News 5 September 2021

 

 Current writing

I’m now on the third draft of my fifth Peace Child novel. Former protagonist Kaleem has now become a minor character. A minor character, his now adopted daughter, Petri, has stepped up.  And it now has a title. The Glastonbury Specification. That was yesterday’s epiphany.   

I’ve almost finished the first draft of my latest non-fiction work as well.

I’m delighted to have had another story accepted by Reedsy:  Postcards and Lemon Shortbread

Also Rozia’s U-log, a novella that connects Peace Child 2 (Babel) to Peace Child 3 is available via Chanillo. Find it here.      

The Young Person’s Library

I’ve now added any books this month so far but I am reading a rather good one at the moment which should make it to September’s list.   

 

Current reading recommendation

The Short Stuff by Jim Bates

Okay, so this was published by Chapeltown but I was only involved in the design of the book. Other people decided whether it was worth publishing. Another editor and proof reader worked on the text.

Jim certainly gets a lot of story into a small space. He retains his distinctive story-teller voice for this.  

There is a lot to make you think in this collection.  

This is one of the little square books of flash fiction and Jim’s work is a very welcome addition to the series.

Get your copy here.        

 

 

Giveaway

Note: these are usually mobi-files to be downloaded to a Kindle.  Occasionally there are PDFs.  

This month I’m giving away 140 x 140.   

So, flash fiction seems to be the order of the day. This was inspired by Twitter – the old order where we were limited to 140 characters. I wrote one 140 pieces of just 140 words each. I used as a prompt the first picture I saw each day on my Twitter feed.  

I enjoyed working with prompts. The discipline was good as well – having to make every story exactly 140 words long. Is this one of those cases where creativity abounds because of the restrictions we’ve imposed?

Find out and grab your copy and lots of other freebies here.

And please, please, please leave a review when you’ve finished.    

I’ve also finished a similar book – 280 x 70, working on the new Twitter regime. This time I’m allowed 280 words per story.  I’m hoping to publish this book soon.  

 

Note: Normally my books and the books supplied by the imprints I manage sell for anything from £0.99 to £10.99.  Most on Kindle are about £2.99 and the average price for paperback is £7.00. Writers have to make a living. But I’m offering these free samples so that you can try before you buy.

 

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.

Sometimes I also write about what might be of interest to other writers.

I have been quite busy again this month.

I’ve reflected on war being about young men sorting out old men’s quarrels in Young Men Fighting Old Men’s Wars.  I’ve revisited the Enabling Act, the act that allowed Hitler to take more power than he really did. Many people, myself included, see parallels with what’s happening now. However, thankfully, we are not yet greeting each other in the name of Boris Johnson nor do we have pictures of him in classrooms.  Is there hope for us? I’ve reviewed another book about the German Resistance: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner . I’ve written about Survivor Guilt and Loss of Citizenship. These topics are also covered in We Share the Same Sky by Rachael Cerrotti, another account of a Holocaust survivor.

 

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 book and books published by Bridge House Publishing, CafeLit, Chapeltown Books and The Red Telephone.  Visit us here.     

 

Chapeltown Books News about our books. Sign up here.

 

The Creative Café Project News about the project and CaféLit – for the consumer rather than for the producer.  Sign up 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.     

 

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.

 

Margaret tell us about her story in 'Aftermath', about lockdown and about some of her other writing.

 

Balcony Views

 

Iris has just moved into a retirement village to be with her friend, Rose, but her arrival is not the happy day she imagined. It’s March 2020, Rose is nowhere to be found, the lockdown means communication with fellow residents is limited to shouting across balconies and entertainment is only provided by the young gardener. Has Rose made a mistake?

 

 

I find story writing a little bit like making soup. You start with one ingredient and then you add another that complements it, but you need an unlikely ingredient to liven it up and then you need to simmer the mixture long enough, for all the flavours to come together.

 

Lockdown for my husband and I was not especially difficult to begin with. We are both retired, my husband is housebound and I have a bad foot, so we were not about to travel the world and we were no strangers to Sainsburys online deliveries, so it was other people who had joined our world. We could sit outside enjoying the garden in spring, while others were battling day and night to save peoples’ lives, while clad in inadequate masks and suits. What was there to complain about?

 

But as time wore on and we were unable to see our family, and my choral singing had shifted from postponed concerts to becoming a forbidden activity, we began to realise that our communication with others, however limited, was the most important element of our lives.

 

We were fortunate, but I thought of older people like us who had moved specially to be in a lively community of similar souls and who would by now, be feeling more cut off than they had felt when living alone.

 

The next ingredient was what I call ‘graded death.’ Death comes to everyone, but if you unfortunately die in a recorded event that makes the news, your every detail will be made known to the world, but if you are just another statistic on a certificate, you are anonymous. (You would never guess both my parents worked in the Births, Marriages and Deaths department in the General Register Office, would you?) In a pandemic, you may well have caused the death of other people without knowing it, or someone, known or unknown, will have caused your death.

 

Finally, I read that the first Sunday in May is a special event in the gardening calendar. You will need to read the story to find out what that is.

 

I started a Covid Diary in March, recording what was happening in the news, as well as what I and my village community were doing. When I was asked to write something for Aftermath, I did not want to record a version of my diary entries, but to write a story reflecting what was happening at the time, through its characters. Nothing reflects the times more than what is written in the moment. I am still writing my diary and looking back at what I wrote on that day in 2020 and already it reads as history.

 

You will find more of my stories in Bridge House’s anthologies – Magnet Book; Café Lit; Snowflakes; Baubles; Glit-er-ary; Crackers; Nativity and Mulling It Over. (Bridge House has been good to me and I am very grateful for their support.) I have had stories on story websites and I also write short plays. I have had two of them performed professionally, in small theatres.

 

My full length play Caribbean Calypso was the runner-up in Trinity College of Music and Drama’s 2011 International Playwriting Competition, in the category of a play suitable for performers aged 11 and under. In December 2017, the play was performed three times in Bangalore by Jagriti Kids – a charity promoting literacy and school attendance.

 

The play is based on the Anansi and Tiger stories and involves music, masks and audience participation. If you have a group of mixed ages and abilities and would be interested in more details of it, please contact me –  jbulleyment@waitrose.com

 

Margaret Bulleyment

 

 

 

Jenny Robertson - writing life and her new YA novel

  See in our online bookshop

Today I have Jenny Robertson on my blog. I have recently published her YA book The Fortune Teller of  Philippi.

 

My name is Jennifer Robertson. I started off with children’s books so I wrote as Jenny Robertson and the name has stuck. I’ve had a lifetime’s career in writing. I was first published when I was grounded at home with very small children and the on-going care of my mother with Parkinson’s Disease. I first wrote for Scripture Union, who were breaking free of the shackles of overt religious writing for children, though there was a requirement for a strong Christian “message.” I found the best way was to set books in the past, in Roman times, in Celtic Scotland and so on. My books were translated into several languages. Then I was asked to write a big collection of Bible Stories, as well as the Ladybird Bible Books which published with the strapline Simply told, simply beautiful. This was a hugely helpful task to learn how to write compellingly in the simplest prose.

I had several collections of my own poetry published and moved on to write for Lion Publishing, a wonderful publisher which cared about its writers, and very actively promoted our books. Ghetto, a collection of poems which give voice to people in the Warsaw Ghetto was chosen as book of the month by the Scotsman newspaper. I read it read in the Edinburgh Book Festival 1989.

My husband and I moved to St Petersburg. I learnt Russian – my second Slavonic language and I continued writing through huge family trauma as a result of my daughter’s downward spiral into schizophrenia and her inability to care for her child. I have written about this in Uninvited Guest (Triangle/SPCK) and Clarissa, or arrested innocence. Clarissa was published by chipmunkapublishing which purports to be a mental health publisher. Writers, be warned, they make no attempt to promote the books and charge exorbitant prices for a download plus postage. I have read similar complaints from other authors.

On my return to Scotland I found it very hard to break back into publishing and was very grateful to Gill who was kind enough to include several of my stories in various Bridge House Anthologies.

I had studied Polish at University, lived in Poland, travelled in former Polish territories in Ukraine so I was delighted to write a children’s book Wojtek, War Hero Bear (Birlinn 2014), the true story of a brown bear adopted by Polish soldiers in 1942 who carried live ammunition at the Battle of Monte Cassino, fought in the Italian campaign , was exiled with the men to Scotland, arrested with them once for being drunk and disorderly, ended his days in Edinburgh Zoo and is now gathering world-wide fame and a much-visited statue in the centre of Edinburgh.

I continued to write Holocaust-related stories which were included in PRISM, a New York journal for Holocaust students and educators. In 2019 Scotland Street Press published my biography of a major Polish woman writer, From Corsets to Communism, the life and times of Zofia Nałkowska 1884-1954. This was the fruit of eighteen years research and close reading of Zofia’s books and other contemporary fiction. It offers a window into Polish twentieth century history and culture and into the life of a pivotal woman writer whose books are still read in Polish schools.

This was read in the Edinburgh Book Festival 2019 but then I was diagnosed with myeloma, bone marrow cancer. I’ve completed a year’s chemotherapy and decided that my writing days were definitely done. But no! Gill approached me with the kindest possible offer – she accepted a young people’s novel set in New Testament times, The Fortune Teller of Philippi. Working on the rewrites took me back to my laptop where I found a partially written children’s novel with a Polish/Belarusian setting in the Second World War. It’s now about to look for a publisher. I would never have completed it if it hadn’t been for the boost Gill has given me.

I’m also privileged to write short stories and other Holocaust related material for PRISM, published by the Azrieli University New York. These are drawn from stories I heard in Poland and from reading and research.

Many books have gone out of print and I’m a total amateur in learning how to promote them digitally, although even through cancer I promoted them at events and in schools. Wojtek, War Hero Bear (Birlinn £6.99) and From Corsets to Communism (Scotland Street Press £12.99) be bought from Amazon, from your local bookshop, from the publisher Birlinn, Edinburgh and from myself. The Fortune Teller of Philippi is available from Bridge House and also online.

 

More about reviews

 

Why I’ve decided to review every book I read

It’s really very simple.  I want everybody who reads my books to review them.  I want as many reviews as it takes to tickle the Amazon algorithm enough that it will start making my work more visible. If I don’t review other people’s books, why should I expect people to review mine? I’m also trying to establish myself as a reliable and effective reviewer.  

 

Some pitfalls

What do you do if you read a book a friend has written and it’s awful?  I think if I knew the person well I’d tell them what I thought but not actually post the review.  Fortunately, since I’ve been doing this, I’ve never had to give less than three stars and for all the writers I know personally I’ve been able to give four or five stars. This is in part because I am extremely picky about what I choose to read. But I won’t hesitate to give one or two stars if that’s what the book deserves and I don’t know the author personally. 

 

It needn’t be onerous

It’s possible to give a review in two or three sentences that explains the strengths and weaknesses of the book and why you’ve give it the star rating you have. This takes between five and ten minutes. Why wouldn’t you spend that amount of time giving a little feed-back to the writer who has spent hours and hours writing that text? And you’ve also spent several hours reading it. Surely another five or ten minutes isn’t too much to ask?

 

Where to review and what the star-ratings mean

I post my short reviews on Amazon, Good Reads and Story Graph.  I tend to put the same review on each one though I may vary the star ratings across the sites.  On Amazon and Story Graph I’m giving an objective assessment of the book as a work in literature. On Good Reads I’m recommending the book to people who follow me as either a reader or a writer. I may give a lower rating here if I think it is not a book my followers will enjoy. Story Graph, incidentally, allows you to add some more detail. You’re asked to supply key words, assign it some emotionally descriptive words and tick boxes about character, plot development and pace. This may be a really good place to find books you’d like to read. 

 

My longer reviews

I review for Armadillo magazine, a site about children’s books. I review in the Young Adult section. These reviews tend to be about 200 words long and we’re encouraged to be as positive as we can.  Generally this is possible as we’re supplied with good books to start with.

 

I also have a site The Young Person’s Library that gives neutral information about books: which ages they’re suitable for, what they’re about, how easy they are to read, physical information about the book, and information about any “value-added” materials such as quiz sheets or maps. All of this information is useful for the adult who may be trying to buy books for the young people in their care.

 

I add books about World War II, the 1940s and the Holocaust to my site  The House on Schellberg Street  Here I am defining the usefulness of the texts. What can they say to the sort of people who visit my site?

 

Once a month I recommend the book I’ve enjoyed the most that month. I mention it on Gill’s Recommended Reads   and in my monthly newsletter.

 

A suggestion

If you really find it hard to find those ten minutes to review a book or indeed the words to describe it, might you not consider  reviewing just those that you feel you can give four or five stars to and that have not as yet fifty reviews?