A wee blog…
An Unlikely Scholar
8 August, 2026
Bit late adding this – I’ve been kept on my toes by all that needs to be done in terms of marketing, printing, promotion and social mediatomake sure Mischievous Magical Maia Malone gets out to see the world and dance onto book shelves, and into classrooms.
I wasn’t able to make thelaunch of Bó, the Frome the Well anthology in which my sotry, An Unlikely Scholar appeared, but having the book in my hand was a trhill. All the other stories are amazing and it’s humbling to find your own in such company.
I really have no idea why one story gets picked over another. I’ve had 21 rejections this year, but three were published.
Is it a numbers game? Since we all aim to keep our writing to the same high standard, I guess it must be – except that when you go to re-submit a story, sometimes you notice ways of tightening it up, making it stronger, sharper…
So it’s a process, I guess.
Here’s the start of the story, and there’s a link at the end if you’d like to read the rest of it!
An Unlikely Scholar, excerpt
My mother is a cuckoo, a changeling, an impractical girl. Head in schoolwork, books and hockey games, but she cannot avoid knowing:
That her father is not well.
That she is disappointing to her mother.
At thirteen, in 1933, her future is let out of the bag with a feline roar. My mother forgets to put potatoes on or stir the soup because she is reading and something burns. Something that cost money, of which there is not enough.
Her father Jack, a former naval officer, is in a land-locked job as a Second Jetty Foreman for Guinness. He has a neurological condition that worsens each year. It won’t be long before he has to retire.
When she turns fourteen, my mother is told, she will leave school and get a job to help support the family. Her father left school at thirteen; her mother at twelve. It seems fair to them.
A creamy Guinness head on the table in front of me. I want to draw a face on it with my finger. My partner, whose pint it is, says he’ll leave and never look back if I do this. Or words to that effect.
Part of me wants to test him but I don’t.
You can read the full story here.
The waiting is over!
20 July, 2026
Really excited to share this wonderful cover by Abigail Hicks for my new book. So much thought and care went into every aspect of it from the buildings featured to the expressions on the character’s faces, the design and colour palette… but I think it really stands out and reflects the promise of the book.
And since Abigail did such a fantastic job capturing the personalities of the characters, allow me to introduce them briefly:
Maia Malone, who has the ability to bring her drawings to life and alter reality if she describes them loud.
Neeta, her older sister, and a skateboarding genius whose life gets turned upside down so many times that she weaponizes one piece of information she has that Maia doesn’t, with disastrous results.
Graham who has a bag of pebbles in his pocket that represent all the streets on the maps in his head.
Winston, the mouse who thinks he’s an elephant.
There is also the most villainous of villains and his twin stooges, Mam who writs books – wonder where that came from! – and Dad who works with refugees. And Mamma Nupp, the octogenarian artist who slides down bannisters.
A rollercoaster full of surprises, it deals with themes of identity, adoption, friendship and bullying, and the power (and cost) of having a magic gift.
Let the mayhem begin!
And some more good news – launch venues are confirmed for Sept 17th in Dublin and October 2nd in Galway. Watch this space!!
Mischievous Magical Maia Malone…
15 July, 2026
“Skateboards, school bullies, family mayhem, talking mice and a dangerous run-away journey; when Maia starts drawing, the most incredible things can happen!
An amazing adventure full of friendship, heart, hope and magic.”
– Mary Esther Judy, Fallen Star Stories.
Mischievous Magical Maia Malone comes out in just nine week’s time. It’s a middle grade book, fully and beautifully illustrated by Abigail Hicks, and I am days away sending it to our Irish printer.
But steam is building up behind the campaign to make sure everyone is talking about Maia before the book comes out – but marketing is hard!
Just to give you a taster of how easily distraction can lure you from marketing (and all the doodles here are mine):
So far I have a number of bloggers lined up to do reviews, and two handfuls of children around the country. I’m working on a series of articles about indie publishing and why I chose to become publisher and management this time around for writing.ie so I won’t go into it here.
If anyone would like an interview or review copy, let me know on the contact form below.
Suffice to say, it’s a rollercoaster all of its own, and lots of juggling of balls and trying to think ahead to make sure your book can be seen when it comes out – and that it will be available everywhere! Watch this space!
It Can Be Nothing…
22 June, 2026
A story unlike the others I have been working on – this one published at the end of May by the Journal of Expressive Writing.
I need to attach a trigger warning to this. It was a difficult piece to publish, for that reason. The prompt that was given by the publication was, “The Story I told Myself…”
This is how it begins:
IT CAN BE NOTHING…
The story I told myself was that it would mean nothing.
That I had to do this because his need was greater than mine.
Hadn’t I said before that kissing felt more intimate than sex.
The photo that accompanies it I took while walking in St Anne’s Park, Raheny. It’s a beautiful park on Dublin’s coastal northside, but the most magical part is the path that runs along the Nanikin River.
There’s something the uplifts the spirit, walking among trees.
I’m actually looking at publishing a little book I did a while ago later this year. It features watercolour drawings I did of trees to accompany each of the major chakras – along with information on them – and creativity exercises to help bring your brain to life inspired by each of them.
It’s called Spellbound Trees and if anyone would like to have a look at it – be an early tester of the exercises, perhaps – let me know through the contact form at the bottom of the page!
Glimpses Beneath launch, June 15th, Dublin
Four books, one evening! Delighted to be one of Silver Locust Press’s inaugural stable of chapbooks with Glimpses Beneath.
Sparks launch, May 14th, Belfast
May 12th, 2026
An artist sends a drawing. A writer responds only to what she sees. No context. No explanation.
A great director once told me it’s what’s between the lines that gives the actor space to act. In a similar way, the 23 observational drawings my friend, the Belfast artist Margaret Woods Moore sent me over a three-week period gave me the space to create tiny stories that range from wryly comic to quietly devastating – sometimes within the same piece.
I had a ball writing them but they were also a way of supporting each other creatively. Margeret was caring for her mother who had dementia and Alzheimer’s, while I was learning to walk again. I’d been four months non-weight bearing after the second of four leg ops.
I genuinely have no idea where some of the voices in this collection came from. I mean, I wrote from the point of view of a pavement slab – that’s new for me! Not to mention swooping crow low over a bloodied field and aiming for Cromwell’s eye.
Must be my ‘too vivid an imagination‘ at play again!
This collaboration gave us so much joy that we’ve added pairings of blank pages to the book. We want other people to continue the collaboration.
[Sparks was launched on May 14th in the Conn Auld Gallery, Holywood Library, Sullivan Building, 86-88 High Street, Holywood Down, Belfast BT189AE alongside Margaret’s exhibition, Do You Mind if I Draw You.]
Clouds Above
May 3rd, 2026
On April 29th, my first piece of creative non-fiction, Clouds, Above was published in the American literary journal, Citron Review. I haven’t entered stories for competitions in more than 20 years – and had decided it really wasn’t in my skillset – so it was wonderful news to be accepted.
I’d finished the latest draft of a memoir called The Kimono in the Bottom Drawer. This book is about my parents, and myself, and about the stories my mother used to tell, but also the gap between story and memory, which is where the truth sometimes lies.
During two weeks in the magical and remote Cill Riallaig artists’ retreat, I had broken it out of chapters and into a series of 32 stories with flash fiction pieces in between.
Beta readers were hugely positive but I decided I needed to prove the concept because it isn’t an easy book to summarise. I started polishing the stories to remove the interlinking threads and submitting them to literary magazines and competitions.
Clouds Above is about my mother, and this is how it begins…
CLOUDS, ABOVE
Cirrocumulus. Cumulonimbus. Altocumulus.
Up the Dell Road, through St Fintan’s estate. Past the gallery in the white house and down onto Carrickbrack Road. My mother tells me the names of plants we pass, of trees, stories from her past.
In sun or wind and rain, she names the clouds.
Cirrus. Cumulus.
It is 1942. My mother is in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), based in a camp in Millom in the Lake District. When news comes through that they are recruiting officers, she is encouraged to put herself forward. Reluctantly, she does, with one job in her sights. It’s a top-secret job that looks glamorous on screen — where slim WAAF officers push planes and boats and troops into place across a map of the war spread across an enormous table.
It is to this room that news comes of troop movements, the success or failure of strategies almost in real time, where the theatre of the war can be seen. This, she feels, is the beating heart of the war effort – but also safely distant from the individual, the personal, the visible cost.
Some days, especially those when I feel an urgent need to fill the pages with words and don’t know where to start, my keyboard becomes an adversary. Rows of tombs for words beginning with C, V, B, N; the shift key for upwards, the caps lock to condemn them to hell.
Hell, Dell.
Couldn’t be farther from a leafy glade.
You can read the full story in the Citron Review by clicking here.
On Being Typecast…
May 1, 2026
As a writer, I’ve always resisted being pigeonholed. Stories demand to be told in the medium that suits them – and not always the one you thought they would fit into.
My blog began as me and a snail (called Percival, adopted from my daughter Libby) in my shed out back. I was working solely as a screenwriter, but the books were simmering away in the background.
As an experiment, I started turning my family films into novels because I missed the characters and wanted other people to meet them. ‘Jessie Jones is Nearly Ten’ became my first book, Dad’s Red Dress.
Now there are seven books out there, three more joining them this year and several morein the pipeline. I’m going to try and make sesne of the chaos of making a living by creating worlds and characters, while teaching others what I have learnt and mentoring newer writers – what could be better?
While I get this going, here is is a link to my original blog: This Writer’s Crazy Life.
There are pages of tips from some of the greats, like David Mamet and Gill Dennis. There are links to trailers and one of my short films, Barzakh.
If there is anything you’d like me to write about or you’d like to review my new book, contact me via the form below. I’m all ears!
Lindsay J. Sedgwick 