Wonderful coincidences

 

We love coincidences. They’re bound to be unusual and so we receive them with joy. I can quote a few real life ones:

• On a trip to London I got off my train and walked along the platform just as my business partner’s train drew out of the station from the other side of the platform.
• We travelled all the way from Holland to Denmark and visited a colleague of my husband.  His front door was opened by one my former students who was staying with his daughter.
• My PhD supervisor moved from North Wales to the south coast and then back again. Once when retuning to the south coast, where I lived at the time, I followed a haulage firm that specialised in moving between the south coast and North Wales – and the company and my PhD supervisor shared a surname.

However these days if we include such happenings in our stories commissioning editors are known to tut and say “That wouldn’t happen in real life.”

Yet Shakespeare, Dickens and Molière used them a lot. Not only did they get away with it but that is what particularly delights us in their stories. 

It is delightful again in Ann Booth’s Girl with a White Dog. The protagonist’s grandmother has a close connection with the family she befriends as she works with the white dog. And the connection is all about another white dog.

These have to be handled well. You can’t simply have a deus ex machina. It has to be convincing and possible.

Maybe the answer to all of this is that we actually move in quite restricted circles. And that, of course, is an enticing premise for story.  

Image by David Mark from Pixabay 

Dramatic Episodes Launch

 

I'm pleased to be hosting this event on 1 April. I've worked with Janet quite a bit over the years.  She has been a regular contributor to Cafelit, the ezine I produce. She has also contributed to Bridge House's annual anthologies.  We'll be chatting about how she came to write the series and how CafeLit serials work.  All welcome.   

1 April 7 p.m. online

Interview

readings Q & A 

Free Event  

 

Sign up here  

Read more about the book on Amazon  

This is one of our CafeLit serials. Dramatic Episodes are linked episodes that have appeared on CafeLit. Learn more about CafeLit and CafeLit serials at this event.   

See you there?   

News 1 March 2021

 

An early career story

In late 2000 several of my suggestions for educational material were taken up. A few years later my first full book was accepted and published in June 2003. This was a guide to learning languages.  Well I had been a language teacher for town-five years up until then.

However, I upstaged myself by getting a short story accepted in a collection for children about war. This was published a few days before the language book. Lines in the Sand was edited by Mary Hoffman and her daughter Rhiannon Lassiter.  Some witters had sent in stories or extracts of stories they had already written, others, like myself, made up a story especially for the book. Artists send it pictures they had in their portfolios and these were matched to the stories. My The Gift Child was included in the “Seeds of Hope” section. All profits and royalties went to the special UNICEF fund for the children damaged by the war in Iraq and the book was our protest against that war.

My copy of the book arrived. I opened the book eagerly and was delighted to see that the girl in the illustration that accompanied my story looked just as I had imagined my protagonist. I turned to the page after the illustration to find that one third of my story was missing.

I phoned the publisher straight away but the office was not yet open. I went for a swim. When I got back to my phone there were about twenty missed calls.

Of course they were very apologetic. They sent a full copy of the story to everyone else in the book. This has had the not entirely unwelcome effect that everyone remembered my story and my name. No such thing as bad publicity?

They also found one name misspelt and that another picture gave away the ending of a story. So, another edition was created but the book retained the same ISBN. So, there are a few unusual books around.  Collectors’ items? I have a copy of the original book and the one with the corrections. Both of them are signed by Michael Morpurgo.  Unfortunately to fit the rest of my story in we had to lose the lovely illustration. All of the original illustrations were auctioned off but alas I didn’t have enough money to buy that one.               

 

News about my writing and other creative projects

The Class Letter, the fifth book in the Schellberg Cycle is now almost completely edited. I also now on the second edit of Not Just Fluffy Bunnies. I’m currently going through the rather tedious process of checking all of the references.  I’m still working on The Business of Writing.   I’m interspersing all of this with short stories and flash fiction.

I continue to write for Talking about My Generation:

I’m writing a series of creative writing prompts for lockdown.  

These are very similar to the exercises I provided for the Bury Art Museum. Readers are invited to send in their work. I’ve provided six of these and they’re publishing one a week.  So far we have:

https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/lockdown-adventures-mining-art-galleries-for-stories

https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/writing-with-the-senses/

https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/meet-in-the-middle-story/

https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/lockdown-adventures-creative-writing-making-names-and-words-into-poems/

https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/creative-writing-adventures-in-lockdown/       

And now I’ve become a cookery writer: https://talkingaboutmygeneration.co.uk/riceandpeas/

 

The Young Person’s Library

This month I’ve added:

South & North, East & West by Michael Rosen

Her Michael Rosen retells in his fabulous story-teller voice several folk stories from around the world. This is suitable for upper primary school children.

 

Beauty and the Bin by Joanne O’Connell  

This is a story for early teens, Key Stage 3, about an enterprising young lady who makes beauty products from what she can find in the kitchen.  There is a lot more to the story however.

 

The Proudest Blue Ibtihaj Muhammad, S.K. Ali, Hatem Aly

This is a picture book that may also be suitable for emergent readers. It tells the story of an older sister who has to start wearing the hijab. The illustrations are delightful.  

  

 

Current reading recommendation

This month I’m recommending Dawn Knox’s Fearless Heart .  It is a story set during World War II and tells of the adventures of Genevieve who speaks fluent French and joins the Special Operations Executive.

Genevieve has to learn to behave as a man in occupied France. Yves is at first very wary of her. She falls in love with him.  But will her love be requited. Will they both survive?

Knox engages us from the beginning and keeps our attention through her carefully drawn characters about whom we care about a lot.   

 Fearless Heart is an historical romance by experienced 1940s Dawn Knox.  It is published by the Linford Romance Library. This is a large print book.          

Giveaway

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

I’m offering this time the mobi-file (for Kindle) of my flash fiction collection, January Stones 2013.    

They were originally published on a blog called "Gill’s January Stones". In fact, they were published in reverse order. The first one you read here, "When Physics Got Sick", was the last one to be written and originally published on 31 January 2013.

Sometimes the stories would come right at the beginning of the day. Sometimes they would take a while longer.

Do they have a theme? Not really, though the idea of ‘stones’ is one of turning them over slowly on the beach until we find the right one. It’s not a bad time of year, anyway, right at the beginning in January, as the New Year starts and the days slowly become longer.

There was no strict word count. Each story is as long as it needs to be. It had to be finished, though, by midnight of that day.

Please, please, please write a review when you’ve read the book.

You can download it and lots of other free materials here.

Note, that 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 and also for other writers and readers of historical fiction.

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

There were three posts in February:

This includes two book reviews:

Fearless  Heart by Dawn Knox (also mentioned above)

The Last Correspondent by Soraya M Lane   another celebration of women doing their bit during World War II.

I have also included an article about a rather nice connection we now have with the people who live in the house on Schellberg Street:

Read the account here.   

 

 

School visits

I’ve suspended these until further notice. I’m now starting work on a series of on-line materials.  

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.

 

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 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.

 

Candi Spillard and her new book, The Evening Lands

 

Tell me about your book 

How would you feel if one day, in mid-life, you discovered that you had - not a guardian Angel, but a guardian Devil? That the same individual which afforded you all the luck you’d had in life - and let’s face it most of us reading this have had rather a lot - is busy inflicting misery on the rest of the human race. What would you do? 

You’d want to fight to foil his schemes, of course! And that’s how I came up with the characters of the naïve environmentalist Verity Player and her evil nemesis, the devilish Stan ‘Satanic’ Mills - a shadowy being composed of all of humanity’s irrational fears. 

Having battled against Mills for the soul of the Banking system in The Price of Time, Verity now has to turn her mind to Mills’ hold over the people responsible for human rights abuses. 

The book is the second in a series, each of which stands as a story on its own. 

 

Tell us about the research for this book  

The Evening Lands started with two ideas: how on earth, I wondered as an idealistic Teen reading about the Milgram experiments (yes: that’s the sort of reading material I devoured as a Teen - biographies of famous scientists) can anyone be persuaded to deliberately inflict pain upon another human being? And then a snatch of lyrics from a rock ballad: ‘Hitting me with the third degree’ - what did that mean? 

My research took a dark turn: everything from the Spanish Inquisition to Guantánamo Bay. But hidden in the darkness was a gem: in every generation, from the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the two sides in World War II, someone turns up who realises - and proves by example - that humane methods work better than pain and coercion. They earn converts, or information, rather than grudges and enemies. In the USA, Sherwood Ford Moran and his interviews of grounded Japanese airmen; in Nazi Germany, former salesman Hans Joachim Scharff. I could go on... 

I wrote up some of my research for The Evening Lands - starting with my own experience at the business end of a Police interview - on my blog ‘In Surreal Time’. You can read about it from this post onwards: https://insurrealtime.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/inciting-incident/ 

 

 What inspired the book? 

In the midst of the furore over the Feinstein Report in 2015, I wanted to bring out the human side of all this: how do ordinary people, from our times, face extraordinary situations like these? And what force lurks behind those who still, in spite of generations of findings to the contrary, insist upon the inhumane treatment of those from whom they need information?  

I wrote the first draft then, and put it aside. I picked it up again when the American presidency changed hands in 2017. Although it’s never stated explicitly, the action takes place in a ‘2017 that never quite was’ - so in a way it’s an Alternative History, but never far away from the one we lived. 

 

What's next? 

I’m working on the next book - Harvest Home in which, in a surreal turn, one of the perpetrators of the atrocities in The Evening Lands is forced, by the aforementioned guardian Devil, to visit our main character in her own home and make amends. The twist: though from opposite sides of the political spectrum, the two must conspire if they have any hope of thwarting Mills’ latest plan - or a pandemic will wipe out humanity.  

The kicker is that I wrote the first draft years before Covid-19 swept the world... 

 

How can we get a copy of the book? 

The Evening Lands is available electronically from Amazon - mybook.to/theeveninglands - and from other outlets, all linked from my website www.cspillardwriter.co.uk. You can also contact me directly from the website for a signed copy.  

 

Themed Writing

 

Image by fancycrave1 from Pixabay

How we get ideas is a bit of a mystery. We dread being asked that question when we give talks.  Because the ideas just come, don’t they? In my case they come when I’m cooking, driving, swimming, walking or doing the ironing. They don’t usually come when I’m sitting at my computer. An odd overheard conversation, a chance encounter or something I see will spark off an idea for a story.

A lot of writers have been unable to work during lockdown. Is it perhaps because they’re tucked away from life and have nothing to write about? Or is it just the anxiety?

Can you force the creativity?

 Ironically, in looking for prompts for my prompt book, I’ve used other prompts to give me ideas. So, for example, the prompt I’ve just read said: “Write a scene or story that includes a character eating cereal. What does a character's favourite cereal say about their personality? Do they carefully pick the marshmallows out of their Lucky Charms, or do they eat Aldi bagged cereal by the handful straight out of the container? Or, perhaps your character prefers healthy oatmeal with no added sugar.” https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/characters-in-a-crunch I’ve turned this into “Write a story about a character shopping in a supermarket.  Every item they pick creates a thought. Weave those thoughts together to make a story.”

I’ve now written two books of prompts like this. Each contains a prompt for every day of the year. Other writers have contributed. I’m working on a third and then I’m going to put all three together so that you have a choice each day. I use these myself to inspire short stories, pieces of flash fiction, memoir or articles that I complete between major edits of my main projects. It’s good to get away from editing and back to something more creative. 

I’ve recently had some success in competitions; I’ve had three pieces listed and they’ll all appear in anthologies. In all three cases I was writing to a particular theme.

On my Fair Submissions web site I have a section called “Themed” where you can find calls for submission and competitions that have a particular theme. Look in the labels and find “Themed.” 

So, yes, I think you can force creativity a little and you don’t have to wait for inspiration to kick in.