Getting people writing!

Tomorrow I’m taking part in an event as part of Bristol Festival of Literature aimed at encouraging aspiring writers. 

Southville Writers will be staging an ‘instant flash fiction’ workshop, while writers, including me, will be sharing their experiences and advice on getting started, maintaining motivation and sending your words out into the world.

We’ll also be performing a few stories – I’ll be reading a short tale from my soon-to-see-the-light-of-day collection, Remember Me To The Bees.

I’m really excited to be part of this event with such a great group of talented writers.

It’s all taking place at Hooper House Café from 1.30-4pm. If if you make it along, please come and say hi!

hooper-house-illustration

A fairytale and a ghost story

Mossy tree cr Judy DarleyThis week I received the exciting news that one of my short stories has been chosen to appear on the Enchanted Conversations websites, a fabulous hub of original fairytales and homages to traditional ones.

You can read my story, Sapling, here. The atmospheric image selected by editor & Publisher Kate Wolford is by artist Richard Doyle.

My story begins like this:

I was the only one who saw him. Everyone else, even my mother, it seems, only saw the tree. I lay in the long grass playing with my soldiers who were using the lawn as a jungle. Sunlight fell thick and heavy through the strands of grass, darkness falling briefly as my mother passed. I glanced up to see where she was going – saw her reach the tree, climb the trunk and disappear into the leaves. I gazed, amazed. My mother had never climbed a tree in my life, that I knew of. I stared at the old oak, then heard a rustling, a sharp gasp, and my mother fell. By the time she hit the ground, my father was halfway down the lawn, running full tilt. Yet only I saw the man in the branches, his skin the color and texture of bark, eyes like two bright spaces between the leaves where light leached through.

Read on…

Find out how to write fairytales here.

We’re already into October, and the run up to Halloween. Britain never celebrates this most gruesome of fiestas with as much fervour as I’d like, but this is also the time of year when ghost stories are most successful, so I’m really pleased to have one of mine published by the wonderful Origami Journal.

My tale, Unwanted Guests, was inspired by a rental property I moved into where the cellar was filled with the previous tenant’s possessions – everything from old pots and pans to gymkhana ribbons and old teddy bears – seriously eerie! Why on earth would anyone leave those kinds of things behind? That was the seed – read the result here.

A candid chat with author Candida Lycett Green

Candida Lycett Green portraitThis interview was originally published by the New Writer magazine.

As the daughter of legendary poet Sir John Betjeman and travel writer the Hon. Penelope Valentine Hester Betjeman, Candida Lycett Green had an imposing literary legacy to live up to, but it doesn’t seem to have daunted her one bit. Now in her sixties, she’s the author of over a dozen books, has written and presented a clutch of television documentaries, is a contributing editor to Vogue and a member of the Performing Rights Society. Since 1992 she has been writing a regular column for the Oldie, and her latest book is a compilation of 100 of her columns. She says that  writing seemed to be a logical career path.

“I needed to get a job and earn my living, and as I was quite good at English at school and writing was part of my parents’ trade it seemed obvious,” she says. “I saw it as a craft I could do rather than being inspiration-driven. I think people can be very airy-fairy about writing – I’ve only ever seen it as a method of earning a living. There’s a terrific mystique about writing that to me seems completely unfounded.” Continue reading

Mid-week writing prompt – a willingness to believe

Feather cr Judy DarleyThe other day while out for a run I noticed two women with pushchairs blocking the path ahead. Seeing me, they moved the buggies out of my way (thanks!) so I sped past, then slowed on seeing two toddlers ambling ahead.

Just as they turned towards me, a feather dropped from the sky and landed from the path between us, and the toddlers gazed up at me with astonishment, as though they thought that somehow I had made that happen. A magic trick under the shadowy canopy of the trees.

All fiction writing is a form of magic trick, asking of our readers that they suspend their scepticism just long enough to slip into our carefully crafted reality. The best writing does this so skilfully we don’t realise it’s happening until we emerge from the tale.

Small children, by nature, have a head start on the rest of us. Try taking one of your old stories with a grown up POV and re-write it from the point of view of a very small child. You might be surprised by what emerges!

If this image prompts you to write something, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. You could end up published on the site!

Book review – Unwrecked England by Candida Lycett Green

Unwrecked England coverBooks compiled from magazine or newspaper columns occasionally struggle to offer the cohesion of a coffee table book written with that end in mind, but this isn’t the case with Candida Lycett Green’s Unwrecked England.

Selected from 17 years worth of her columns from The Oldie magazine, Unwrecked England is a vast, deep pool of a book that you’ll want to dip your toes into, wade up to your waist in or dive head-long into.

Candida’s passion for England’s wild places was passed down to her by her mum Penelope and dad, St John Betjeman, and in her preface to the book she writes of happy childhood memories spent exploring the countryside. Far from being a simple travel-guide, the book is a celebration the best of England’s unspoilt areas, from entire villages to a single oak-tree, so that while her entry on Ashdown is largely factual, other pieces are a glorious mishmash of impressions supplemented with quotes from diverse sources ranging from modern-day horse traders and pub landlords to historical diarists, artists and poets. Continue reading

First glimpse – Remember Me To The Bees

So, the proofs are back, changes have been made, a few more minor corrections may be needed, but it exists! My debut short story collection Remember Me To The Bees, nestled in my hands with its heart beating like a live thing.

Remember Me To The Bees first glimpse

And here’s the front cover for you to gaze at, featuring bespoke artwork by the talent Louise Boulter.

Remember Me To The Bees spine

And here’s the spine…

Not long at all now till it will be available to buy. What do you think?

Mid-week writing prompt – Daisy, daisy…

My lovely father-in-law knows I would love a house with a proper garden so he dug up and potted a daisy for me!

Daisy

I already have a patch of lawn growing in a pot of earth on the desk in my writing room. Must confess to feeling quite horticulturally blessed, but I know most gardeners would be quite bemused.

What other reasons (innocent and perhaps not so…) could someone have for potting up something as simple and common as a daisy?

How to use fiction to explore the truth

A Room Swept White pbToday’s guest post comes from bestselling author Sophie Hannah, and explains how authors can use fiction to explore the truth behind controversial subjects, as she did for her novel A Room Swept White.

In the UK there have been several high-profile cases of mothers losing more than one child to cot death and subsequently being accused of murder: Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel to name just three.

Clark lost two sons to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), and Cannings and Patel each lost three babies. The women protested their innocence, but the dominant view at the time in legal and medical circles seemed to be that it was simply too much of a coincidence for more than one infant from the same family to die an unexplained death; many people believed these babies had been murdered.

Choose a subject with the potential to consume you

One expert witness who testified against both Clark and Cannings, paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, said that within a single family, ‘One cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, three is murder’. This came to be known as ‘Meadow’s Law’.

Clark and Cannings were both convicted of the murders of their babies.  Immediately, campaigns were launched to secure their exoneration and release, on the basis that there was no concrete evidence to prove that either woman was a murderer. The only evidence of murder, supporters argued, was disputed medical evidence. Continue reading

Mid-week writing prompt – the balloonist

For this week’s writing prompt I’ve decided to feature a photo I took a few years ago at Bristol’s Balloon Fiesta. The gentleman in the balloon basket is Scottish ballooning pioneer Don Cameron of Cameron Balloons.

Don Cameron in the Bristol Belle cr Judy DarleyThe ragged-looking balloon about to carry him away is the Bristol Belle, the world’s first modern balloon, which don and his buddies at Bristol Gliding Club constructed in the 1960s – it first took to the air in 1867!

There are countless directions you could take this story in – you could draw in the history of this ballooning legend and his first balloon, or you could disregard that and focus instead on what you see – an old man in the basket of a torn and frail-looking balloon about to set off on what may be their last adventure together…

 

Book Review – A Room Swept White by Sophie Hannah

A Room Swept White pbIn her psychological thriller A Room Swept White, Sophie Hannah examines the contentious subject of guilt and innocence surrounding cot death cases.

A serial killer is targeting women accused of murdering babies. The first victim is Helen Yardley, a woman convicted then acquitted of killing two of her own children, who then went on to campaign for the release of other women in the same circumstances. A mysterious card is found on her body, marked with seemingly meaningless numbers laid out in neat orderly row.

The story is told through the viewpoints of the police involved and a woman named Fliss Benson who has been given the job of making a documentary of the acquitted women, and who has received an card identical to the one left with Helen Yardley. Continue reading