THE COMPANY OF FRIENDS by Penny Dolan

I like being alone, but there’s always some kind of company at my house. There’s always somebody around who can match my mood, or come up with an interesting fact or idea, or offer a different way of thinking about things. There are friends whose voices I enjoy, even though they just to ramble on about whatever they want. Most of the time, they hang about together, peaceful enough, but they can be also be surprisingly chatty and conversational. 

                    

Often, when I see them waiting, simply stepping away and ignoring them is not as easy as it should be. I ought to be paying attention elsewhere but how, in that moment, can I stop listening? How can I ignore that voice? I rarely think, let alone say, ‘I’m done with you,’ although I might think ‘Sorry. Not right now,” and scuttle on.

Friends, I have heard what your voices told me and I remember, or did once; the memory fades. Some of them stay huddled together, muttering and whispering, as if there is more they could tell me. A few speak freshly and brightly, like new neighbours who have moved into an established street, eager to share their experiences and views. There are, I admit, a few with old or complicated voices, those who ask for a little too much time and patience whenever we have a moment together.

To be honest, I like seeing them waiting around, all gathered together, here and there, as I pass by. They do make it easy to know who is with who, which ones are likely to be kindred spirits, which ones share the same vibe. I watch out for the colours each one is wearing: their style and design. What hints do they give off? What mood? What feeling? Does this one carry a whiff of worthiness, or is that one, loudly and clearly, occupying more room than really necessary? I know there are other ways of enjoying such friendships: ways maybe more admirable than this, and I have tried. However, at heart, I am not someone happy with that kind of virtual relationships.

So, there it is. Company! Friends, eh? Hey ho! So many days, weeks - and even years - spent with some. Those happy, contented moments of joy. Or those times of waiting, when their initial greeting was minimal or worse: plainly discouraging. So easy to be lured on by the need to know, to listen to what this or that friend says, to be in awe of their personalities, and then slowly steadily feel the need to seek out more friendly guests.

However, for now, sssh! Enough! Enough! A hard thing has been decided.

This space is too crowded for all of them, and I’m fairly that sure that some haven’t spoken my name for ages. The time has come for many of the present company to leave the room, to shift somewhat closer to the door and, yes, to exit and depart. An area waits, ready in the hall: an ideal spot for a last gathering, a final chance to pause, eye to eye with old friends, and say goodbye. 

I am not joyful about seeing so many friends leave, but there are places they can go, and bags and boxes to aid their journey. All is ready. The time has come. This - ta da! - is a moment for action. And so I shift a couple gently towards the exit, following up with a group I had honestly forgotten about.  

So sorry, goodbye, farewell, adieu, my friends. We’ve had some good times together, and you were very useful way back when, I know, I know. 

Time for the big sigh and the shake of the head. Tears? No, I don’t think so.

Yet now is when I make my mistake. I pause, lose focus. I should be escorting an old friend briskly to where they need to wait but instead, I take that one book, one particular title, down from the shelf. And worse. I open the book's cover, and then cannot help but turn a couple of pages. I start to read, and read on, and read on - and the  whole chance passes. 

A little later, I slip the book fondly back on to the shelf again. That friend isn’t going anywhere, and in addition, by all things Mari-Kondo, I glance at the clock and see that my book de-cluttering moment is now over, done and gone. Things happen.

Saying farewell to good company is never easy.                      

                 

Penny Dolan

Awfully Big Adventures in Self-Publishing by Sheena Wilkinson

 It feels very odd to be posting on the 29th day of the month. Ever since I first blogged for ABBA – March 2014 if anyone’s interested, it’s been the 13th. Easy to remember (and as far as I know I’ve only forgotten twice in eleven years). Sometimes I got to blog on Friday 13th, and once a year it fell on St Lucy’s Day, which was always an invitation to write about light at a dark time of year. 

But here I am on the 29th! Out of my comfort zone. Because of the reshuffle of ABBA dates, I haven’t blogged for ages, there having been no 29th February this year. (Oooh, this means that three out of four years I’ll get a month off, and every fourth year I’ll get to blog about Leap Day. Yay!) And it doesn’t matter when I blog: the fact is, Awfully Big Blog Adventure gives me a real sense of community in an often fractured world. There are writers I’ve never met, who feel like friends because we read each other’s posts, writers whose books I will seek out because they are Scattered Authors. 

I am very much a creature of routine and habit, and though I love change and adventure to some extent, I do fear the unknown. I am especially pusillanimous about techy things: that’s probably why it took me until 2023 to get a website.

Another thing I’ve been scared of is self-publishing. No matter how many talks I have been to from really successful and savvy indie authors; no matter how many times other writers have waxed lyrical about having complete control over every aspect of the process; no matter how many self-published books I see with much better sales than I have had for ten traditionally published books, it’s always felt scary, and I’ve always thought I wouldn’t do it. Even when one of my good writing friends, Rachel Ward, self- published the excellent, beautifully produced Write Your Cozy Mystery: a practical, how-to guide, I still couldn’t imagine myself managing to actually make a book happen – writing, after all, is the easy bit!

one traditionally published, one self-published

But later this year I am going to self-publish a novel – a much scarier leap for me than changing my blogging day. And it’s mainly thanks to ABBA – or at least to the Scattered Authors. 

Here’s how.

As we all know, Scattered Authors get about a bit. One place where many of have scattered to over the years has been Charney, the annual, much-missed retreat in Oxfordshire. It was at Charney where I met Linda Newbery, Celia Rees and Adele Geras, who run the excellent, eclectic review blog Writers Review, which I’ve occasionally reviewed for, and was interviewed by in 2023: http://reviewsbywriters.blogspot.com/2023/04/special-feature-q-with-guest-sheena.html

A month or so ago I read in The Bookseller that Writers Review was branching out into publishing, bringing out three books this April: The One True Thing, a new adult novel from award-winning Linda Newbery, and reissues of two highly-acclaimed novels – The Poet’s Wife by Judith Allnatt, and David: The Unauthorised Autobiography by Mary Hoffmann. https://www.thebookseller.com/author-interviews/author-interviews/testing-the-waters-linda-newbery-makes-her-first-foray-into-self-publishing

All three authors are widely published, hugely experienced and highly respected. Reading about their decision to self-publish these novels as a Writers Review initiative made me think about a book of mine, finished this time last year but languishing on my hard drive ever since. If they could do it, maybe I could too? 

My first adult novel, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, a 1930s feminist feelgood story, was published in 2023 by HarperCollins Ireland and in UK paperback in 2024 – a year and a day ago, in fact. Readers loved it; reviewers called it ‘a gem’ (Irish Independent) and ‘briskly witty, reminiscent of the best inter-war fiction’ (Irish Times) and the majority of the two hundred Amazon reviews (mostly five star) hoped for a sequel. In fact, the acquiring editor, at our one and only meeting, waxed very enthusiastically about a sequel or even a series. 

But it was a one-book deal and that passionate editor moved on, as is the way in publishing, and though Mrs Hart had clearly struck a chord with readers, there simply weren't enough of them to justify HarperCollins offering for the sequel. So they didn’t. 

And yes, it might have been more sensible to wait for a contract before I wrote it, but the fact is, like readers, I wanted to know what happened next! And as I wrote Miss McVey Takes Charge, set in 1936, I was feeling optimistic and determined. This book would see the light of day. To anyone who enquired, I said blithely that if HarperCollins didn’t take it I would jolly well publish it myself. (I said it very fast, because to be honest I was terrified of the prospect.)

There seemed no point in sending the book elsewhere: publishers are unlikely to want the sequel to a book published by another company. I did look at reworking it to make it less like a sequel, but that was like trying to turn my dog into a cat. 

I hoped that, if I did nothing for a year, something amazing might happen to make HarperCollins change their minds – Mrs Hart might be optioned for TV or go viral for some reason. This didn’t happen, but when I read about the Writers’ Review initiative, it spurred me on to start thinking seriously about taking that kind of action myself. 

And then something lovely happened! Having engaged in a little chat on social media about the trend for respected, successful writers to self-publish, I admitted that I too was considering self-publishing and explained about Miss McVey takes Charge. The next day I had a message from Linda Newbery, inviting me to bring the book to Writers Review! I will still be self-publishing, but with the support and cooperation of writers I really like and trust. And I know that the Writers Review endorsement will give the book a stamp of approval and respectability, and that they will support my book, as I will support theirs. 

three splendid, and beautifully-produced novels from Writers' Review 

Miss McVey Takes Charge will publish late in 2025. I need to leave some breathing space around my forthcoming school story sequel, which publishes in September, and it gives me time to build up (I hope!) some interest in the book. I’ve invested in engaging a really first-class editor and cover illustrator, both of whom have worked on my traditionally published books. I don’t expect to sell thousands of copies or to make any money; it’s not about that. It’s about giving the readers who bought, loved and reviewed the first book the sequel they – and I – want. It’s about taking control in a world where writers’ words are blatantly stolen to train robots, as Claire Fayers blogged about on here only yesterday. https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/

And – because without the invitation from Writers’ Review I might still be dithering about this – it’s about community and solidarity, and writers helping each other out. Because that’s what matters. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Bother? by Claire Fayers

 I'm sure by now that everyone's heard the news that Meta has stolen millions of books and research papers and used them to train their AI programmes. They did it in full knowledge that this was theft. Staff at Meta discussed obtaining material legally and decided to steal it because it would be quicker and cheaper.

Just about every author I know has been affected. It makes me wonder why we still bother to write when our work is consistently undervalued, taken and used without our consent.

And then I thought back over last week, which was my last set of 'World Book Month' school events. Three days of encouraging children to use my Welsh folktales books as springboards for their own stories.

And I remembered that a few weeks ago, a teacher, Julian Rees, contacted me. He'd come across my Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins, and being a musician and composer as well as a teacher, he'd written a march to go with my stories of the giant Idris's travels around Wales. Here it is, if you're curious.

And, because once I started thinking about this, I found so many examples, I remembered my artist friend, Bonnie Hawkins, painstakingly creating characters inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, and how I ran a workshop in the art gallery, creating a new 'play for voices' inspired by her artwork.

There is a Welsh word, 'cynefin', which means community, connection, belonging. A coming together of the multiple strands of our environment, our experiences, the people we live alongside. To me, this is how creativity is supposed to work. A story sparking off a piece of music, a play giving rise to a gallery of art, which gives rise to new writing. Creativity connects people together in a way that AI can never do.

This is why I'll continue to write. 

And here, in case you need them, are links to the Society of Authors and the Writers' Guild, with advice on what to do if Meta has stolen your work.

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/03/21/the-libgen-data-set-what-authors-can-do/

https://writersguild.org.uk/libgen-database-advice-for-authors/

Thoughts about a classic

I’ve always thought a good writer ought to be able to write about almost anything. It’s a question of insight and observation. Research, too; although not so much the story drowns in too much detail.
And then I read this book and I think it could only have been written by a woman. 

(This is a comment in no way intended as any kind of a put-down. Not for so much as a millisecond. I really enjoyed the book, and my only regret is that it’s taken me so many decades to getting around to reading it.)

It’s just that the level of detail in the thoughts of the 17-year-old narrator – her reactions to the men who appear in her life; the meaning of a kiss; what clothes to wear and how to look; what to say and to whom… I’m not sure any man could have described all this with such surgical precision and insight. 

One other aspect that interests me: It’s currently being released as part of a Vintage Classics series that also contains The Wind in the Willows; The Secret Garden; Emil and the Detectives; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Silver Sword. 

I’d classify all of the above as children’s classics. No question. But does I Capture the Castle belong with them? Is it really a children’s book, a book for young readers? I’d have said you’d have to be at least the age of the narrator to get anything out of it, and that anyone younger would just be bored by all the talk of looks and glances, stolen kisses and the right dresses and who should really be marrying who.

No argument about it being a classic, though.

None at all.

Reading the magic: The Children of Green Knowe - Sue Purkiss

 Have recently been doing a lot of sorting out/chucking out of all kinds of things. (There's something very liberating about it, isn't there? It certainly brings out the ruthless streak in me.)

Part of this was making room on bookshelves. (We buy far too many books, and have historically been far too averse to recycling ones that, in our heart of hearts, we know we'll never read again.) As I was sorting through a shelf full of children's books, I came across this one by Lucy M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe.

Now I know that many of the people reading this are very knowledgeable about children's books, and will be very familiar with this book. But I wasn't. I first heard of it some years ago on one of the Charney retreats that the Scattered Authors used to run, and I guess that's when I bought the book. If I read it then, I had forgotten it - which would be a very strange thing, because I've just sat down and read it and found it literally enchanting.

I'm quite puzzled by my feelings about fantasy in children's books. Some of my favourite books ever are fantasy: Lord of the Rings, Alan Garner's early works, C S Lewis, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter. But I haven't felt the same about recent fantasies I've read, and I'm really not sure why. I've enjoyed them, but I haven't been totally drawn into and mesmerised by that world, in the same way as I was by those I've mentioned. (Harry Potter not quite so much, perhaps.)

But this book - yes. Lucy Boston's Green Knowe is based on the house she lived in herself - not as a child, interestingly: she didn't come across this ancient, magical building till she was middle-aged. The premise of this first book in the series is that Tolly, a seven year old boy in the thirties, has been virtually abandoned by his father: his mother has died, and his father has remarried to an evidently unsympatheic stepmother and gone to live abroad, leaving Tolly at a boarding school, till he is rescued by his great grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, who invites him to stay with her in the holidays. Tolly instantly bonds with her - and quickly senses that the old house is full of magic - and also of the ghosts of children from the past, who become his playmates.

The actual story is pretty much that - there is no quest, no journey, no powerful narrative arc - though there are lots of extraordinary encounters. And yet it is completely gripping. The house and its inhabitants became as real to us as they do to Tolly: it is, literally, enchanting. This is partly to do with the detailed and luscious descriptions of the house - it's clear that Lucy Boston is describing a very real place that she loves, not somewhere that she's made up. Here she describes part of the stables: Here and there a ray of white light came slanting through a broken roof tile, against which you could see the golden motes of dust in the air. It looked mysterious and enticing. And in such a place, would you not expect magical things to happen?

I was so enchanted that I sent off for three more of the books in the series, and also a memoir by Lucy Boston of her early life. What I am very interested to see is whether the books will appeal to my eight year-old grandson, who is a keen and very good reader. Their world is a very long way from his - but it's also a very long way from mine. We'll see.

A few Draft Zero nuts & bolts if you fancy picking them over - Rowena House

On a self-imposed deadline to finish the first draft of my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress this month, and with less than four thousand words to go, I might actually make it. Fingers crossed. Then, a few months stepping back to let it stew. Phew.

Meanwhile, a rushed post here because - argh! - this week the plotted end turned out to be rubbish. Cue confidence collapse. Which might have been a form of procrastination. An unwillingness to reach The End after years of working part-time on this one story.

Anyway...

The trick that helped to stop panic from setting in as the denouement crumbled before my eyes was the notion of Draft Zero. Emma Darwin did a great review of the various forms of these beasties on her endlessly useful Substack this week. Here’s the generic link as I can’t track down the specific one, but please do have a look around for it. Emma's advice is alway brilliant, imho.

https://emmadarwin.substack.com/

Over the past year, I’ve found Draft Zero most useful as a way to convince myself that this is just a first version, something to edit. There are no darlings that can’t be killed off, even denouements that are the result of years of planning!

I’m writing towards An End, not The End.

I’ve also recently refined my Draft Zero scene planning system, having belatedly realised that what shows up on the page is a sort of half-way house between the outcome I anticipated would work and how the creative act changed it AKA typing as storytelling AKA the antithesis to long-form outlining.

The first time around, a scene is what happens between intention and execution. A Draft Zero.

Being a structure fanatic, I have developed a matrix for plotting suchscenes without wasting too much time. So, in case it might help anyone else trying to plot less, here is a worked example.

First, I locate the scene within the Act, with the current one highlighted.

For my current Act 3, these scene headings are: Q-Factor (from James Scott Bell) – revised gaol/plan – plan goes wrong AKA High Tower Twist (Save the Cat for Novelists) – Dig Deep AKA psychological self-revelation (Truby) - New Moral Action - Final Battle – Resolution – Final Image.

For the actual scene plan, I borrow from Story Grid, the online resource, rather than the book. Scene driver A [not necessarily the protagonist] wants to achieve X WITHOUT causing or revealing Y. This came from an open email, so I don’t feel it’s stealing their idea to share it here.

Next, from John Truby's Anatomy of Story: a) how does A plan to achieve their desire, b) what is their underlying desire, including how it's changed from previous scenes, and c) what is their motivation. Truby is very good on the differences between plans, desires, and motivation. I find the distinctions help a lot.

Here’s how I laid out the plan for my current New Moral Action scene.

Story Grid Tom wants Beth to help him set William free WITHOUT alerting the prosecuting magistrate.

1) Plan: to persuade Beth they are both going to hell if they let William die in the castle.

2) Desire: to save himself from psychological death by escaping from Beth’s control.

3) Motive: he cannot accept his return to the conformist half-life of a wilfully blind servant.

From Mckee, I set a diametrically opposed force of antagonism. That is usually a character with the opposite desire to the scene driver’s, though it can be an external event or inner state. In this example, Beth wants to persuade Tom that William cannot be freed without risking a hundred lives.

Finally, the polarity switch of a story value = free/imprisoned, frightened/brave etc. For Tom in this scene the switch is oppressed/assertive.

Finally, the outline contains a read-on prompt, usually either a cliff-hanger or a significant outcome that drives the story in a new direction. I haven't worked that out yet, so please fill in the blank!

Leaving all that to bubble away for a day or three usually improves the plan, but that doesn’t mean it will translate onto the page. Often, the action or character development turn out to be less plausible than anticipated. Sometimes, a Eureka! moment arrives to improve on the plan. Other times, the whole thing turns out to be rubbish and I have to start over again. But at least the plan is there as a basis to analyse what worked, what’s missing or ill-conceived, and where missing or new bits might fit, either in an earlier or later scene.

As the threads of the story come together towards An End, this system is proving useful. I’m hoping it will also help structure the development edit during which, no doubt, tens of thousands of lovingly crafted words will get thrown out and half the scenes spiked.

On the upside, that might mean I’ll never finish this story and won’t have to think up another one. Yay. Have a lovely creative time, folks.

IMAGINE A PICTURE HERE. BLOGGER AND/OR GOOGLE WON'T LET MY COMPUTER TALK TO ITSELF TODAY;


A daily diary of the WIP is on Rowena House Author on Facebook, a professional page which has a thousand plus followers and around twenty people who see the posts. No, me neither.

Two live bullets and no gun - by Lu Hersey

 Since my father died, I've done nothing but deal with a ton of admin (I call it dadmin), arrange his funeral and start work clearing 97 years' worth of hoarded stuff from his house before it sells. At night I dream I'm trapped in dust filled rooms, where ghost figures flicker in dark corners, moth eaten carpets crumble under my feet, and huge spiders fall on me from web-strewn ceilings, jerking me awake at 3am. 

On the plus side, I've found some interesting things along the way. As a hoarder, my father kept practically everything. It's too late to ask him why he had an alligator skin in the wardrobe, or what the two live bullets (no gun...as yet) were doing in the kitchen cupboard. In fact his house is filled with endless threads to unfinished stories. 

Take the boxes of letters. Not just his - his mother's, his father's, my mother's and even some of his last wife's. Many are self-explanatory and easily discarded, but some leave me dying to know more. Like the one from his sister to my grandfather complaining bitterly about my mother and 'that unspeakable incident in Gibraltar'... My mother? I didn't think she was the unspeakable incident type, so WHAT HAPPENED??

Obviously there are endless photographs. The large filing cabinet in his office, entirely filled with boxes of slides, proved way too much for me. I kept some taken pre 1981 (haven't had time to look at any of them yet, and of course have nothing to look at them with) but left the rest for house clearance. Life's too short for that many slides of other people's holidays.

More interesting were some printed photos from before he started taking slides. In among some black and white photos I'd never seen, there was a picture of my parents holding two babies - only one of which was me. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if maybe you were a twin and no one bothered to tell you. 

And now there's no one left to ask.

Of course he kept every single passport he'd ever owned, along with all the address books (including his mother's, my mother's and his last wife's). I flipped through before discarding them, So many people I didn't know, and so many places i'd never visited. Like driving through towns on your way to somewhere else, and briefly wondering about the lives of all those people who live there. 

Diaries? Tons of them, mostly recent, all totally uninteresting, filled with doctor appointments and bin day reminders - but he'd kept them anyway. The one exception is a Letts Schoolboy Diary from 1939, and what makes it interesting is the content Letts considered suitable for a schoolboy at that time. The bottom of each double page spread has a box with a different, reasonably researched snippet of information on such things as mythical beasts, necromancy, demons, different types of fairies, witches, harpies and Norse gods. I found it fascinating, but I don't think he did. All his diary entries are about visits to the dentist or going on car journeys - a schoolboy life so dull, he'd given up writing in it before March was out. Seems even the start of the war didn't make an impression. 

On his computer I found the start of his autobiography, and thought that might be worth reading. Sadly it stopped before he reached the age of seven. Fair enough. Memoir writing is a lot of effort - and anyway, knowing my father, he'd have left out ALL the interesting bits.

Clothes? The dressing gown alone was one he'd had since before his first marriage. Unwashed, moth-eaten and badly stained. Ew. I think he kept all the clothes he ever owned since doing his national service. And of course he kept all his last wife's clothing, still neatly hanging in the wardrobe just as she'd left it when she died 10 years ago. Presents she'd bought, waiting to be wrapped for unknown children, long since grown up and probably past university by now.

I guess house clearance sums up all the messiness of a life. Few of us manage to tie up all the loose ends before death, and my father was no exception. Even at 97, he was planning for a future while carrying the weight of his past with him, just in case any of it came in handy. 

It's left me wondering whether to make my own house a minimalist haven, or leave tantalising half-finished letters, spicy diaries and cryptic clues to a mysterious past lying hidden in wardrobes and kitchen drawers. Fragments of stories for my children to wonder at. 

But on balance, I reckon they'd rather I went for minimalist.

Lu Hersey

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