in front of the television dropping food down our fronts and getting indigestion.

My favourite seasons are those in which I can potter around the garden, grow beautiful flowers, and generally chill. Afternoon tea and homemade cake, enjoyed out in the fresh air, is my idea of heaven. The spring and summer also brings with it the enjoyable task of tending the family allotment and harvesting bountiful produce for culinary use.

Until recently, I’ve written quirky cross-genre novels that are every traditional publisher’s nightmare re marketing, which is why I chose to indie publish two of them as an experiment. Loosely speaking, both books are both for younger readers, although they’ve proved to appeal more to adults. A couple of years on I’ve concluded that indeed they are a marketing nightmare!

In the First Three Pages of a Novel Competition in the University of Winchester Writers’ Festival 2017, the judges awarded my adult speculative fiction work Counting Magpies highly commended. Reviewer feedback described my prose as “richly textured and tremendously evocative, with shades of Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman”. Thus, encouraged that finally someone has decided my fifth novel does fit a definite category, I’m having a go submitting it to traditional publishers just to see what happens.

Recently, I completed the first draft of my sixth novel Twicers, of which I wrote the first 50,000 words during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2017. My initial aim was to write a straight science fiction novel, but about twenty pages into the story I realised that I wasn’t writing science fiction at all; rather, a character-based satire set in the not-too-distant future (shades of Ben Elton and Jonas Jonasson, but quirkier).

In 2010, I reached the finals in the fiction category of the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition with a dystopian romance between a beggar who had made himself intentionally legless and a girl with bad skin. This story seeded the idea for my NaNoWriMo novel, although the work-in-progress is evolving into something quite different.

My more offbeat and unhinged literary characters can be blamed upon my time of working in psychiatry. My earlier jobs included kennel maid, serving in a pub, shop assistant, factory worker, and secretary, all of which proved valuable life experience; however, anything that involved mathematical calculation or the operation of money tills did not last long.

So that’s me. What about you? I love hearing about your lives from around the globe and interacting with you.

Wishing you peace and every happiness,
Sarah Potter 🙂