Hello, and thank you for visiting my site. I hope that you'll return often and always find something of interest about my world and what inspires me to pick up a pen. (This is a figure of speech, unfortunately. My handwriting is terrible!) Here's what I've been up to recently...

Guesting on Iain Pattison’s blog

It’s always an honour to appear as a guest on another writer’s blog and I was particularly pleased to accept Iain Pattison’s invitation.

Our paths first crossed when  Iain, as a highly respected competition judge, was a main speaker at the Writers’ Summer School (Swanwick). I now know him also as a prolific writer of short stories who can never resist a good (or even a bad) pun.

Iain asked me to write about my recent transition from short story writer to novelist and TO MAKE IT FUNNY. I hope that I’ve fulfilled my brief  with ‘From a hundred-metre dash to a marathon’, but you can judge for yourself by cutting and pasting  http://www.iainpattison.co.uk/give-a-warm-welcome-to-my-first-guest-blogger/#more-469

It begins with a few of Iain’s own words:

I’m off on holiday – what, I hear you cry, another one! And it’s not that I don’t trust you, but I’m wary of leaving my blog unguarded for just any passing scribbler to wander into and start posting. So good friend Maggie Cobbett has offered to keep an eye on the place and water the dogs and take the plants for a walk.Thanks Maggie – help yourself to anything in the fridge, but I’d avoid the cheese. It wasn’t that colour when we bought it!

In this guest blog she talks about the challenges of making the leap from short story writer to debut novelist and reveals how a rather bizarre teenage holiday in France provided her with loads of memorable, if slightly disturbing, material. Over to you, Maggie…

8 October, 2015 - Make the first comment on this story

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Armed with a battered copy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Maggie Cobbett crossed the USA by Greyhound bus during the chaotic summer of 1968. The distances were vast, her budget minimal, and anything seemed possible. From camp counselling in the Catskills to bagels for breakfast in the Bronx, her first sojourn in the States had it all.
Supporting artists, or ‘extras’ as they’re more commonly known, are the unsung heroes of television and film. Maggie Cobbett recalls the ups and downs of twenty years of ‘blending into the background’.
A working holiday in France for so little? “It sounds too good to be true,” says Daisy’s mother, but her warning falls on deaf ears.
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