J A Brunning - Ribble Babel

'so much to love about this book' - Witherstone goes International!

2012-02-12T09:50:00.001Z

Wow. Absolutely fantastic NEW review of Witherstone on Amazon - from Greece!

5.0 out of 5 stars. So many ways to be wonderful, 12 Feb 2012

By T. Stoker (Greece) - See all my reviews

'There is so much to love about this book, I hardly know where to begin.
Yes, a well-crafted plot, an exciting story and a vulnerable yet brave heroine we can readily identify with make this an unputdownable adventure story. But for me it was the quality of the writing that made this novel more than just a heart-thumping good read. There are descriptions of nature that give a wonderful sense of immediacy. There are the tiny details of everyday life that put you right there in seventeenth century England. The author clearly knows the period well, from politics and religion to folk-belief and food, but none of this is laboured. JA is too subtle an author to foreground her research at the expense of the story.
But for me what lingers of the book is the extraordinary and seemingly effortless evocation of family life. The unspoken love that binds a family together through unbearable hardship and unspeakable fear makes this more than a historical novel. It makes it a book for all times and places.
Having read the book myself, I bought it for a teenage friend and continue to recommend it heartily to everyone who will listen. Am I becoming a Witherstone bore?'

Not boring me! Fab reviews such as this are what keeps me going - so thank you T. Stoker!! x

Work In Progress

2012-02-11T10:05:00.002Z

Work on The Hunt Begins - book 2 in the Witherstone trilogy - is progressing nicely!

Half-way through first re-draft already and it's lookin' gooood!

Also, Good News - the Witherstone paperback is back in stock on Amazon.

Less good news - only 1 copy left already!! So be quick!

The Kindle edition is now only £3.93 - which sounds like a bargain for a book people are calling:

'a really outstanding read – good old-fashioned storytelling, in the very best sense; engaging and gripping as only the most skilfull writing can be'

- Gordon Askew.

Sold Out again! Thank goodness for Kindle...

2012-02-04T10:01:00.005Z

Uh-oh! Amazon have just sold out of Witherstone paperbacks again folks!

Thanks goodness for Kindle, though, it never sells out! Latest review for Witherstone: "a gripping read! ... excellent plot teeming with excitement".

Anyone in desperate need of the paperback and can't wait for Amazon to re-stock, you can email me or buy from Amazon Marketplace sellers.

Came across this fab "e-reader" which I just had to share...

Love it!

The new Pony Reader from The Bookseller Crow.

But you will need the paperback copy for this reader.

King Crow - Michael Stewart

2012-01-31T23:01:00.005Z

King Crow by Michael Stewart is definitely a book I'll be reading again. Only good books are worth re-reading, and this is a good book. It's also a hard book to review without giving too much away, but it's vital to read this book without knowing what's coming - even if, by the middle of the book, you find yourself dreading what might be coming...

You know from the start that the central character, Paul Cooper, is a lonely boy, introverted and inhabiting a world of his own on quite a profound level. Even engaging with the reader, he's a slippery character, hiding behind his obsession about birds right from the first line:

'When I look at people, I wonder what sort of birds they are.'

He distances himself from other people in every way he can, even introducing himself by his surname, and not because he's from an upper class public school either. Far from it. Despite his determination to distance himself from the world he finds himself in, he draws your sympathy from the start, even though (or perhaps because) Paul is a strange mixture of dispassionate observation and fear, and uses one to hide from the other. He is so afraid of the world that he literally switches his mind to thinking of the facts he knows about the feathered creatures he is so obsessed with as a means not just of emotional escape, but trying to 'block out' the world and physically hide in his thoughts. As though he believes that if he thinks about birds, people won't see him - like a small child who thinks you can't see him if he puts his hands over his eyes:

‘Then he says to me, - Yeah? Want some, new boy?
I feel his breath on my face. Focus on his blazer, a darkening sky. The finches fly off and are replaced by starlings, triangular wings, twisting and soaring, a swirling black cloud […] Remember to breathe. Think about starlings. Think.’

When he meets Ashley, a boy who is the opposite of Paul with his cool confidence, you know everything is about to change. This is where I have to tread carefully as Paul's story needs to be read to really appreciate this excellent book.
Stewart's prose is somehow deceptively simple and yet beautifully poetic, and is often in the immediacy of present tense, and the story unfolds through a character depicted with a rare psychological truth. Paul hides behind shrugs and his quest to see ravens as he observes the world and his own story as it unfolds, and that's the key way the magic of this book works for me.
Stewart manages to convey Paul's matter-of-fact observation of the world he inhabits and the often shocking events in beautifully poetic prose to reveal the story, and interweaves Paul's experience of nature and particularly his constant sliding into his obsessively ornithological world to create a refreshingly different book, and an intensely poetic and compelling one.

This is a compelling read, and even if you see what's coming, you'll want to read this book again.

~

King Crow by Michael Stewart is available in all good libraries and bookshops, in paperback and Kindle, and from Amazon.

Michael Stewart is from Salford and now lives in Yorkshire and has won several awards. King Crow is his debut novel and won the Not The Booker Prize 2011. You can find out more about Michael Stewart here.

Good News!

2012-01-28T13:35:00.000Z

Good news! The first full draft of the second book in the Witherstone trilogy, The Hunt Begins, is now FINISHED!

Hold fire before you email me to ask when it's going to be published though... it took me several months to redraft and edit Witherstone before it was ready to publish, so patience, good readers, patience.

I'll keep you posted...!

And if you haven't read Witherstone yet, Amazon have new stocks of the paperback just in, and the Kindle edition has been reduced to £3.93 !

Amazing Stuff

2012-01-21T09:53:00.000Z

I love research.

Researching 17th Century road routes in England has thrown up some absolutely fabulous hand-drawn maps - the first "road atlas" of Britain in fact. Beautiful!

Made by a gentleman by the name of John Ogilby who was apparently a Scottish translator and "impresario", and who according to the maps themeselves became 'His Ma.ties Cosmographer' or what we would now call a cartographer, the maps are in the form of an unravelling scroll with a linear journey along the designated road.

And they have wonderful details, such as 'bad road', and 'Stone bridge 2 arches & Brook', and an unmistakable diagram outside some towns with the word 'Gallowes' beside it. *shudder*

(And yes, I am pressing on apace with the second book in the Witherstone trilogy, The Hunt Begins...)

Starting the New Year on a High!

2012-01-01T11:59:00.002Z

Ending 2011 on a high!

The Amazon sales rankings for the Kindle edition of Witherstone have climbed from the lowest starting point of #652,853 to the dizzy heights of #67,013 in November and ending 2011 with the happy ranking of #82,086 !!! A climb of between 585,840 and 570,867 places!

Dizzy heights, people, dizzy heights!

OOOOH, I say! Amazon have sold out of Witherstone for the 3rd time!

2011-12-16T16:32:00.000Z

"OOOH, I SAY!"

Those lovely Amazon people have SOLD OUT of Witherstone for the THIRD TIME!

They'd better hurry up and get some more in, otherwise I'll have to resort to buying one on Kindle !

At least they never sell out.

Luckily Marketplace sellers on Amazon still have good old fashioned paperbacks.

So THAT'S alright then, Matron!

Woo, what a fab review! Can't stop smiling!!!

2011-12-09T10:28:00.007Z

Received another fabulous bit of feedback for Witherstone yesterday which just about blew my socks off, and I can't stop smiling...

'I came across Witherstone through the review in Big Issue North and bought it on Kindle. I have had a long career involved with children’s literature (headteacher of three primary schools, English Adviser for East Riding of Yorkshire and, most recently, early reading consultant to DfE), so I hope I know what I am talking about when I say Witherstone is a really outstanding read – good old-fashioned storytelling, in the very best sense; engaging and gripping as only the most skilfull writing can be. A massive well done – and thank you. Like, I suspect many who have already read, and many more who will read the book, I was devastated to discover at the end that it was only Part I. Whilst it is a great joy to think there is more to come, the frustration is also considerable. Please press on apace.'

Gordon Askew.

Thank you Gordon Askew, and thanks again to Antonia Charlesworth and The Big Issue in the North for reviewing Witherstone! x

Guest Appearance at Word Fest 7th December

2011-12-05T10:02:00.002Z

It's Literature Week at Cardinal Newman College, and the College have kindly invited me to come along to this year's Word Fest and meet the students on Wednesday morning,
and do a reading from Witherstone
and a Q and A session with them.

Really looking forward to it!

Guest Article for A Dead Good Blog

2011-11-27T15:12:00.001Z

Those Dead Good Poets from Blackpool (who regularly grace the Lancashire Writing Hub's Word Soup live literature nights at The Continental in Preston) invited me to contribute an article to their discussion about writing exercises this week on A Dead Good Blog.

All of the articles produced by the Dead Good Poets are as useful to prose writers as they are to poets, and you can read more of them here, and I'd like to thank them Dead Good Poets for inviting me.

And here it is:

'The musings about writing exercises on the Dead Good Blog this week have been thought-provoking, and in thinking about the point of writing exercises, I agree with everyone: sometimes they are really useful, sometimes what they produce seems forced and useless, and sometimes they are essential.

All writers have different techniques, and at certain times taking different approaches to our writing can be invaluable. For me, writing exercises are just the different things writers do when they write, and at times we need to try different things:

1. At writing workshops - getting the creative juices flowing even though you’re not sitting in your usual corner, cat on knee and pen/keyboard in hand, but with a group of strangers… or getting started by yourself when you’ve made some writing time (fed the cat, tidied your desk, disconnected yourself from Facebook and Twitter), only to sit with the cursor blinking accusingly on that oh-so-blank screen while it waits for you to get cracking: Exercises here force us to respond to stimuli and write something.

2. Stuck in the middle of something and not sure where it is going.

3. Final redrafting stages.

Stages of writing requiring different approaches, so you try things out and find what works for you. Some of my favourites which do it for me (and anyone caught in writing workshops with me at UCLan or at the Lancashire Writing Hub will know these, so apologies if it’s you):

1. Getting started. My muse often manifests itself through the visual, so if stuck for an idea, or how to progress the ideas I do have:
I type a random word into Google images (seaweed; bramble; tree), or key words of an idea in progress, find a picture that grabs me then use my responses to it (mermaid’s hair; trapped; twigs like bony fingers) to write a key scene. Even if you end up discarding things, the poetry of language is all in the mind so stimulating your mind visually or verbally is the key.

2. Stuck in the middle of things:
Leave your work-in-progress for a few days but let it move into your mind while you are walking, digging the garden, washing up, lying in bed. As Ste says, “live in the story”. Ideas sit in your mind and almost create themselves if you give them the time and space to do it.
Read through what you’ve got so far – this can trigger the next stage.
Write a summary/synopsis of the overall piece – what it’s about, and what the themes are. This can help to see where to go next.

3. Redrafting exercise:
- Identify underlying themes beneath what your piece is about, and the images and words you are using to create these. So, for instance, your poem is about the narrator’s relationship with his father, but what images and words are you using to show this? If using words associated with “cold” to show the father’s expression, for instance, try extending associations into his movements, the narrator’s physical and emotional responses, the landscape, etc, using cold colours, hard images, negative associations: “pale eyes”, “chill skin”, “stone”, “breath ghosting”, “empty sky”...
Is the father a threat? Does his grin suggest a certain predatory wolfishness you can extend into his movements (“slinking”), and into the landscape (the smell of animal fur or blood; a forest path), almost subconsciously suggesting the sinister landscape of fairy tale and a sense of ourselves as vulnerable, for instance. In redrafting, we can use techniques to intensify underlying themes and deepen the overall meaning.

Despite being a prose writer rather than a poet, for me all good writing is poetry as it’s all about how we use language, and the more poetic the better for me. Writing exercises are no more than the techniques we use to stimulate our minds and progress our writing in all of its stages, and as such, are as valuable as everything else we do. Writing is hard work, and the trick of it is to use everything that works for us to end up with something which reads so naturally that all that hard work is invisible.'

See A Dead Good Blog here!

Thank you thank you thank you...

2011-11-25T13:00:00.002Z

...to everyone who has been giving such rave reviews of Witherstone!

It's been an amazing few weeks, and all of your lovely feedback has made me believe the decision to publish was definitely the right one!

I've received emails and Facebook messages and Tweets and personal comments with such marvelous words as:

"absolutely LOVING Witherstone Jane!"
and
"91% into the book and loving it- but know it's going to end soon and not liking that- get the next one out J WE WANT IT!"
and
"5 STARS. 13 yo heroine summons spirits and desecrates graves: Wilkie Collins meets Dennis Wheatley..." (!)
and
"just finished the book, may regret staying awake quite so late to finish it though, loved it, and how far into next year will I have to wait for the next one?"
and
"Jane, ok you need to get writing on the next one please. I couldn't stop reading and now I've finished it. Will probably have to read it again at a slower pace but if I like a book I just have to go for it. Read it while I was cooking tea and everything."
and
"My God, woman, I couldn't put it down".

Antonia Charlesworth has reviewed Witherstone for The Big Issue in the North - and the book is getting 5* Reviews on Amazon!!!!!

The Big Issue in the North review said:

"...The story follows 14-year-old Hephzibah Creswell, or Eppie, as she protects her family from an unknown enemy. Following the English Civil Wars, the plague consumes the small English village where Eppie and her working class family live. But when she acts to save her younger sister’s life, her actions unleash devastating consequences. This was a period when society was obsessed with the idea of witchcraft and Brunning weaves in a sense of the paranormal themes... the family are portrayed as likeable and believable characters, keeping the tale anchored in a sense of reality. Subtle political themes counteract the extraordinary and add historical context. Despite a slightly slow start, the book develops a tense and complicated plot with an exciting climax. The second book in this series is out late next year and readers will undoubtedly be itching to find out what happens next. However, it also stands on its own and those who enjoy historical tales won’t be disappointed."

and reviewers on Amazon said:

"Brilliant!! I absolutely loved Witherstone; very well written, with good depth of characters. The heroine is very likeable and realistic, and the plot is really mysterious and believable - resulting in a huge amount of anticipation. It's genuinely 'unputdownable', and was still circling through my mind long after I'd finished..."
and
"A Gripping Read: ... drew me in and kept me hooked from start to finish. The story is told through the eyes of Eppie as she struggles to save her family from an unknown enemy... full of convincing historical detail and I found myself transported back to a seventeenth century England immersed in superstition, magic and dark political forces. I don't usually read books which include superstition and witchcraft but this is a story about real life struggle. The plot is gripping and the narrative carries the story with pace, creating a feeling of deep unease as Eppie uncovers the truth.....I can't wait for the next instalment."
and

"heart racing: I could not put it down, there were moments in the book where my heart was racing with both nerves and excitement. An absolutely brilliant book...".

Thank you, you lovely people.

Good News and Bad News...

2011-11-21T14:47:00.003Z

The BAD news is Amazon direct sales have sold out of paperback copies of Witherstone AGAIN over the weekend...
although the GOOD NEWS is that the Marketplace sellers on Amazon still have copies in stock, and of course it's still available for Kindle and iPad .

But the GREAT NEWS to those of you a-waiting for your copy of Witherstone directly from me - the third consignment of books was delivered this morning!

Hurrah!

Please form an orderly email queue - and don't panic, those of you who have already requested a copy will receive it by this Wednesday (23rd) and there'll still be several left for new orders, plus consignment #4 for yet another 50 copies is already on order and should arrive within the next 2 weeks!

And Amazon will undoubtedly be restocking paperbacks within the next few days too. Phew!

Woo hoo!

2011-11-02T11:34:00.002Z

Great News!

Witherstone is now directly available from Amazon.co.UK so you don't need to wait for 2 weeks while it wends its way slowly across the water from the U.S. of A. anymore!

Hurrah!

Witches

2011-10-31T16:23:00.000Z

'Pilgrimage to Molenbeek' by Brueghel has haunted me for years, not least because the "explanation" for the painting - "a pilgrimage of epileptics" or "dancing mania" - doesn't quite tally with the nagging question of why the women appear to be being marched against their will by a sinister group of men.
It seems to me to represent the reality of accusations of witchcraft throughout the centuries.

A reality explored in Witherstone.

One reviewer of Witherstone said:
"... I found myself transported back to a seventeenth century England immersed in superstition, magic and dark political forces. I don't usually read books which include superstition and witchcraft but this is a story about real life struggle. The plot is gripping and the narrative carries the story with pace, creating a feeling of deep unease as Eppie uncovers the truth..."

~ www.witherstone.com ~

There's a Virus going round

2011-10-27T10:51:00.000+01:00

There's a bit of a virus going round which seems to be unusually contagious - and I rather like this one!

It appears to be spreading via Facebook especially, but also passing on through word of mouth which has already led to my first official Author Invitation to the Literature Week at Cardinal Newman College in December, where I will be doing a reading from Witherstone and engaging in a Q & A session with Creative Writing students, and the second consignment of books is being posted out left right and centre so I'm going to have to order another batch within the next few days at this rate...

I like this virus!
~

Witherstone ! ! !

2011-10-21T10:48:00.001+01:00

Witherstone ! ! !

Out now in paperback, and for Kindle and iPad.

~ www.amazon.co.uk ~

~ www.amazon.com ~

Find out more!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

ONE...!

2011-10-20T10:06:00.000+01:00

ONE...!!!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

TWO...!

2011-10-19T09:13:00.002+01:00

TWO...!!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

Three...!

2011-10-18T09:41:00.002+01:00

THREE!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

FOUR

2011-10-17T11:54:00.001+01:00

FOUR!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

FIVE

2011-10-16T16:46:00.001+01:00

FIVE!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

Blown away...!

2011-10-16T09:16:00.001+01:00

pic courtesy freeartwallpaper.net

Well I'm just about blown away...!

All the advance copies of Witherstone have GONE and it's selling steadily on Kindle too - and the book doesn't even officially launch until Friday!

For those of you still after an advanced paperback copy from me personally - the next consignment is arriving TOMORROW so I'll be in touch in the next coupla days...

...and we're officially into the last FIVE days of the countdown! Woo hoo!!!!
~

Who is Master Nalgah?

2011-10-15T17:24:00.000+01:00

Who is Master Nalgah, and what part will he play in Eppie's story?

Only 6 days left and then you can find out!

~ www.witherstone.com ~

What will Hephzibah Creswell discover?

2011-10-14T20:01:00.001+01:00

~ www.witherstone.com ~

What is the Secret of Witherstone?

2011-10-12T15:34:00.003+01:00

What is the secret of Witherstone?

~ www.witherstone.com ~

and I'll have a Tea please, Bob, as I have a little announcement to make...

2011-10-10T11:00:00.002+01:00

W-Day is Friday 21st October!

Witherstone will be launching into the big wide world in paperback on Friday 21st October - although it's already available for Kindle and iPad NOW on Amazon.co.uk, and is already available on Amazon.com in paperback (oh how lucky, Anthony and David!)

For UK dwellers, the paperback will be available here from 21st October...

...although a lucky(?) few will receive their advanced copies of the paperback directly from me a few days before the official launch...!

and an "i" please Bob...

2011-10-08T10:04:00.000+01:00

Hmmm, wasn't quite the "eye" I had in mind but pretty good...!

I'll have a "W" please, Bob.

2011-10-07T11:26:00.000+01:00

Yes it's COUNTDOWN time!

How exciting is this!

Red Letter Day

2011-10-05T11:38:00.000+01:00

Woo hoo! Got Something REALLY Interesting in the post today and am really enjoying checking it out from front cover to back - literally!

And it's lookin good...!

So the Countdown begins....

Fun #3

2011-10-01T09:41:00.000+01:00

Not really a Diversion - honest.

This is why we write and read, and this is why I'm spending all my spare time at the moment getting Witherstone ready for publication:

IT'S FUN!

I LOVE BOOKS!!!

- Tweet your #myfavouritebook today!

http://followalibrary.blogspot.com/

Fun #2

2011-09-23T14:01:00.000+01:00

Now this bit really is fun!

Got exactly what I wanted - thanks to a very helpful Master Nalgah and my even more helpful and wonderfully talented daughter who didn't tut and sigh anywhere near as much as I would have done if I was showing her yet again how to use the editing programme in such a way that the lettering actually comes along with the picture when saving it elsewhere...

Fun #1.

2011-09-22T15:16:00.000+01:00

- Formatting pages for paperbacks is not the same as the formatting required for Kindle;
- formatting pages for paperback requires choices in final book size (trim size) AND in font size, spacing etc FIRST;
- formatting for Kindle involves REMOVING all inset spaces for new paragraphs and every single new piece of dialogue throughout the entire book, AND inserting page breaks after every chapter;
- formatting for print involves very precise considerations of font size and line-spacing, as well as the gutter spacing and margins top, bottom and outer edge ... not to mention how it actually looks on the page;
- formatting for Kindle involves completely different considerations of font sizing and line-spacing, nowt at all to do with gutters etc, and everything to do with how it looks on the page;
- formatting for paperback involves either paying someone good money to design your front and back covers OR you having "fun" doing that more times than I have fingers to count in order to ensure it looks right in print AND meets their sizing criteria including ensuring all words are well within 0.5" of the edges;
- and formatting the front cover for Kindle involves completely different things, most of which appear to be invisible, and all of which involve having "fun" doing it more times than I have fingers and toes to count...

Spine. Bleed. Gutter.

2011-09-07T17:00:00.002+01:00

spine pic courtesy grasshopper3d.com

My daughter's right.

This publishing lark is fun, and the terminology for layout reads like the keywords of a particularly gruesome thriller.

Spine. Bleed. Gutter. There's definitely a story in there.

A Writer's Challenge

2011-09-02T15:09:00.000+01:00

I've been set two challenges (well, one is more of a dare) to achieve by November - but I can only choose one of them...

Rob set me the challenge of writing the first three chapters of my next novel Ivan Wolf by the end of November.

My daughter set me the challenge of publishing Witherstone by November. Self-publishing, obviously. She thinks it would be great fun.

A Fugue, or, Twenty Questions I'd really like to know the answers to...

2011-08-12T18:11:00.001+01:00

A Fugue. ladonasmusicstudio.wordpress.com/

How come some of the manuscripts that I proofread and critique are a million times better written, plotted, structured, characterised, and downright more enjoyable to read (Sarah! Jo! Steve B!) than far too many of the published books I buy or get out of the library?

Why do the former authors keep getting rejection letters? (After several months waiting, of course.)
And the latter actually get their drivel published?
How does said drivel become on the jacket a glowing 'story that will leave you breathless', for instance?
Or is the breathlessness through gasping for a breath of good writing, plotting, characterisation, something of interest, in a book which gets to page 82 before anything happens?
Why did I read it?
Is it really necessary to read something so deadly dull during a bout of insomnia that it's worth the braincell murder in the vain attempt to fall asleep?
Am I becoming slightly jaded?
Am I happy to let my writing disappear under a fugue of silence?
Can a silence have a fugue?
Can a writer fight her way out of one?
Or, as my small but lovely readership keeps asking: why don't you self-publish?

Oh Buzzer.

2011-07-18T10:09:00.001+01:00

Managed to get the new website all sorted in time to get back to writing Witherstone Book 2 today... only the bees have other ideas.

A mass of bees at the entrance to Hive 3 (aka The Ritz) means they need more living space asap so I need to get in there and sort that out before they decide to leave!

Good news is the rain is keeping them there for now. Bad news is they don't particularly like being out in the rain when I'm rearranging their living accomodation. Neither do I, come to that.

Another (non)writing day, sigh...

Shh...

2011-06-29T09:50:00.000+01:00

Don't tell anyone but I've just set up laptop in the garden to work on Book 2 ALL MORNING!

Lost and Found

2011-05-27T07:23:00.000+01:00

Printing off Witherstone Book 2: The Hunt Begins with progress so far to take on holiday and grab the opportunity of Time at last, and get back into Hephzibah Creswell's world.

Just have to remember to staple the pages together as the webcam shows that beach is lookin pretty windy...!

Time.

2011-04-28T18:55:00.001+01:00

Spending too much of it on all the wrong things. Some of them are worthwhile doing, like the day job for instance, and building bee hives, and reading other writers' work and giving them feedback, and spending time doing Stuff with them indoors over the holidays, but when was the last time I wrote anything? It was so many weeks ago I can't remember. Think about it a lot though, especially in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping.

Love this. Crack open the wine Bernard.

2011-04-13T10:32:00.000+01:00

interesting!

2011-03-22T10:02:00.007Z

Well, that was interesting! Some nice comments came out of the YTB Bookclub discussion of Witherstone, and a few of these are:

§ loved this, and particularly liked that the family were an ordinary working family. I liked the character of Grandad Creswell, a sort of curmudgeonly socialist!

(which prompted this on Twitter - RedScareBot Robot J. McCarthy
@Commies R here! RT @siancummins #yettobebooks 'a sort of curmudgeonly socialist' - http://tinyurl.com/6eyp7e9 - lol !!)

But back to the discussion...

§         there was a strong political string to the book, with Grandad Creswell and Grandma tugging not-neccesarily-opposite ends of it

§         It’s an enormously tense story, but with very careful detail that is very interesting and balances the powerful surge of the main plot

-      I mean detail in the sense of elemental happenings I think, rather than overdescription…there’s none of that. You can reach out and touch things in the story, so the characters’ ordinary lives are of as much interest as the unordinary things that happen to them.

o I read the book as an adult without feeling it was written for a younger person and not for me, but could also see that it would be compelling and readable to someone of 9 – late teens.

So how does it work as part of a series?

- ... it works very well as a stand-alone, but at the same time – knowing there are more – I’m gagging to see what happens next!

Favourite characters...?

- Grandad Creswell and Eppie – angry socialist grandad who makes a lot of sense, and tenacious, layered, likeable main character

And more from Twitter...

#yettobebooks 'I think the book is really exciting'- http://tinyurl.com/6eyp7e9

#yettobebooks the “truth” is always more complex than a simple one-side or the other'- http://tinyurl.com/6eyp7e9

Fabbo.

rather excited!

2011-03-21T10:05:00.001Z

Discussion of Witherstone at the YTBP Bookclub tonight at 8pm...!

Nervous, bemused, and rather excited - and really looking forward to it.

bemused...?

2011-03-19T00:19:00.000Z

Bemused perhaps?

three days and counting...

four days and counting...

2011-03-17T16:50:00.000Z

Nervous? moi?

Four days to go....

success floating in the ether

2011-03-07T10:34:00.000Z

Fab to see Jenn Ashworth taking her well-deserved seat amongst the top 12 new novelists of 2010 - really looking forward to her new novel Cold Light as A Kind of Intimacy is a really great read, the kind that creeps into your mind and stays there long after you've finished the book.

Christine's daughter Rachel Cotterill has published her debut novel Rebellion.

While I... well, I'm nearly half-way through building a new beehive.

I'm also nearly half-way through the first draft of the second book in the Witherstone series, The Hunt Begins, and it's coming along really well, and I was hoping to have something even more interesting to report by now, but Time is a slow beast when you're waiting for Someone interested in Something to get back to you...

Still. Enjoying watching the crows in the woods every morning as they collect twigs for their fabulous nests. Spring is coming, Master Nalgah tells me so.

people power

2011-02-21T12:35:00.000Z

It is the case that if ordinary people speak out, change can happen. Whether on the North African continent or in British forests, ordinary people can make a difference.

If we can force the Government to think again about selling off the last publicly-owned forests in Britain and force the potential reprieves of execution for some of our libraries, then we can try our damnedest to save all of our libraries.

Speak Out for your library and other public services, which are under threat as never before .

Once they are gone, they are gone.

Why are libraries important?

2011-02-12T15:55:00.003Z

Well, at risk of stating the bleedin obvious, libraries are at the heart of culture and learning and, above all, democrary. Libraries are there for everyone to use. If I hadn't grown up with access to local libraries and as many free books as I could eat, I would not have passed my O Levels, gone on to study A Levels, degree, and post-graduate study, and jobs in academia and the arts sector. And I would not have become a life-long reader and writer. It really is as simple as that.

As Alan Gibbons states in his open letter to DCMS ministers Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey:

As a consequence of the Comprehensive Spending Review 400 libraries are under threat. Compare this with the situation in South Korea where 180 new libraries are being built. South Korea is top of the PISA international rankings for competence in reading. In ten years the UK has fallen from seventh to twenty-fifth. This is no time to cut libraries.

We call on you to heed the view of the people. Libraries are a vital part of local communities. The National Literacy Trust has given evidence that visiting a library makes you twice as likely to be a good reader, the very foundation stone of academic and social achievement.

Which would we rather have? Or should I say, which of the following do we need? -

This?

or this?

The answer to the question is in what we do with these...

Campaign for the Book:

http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1563487899246&sk=messages#!/group.php?gid=43030635058

Public Library Service Campaign page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Public-Library-Service-Inquiry/139910396070378

Within the next two weeks the number of public libraries in the UK could be cut drastically. The Government aren't listening.

Make them stop and listen:

STEP 1 –Stop and Help on Facebook - ask your friends to give Public Library Service Campaign a 'Like' for our Libraries on FB and suggest the link to as many friends on FB as possible - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Public-Library-Service-Inquiry/139910396070378

STEP 2 – Everyone Get ready - - Give 52 seconds on You Tube ; give a 'Like' our Libraries again - AND THEN on You Tube please comment how a book or the library has made an impact on your life. Please Email this link to everyone in your address book and ask them to comment.

STEP 3: - There will be a ready, steady -GO ! and we all email Downing Street using their online form to nominate the Public Library Service Inquiry campaign for one of David Cameron's Big Society Awards. This is why Public Library Service Campaign are going for 100,000 likes on FB and You Tube - 100,000 is the number of people you used to need for a Downing Street e petition. The Government stopped those petitions before the cuts.

For more information about the Inquiry visit National Public Library Service Inquiry http://www.facebook.com/pages/Public-Library-Service-Inquiry/139910396070378

~

Progress

2011-02-03T18:12:00.002Z

Well, Book 2 is well under way now, and have reached a decision regarding the length of the series... that I'll be reducing it from 5 books to 3.

Bit of a drop, you might say, but I think the overall plot will work better - and most importantly, may read better, split over 3 books overall. The only thing is that books 2 and 3 will consequently be a leetle more voluminous than book 1. (Those who know me well will know what a "leetle more" is likely to involve...!)

I've got to the stage in Book 2 where the decision needs to be made before I can seriously progress any further, and following a brief but rather interesting conversation with someone in the publishing world a couple of weeks ago, my decision has been made.

Of course, there's always a proviso, and if a certain prospective publisher reading this would prefer 5 books to 3 after all, then please note my decision is not legal and binding.

pic of crows courtesy beaconstreetusa_imagesCA1IFROL

Our Forests need us!

2011-01-27T17:11:00.001Z

There's a petition to
save our forests
from being sold off from public ownership into private hands - please make your mark here:

http://38degrees.org.uk/

and tell all your friends.

Master Nalgah and all his woodland friends will thank you.

Photo of crows making a wonderfully raucous racket over our woodlands courtesy of www.tojo2000.com

Save Our Libraries

2011-01-18T21:55:00.007Z

The Public Library Service Inquiry Campaign is a new group 'calling for an inquiry into the future of public library services in the United Kingdom. Within two months almost half the UK's libraries could be axed.
Aim 1: 100,000 members by 24 Jan 2011 to make government hear our call - that the cost of short term cuts now on our future competitiveness, knowledge and culture will be massive and our ability to meet the challenges of tomorrow irretrievably damaged. Please help - the future is now in our hands. Are you ready to hold on to it? And not let it go?'

And it isn't "just" books - I know, I know, "just" and "books" are a contradiction in terms - but it isn't "just" books we'll lose. Many people rely on their local libraries for internet access too.

Sign up and join the Public Library Service Inquiry Campaign on Facebook and tell all your book-lovin' library-lovin' literary-lovin' friends.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_171907272852321#!/home.php?sk=group_171907272852321

and after you've added yourself, JOIN their dedicated Facebook page too at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Public-Library-Service-Inquiry/139910396070378?v=wall

grrrrrrrrr

2011-01-06T21:25:00.003Z

so teeth-grindingly angry and frustrated at libraries closing. Libraries CLOSING? Did we ever think we'd see the day?
And don't even get me started on cuts to social services. Front-line services won't be affected? Only if you're a banker.

pic courtesy of soyouseewhy.com

Faery.

2010-11-16T12:47:00.008Z

photo courtesy Misty woodland BW by alternakive on flickriver

Sarah.
She jerked awake into the bedroom, heart thudding, and looked around in panic. There was no one there. She turned to the other pillow. Matt was asleep, his breathing slow and untroubled. Sarah relaxed back onto her pillow and stared around the bedroom. It was dark and quiet, but not quite empty. The hush felt occupied, expectant, and she mentally shook herself and tried to laugh at her foolish fears as she slipped her hand down to her belly, not showing yet but cradling a surprising firmness, the growing child, 12 weeks safely reached.

The dreams had started before she’d even known she was pregnant. Strange and disturbing, vivid with colours and fears, and this dream had been the strangest yet.

It had been Winter, as it was now, and she had gone for a walk in the woods behind the house, passing through the bare garden. They hadn’t had time to plan it out and plant anything yet, so she’d picked her way across the disturbed earth, avoiding decapitated tree roots still clinging to one another between straggling weeds trying to reclaim the woodland flora, reminding herself to phone someone for a load of topsoil to be shipped in, the logic of everyday life invading the dream, as often happens. The hinges of the gate creaked as it closed behind her, and she set off down the narrow path, winding through the winter trees. The woods must have been much bigger before the area was cleared for the new houses and access roads, and the trees she walked beneath now were ancient and close-growing. It seemed much darker in the woods, almost as though it were already dusk, a damp mist beginning to form between the winter-blackened trunks.

She hadn’t realised she’d left the path until she found herself in unfamiliar territory. Instead of coming to the edge of the woods by the old part of the village, she had somehow walked deeper into the woods, and she turned to make her way back to the path. As she tramped on she found herself still moving through dense trees, no sign of the path, the damp-blackened leaves thick on the floor absorbing her footsteps so she felt like a ghost. She was surprised the remaining woodlands were still so big. They’d seemed little more than a copse when walking through them to the village on Sunday afternoon strolls, or when driving past on the bypass. She walked more quickly, the light fading now, anxious to be home.

Then she found herself entering an ancient clearing, thick with mosses and, delightfully, a complete fairy ring in the centre, the clumps of ochre toadstools glowing in an unbroken circle in the dusky light. It was only after she’d danced around inside the ring, laughing as she swirled round and round inside the circle with her arms stretched out, that she remembered from childhood tales that you weren’t supposed to enter a fairy ring. She stopped her twirling abruptly, feeling suddenly chilled, and the oaks' gnarled fingers seemed to reach towards her as she left the circle quickly and walked back into the woods, afraid to look over her shoulder. She made her way back through the lengthening shadows as fast as she could, and was relieved when she found herself on the path again at last.
As she turned towards home, she knew someone was behind her and started to run, but the air was as thick as water, the childhood nightmare of limbs bound in treacle as you flee the unseen monster, only safe when back in your bed, under the covers and pretending to be sleeping, but getting there at anything faster than slow-motion is impossible and you feel it gaining with every step.

By the time Sarah had reached the gate, she was screaming for Matt, but at the same time she knew she was asleep and dreaming, and tried to thrash her arms to wake him but was hag-ridden, paralysed in sleep. She pulled herself through the nightmare, through the house, trying to break free of the spell, but the air seemed thicker than ever, and she hauled herself up the stairs against the tide and into the bedroom. Matt’s form was silent under the covers as she dragged herself in and pulled the duvet up to her chin, closing her eyes and trying to still her breathing. But he was in the room. A tall figure, long weathered coat and muddied boots, his face pale and thin beneath the shade of a hat as he strode over to where she huddled in the bed, and said her name.

Sarah.
And then she had woken up.

The room was still quite dark, the familiar daytime furniture incongruous shadows against the walls. She realised she was holding her belly tightly, still chilled by the dream, and her hand crept out from beneath the covers and switched on the bedside light.

The yellow glow of the lamp threw the room into relief, and after a few minutes, Sarah got up to make a cup of tea, even though it was still another hour before they would have to get up for work. She felt a chill as she saw the mud on the kitchen floor, mopping the footprints away with a shiver. Matt must have been out for a cigarette after she’d gone to bed the night before.

She didn’t have that dream again, but unremembered others, and every night for the next week Sarah would wake suddenly into the shadowy bedroom, the silence still ringing as though a voice, a whisper, had just ceased, and knew the stranger had erupted into her dreams again, saying her name with urgency to wake her. But she could never tell if he spoke in warning or in threat. His image burned like a shadow on the retina of her mind, his pale features barely visible beneath the hat and his upturned collar as he faded from the room, leaving the dank smell of the woods behind him, and she lay there, heart pounding and gooseflesh tracing along her skin.

On Saturday she had a lie-in, feeling exhausted, not from the commute to and from work every day, but from the strange dreams from which she was summoned awake every night, his voice echoing through her sleep. Matt was writing reports at the kitchen table by the time she ambled downstairs, and he shuffled a pile of paperwork from the chair to the floor so she could sit down. Sarah looked out of the window, the shadow of the woods falling across the garden, and leaned back in the chair and sighed. She needed some fresh air.

She wrapped herself in her winter coat, then opened the door into the back garden and looked across at the woods. It was a dull day, grey and shadowed. She realised today was midwinter, the shortest and darkest day of the year. She closed the door again and went out the front door instead, and walked along Woodland Drive to the main road, and from there into the village. There were a few people about. She didn’t know the faces turning towards her as she walked past, but she smiled and said hello breezily.

It was a typical English village, two rows of small labourers cottages facing one another across the main street, some painted white, some bare stone, all with small dark windows and footscrapers by the door. In the centre of the village was the green and a small pond, and next to them the pub, the only business left open now. The village shop and post office had closed down within weeks of she and Matt moving here. The dream of idyllic village life had brought them, selling the flat in the centre of the city but commuting back in from the new house every day: to work, to shop, to go the cinema, to see friends at their favourite bars. They’d only been to the village pub once, and had felt uncomfortable, eyes observing them quietly over pints, the only conversation with the landlord, embarrassingly banal replies to his questions. Sarah had yearned for an old cottage but any for sale were beyond their means. Then came a rare cluster of new houses, “affordable” properties built by a developer on cleared woodland, and Sarah had quelled the thought that they might be taking a house intended for the local young families, just starting out, as when else might they get another chance? They were just starting out too, and wanted to raise a family away from the city, in the idyllic peace of the countryside where everyone knew everyone else and you never had to lock your door. They’d had an offer on the flat just at the right time, so it was now or never. To find herself pregnant so quickly after moving in was an unexpected bonus. They’d trawled antique shops for furniture, and it was delivered piece by piece until the small house was tastefully old. As long as you were inside looking out. It was a shame they hadn’t got round to sorting out the garden yet, the tangles of tree roots still miring the disturbed earth, but there was plenty of time for that.

Sarah had reached the centre of the village now but felt cold suddenly, and as her eyes focused on the figure ahead of her she faltered. He walked with measured strides, his long dark coat the colour of winter swaying against his boots, his collar turned up against the chill air. Sarah’s heart thumped as her own steps followed his, the outline of his tall figure blurring and crackling in the air. Time seemed to slow, each heartbeat taking an age and as sluggish as a nightmare, and Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, suddenly dizzy, and when she opened them he was gone. The road was empty ahead of her. Feeling a rush of sickness, she turned quickly and went home, trembling and clammy, and curled up on the sofa in a blanket to doze the afternoon away.

When his voice woke her into the dark bedroom again the next morning, the room still full of shadows, the sound of her name and his shade had barely died away before she knew something was terribly wrong. Then she felt it, a harsh cramping in her belly, and she cried out, but Matt slept on, and she sat up gasping for breath, hunched over, and when the dank blood came she stared at the tiny, perfect form in the palm of her hand and wept.

And even much, much later, long after they’d sold the house and moved back to the city in an effort to shake her from her depression, Sarah couldn’t help thinking that the Faery King, the Lord of the Woods, had taken her child in revenge.

Competitions and Short Story Season

2010-11-05T10:05:00.005Z

Good news on the edit-for-the-competition front: got the manuscript down below the 80,000 wordcount limit and only lost one chapter, leaving the finished version #2 ending exactly where it was originally intended to end and leaving me already one completed chapter into Book 2 - and I'm actually really happy with the final version of Witherstone, so that can't be bad!

(-and thanks to A. J. Duggan for such helpful advice & support on the To Edit or Not To Edit question, Prince of Denmark, eat yer heart out. Oh yes, you already did.)

Managed to get it in the post in plenty of time before the competition deadline too, so all-in-all, a job well done.

So now what? I'm already off to a cracking start with Book 2, and keen to get on with that now to stave off the prospective silence emanating from prospective publishers and competition judges, but I'm also enjoying getting involved with the forthcoming Short Story Season (short stories being my main focal point before I wrote the book) and have crazily replied to a fabulous offer from poet Max Wallis to apply for a slot on his somethingeveryday site...
As this will involve writing er, something every day, and this is what I try to do anyway, it seemed like a great idea at the time I said yay, but the question I'm now raising with myself is whether that something I pen every day is something I'm happy to share with at least 5,000 people (Max's site has that many followers and has received 60,000+ hits in just 8 months...) and I think the answer is probably no.

So, motivated by Max, I'm now aiming to write one GOOD short story every week for Short Story Season - kicking off with the week of 16th November when the Lancashire Writing Hub are running a Word Soup Short Story Night and publicising their Short Story Competition, and typing furiously right through National Short Story Week 22nd-28th November, and rounding off with National Short Story Day on 21st December when LWH will be publishing the winning story from their competition on their website as part of a collaborative Short Story Day project with Comma Press, Flambard Press, Iron Press, Route Publishing, Cadaverine and Mslexia.

By my reckoning, I should end up with 6 good short stories under my pen by 21st December. Well, 6 short stories, anyway.

So, am I planning to send off one of these Short Stories to the fab Lancashire Writing Hub Short Story Competition?
No.
Why not? Because I'm one of the judges, groan...

Some really good news on the topic of writing competitions though is that my talented daughter was a runner-up in a recent Bloomsbury Short Story Competition, so at least someone in the house can write GOOD Short Stories! Congrats HB, for a job well done! ;o)

Word Soup Short Story Night The Continental, South Meadow Lane, Preston PR1 8JP;

Lancs Writing Hub Short Story Competition deadline 10th December, winner published online 21st December;

National Short Story Week 22nd-28th November,

National Short Story Day website & facebook page.

conundrum

2010-10-15T10:06:00.005+01:00

Now here's a question I've been wrestling with for the past few weeks: what price artistic integrity?
Which leads to the next question - why do I write? - and leads to a basketful of other questions, all raised by one simple but rather thorny issue - wordcount.

Leaving aside the resounding silence following the submission of the completed book to Publisher #1, identifying the next publishers on the list to be graced with my submission raised a persistent problem - wordcount. A typical submission criteria required by those publishers most suited for my book often includes a maximum wordcount, which Witherstone in its final and unabridged form exceeds by quite a bit...
...and having in those same few weeks been persuaded by an insistent writer colleague to enter Witherstone into a certain competition, the questions have been compounded as there is of course a maximum wordcount for said competition which comes a good 2 chapters before the end of the book.
A serious (and I mean serious) edit of the whole manuscript in the subsequent weeks has got it down pretty impressively, losing some bits n bobs but keeping the story & its integrity intact & something I'm still happy with - but still way over the submission criteria.

So what next?

Don't bother with said competition & publishers with maximum wordcount criteria? That's certainly an option, but I do actually want to get it published. And I console myself that if I did manage to get Witherstone published, and it sold well enough, then said publisher would be happier for the subsequent books in the series to be a little longer (eyes glancing at ever-increasing girth of certain well-known series for younger & cross-over readers as each book came along as I speak...)

So, currently tinkering with earlier parts of the story as alternative endings - not such a major problem in a significant respect as the earlier finish would merely mean that the excised two chapters or so move to the beginning of Book 2 instead, and there are a couple of really good places Witherstone itself could finish quite well. And it would be foolish to ignore a goodly batch of potential publishers, and a relevant and prestigious competition.
But. Where it finishes at the moment is the best one. That's why it finishes there. The alternatives all have merit, and merely mean that the next part of the story begins in Book 2 instead of ending Book 1. But. Still BUT. That's not how I want it to end. And that's not how my daughter thinks it should end (she was gasping for Book 2 as soon as she put down Book 1, which is, of course, exactly the effect we wish to create). And the book itself thinks it should end there too.

So... not a fun pun but rather ironic all the same. Do I write for its own sake or write to be published?

?

Finally: Have. Sent. Synopsis. And. Three. Chapters. To. a. PUBLISHER...!

2010-09-07T22:46:00.006+01:00

At last. FINAL final edit finished after daughter (finally) got The Book and was allowed to read it. Only three and half months after I "finished" it in time for her birthday in April and then wouldn't let her actually read it until I'd done a "final edit"...

Her patience is astounding, and the good news is she loves it - you might think "well, she would say that," unless you know my daughter! She had a couple of useful suggestions to make (enhancing a paragraph on the first page to make it longer and have more impact, and one or two other tweaks for clarity, but nothing major, and rewriting those small sections at her suggestion while sitting beside Skrevatn lake near Fyresdal, Norway, wasn't exactly a chore either.)

Got back from Norway at the end of August and had to hit the ground running at work, but the new resolution of keeping working hours within sensible boundaries and treating the writing as my other job is already paying off as Monday was spent identifying some of those few-and-far-between publishers who DO accept unsolicited manuscripts and actually sending the synopsis and the first three chapters off.

I'm not actually expecting to hear anything back as the poor Readers are probably desperately trying to find the matches so they can burn their way out from under the daily avalanches but at least it's now Out There in the world.

Next job? Identify a few more places to send it as the rejections/deafening silence start rolling in, and finish the fine-tuning for the overall plan (which has undergone a few shifts since writing Book One) and settle down with the inkpot for the first serious work on book two... so roll on Friday!

Short Story Published! - woo hoo!

2010-06-23T11:02:00.004+01:00

Well, how proud am I? Published in a real book and everything! With real writers!

My short story Dragon has been published in Word Soup: Year One, an anthology of Lancashire writers selected by Jenn Ashworth, author of A Kind of Intimacy.

My fellow writers in the anthology are Tom Fletcher, author of The Leaping, Nicholas Royle, author of a number of books including Antwerp, much published Lancastrian poet and short story writer Sarah Hymas, author of Host amongst others, A J Duggan, author of Scars Beneath The Skin, Peter Wild writer, and editor of Before The Rain and other anthologies, Mollie Baxter, writer and musician published all over the place, Norman Hadley, published poet and prose writer, Socrates Adams-Florou, blogger and writer, Sandy Calico, blogger and writer, and Rachel McGladdery, Garstang poet.

For more info on the book, see the Lancashire Writing Hub.

Galvanised into activity this morning, by this step into being a Published Writer, I'm keen to press on with the seemingly never-ending "final edit" of Witherstone, so it's out into the garden with an extension lead and the laptop to type away within smelling distance of the bee hive, replete with fresh wax combs and the busy drone of my busy bees, storing nectar...

Writing it Large!

2010-06-17T19:45:00.005+01:00

Woo! Seeing ma wee wurrds Writ Large in the side of public buildings in Preston - and later tonight in Lancaster - is really cool...

...and finally makes it sink in that I'm about to be Published! In a Real Book!!! Woo hoo!!

I've made it into the Lancashire Writing Hub's first full publication - Word Soup: Year One - alongside such cracking Lancashire talent as...

Tom Fletcher (author of The Leaping), Sarah Hymas (Lancaster Poet), Nicholas Royle (published loads of novels including Antwerp, and runs his own printing press Nightjar), Rachel McGladdery (Poet and a super shiny star*), Norman Hadley (poet, author, and designer of enormous engines by night), Socrates Adams (award-winning blogger and writer whose emails never fail to calm stressful moments with his insistence that everythingisfine), Sandy Calico (blogger and writer of short fiction and super shiny star*), Peter Wild (writer and editor and co-author of 'Before The Rain', published by Flax), Mollie Baxter (writer and co-author of 'Before The Rain' who "finds that the act of writing is best approached by stealth"), and A J Duggan (author of Scars Beneath The Skin and, he tells me, a New Novel...!), and cool "Outsiders" photo-documentary dude Garry Cook.

The final choices for the successful authors in the publication was Jenn Ashworth's - author of A Kind of Intimacy - the kind of book that makes you look at your neighbours with a leetle more caution (though I'm more unsettled by the feeling that it isn't me who lives next to Annie, it's my neighbours...)

Check out the book launch at The Continental in Preston on Tooosday 22nd June - a Word Soup special!

Published!!! RESULT!

Editing

2010-04-30T09:15:00.009+01:00

Well, I "finished" the first full and complete good draft in time for my daughter's birthday - but I haven't let her read it yet because I'm still editing.

So she's diligently reading her other birthday presents without complaint, which I think is down to her innate kindness and understanding, rather than a happy-to-put-that-off strategy...

Work is busy, which means I'm getting little time for the editing, and I keep waking up in the early hours mumbling "the painting!" or "the window!" or "the oven!" as some hidden extra-bit-I-need-to-do-to-The-Book emerges from my subconscious. Weird this writing lark, isn't it.

So today is a Writing Day, but first I have to go and help some bees settle in at the bottom of my garden with a nice feeder sloshing with sugar-syrup, and then meet the designer Helen Ashworth for lunch - Helen designs and makes the most fabulous bags and cushions and notebooks using old letters and postcards as templates and uses old fabrics - which makes it sound as though I move in very elegant circles but really Helen and I both worked together in a library once...

... and then I'll get on with the editing.

Helen Ashworth "Vacances" purse, picture courtesy http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/rosiesarmoire

The Book is Finished!

2010-04-20T16:15:00.006+01:00

- well, finished the first full draft anyway.

Having said that, I don't do "rough" drafts at all but work and work at each section until it's as good as I can get it before I can move on to the next bit. Then the next time I'm working on it (in those snatched moments of calm between working at my real jobs and living in a somewhat lively household), I re-read the preceding section, inevitably tweaking and editing while I do, then move on to the next...
...although my writing tends to move into my head so that I'm thinking about it while eating, sleeping, and washing up and that's often when the next bit starts to take shape - and when the not-previously-spotted mis-shapen nature of what has already been written raps me sharply on the skull too so that I have to revisit it for a rewrite.

So now the first book in the Witherstone series, called, er Witherstone surprisingly enough, is now a complete 13 chapter - 150 pages of A4 - book which only needs a top-to-toe edit to get rid of those irritating little typos and writer's tics which you can't see for toffee when they're on the screen no matter how many times you read them, but jump up from the page and blow raspberries at you as soon as they are printed on real paper.
Weirdly, each chapter seems to have ended up being roughly the same length as one another, although this wasn't intentional, so that's either good fortune, a sign of sheer writerly brilliance, or, as I suspect, an indication that I've done something terribly wrong...

The first port-of-call with the book is my harshest critic - my daughter. I wrote the book for her and managed to get it into its current "finished" state in time for her Birthday on Friday 16th, although having looked at the first couple of chapters since it's been in complete paper form, I desperately want to edit out those irritating typos first! - if she'll let me... My Writing Day is coming up on Thursday so fingers crossed she won't have finished her current read by then and I can sneak her Birthday Present off for a quick editorial first.

Having said that, I'm not sure I'll ever feel that it's really finished - I'm a real devil for picking at a piece of writing and have to tell myself that if I'm at the stage where I'm spending more than 20 minutes dithering about whether to use "said" or "whispered", I have Finished.

Probably one of the most interesting things about the book is that the germ for its inception all began with an encounter in my brother's garden shed last summer - with a hoard of spiders. When I asked my daughter to design a book cover for it though, she came up with a great picture with no spiders in it at all...

Goosebumps of the Literary Kind

2010-02-23T11:26:00.010Z

Literature is a strange space. The arrangment of words on a page can leave you laughing, crying, gasping, breathless. The first words on a page can pour through your eyeballs and be scorched into your brain forever.

One of the most remarkable opening moments of a novel I've ever come across is Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces. My friend Julia held it out to me in the University library and whispered 'I've bought this as a birthday present for Ria. Do you think she'll like it?'

I glanced at the Prologue quickly: a suggestion that the novel is based on retrieved texts - 'memoirs, diaries, eyewitness accounts' or perhaps is one of those other lost stories 'concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken' - hidden during the Second World War. It sounded interesting.
I turned to the first chapter, read for less than five minutes then packed up my half-arsed essay and went down to the bookshop and bought the book and took it home and read and read and read.
Years later I use different sections of the opening pages of this novel when talking to my own students about literature and memory and questions of truth, literary criticism and literature itself as a kind of archaeology, the strange place of literature where we can tell the untellable, speak the unspeakable, examine our humanity, and the way in which the words on a page can burrow into your brain and seep into every pore of your being so that you carry that arrangement of words around inside you for the rest of your life.

Time is a blind guide.
Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.
No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of earth.
I saw a man kneeling in the acid-steeped ground. He was digging. My sudden appearance unnerved him. For a moment he thought I was one of Biskupin's lost souls, or perhaps the boy in the story, who digs a hole so deep he emerges on the other side of the world.

You can click on this link to read reviews of this novel on Amazon.

In this novel, Michael's uses poetic language to examine the profound impact of loss, the importance of remembering, and the redemptive power of human love. In part she does this by defamiliarising the murder committed in war in ways which lose none of the horror whilst at the same time foregrounding the enormity of what is lost - those unique and individual lives, the lives of the survivors, and humanity itself. Her use of language evokes similar layered depths of love, humanity and ethical truths as Michael Ondaatje, another writer who just about blows you away with the intense beauty of his language; both writers, for me, poetry in motion.

It's true to say that I'm one of the readers of Michael's novel who finds it in some senses a novel of two halves, preferring the first half, Jakob's half, to the second half of the book overall, although that isn't to say the second half isn't well worth reading because it is, and Anne Michaels' truly beautiful use of language permeates the whole book, but I guess what I'm saying is that the first half of the book has lodged itself in me - has "entered me through my pores and been carried through my bloodstream to my heart" to paraphrase Michaels.

If you'd like to discuss a piece of literature here, you can email me at jabber.wocky@tiscali.co.uk

Dragon

2010-02-09T09:48:00.025Z

backyard bramble by http://www.paulsantoleri.com/

The ant ran across the palm of her hand, and Beth watched its tiny antennae wave in the air when it stopped at the end of her index finger. It ran on, and she turned her hand to keep it in sight as it ran over and over her hand in an endless loop, criss-crossing its own tracks but getting nowhere. She sighed and lowered her wrist to the mud below the grass so that the ant could find its track back to the rest of the colony. It wouldn’t get off, stupid thing, so she blew it and shifted over onto her back, sliding her hands behind her head to keep the ants out of her hair. The sky was forget-me-not blue, receding away forever. Small puffs of cloud swept occasionally into view from behind the tall sycamore trees and drifted steadily away. The birds were chirruping and singing in the trees, and darting across the eternal blue like stones, only the occasional blur of their wings disturbing their perfect streamlined bodies.

The small clouds puffed out across the treetops like the soft white exhalations of a dragon’s breath, and Beth drifted slowly across the sky with them, until a blackbird began a loud chack! chack! of alarm above her head. It was calling in agitation from the uppermost branches of the nearest tree, and her eyes searched around for the threat of a magpie but could see none. As the blackbird suddenly fled from the tree and shot away across the sky, its warning slicing through the air, the huge dragon rose silently but laboriously up from behind the trees. Beth could hear the leathery creak of its wings as it heaved itself over the canopy, and she found herself turning and scrambling for the thick island of brambles behind her before she had even become fully aware of what was coming, her body moving as though bound in glue as she fled.

She tried to plunge straight into the deepest part of the thicket, but the branching arms resisted her, holding her back, and she had to force her way in, the thorns tearing at her clothes and hair and ripping threads of blood across her arms and legs. She turned her head back towards the dragon as she pressed herself further and further away from it, and saw through her hair the glinting coppery sheen of its scales as it swooped down towards her and landed heavily on the grass. Beth forced herself backwards into the brambles, managing to put branches between her and the beast as it folded its brown leather wings down behind it and lunged forwards. Beth kept moving, further in, further away, but the dragon’s breath fouled the air in front of her face as her arms, legs and body struggled and pushed against the resisting arms of the thicket. Her hair was almost completely covering her eyes now, pulled over her face like a mask by the thorns which ripped and gouged at the back of her head and her body as she tried to press herself further away. Beth kept forcing her body back, brambles growing and thickening between herself and the dragon, until she lost sight of it altogether.

She stopped and tried to quieten her whimpering breath. She tried to turn her head from side to side but it was tightly bound, and her eyes strained to see around her as far as she could. Glimpses of leathery skin flickered between the branches, and she could hear a grunting breath which was not her own. She could smell the dragon’s odour, like sour dough and bitter almonds, and found its golden-brown eyes glinting at her through the thorns. Beth closed her eyes as its shadow loomed closer, knowing she was trapped, and the branches bent and swayed and creaked around her.

When she opened her eyes again, Beth pressed her head back to look up through the tangles of hair and branch to the sky. It was still blue, a glorious day, the sunlight dappling through the thicket all around her, but the birds had fallen silent. Listening. A breath. Whuu. Silence. Whuu. A long, drawn-out sigh. Whuu-uugh. The sky darkened suddenly and the grunting breath became a creak of leather and a swoosh of air. As the dragon passed over her head, Beth’s whimpered breath finally became a scream, but the dragon kept going, up and gone, sunlight and blue sky and silence streaming suddenly in through the thorny branches as the sound of her scream died away. After a moment, her breath drawing shakily back into her tensed and trembling body, Beth collapsed and wept into the thorns which still held her, a rag-doll of arms and legs and hair.

Beth stayed in the bramble thicket for a long time. After she had stopped crying she hung there, listening to the birds singing and chirruping in the trees around her once again. She heard her mother call. Beth looked down her body at her arms and legs, the bloodied scratches drying and crusty. She crawled and picked her way back out, adding new wounds. Weak and trembling, she got to her feet and ran back through the garden to the house as quickly and as quietly as she could.

As she stepped into the kitchen, her mother tutted at her appearance and told her to go and wash for lunch. In the bathroom, Beth washed the blood and dried sap from her arms and legs and looked at her face in the mirror. A pale, freckled face looked stonily back at her, hair tangled with leaves and thorny twigs and stuck down to the dirty forehead with dried sweat. Beth shakily pulled the twigs out of her hair and dropped them into the waste basket under the gleaming enamel sink. Washing her face straight under the cold tap, she wiped the grime onto the fluffy pink towel hanging by the side of the bath, then went into her bedroom to change. She screwed the soiled dress into a tight ball and pushed it into the furthest corner under her hearts and flowers bed, then went back downstairs.

Looking her up and down briefly, her mother nodded her head towards the dresser, and Beth opened the drawer to take out the cutlery and set the table for lunch. She set three places, two at one end of the dark, gleaming table and one at the other. Her mother moved the further set back up the table next to the other two and positioned the three place-mats then the steaming bowls of thick, fragrant soup. Beth dragged her chair to the table as her mother opened the back door and shouted “Lunch!”

Beth had already finished her soup by the time her father entered the kitchen, and she watched him at the sink, washing his soiled hands and his leathery arms, tanned to a copper sheen. She left the table quietly to find a new place to hide while her parents discussed the gathering clouds, and the potential for more gardening that afternoon, while they ate. When they had finished, Beth's mother leaned across her daughter's empty chair to clear away the remains of her husband’s meal.

rock pool

2010-01-24T18:07:00.013Z

seaweed courtesy of static.zooomr.com - images - 851606

Robert couldn’t wait to get out of the car. He jiggled up and down in his seat, his face close to the window so that he didn't miss a thing.
‘Can we get out now? Are we parked?’
‘Just wait. I need to get a ticket’ said his mother, and she undid her seatbelt and opened her door.
‘Can I come too?’ he asked, but she slammed the door shut without answering and walked across the car park. Robert craned up to see where his mother was. She was at the ticket machine. She was coming back to the car. Excitedly, he undid his seat belt and picked up his overstuffed rucksack from the seat beside him and tried to open his door, but it was locked.
‘Mum! Mummy! I can’t get out!’
‘Just wait!’ she said as she opened her door. She peeled the backing off the ticket, stuck it half across the back and pressed the ticket to the window. She slammed her door shut again and opened Robert’s door from outside.
‘Don’t go running off as soon as we’ve crossed the road.’
Robert held his mother’s hand as they crossed, trying to stop his rucksack from banging into his leg as it hung awkwardly from his other hand. When they reached the pavement, Robert tried to run onto the sand but his mother kept hold of him.
‘You’re hurting!’ he said, trying to free his hand.
‘Just wait!’ she hissed.

Robert looked at the curve of the sandy beach with the huge boulders all along one side, tumbling down towards the sea. The sea. The tide was out past the rocks and some children were already down by the rock pools, their fishing nets waving as they ran from pool to pool. Their voices sounded far away and Robert felt as if he would never get there. He looked up at his mother. She was slowly surveying the beach. She let go of Robert’s hand and started to walk the other way, away from the rocks. Robert walked behind her, awkward in his shoes in the soft, dry sand. He watched it dust up onto his shoes and socks as he walked. There were tiny stones and shells lying in dry waves along the tide-line, framed by parched seaweeds which stretched away in long, tangled mounds across the sand.

After walking an endless way along the beach, Robert’s mother finally stopped and started to unpack her bag. She unrolled her beach-mat, took off her sandals, sat down and stretched out her legs. She began to unscrew the top from a bottle of sun-tan lotion. Robert watched her, trying to wait until she was ready to let him go, but his impatience butted in.
‘Can I go to the rock pools now? Please mum?’
She waved him away without looking up.

Robert fumbled with his shoe-laces and impatiently prised his half-unlaced shoes off his feet. His socks quickly followed and his feet found themselves at last in the hot, loose sand. He opened his rucksack and emptied it beside him. He left the plastic spades, picked up a small bucket and started to run across the soft sand. It was hot and soft but rough on his bare feet. Sand-shrimps jumped out of the tangles of seaweed as he quickly picked his way across them. As his feet met the smooth wet sand, he ran faster, his footprints lighter behind him slowly darkening as the water reclaimed them.

As he reached the rocks, he slowed. Walking as slowly as he could force himself, he reached the first pool. He looked into the water and the sun rippled across the sand at the bottom. A dart of movement. Fish. Robert held his breath and slowly crouched down to see. Tiny fish, the colour of sand, swam without moving in a patch of sunlight. Robert slowly let out his breath and watched them, their tiny fins blurring like wings. He gently eased the bucket into the water towards the fish. At the last moment, the translucent creatures darted away, but when he pulled the bucket back towards him, he saw that one fish was hovering in the water of the bucket. He carefully sat down with the bucket in his hands and watched the fish. It was so transparent he could see its darker organs through the skin. After a while, he slowly got up, lowered the bucket back into the pool and encouraged the tiny creature out towards where the other fish had swum.

Robert walked from pool to pool, his shadow following him. He saw the small empty skeleton of a crab, moving gently to and fro in the soft motion of the water. Feathery fronds of bright green weed held motionless in the smaller pools amongst mop-headed bladderwrack. Red anemones on the submerged rocks glowed like rubies in the deeper pools, and black sea-snails glided silent tracks across the sand at the bottom. He stepped into the warm water, watching the sand rise in slow little puffs around his feet.

Further on, surrounding a huge rock which jutted out of the sand, was the biggest pool yet. It was deep, and deeper still where the sea had excavated around the base of the grey-black stone, the pool sloping down into the shadows where long strands of reddish seaweed floated out like underwater hair. He stepped into the pool, and a shimmer passed across the surface of the water. Looking down into the water, he saw more of the tiny transparent fish, hovering in the long red strands of weed which floated out from the deepest part of the pool.

He slowly walked down the sea-carved slope into the deeper water and let his fingers float in amongst the fish. The fine strands of weed caressed his fingers, clinging slightly to his skin. His toes sank into little clouds of sand, and he saw a silvery sheen behind the flowing weed, stretching right along the underside of the rock.

Robert leaned in more closely, adjusting his head to avoid the glare of the sunlight on the water, and in the shadow of the rock he saw a long fish tail, longer than his own legs. His eyes followed the tail back up towards the long strands of seaweed, where the scales gradually evolved into silvery skin. The mermaid’s arm moved gently in the motion of the water, fingertips caressing the tail, its scales shimmering in silvery rainbow colours where the sunlight found them. Behind the floating hair, which still tugged gently at his fingers, a silvery oval slowly resolved itself into a face. The mermaid’s dead fish eyes were open and staring blankly, while a tiny transparent fish nibbled at the still, grey lips. Robert tried to untangle his fingers from the mermaid’s hair. His feet were held by the shifting sand, and the mermaid’s dead fingers brushed against his feet as he struggled to get away. Freeing his feet and hands at last, he stumbled from the water, fell to his knees and was sick into the wet sand.

the hill

2010-01-14T12:03:00.005Z

photo courtesy ct3.pbase.com

The wiry grass glittered with diamonds in the clear crystal light. The hollow of her footsteps amplified the silence as she climbed, and she looked up the hill to where the green grass clung to the luminescent body of the rock, poised in its reach. The wind whispered around her, and breathed the new-born smell of heliotrope onto her skin. She inhaled its breath, her heart lifting, and trod the echo of her boots into the earth.

An exposed hawthorn stood silently, clasping the rock above her, where the skin of turf was thinning. She stopped for a moment, and a coil of air exhaled a breath of decay from the ground at her feet. A tangled scrap of wool and tiny bones lay rotting in the early morning sun. The heap stirred, the wind in its wool, mingling its dusky air with her breath. She turned away and carried on up the slope. As she neared the hawthorn, the silence was startled by the song of a blackbird pouring its golden enchantment through the air from the bony web of thorn, shimmering with endless points of light. The bird paused and looked back at her for a moment before continuing its clear, thrilling rapture. As she resumed her journey, the sparkling song washed over her, and her heart beat its tune.

As she climbed steadily higher, the wind’s murmur was becoming cooler, and the clear blue air was beginning to dissolve into a grey mist, gradually thickening around her as the hill became steeper. The grass was thinning, finally giving way completely to cold stone as the barren rock emerged beneath her feet. She stopped and turned, leaning her back against the cool granite, and felt herself alone on the hill.
Time was getting on. She turned back to the rock and climbed, the only sound carried on the sigh of the wind was the resonance of her footsteps into the stone. Her body pressed into the hill as she sought for any relief on the rock to which she could cling, and the rock steadily lifted her higher into the darkening clouds beginning to mass over her. The wind was hurrying her now, swirling its cool insistence against her neck. She shivered, pulling her collar in tighter against it.
As she finally emerged from the lee of the hill, the wind’s urging suddenly became a roar, pulling her clothes out from her body, screaming her hair into its mouth. Her cry was dragged out of her mouth whu-uff, and behind her, the wind cried O God! to the sky.

Great swathes of rain began to move across the dismal clouds, a huge bolt of cloth slowly unravelling in the wind. A thousand beads of rain wept into her face. The torrent of water soaked through her clothes in seconds, immersing her skin, and her heart ached suddenly for the blackbird’s song, far behind her now, flowing endlessly from the shimmering branches of the past. For a moment she thought she could almost hear it, echoing through the air which surged and howled around her. She closed her eyes to keep the song within her as she leaned against the hill.

Clasping the pale granite, heart pounding with the rain, she spread her fingers wide, roots tapping into the rock. Shimmers of rain clung to eyelashes, and skin of wet stone. As the sky slowly darkened into night, scraps and tatters of cloth flapped wildly, before breaking free and whirling away into the roaring silence.