Meetings, meetings....
Frome Festival is less than a month away now so our final committee meeting, in Rosie Jackson's garden, is more or less dotting Is and crossing Ts for all of us - except for Mike, who's recording short stories and interviews for Frome FM. Mike's blog tracks the progress.
...on Tuesday a meeting with Paula at the Merlin Theatre, to plan Spoken Words events for autumn, and then a meeting of the Fromesbury Writers Circle.
Founder member Debby Holt, consistently best-selling, never misses a meeting and is tirelessly & delightfully encouraging. Unlike some authors who avoid the competition, she tells us: "Every time I read a book I write down what I think of it, and what I've learned from it."
Wednesday is the meeting of the Frome Creative Network to hand over to new steering committee. It's an exciting time, Martin Bax tells us all, and the network is very exciting. It is, but the writers of Frome already have an elegant sufficiency of meetings, what with the festival committee, the Library group, and our monthly Writers' Circle, so hopefully it will work for the literary element to be a wheel within the wheel, unreinvented.
And now I'm off to Leamington, where the Leam writers are meeting for a Creative Writing workshop.

With no connection other than that this is the season for orchid hunting, here's a rare bee orchid Peter and I saw on Cley Hill last week, and a heath spotted orchid from my walk on the headlands of Howth above Dublin Bay with my friend Jenny last weekend.

Final words to Beatrix Potter, as boisterously interpreted by Renée Zellweger - or rather by Richard Maltby Jr who as writer of 'Miss Potter' presumably penned the voiceover that bookended the movie: "There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story - you can never quite tell where they will take you..... Stories do not always end where the author intended. But there is joy wherever they take us."