Posts

The Winter Blues

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 January has been a looooong month. It's never an easy month but January 2025 has been very mixed, not just in the world, but in my own life. Sending my manuscript into my agent was a high, as was a fabulous evening with Barbara Nadel at West Barnes Library. But family illness on various fronts and the death of a very dear friend has taken its toll. The winter blues have continued on from January into February. I only realised today's date this morning so I'm writing this post ad hoc! I'm burnt out and need to replenish myself. This happened a few years ago and I wrote down places I wanted to visit that I knew would minister to my soul. I haven't written a new list yet but without even meaning to, I started the replenishing process yesterday by visiting Hampton Court Palace. It was a beautiful, sunny day. The palace wasn't too busy and although there wasn't an abundance of them, I found some snowdrops. There's something about these little flowers that br...

Structural Issues (Cecilia Peartree)

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I had been waiting for quite a while for the third in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors, so I could hardly wait to read it when it was finally published. While the story managed to wrap up some plot threads that had been left dangling after the first two books in the series, in a way that was satisfying in itself, I couldn't help finding the structure of the story a bit laboured. After thinking about it for quite a while, I realised why I had noticed this. The answer surprised me. I had myself wrestled with a similar writing problem in the past.  I am a very low-profile writer - I have written and self-published a lot of novels but none have been wildly successful, which I think is partly because I tend to write in the odd gaps between genres. This is more or less unintentional. My cosy mysteries are either not cosy enough or not mysterious enough, and my historical romances are not romantic enough, though I have found a few loyal readers who seem to stick b...

The Great Divide – A book review by Sarah Nicholson

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Sometimes you come across a great book by chance, in this instance I found it when scrolling on the Borrowbox library app. Sometimes you read a book and you have to share it with everyone because it is so well written and the theme of the novel is so topical. The book in question is The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez. I listened to it and the narration is excellent, with distinctive accents for each character. Although as with “listening” to any book I did struggle to work out who was who at the beginning, without the benefit of flicking back a few pages to clarify, but it was well worth persevering. According to Wikipedia “the most common meaning [of The Great Divide] is the Continental Divide of the Americas, which separates the watersheds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans”. The novel is set in Panama in 1907 at the time when the Panama Canal was built, a construction which crosses the Great Divide and divides a country in the process. Panama has often been in the news...

Participation, Beauty and Meaning

  Participation, Beauty and Meaning: An Account of My Research Journey*   ‘ Reading literature can help one regain one’s balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium, as a result of illness, disability, or a traumatic event encountered in the course of an ordinary life’.    I wrote this in my first ever ESREA paper in 2017 and it was the beginning of a journey that I made to find out whether there was any truth in the theory known as bibliotherapy.    In my research since then I have posed the question of whether a reading of literature can help to heal minds and hearts? As a result, I have come across indications from my own life and from outside sources that this can be so. I have amassed a vast number of articles on the subject and published several essays, both in educational journals and as part of a group of bloggers. Most of the latter are writers of novels for children and adults.    Since I joined this group, about five years...

Language: the Gift that Keeps on Gifting by Griselda Heppel

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Apparently I had an idea for this month’s post, inspired by fellow AE writer Peter Leyland’s thoughtful musings on how powerful poetry can be in evoking lost friendships and past times, Looking Forward, Looking Back . Unfortunately whatever it was, I’ve forgotten it. Perhaps my theme for his month should be amnesia.  New Year's resolutions... for others. Instead, as it is yet early in the year, I shall make some resolutions for 2025.  Oh no, not for me.  I wish to make them on behalf of journalists, editors, all kinds of writers and in fact, anybody who occasionally puts pen to paper. I have several targets in mind but they all boil down to one thing: please, all of you, write words as they are meant to be used, not how you think they should be. Honestly, no one actually speaks like that. Or at least, they used not to, before you blazed the trail.  Sorry for gifting you influenza. 1. GIVE. A perfectly nice, useful verb that has been with us since language began....

Want to Get Published? Think Small. Think Chapbooks. Guest Post from Nadja Maril

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Getting published can be daunting. This post is written for every writer who has felt the sting of rejection and it about to give up. Maybe you have dreams of publishing an important novel, a trilogy of Sci-fi adventures or a heart wrenching memoir; but your efforts haven’t gotten very far. Did you ever think that perhaps your first book might be something different.  Sometimes you have to start small. A great place to begin is with shorter work.  I’ve always written poetry, but I seldom sent it to magazine. My poetry was private. For me poetry is a form of shorthand, a way to express and record my feelings for later reference. My poems are usually written in free verse.  Another type of short form writing I enjoy is flash. And when I think of flash, it has to be short, very short. I’ve published 50 -word stories, and 250-word stories and 700 -word stories. Much of my work is inspired by true life events and observations and thus is considered Creative Non Fiction (CNF). ...

Say no to winter blues!

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I thought long and hard about what my subject would be this month. Not only does January contain ‘Blue Monday’, but I always turn a year older, and what with one thing and another in the world of politics, the threat to creativity from AI, and so many other things, there has been much to make a person miserable already.     So, I decided to bring a bit of positivity to you. Firstly, that birthday thing – getting older is a privilege not a curse. Let me instead turn to something which is important in our personal worlds: friendship. If we have just one friend we can rely on, we should be thankful. I have a few who have really stood the test of time – nearly 50 years, in fact. The picture above was taken when I was staying at Wainman House in Wisbech, a beautiful Georgian Mansion. Wisbech itself is not the most exciting of towns and it makes Ipswich look busy and full of shops, but the aim of the stay was for a group of friends to get to get together, all in the same place for t...