A time to reflect

This week I attended the funeral of my long-time writing friend, Eileen Robertson.  I've known Eileen for over twenty years, and she was a good friend.  Her passing has set me reflecting on the friends I've had who have shared my writing journey.

I'd forgotten, until another writer friend reminded me, that Eileen and I had been part of a writing group in Portsmouth.  It was called Pen Ultimate, and it was at its liveliest and best when the group met in an arts centre housed in an old Victorian school.  Sadly, the school is long gone, as is the group.

The Chairman of that group, Kier Cheetham, is another writer I knew for many years.  He too is no longer with us.  In the days when a gang of us writers would go to the Winchester Writers' Conference every year, I would drink into the night after the programme was done with Keir and my friend Carol Westron.  Kier has been gone for some years, and so has our attendance at that conference.

I have critiqued my work with friends for many years, and Eileen was a member of a long-running group of us who met in each other's houses to read and critique our work.  I always remember Eileen telling me "You've got too many 'she's at the start of paragraphs on that page."  She was always right. I used to have a bad habit of starting each paragraph with 'she'.  Thanks to Eileen, I have trained myself to spot an excess of 'she's'.

For several years I belonged to a group called Dunford Novelists, and there I met other writers who I've also known for many years.  Eileen was a part of that group too, and we've spent many a Saturday night in the bar at the annual conference, talking writing.

Losing Eileen suddenly was a shock.  A week before she died I was sitting beside her at a local author fair at Southsea Liibrary.  She was bright, and as determined as ever to sell her books.  She had four published, and was part-way through writing a follow up to her successful Miss Maguire is Missing when she died.

I will always remember her unwavering support for me, and her firm "You'll make it," when I moaned about still not being published.  Those are the things true writer friends do for each other, and Eileen was was always a true friend.