Mid-week writing prompt – a willingness to believe

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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

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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

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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…

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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

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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

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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

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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 →

Book review – All The Birds, Singing, By Evie Wyld

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All The Birds, Singing coverOpening with the discovery of a dead sheep, Evie Wyld’s second novel is a sensuous, brutal, disquieting book that will seep under your skin and haunt your dreams. Protagonist Jake Whyte is a strong, mostly self-sufficient sheep farmer making a life for herself on an unnamed British island where the weather is harsh, and the local people nonplussed by this new, unsociable Australian in their midst.

But now something is killing her sheep, and memories of the past are tugging at her.

In alternate chapters, the stories moves us forward and back, like an insistent tide. The flashbacks move through her past towards childhood, written in a present-tense form that gives them an immediate sense of urgency as we search through her experiences for the ingredients that have made her the frightened, solitary creature she is today, and, most specifically, what caused those terrible scars on her back. Continue reading →

Poetry book review – Notes from a Bright Field by Rose Cook

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Notes From A Bright Field book coverI encountered this poet at the night of readings I took part in for Telltales at Penzance Literary Festival. In a sea of stories and performance poetry, Rose Cook’s poetry rang out as something deeper and more substantial than most – nourishing in a way that few assortments of words achieve.

Because as writers, that’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? To string words together in ways that are original and fresh, yet cut through to a truth all can recognise and potentially be enriched by?

Rose has a defter hand than most, or should that be a keener eye? She sees the world with uncommon clarity, noticing the things, small and large, we might easily overlook, and helps the reader view it afresh. The collection reads as being distinctly personal yet generously shared, as Rose talks us through strolls through woodlands, pointing out the birds she seems to love, then sweeps us indoors to peek into her mother’s hand mirror, to spy contains reflections of “my eyes, quick green,/ wild sticklebacks in a rain pond.” Continue reading →

Escape to Penzance for the lit fest

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Penzance shore cr Judy DarleyPenzance Literary Festival begins tomorrow, running from Wed 17th till Sunday 21st July.

On Thursday 18 July I’ll be enjoying the glorious train line that runs from Bristol to Penzance, hugging the Devon and Cornish coasts wherever possible. Then, that evening, I’ll be reading one of my stories as part of the Telltales night at Admiral Benbow from 8.30 – buy tickets here.

The festival organisers invite you to “Come and meet a galaxy of prize-winning and up-and-coming authors, poets and playwrights, from West Cornwall and ‘up-country’ too.” And most of the events only cost a couple of quid.

Literary happenings that have caught my eye include a talk from artist, author, photographer, film-maker, maker of books, and ‘out-of-the-box thinker’ Andrew Lanyon, sharing details of “his latest explorations into the worlds of creativity, imagination and logic.”

On Sunday there’s be a chance to hear local poets Angela Stoner & Susan Taylor, in a performance called ‘Overlapping Steps: Poems that speak to each other‘.

The festival programme says they will “explore the connections they have uncovered in their separate voices by reading poems from their works that interact with one another.  There will be visual (and possibly musical) accompaniment.

There are also drop-in sessions for writers at the delightfully named Lost and Found café, guided walks around the Lamorna Valley, and much more. I’m really excited to be a part of it!