Aftermath and I

 

Many of the contributors to Aftermath answered the following questions so I thought I would too. The pandemic is part of the past now and it is a significant piece of history that we have lived through. Aftermath is a creative response to the time as we emerged from the pandemic.    

So here is something about my stories in Aftermath - but without any spoilers! 

I have two stories in the anthology - The Rise of the Zenoton’ and ‘The New Normal’.

The Zenoton come from my science fiction ‘Peace Child’ series. They are not human but very like humans. They have one interesting physical feature: instead of hair they have medusa-like fleshy locks that change colour according to their mood. They have lived through a pandemic that was worse than an earlier one they had that was worse than Covid:

“It’s worse than we expected. We’ve never had anything like this on Zenoto before. It’s deadlier even than the Covid-19 disease on Terrestra in 2020, worse even than the Peace Child disease they had after the poison cloud lifted. It kills and it kills quickly and painfully. The death rate is doubling every two days and newer cases are tripling every day.”

It was the recovery from that pandemic that made them into a moneyless society. Moneyless, not just cashless. They are admired throughout the universe for this.

‘The New Normal’’ shows a rather grumpy old man adapting to lockdown and then finding a new normal as we come out of the pandemic. He is now quite proficient at using Zoom.      

 What inspired you to write this?

Both stories are an attempt to explore the effect of the pandemic and importantly how we may have even improved the way we live as we come out of it. They’re both cases of using fiction to explore real life.   

Why did you think it important to contribute to this collection?

As it was my concept in the first place of course I thought it was important. I see the whole book – and its predecessor Covid 19: an extraordinary time as a time capsule, a record of the time.  

 

     How did I cope with pandemic?

I remember being very scared at first.  We cut a holiday short and then the first time we needed groceries my husband went out at the usual time on a Friday, just after 8.00 a.m. I expected him to take hours and told myself I wouldn’t start worrying until tea time.  He was back just after 9.30. He used to go out earlier and be back later. We never lacked toilet paper, pasta or flour. And he still shops at the same time.  The pandemic helped him to find a sweet spot.  After the school rush (yes, he used to trip up over teenagers buying healthy food) but before it became busy and after the shelves had been restocked.  

Zoom became my friend and has remained so. I love face-to-face meetings now but the online gatherings offer a wider scope.   

I was labelled vulnerable so isolated effectively. In the end I quite enjoyed being at home.   However, now that everything is back to normal’ I appreciate ‘normal’ even more.

     Can you tell us about your other publications?

I II guess most of you reading this know me quite well but here’s the list: science fiction novels for young adults, historical feisty women for women, short stories and flash fiction for everyone and a lot material liklike this. See my Amazon author page .

FiFind your copy of Aftermath here  

News 3 June

 

There’s a lot going on at the moment. It’s alarming that we’re going to be building more weapons and that we’re putting money into the military. Some Heads of State are behaving very badly. We’re all concerned about climate change and the cost of living seems impossible for many. The number of homeless and of those seeking asylum is worrying. We seem to be making a U-turn on our acceptance of otherness.
One of the members of my creative writing group told us how she won’t watch the news. She can’t bear it because she feels useless.
True it’s not obvious what we might do. Yet there is space for kindness, the mindfulness of living each moment as it comes and we can use our writing to bring a message of hope or an analysis of what’s happening.   

Writing news

I’m continuing with my work on the seventh Schellberg book. The Great War is putting in an appearance and I’m thinking about taking a trip to Munich for a little research.     

I have several publications this month:

My story ‘White Christmas Dreams’ appears on Booksie

I have a review of the Whitefield Garrick’s Pygmalion on Talking About My Generation

My piece of creative non-fiction ‘Sleuthing’ appears on Lit-Break.This is a reflection of the time I used to travel to London regularly to take part in a SCBWI critique group.   

On My Blog

You can read my short story ‘Film Noir’ that appears in The Best of CafeLit 7.

I have also written two articles about my involvement with CaféLit 12 : and  CafeLit 13

There is an offer on the two hard back books that commemorate Covid 19 and the lockdowns. These are good souvenirs of a bit of history we’ve lived through. 

I have an interview with Rosemary Banfield and Sam Banfield-Keller about their lovely new picture book Are You an Alien?

I tell you about how the first book in my Peace Child series came about and how that fitted with my PhD:

My article about point of view discusses how to avoid head-hopping and the work of Monika Feth,

The Young Person’s Library

I’ve added three picture books this month:  

Splat  by Vanessa Horn and Georgia Przygocki

Coorie Doon by Jackie Kay and Jill Calder

Are You an Alien? By Sam Banfield-Keller and Rosemary Banfield

Recommended read

This month I choose Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute

It is my book group’s choice for our meeting on 16 June. It is a modern classic.  

The writing seems very smooth compared with many modern stories. The main character is so very well formed that we like him and we wish him well right to the very end.
Keith Stewart and his wife are very down-to-earth and though not poor they are certainly not as well off as Stewart’s sister and brother-in-law. His sister and brother-in-law are drowned as they cross the world in a small yacht and he becomes the guardian of his young niece Janice.

There are some very powerful descriptions of the sea voyage and though there are many technical details that go right over my head, I don’t feel as if the author is showing off.  These details are important to the two characters in the boat.

The same is true of the engineering detail that we are given as Keith discusses and thinks about his small scale model projects. Again I don’t understand those details but it’s clear they are important to Keith and to the men to whom he talks.

Keith goes on tricky journey to recover some items from the yacht and to make sure his relations have had a decent burial and this creates much of the tension in the story. We are kept guessing right until the last minute about whether it will all come good for the family.
Keith does get some help through the kindness of strangers, which is richly deserved, and that is a reassuring message.              

Find your copy here 

 

Note, this is an affiliate link and a small portion of what you pay, at no extra cost to you,  may go to Bridge House Publishing.   

Giveaway  

This month I’m giving away a copy of Clara’s Story
Clara will not be daunted. Her life will not end when her beloved husband dies too young.  She will become a second mother to the young children who live away from home in order to visit a rather special school. When life becomes desperate for a particular class of disabled children growing up in Nazi Germany she takes a few risks. Is her ultimate faith in the goodness of human beings a fatal flaw that leads to her tragedy, or is her story actually one of hope?
RRP £10.00
 
Sign up to our newsletter and download your copy. You’ll find an e-book file and a PDF plus a lot of other free materials here.
Please leave a review on Amazon, if you’re allowed to, on Good Reads and anywhere else you can.
 

The Schellberg Project

The posts may be helpful for teachers who are familiar with the Schellberg stories or who are teaching about the Holocaust.  They may also be interesting for other readers of historical fiction. 

 

I have written a review of One Child’s War by Audrey Curtain : This is an account of on young girl’s experience of being evacuated and of the London Blitz.

I offer a caution about over-romanticising World War II and the 1940s: The 1940s Trope

Some notes about my newsletters and blogs

They do overlap a little but here is a summary of what they all do.
 
Bridge House Authors For all those published by Bridge House, CaféLit, Chapeltown or The Red Telephone or interested in being published by us. General news about the imprints. News for writers. Links to book performance. Sign up here.
 
The Bridgetown  Café Bookshop where you can buy my books and books published by Bridge House Publishing, CafeLit, Chapeltown Books and The Red Telephone.  Visit us here.     
 
Gill’s News: News about my writing, The Schellberg Project, School Visits and Events. Book recommendations and giveaways. Find it here.   
 
Pushing Boundaries, Flying Higher News about conferences and workshops to do with the young adult novel. (infrequent postings) Sign up here.  
 
Red Telephone Books News about our books and our authors. Sign up here.
 
A Publisher’s Perspective Here I and some other editors blog as a publisher. Access this here.   
 
The Creative Café Project Listings and reviews of creative cafés. See them here.   
 
CaféLit Stories Find these here
 
Gill James Writer All about writing and about my books. View this here.
 
Gill’s Recommended Reads Find information here about books that have taken me out of my editor’s head and a reminder of the ones I’ve highlighted in this newsletter.    
 
Gill’s Sample Fiction Read some of my fiction here.
 
The House on Schellberg Street All about my Schellberg project. Read it here.
 
Writing Teacher All about teaching creative writing.  Some creative writing exercises. Access this here.  I also invite other writers to provide prompts and work for critique.     
 
Books Books Books Weekly offers on our books and news of new books. Find them here. 
 
The Young Person’s Library The children’s book catalogue. Access it here.
 
Fair Submissions  Find it here.   

Opportunities for writers are added several times a day. Roughly once a month I send it out to a list. If you would like to be on that list, sign up here.  

Happy reading and writing.
 
 

More about me and CafeLit

 

The Best of CaféLit 9 was one of those books where we asked those who had been in the previous volume to vote for this year’s  stories  They were to pick five and give five points to the best, four to the second best etc. We totted up all of the points and found a rank order.  We published the top 40,000 words. The stories were published in rank order in the book.

Okay, so my two stories ‘The Yellow Bus’ and ‘Three’s a Crowd’ were the last two to be included. Never mind. They got there.

‘The Yellow Bus’ is based on a true story. I always say, anyway, that bus journeys provide writers with tons of ideas.

‘Three’s a Crowd’ was based on a writing prompt.

I write short stories as a way of punctuating my involvement with my novel writing.  Every time I finish an edit I write a short story or something similar. I go to Fair Submissions and try to write something for whatever is on the landing page. I enjoy the discipline of writing to a brief.  However, that doesn’t mean that the story hasn’t come from something I met on one of my travels – perhaps on a yellow bus.

How did these two stories end up in CaféLit?

I submit something every day somewhere. I keep a spreadsheet of what has gone where and what is available to submit. CaféLit comes to the top of the list every now and then.

I never give up on a piece, but I do reedit before I send it out again.

Recently, I had a piece of flash creative non-fiction accepted that had been out eleven times before.

By the way, we use a different method each year for selecting which stories go into The Best of  books. 14 and 15 are chosen by different editors. 16 will be by yours truly.  Who knows what we’ll do for 17? 

Find your copy here             

My involvement with 'The Best of CafeLit 12'

 

I often interview other people about their contributions to our anthologies so this time I thought I’d talk about my stories in this collection. 

What inspired me to write my stories ‘’Doing the Right Thing’ and ‘Socrates’ Wink’?

We all try to ‘do the right thing’ but I worry that some ‘cures’ might be worse than the disease. Remember, we started using single use plastic bags to save paper. We’re asked to recycle but to wash out our recyclable items first. What does that cost in water and energy? Electric cars, sure, but what is the carbon cost of producing them? I’ve tried to crystallize these ideas into a piece of creative non-fiction.

As for Socrates – he’s fascinated me for a long time especially since I attended a couple of U3A philosophy groups particularly during lockdown where I think we all grabbed at straws.  Except that this seems to be a rather sturdy branch. In this story Father and son unwittingly use Socratic discourse techniques to find some common ground. Father is a fan of Socrates.       

What made me think of CaféLit? 

It was partly about creating a platform where some of my writing friends and the creative writing students I used to teach could send work. The stories we accept are diverse in subject matters, length (with the parameters of 50 – 3000 words) and style, so we need something to unify them. So, we look for tales that would go well with a brew, particularly at 4 pm. We’ve been going quite a while now – since 2010 in fact. We have over 3000 stories on the site. We ask writers to allow us to display the stories for a year but only take them down if they ask us to.  We’ve only ever been asked to take two down.      

 What’s special about short stories for me?

A short story or piece of flash fiction will stay for you a long time after you’ve read it. Of course the same is true of a novel but it takes you longer to read it in the first place. So, the effect of the short story or the piece of flash fiction is stronger. Here’s an example. The novel I wrote for my PhD was over 103,000 words. When Mary Hoffman put out a call for stories for the Lines in the Sand anthology I told the same story in 1000 words. All have their place: novels, novellas, short stories and flash fiction.   

 

Find your copy of The Best of  CafeLit 12  here   

How to Avoid Head-Hopping

 

 

First person and close third person narratives are in favour at the moment.  This is possibly because these two narrative voices hold us very close to the characters in a story and that is what the modern reader enjoys.

I’m a fan of Charles Dickens. He was a great story-teller. But he was an omniscient author who could look down into all of the characters’ minds. We crave a greater closeness now.

I’m also a great admirer of Monika Feth, the German writer who has created a series of thrillers for young adults. We always know who ‘did it’ and the tension comes from wondering whether the victim will escape the criminal. In a novel I read recently, Der Libellenflüsterer, (the dragonfly whisperer)  we enjoy the point of view of the protagonist, her mother’s, the victim’s,  the perpetrator’s, his wife’s, his little girl’s, and that of a social worker who is murdered.  But Feth doesn’t head-hop. She stays with each character throughout a scene.

How does she achieve this?

She uses the senses

She tells us what the characters see, hear, taste, smell and feel

She doesn’t tag thoughts

Instead of saying ‘Merle wondered whether he would find her’ she just goes straight to the thought. ‘Would he be able to find her? Could she get out without him hearing?’

She gives each character a distinct personality

Each character acts, thinks and speaks in as particular way. We should be able to open the book at any page and know which character we’re reading about.  

Each scene is only seen by one character

Yes, we might see the same scene several times through different characters’ eyes but we only see them one at a time. The daughter has one perception of what her father is doing; her mother has another.

Each scene is consistent with how it character sees the world

Feth can do this because she knows her characters well.  She knows about their intellectual capability, their physical abilities and limitations and their emotional circumstances.

 

Feth is the master of having multiple viewpoints without ever head-hopping.  She writes very long books in series of small scenes.  It really works.

‘The Prophecy’ - something new for me at the time

The Prophecy is science fiction and it is a Young Adult novel. It is the first book in the Peace Child series and it was a first in many ways for me when I wrote it. It was the first time I’d written science fiction, it was the first time I’d written for young adults and it was the first time I’d written a novel over about 29,000 words.

In fact, if formed part of my PhD thesis, Peace Child, Towards a Global Definition of the Young Adult Novel.

I had a writing routine back then (2003-2007) that involved writing for two hours a day and producing 2000 words. I also read avidly and devoured as many young adult novels as I could find: ones in other languages, form other English-speaking countries and anything that was labelled ‘young adult’ by publishers, book-sellers, teachers, librarians and young adults themselves. I sought to define what the young adult novel was and shape my novel accordingly.

It soon became apparent that it wasn’t a matter of writing the story and then working on the definition.  The two processes had to go hand in hand.

I won’t give you my definition here - why would I deprive you of the pleasure of reading the thesis? Find out all about it here: https://research.bangor.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/peace-child-towards-a-global-definition-of-the-young-adult-novel. I can however tell you I identified seven characteristics.

There was an explosion in YA literature between 1996 and 2005. Back then I was familiar with pretty well every YA text. Now there are far too many of them to keep track and the YA novel has moved on.

The story itself is a about a Peace Child, a sort of super-charged diplomat who seeks to bring people on opposite sides together.  Oh, I wish we had a few of those around now. Kaleem’s world is in a distant future, where we have colonised other planets and found other life in the universe, But as ever in science fiction we encounter the same problems that challenge us in our own world.

I spent many months before I started writing the story creating Kaleem’s world.  I thought about food, clothing, schooling, religion, finance and many other matters.  When I started writing more questions came up. I find this happens too in fantasy and historical fiction.   With the latter you have to go and find out - for example for one book I needed to know which cut flowers would be available in the autumn in 1941. In fantasy and science fiction you have to use your imagination – but in fact you are still writing what you know.

Is science fiction and science fantasy for young adults the equivalent of the glove puppet and  anthropomorphised animals for very young children? I suspect it is.

I have now completed six stories in the Peace Child series. I shall be starting the seventh and final one shortly.    

This first novel shows how the Peace Child, Kaleem Malkendy, fulfils a prophecy and saves his planet. In the process he finds out a lot about his own identity. He has to learn to understand otherness. In subsequent books he faces other issues but there is always the need to find a third way between opposing entities. In books five and six he hands over the batten to the next Peace Child and in book seven we shall meet her successor.

The prophecy? It is something to do with the Tower of Babel. Kaleem is a super linguist. Is the prophecy accurate? In a later book some explanation is offered as to how it came about … and yet we are left wondering. Here’s a hint for you:  one characteristic of the young adult novel is that it allows the reader to make up their own mind about what is really happening. I think The Prophecy does.              

 

Kaleem Malkendy is different – and on Terrestra, different is no way to be.
Everything about Kaleem marks him out form the rest: the blond hair and dark skin, the uncomfortable cave where he lives and the fact that he doesn’t know his father. He’s used to unwelcome attention, but even so he’d feel better if some strange old man didn’t keep following him around.
That man introduces himself and begins to explain the Babel Prophecy – and everything in Kaleem’s life changes forever.   

Find you copy here