Halloween and Childhood Memories

On Friday night I went to watch the fireworks which opened Youghal's Halloween festivities. There was a full moon and the tide was in, the water reflecting eerily in the moonlight. It was the perfect setting.
Looking back on my own childhood, Halloween was pretty low key. Fancy dress costumes were not on sale in every store as they are now and there was no such thing as trick or treat. It was mostly celebrated at home. We bobbed for apples and as far as I remember there might have been a ghost story or two broadcast on the radio and also published in the popular magazines (we didn't have a television until I was a teenager).
For me, at any rate, the biggest thing was the barm brack. This is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins. Traditionally, each barmbrack contained a pea, a stick, a piece of cloth, a small coin (originally a silver sixpence) and a ring. This was a form of fortune telling in which each item, when received in the slice, was supposed to foretell the fate of the person who received it: the pea, the person would not marry that year; the stick, would have an unhappy marriage or continually be in disputes; the cloth or rag, would have bad luck or be poor; the coin, would enjoy good fortune or be rich; and the ring, would be wed within the year. As children, we were very competitive. I remember once getting the stick and being highly upset about it and teased by my siblings. At school next day we always compared what we had found in the barm brack and word would quickly go round that so-and-so had found the coin. I was never lucky enough to find the silver coin. In those days sixpence would have seemed like a small fortune to me!
When I bought a barm brack the other day, I discovered it did have a toy wedding ring. I expect that the other items are no longer allowed for safety reasons. At any rate, the wrapper on this barm brack warned about swallowing the toy ring by mistake. But I am not going to start moaning about lost innocence or the necessity of food safety regulations. Halloween is still a lot of fun and it is refreshing to see that kids still like dressing up and painting their faces. Some things never change.

Keeping on Writing

I have been away in Holland on holidays at the beginning of the month. Before I left, I told myself I would not start re-writing my novel until I returned home. I have now been back over two weeks and still have not got round to it.
Writing is a habit. Every morning I get up and work on a novel. Or so it has been up until now. Yes, there are always days when I don't get round to it but they are few and far between. I do believe I am addicted to writing and suffer withdrawal symptoms if I am not working on something.
Thus, I have been plaguing myself for not doing anything these past few weeks. I have, in fact, talked myself into a guilty conscience. 
Today, I resolved to get down to revising the first chapter of this novel tomorrow. I originally titled it FREEFALL but there are a number of novels with this name out there and someone once told me that it could be classified under ''hobbies - parachuting''.  It is a thriller and although I hope it will keep readers on their toes, it has nothing to do with choosing a hobby.
I know that when I get started, I have a lot of work to do because although the original manuscript got some positive criticism, it does need a lot of work. But that is the writing life. You have an idea, you write up your first draft, read it over, make changes, come up with the second draft and so it goes. Like most writers, I am never one hundred percent satisfied. I usually work on as many as ten drafts of any novel until I feel I have got it right. This can mean deleting thousands of words. But it is all fun and that feeling when the words flow, can't be beaten.

What am I doing tonight? Well, now that you ask, I'm going to curl up for an early night and finish reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I love that feel-good effect her novels produce and when I finish reading one of them, I often take a break from picking up another book to read. Looks like I'll be back on track with my writing.
In the meantime, my Christmas novella is available in paperback on Amazon and will be available as a Kindle in mid-November which proves I have done some work this year. Here's the cover. See what you think.