Some nice comments

I'm thrilled to have come across a lovely new review of Too Many Magpies, by Michelle Bailat-Jones.
Here are some quotes from it that are still making me glow:

"Without a doubt the story and the questions Baines poses are compelling, unique even. But her writing is what makes this short book exceptional ... The book involves this wonderful tension between ideas of science and more romantic and felt explanations for what happens in everyday life. The narrator is curious about how deeply we want to believe in magic, yet she is aware of how dangerous and beautiful those beliefs can be. But also, on the other side, how very shocked and disappointed we may feel when science fails us in some way. It is really well done—complicated and with no real attempt to do more than question and examine and highlight these tendencies. I love the ambiguity in that."

And in the same week  Dan Powell, author of the Scott Prize winning collection of stories, A Storm in a Teacup, has commented thus on my story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', published on The View From Here: ‘I bloody love this. Part life story, part love story, part memoir, part exploration of the nature of stories. Brilliant. Brilliant.’

It's so easy to lose confidence as a writer - to some extent it's part of the job description: you need constantly to be reappraising what you write and striving to get better, which last inevitably involves a sense of dissatisfaction with what you've so far achieved. But such affirmation can send you floating up to Cloud 9!