Winter sun and sustenance

Last week here in southern England we had a couple of icy days followed by a sunny day. The snow was still around but the fox discovered s/he could catch a few warming rays from the top of my garden tool-box. S/he lay there snoozing for an hour, woke, stretched, yawned -diplaying fearsome teeth- then curled around the other way and slept for another hour until midday.



















Then on the way through the park yesterday I noticed what looked like a red squirrel ( or maybe just a grey squirrel with red hair? ) sitting in the crook of a branch. It would jump down, forage for a buried nut and hop back up to its perch to nibble it. Glad I had my camera to capture it.

The Fantastic Mr...

Having a nap under a bush in the back garden.

Two good 'how-to' books on crime writing

Two 'how-to' books:
For an overview and intro to crime fiction, and all its sub-genres, Lesley Grant-Adamson's book in the Teach Yourself series "Writing Crime Fiction" is good. It has a pic on the front cover of some bald guy peering around a shower curtain. Despite this it's still a good helpful overview book, which includes a reading list for each chapter and website links at the end. It also has one 12-page chapter on writing short stories.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teach-Yourself-Writing-Fiction-McGraw-Hill/dp/0071421300/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254937355&sr=1-5

But for the best ( in my view anyway) crime / mystery how-to book get "Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery" by Robert J Ray & Jack Remick. It is THE complete step-by-step approach which starts with creating a victim, then a killer, and thinking about how those two are connected, then it brings in creating the sleuth, the catalyst character etc, and just keeps on getting better and better. It really is a blueprint for the entire process from backstory through to third draft.
Every step in the process is illustrated with examples from other novels and also by using a "write-along" mystery story. Some people may find this helpful, for me it was too much. I wanted to see the process steps, and maybe one example, so I actually cut a fair few pages of examples out of my copy as I got fed up wading through them to find the next piece of process. Never-the-less, this book is one of the very best and the wealth of writing guidance in it can be applied equally well to other genres.
For crime, it is especially helpful and includes some useful charts, timeline suggestions and all you need to write a crime novel. I know I'm going on a bit here, but credit where it's due, this book is exceptional.
I have since also read James N Frey's "How to Write a Damn Good Mystery" which was also very good and covered some of the same ground and I'd score it maybe eight out of ten, whereas for it's thorough step-by-step method the "Weekend Novelist" scores ten out of ten, examples or not.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Weekend-Novelist-Writes-Mystery-step/dp/0440506581/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254937124&sr=1-1

Review of 'The Pools' a novel by Bethan Roberts

I enjoyed reading this. It's a very good 'people-story' which explores families and their deep undercurrents. It reminded me of some of Elizabeth Berg's books. There is no high action plot, but she takes you inside the characters in a satisfying way.

Families are pressure-cookers and these characters seemed to be based on real people from real families: the beautiful Kathryn damaged by the loss of her first love, Howard the serious-and-sensible with his passion for orderly gardens, and their son Robert growing from child to the popular teenager 'Rob'.

It threw me some when, after a hundred pages, we jumped VP character and jumped families but I was willing to follow Joanna's narrative, and the introduction of the menacing Shane character pulled me along.

The story touches on a number of aspects to be found in real-life families:
~ a young woman's choice of a 'safe' or 'dangerous' partner
~ a mother who cannot accept her son's wife as good enough for him
~ adjusting to year after year of daily life with a partner who is programmed in a different way from yourself
~ a family breakup and the arrival of a new 'partner' in the house
~ teenagers becoming sexually aware
~ social 'norms', and the pressures if your child happens to be different
~ how an 'abnormal' or 'damaged' teenager is treated by strangers / school pupils / those close to him
~ communication failures
~ tragedy happens to anyone

The story was skillfully told using different viewpoints. Howard's VP is in past tense but Joanna's is in present tense.
I also liked the structure of opening with the aftermath of a tragedy then dropping back to the beginning of the journey that led to it. This gives it a feeling of suspense.

The background presence of those power-station cooling-towers added to the feeling of unease and also served as a reminder that regardless of family dramas, the humdrum of daily life goes on in the background.

Interesting to read that the author wrote it 'one sentence at a time' with no planned plot.

Despite the mixed reviews of Bethan Roberts' second book, 'The Good Plain Cook', I enjoyed the sample first chapter and will be reading it as well.

Daily devotion

At work today a retirement collection came round for a man who has worked for 40 years as an audio-typist. He and his guide-dog Pasha have been a familiar part of life here.

More so than other retirement collections this one makes me sad. It seems to be ‘the end or an era’ in more ways than one. In today's world ‘the typist’ has become almost extinct. Sadly the caring nature of the world has also changed.

It's true that many people will still go out of their way to accommodate a blind person but today these vulnerable people are also more likely to be ridiculed or robbed. But that’s not the thing that makes me feel sad, it’s the total devotion of his dog Pasha, to her master. A guide-dog gives everything.

I recently walked to the far end of the building. Around the corner came Pasha lolloping towards me, tail wagging, happy to be able to roam and ‘play’ while her master was safely settled working, and that’s what makes me sad.

When he has retired we will no longer see that living example -the total devotion of dog to man.

Community reading

I came across a newly re-printed copy of Helene Hanff's "84 Charing Cross Road" which I enjoyed re-reading.

Googling her I found an obituary in the Independent of 14 April 97 by James Roose-Evans. In it he mentions that Helene told him about a community of Benedictine Nuns in Worcester, England, who placed their single borrowed copy of '84 Charing Cross Road' under a glass case and gave an American nun the honour of turning over one page every day, so that the whole community could read it at the same time.

This made me smile!

I wonder if that community of nuns is still there today, reading their way through the Harry Potter books one page per day?

Imagination feeds imagination...

On a writing-board you can respond to posts other people write, and imagination feeds imagination.

But there must be some advantages to a blog. I just haven't realised them yet.