Sermons in Stones by Sheena Wilkinson

Sometimes I feel like a priest. This normally descends around the second week of every month. It’s got nothing to do with faith and less to do with preaching. It’s all about words.

Coming up to the 13^th of every month I start to think about my ABBA post. (For think, read worry/obsess.) What can I say that’s new? Other contributors are wonderful at seizing the Zeitgeist and turning that into a pithy, thought-provoking post. I’m hopeless at that, or, to be honest, too lazy to do the necessary research. So my posts tend more towards the personal. ABBA is definitely the online space where I’m more confessional than anywhere else.

But I do have a rule for myself – somehow, even tenuously, it has to relate to writing or reading.

Feeling like a priest? Confessional? No, I don’t have a Damascene conversion to report. But every month, as I wonder what on earth to write about, I feel a bit like a vicar sitting down to write a sermon, knowing that whatever s/he writes about, it will have to contain some pithy reference to God. We had a chaplain at school who was brilliant at this: he’d tell a funny story about his dog or a packet of crisps or the laundry and you knew that at the end it would all come down to Jesus.

This month was harder than most. I had already written an Author Allsorts blog post about music, and my first History Girls post. Other writers have written widely about UKYACX in Newcastle, which I was delighted to be part of. I can’t really write about what I’ve been doing this month, as I’ve mostly been editing a novel which is coming out next spring, and which I’m not allowed to talk about yet. I’ve just embarked on a new novel, but it’s too nebulous to write about …I’m gearing up for an October spent largely on the road doing library visits but I’ve written about that in the past.

For the last week I have interrogated every little incident, looking for Jesus, so to speak, but to no avail. It’s not that I’m precious about what I write about: in the past I have exploited found apposite writery things to say about: gardening; birds building their nests; playing the guitar; cake baking, David Bowie. 

I've written about gardening....

...and baking...

Surely I could find something? What about crochet? I started a post about crochet, but realised it would be much better when I’ve finished the blanket I’m making – I’ve already thought how the squares can be the chapters and sewing them together is like the editing…

...and my guitar....

So, I think you’re getting crochet next month. I bet you can’t wait.