All Change

I haven't blogged here recently because life has been more than a little hectic.  

First of all I handed my notice in at the horrible job. I've been wanting to leave for ages but didn't want to leave until I had another job to go to. In the end the atmosphere had become so toxic that I felt physically sick each day before I had to go in and near to tears most of the time that I was there.  Eventually I decided that life was just too short.

It saddens me that an organisation whose aim is to empower women made me feel so belittled and diminished.  From the moment I handed in my notice until the day I left the trustees didn't even have the courtesy to speak to me or even respond to work related emails. After nearly two years of dedicated hard work I found their attitude positively insulting.  I can only take heart that their behaviour reflects badly only on them.  I know I behaved with professionalism and dignity until the end.  I am just so pleased that I don't have to have anything to do with them any more.

Because I didn't have another job to go to (although I didn't tell them that), I spent my notice period applying for jobs and trying to make more freelance contacts.

I left work the day that half term started and was hoping to have a quiet week spending some quality time with my boys.  But it wasn't to be as two lots of last minute work came in which kept me tied to my keyboard for most of the week.

The following week I was offered a job, working three days a week.  Its with another charity - this time working with the elderly, but because of my recent experience I was a first hesitant to take another job in the voluntary sector.

As the expense of Christmas is around the corner though, I took the plunge.  I completed my first three days this week and thankfully they seem like a really friendly bunch and it has felt good to be in an environment where the staff are respected.

There is just so much to take in though that each day my head has been near to explosion point by the time I get home.

Its going to be a challenge fitting my increased freelance work, home and family around all this and over the last few weeks my writing has definitely taken a back seat.

I'm sure things will settle down soon but in the meantime I'm setting myself small writing takes each day so that at least I'll feel as though I'm achieving something, rather than having so little time and head space that larger projects seem too daunting.

There is one thing I'm grateful for though, and that is that I didn't sign up to NaNoWriMo this month.  I think that might just have sent me over the edge.

Woman's Weekly

This morning two fat envelopes appeared on my doormat, and recognising the labels, I knew without opening them that they were rejections.

The sad thing was that they were both from Woman's Weekly.

It doesn't matter how hard I study the magazines and scrutinise the guidelines, I've never managed to get it right for this magazine, even when I think I've written the perfect story from them.  What's even more frustrating is receiving a standard rejection telling me to read their guidelines.  Sometimes I wish I had a bit of mystic ability and could interpret a crystal ball.

Never mind, you have to take it on the chin and my stories will be reassessed and sent somewhere else.  You never know, one man's meat is another man's poison or so they say.

So now its back to the drawing board to create the perfect story for Woman's Weekly, because now its personal and I'm determined to crack this market one day, even if that day is a long way in the future.

I'm In Prima Magazine!

I was absolutely delighted last week to see my story appear in Prima Magazine.  It’s been my first success for a while, so it was almost as exciting as seeing my first ever story in print.  My experience with the team from Prima has been fantastic.

Firstly I received a telehphone call to say that my story had been accepted, followed by quite a lengthy conversation about me and my writing habits.  This was a bit weird and made me feel like a “proper writer”.  

Right from the beginning I was told what edition the story would be in and when it would come out in the shops, and have also had correspondence regarding updates on payment.  All in all a lovely and efficient team.

I was also really impressed by the illustration which accompanies the story which shows that the illustrator has really read the story and tried to include as many details of the story as possible.

Prima ask for 800 words and pay £100 - not bad.  This was the first time I had submitted to Prima so was even more delighted to be published.  My story had a twist in it which do seem to be popular.  The only downside is that Prima classes the publication as choosing a winner, so I would imagine that this is a one off opportunity, although if anyone knows differently, please do let me know as I would love to submit to them again.

If you haven’t tried submitting to Prima before I would definitely suggest giving it a go.  Their email address is: yourwinningstory@hearst.co.uk.

Time Travel

Those of you who are regulars to my blog post will know that I love novels which are written with a dual timeline. So here are a few I have read recently:

A Week In Paris - Rachel Hore

I'm a big fan on Rachel Hore so was delighted to download this one onto my Kindle.

As the name indicates this is set in Paris.  The timelines are 1961 and in the run up and during World War II.

In 1961 Faye is visiting Paris as a violinist in a concert tour.  Fay’s mother, Kitty is in a home and Fay is at first reluctant to leave her mother, if only for a week, but is assured that her mother is well enough for her to leave her. Another reason for her to visit Paris is that she has found an ancient rucksack with an address in Paris in a trunk in her mother’s home.

Intrigued Fay decides to investigate and this introduces the timeline of a young woman living in Paris in the run up to war and in a country which is being overrun by the enemy.

If I’m honest I’d say that I enjoyed the story set in the war more than that of the early 1960’s and could have quite happily read that story alone but I still enjoyed the novel greatly and was genuinely afraid for a woman living in occupied France.  Rachel Hore certainly brought this period of history to life in this book.

The Dandelion Years - Erica James

Another of my favourite authors is Erica James.  I love the way she examines the relationships between her characters – you can’t help fall in love with most of the characters she writes about and that, for me, gives her books real page turning quality.

I also love the fact that she sets most of her books around the area where I grew up, which often gives her books an extra likeability for me.

The Dandelion Years is a bit different as it is set both in Suffolk and in the famous Bletchley Park.  It also switches between the present day and 1943/44.

In the present we see Saskia living in a beautiful house called Ashcombe, with her father and two grandfathers.  Saskia and her family have had to overcome a dramatic trauma and over the years it has led them to band together for support, to the extent that they live rather insular existences.

Saskia’s father is a bookseller and Saskia restores old books.  It is through this that she finds an old notebook in a family bible.  The diary tells the story of Jacob a Russian Jewish immigrant working at Bletchley during the war and the woman he falls in love with, Kitty, who is from an aristocratic British family.

Weaved in between this story of the past is the relationship which develops between Saskia and Matthew – a young man who has inherited a mausoleum of a house from a man for whom his mother used to keep house.

Sometimes within dual timelines like this you find yourself becoming more involved with one or the other story, but both stories here were fascinating and worked really well together.

There are tragedies in both but each party learns from them.  A truly satisfying read.

Life On The Cobbles

One of my guilty passions is – Coronation Street.  I was brought up on Corrie, and the opening soundtrack to each episode evokes such a sense of pleasure, I fear that I have turned into one of Pavlov’s dogs. 

OK, as it’s a soap, I have to admit that it can be a bit far-fetched – I mean, just how unlucky can some characters be?  But it also brings some massive issues into the forefront of people’s minds – ie how men can be the victims of domestic abuse (Tyrone), euthanasia (Hayley), depression (Steve), alcoholism (probably several characters here – I mean, how can you drink in the pub at lunchtime and then go back to the factory and sew knickers or mend cars in Kevin’s garage?) and one of the current storylines of an adult being abused by her teenage step-son. As the mother on one teenage son and one soon to be teenage son, this is particularly scary.

But sometimes the smaller stories can also resonate.  The developing relationship between Roy and Cathy is one that springs to mind.  Both of them have recently lost their spouses and both are trying to move on with their lives but are struggling in different ways.  They have feelings for each other but both feel guilty about still being alive when their partners can’t be with them anymore.

Cathy is a hoarder, her house has become her own death-trap and Roy has been trying to persuade her to clear the clutter.  Cathy has admitted that the amount of possessions she has are diminishing her, but they also provide her with a comfort blanket.

In response to her admission, Roy replied with something that I found particularly profound.  He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that he liked to anchor his life in predictability but that the one predictable thing in life is that it has to change.  As I heard him say these words I felt something really connect.  My husband tells me that “it’s not real you know”, but hey, I write fiction and good fiction is about making a connection. 

Perhaps it’s because my own life is about to go through a period of change that this touched a nerve, who knows?  But one thing it did for me was to encourage me to embrace that change.

My children are growing up and need me less (unless they want a lift or money) and although a period in my life has passed, I’m looking for the positives.

Perhaps that has been behind my current need to declutter.  Now, I’m nowhere near the hoarder that Cathy is, but I’m ashamed to say that I have found a stack of magazines which are older than my marriage and therefore older than my teenage son, need I say more?  However, I haven’t been able to throw them out without reading them once more, after all, something in them might be a trigger for a new story.

So, I’m slowly working my way through them and yes, I have to admit, there are things in there that have triggered some writing ideas. And now that I have harvested them, I simply must recycle!!!

Cringe!

You may have noticed that I've been having a play around with the look of my blog recently as I thought it needed a bit of sprucing up.  Still not sure if I'm happy with it but I think it's better than it was.

I also decided to add a photo of myself, cringe, but the photo has come out rather large and - pun alert - a bit in your face.

Does anyone know how I can make this smaller? I hate photos of myself at the best of times and this one is far too much.

Read, Read, Read

Advice given to aspiring writers is to read, read, read and for most writers that is not as problem as a love of writing tends to follow on from an initial love of reading.

I've been reading quite a bit over the summer, and although its too late for recommending summer reading, the nights are drawing in and so what better excuse that to sit by a fire with a good book.

So here are a couple of books I have read recently starting with some thriller / suspense novels.

This is a book which I first heard about on the Richard and Judy book club and was intrigued enough to download it onto my Kindle. 

The story centers on Yvonne; a geneticist in her early 50’s who is asked to give evidence at a parliamentary Select Committee in the House of Commons.  There she meets a man who is about to have a dramatic impact upon her life.  The novel starts with a prologue where Yvonne is standing in the dock at the Old Bailey as an accessory to murder and the novel charts the path from being at the height of her career to this.

This novel is explicit in some scenes of sexual content but it is all written within the context of the story and is not gratuitous.  At times I found it difficult to correlate how such an intelligent scientist could behave in such an erratic way, with a man whose character I found quite unlikeable.  Perhaps she’s having a mid-life crisis l but I think in Yvonne’s case she was driven to behave so completely irresponsibly because in her life she has always had to be the sensible one.  However, taking something entirely for herself led to dramatic consequences and it made me grateful for the relative safety of my own life. 

This was certainly an intriguing read even if I wasn’t always entirely comfortable with it and couldn’t really understand why Yvonne was behaving as she did.

I’ve read Cally Taylor’s two previous novels and thoroughly enjoyed them, but this one steps away from the romance in her earlier works and tackles the gritty subjects of both domestic abuse and how much parents really know of their teenagers lives.

At the beginning of the novel 15 year old Charlotte is in a coma.  It looks as though she has deliberately stepped under a bus.  Susan, her mother, can’t believe she would do this and begins a quest to find out what really happened to her daughter.  She finds her daughter’s diary but this actually throws up more questions than it answers.  Susan begins to question her daughter’s friends and becomes obsessed with trying to find out the truth – so much so that those around her begin to question her sanity.

But Susan has every reason to be worried with the answer to her daughter’s behaviour finally being revealed in a dramatic climax.

I must admit I did find elements of this story unbelievable but like Susan I was gripped to find out what had happened.  A page turning read.

I read Close My Eyes and reviewed it in September 2013 and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to reading this one.

When Julia finds her friend Liv dead in her flat she cannot believe she has taken her own life even though the police seem to be perfectly satisfied that this is what happened.

Julia sets out to uncover the truth and in doing so discovers that she didn’t know her friend as well as she thought.  She begins to wonder who she can trust.  Her husband had an affair several years ago and although on the surface she has forgiven him, this betrayal has never been far from her mind and now it looks as though he has started up the affair gain.

Unable to confide in him Julia searches for the murderer of her friend alone and in doing so jeopardises both her own safety and that of her family.

I did enjoy this book and was keen to find out what had happened but some elements of the plot just didn’t ring true for me and that did affect my enjoyment of it.  There were some good twists and turns though and it kept me guessing.

I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as Close My Eyes but it did keep me reading.

Well that's it for now, I will review some more of the books I have read recently throughout September.