Floating Free after Finishing The Bad Child,

 I’ve just completed my newest novel The Bad Child, about twelve year old Dee, the misfit in her family, who decides not to speak at all. 

Now I’m floating free! Now I’m breathing great sighs of relief and satisfaction. This novel has been a joy to write. To know it is truly finished I have to be pleased with it and very sure it’s as perfect as I can make it.

The writing life is cyclic, offering different writing, emotional, inventive challenges at each point in the cycle. Writing a novel is an organic process, born of a glimpse, a thought, a new insight perhaps a year or two before.

 This could be a line from a book or a newspaper, an overheard

conversation, an image that fixes in the mind, a linked memory from childhood. When I have embraced this core idea I cast around and start to think, talk, scribble, and dream stories around this core idea in both my waking and sleeping life until it becomes a solid reality in my mind.

At last, into this mass of notes, ideas, research and story-telling, walks a distinctive character with a mind of her own.Then another. And another. These characters begin speaking to each other in different tones and accents, with different agendas and priorities in their lives. At one point I wake up with their conversations in my head.

And somehow out of this inchoate mass of stuff emerges a sense of a beginning, Eventually I manage to write a beginning that locks

these characters into  their certain time, their certain place, with their certain preoccupations. With my imagination now fully charged, the novel insinuates itself into my daily life, somewhere near the centre. And I write. And write.

Now and then, as I write on, I have to slow down just to check that the story I’m writing today has grown properly out of my yesterday’s prose, and that of the day before, and the week and even the year before.

So, after working for a year or so in this way I find that this self-willed creation begins to move towards  its close and I find myself

looking for a sense of an ending. Now is the time to  slow down again, to make the best ending that for this particular the story. If - as I do - you write close to real life, then ending a novel is not easy. The ending has to fit the narrative logic bedded in this story’s organic growth. As well as this, the ending has to imply a new logic, a new organic possibility, a spurt of new life – life beyond the story.

With The Bad Child I changed the ending four times before I thought it worked.

Once the end has been written, it’s time to put on my cap and gown and be my own editor – to check every word, every line, every paragraph for correct meaning, syntax, and spelling. I must check that time, place and characterisation serve the consistency and the dynamism of the story. At this point I usually read the prose out loud to check its that the sound flows.

Now the manuscript is as perfect as I can make it.

In the end, like any intelligent writer, I understand that my novel just cannot be perfect. The story has its own existence inside of me and I am not sufficiently objective to catch every flaw. 

And, like any intelligent writer, I know that my story needs a skilled, outside editor and proof-reader (not a ‘friendly reader’) before it can go out there into the cold world. This wizard of a person will inevitably pick up snags and flaws that I, with the narrative events printed on my soul, will have missed.

I discovered my own eagle-eyed editor/proof-reader  CliveJohnson two books ago. Since then I’ve realised that once the manuscript been through his capable hands I can proceed with confidence to the further challenges of designing the cover and going through the process onto publication.

Then the book will be published and my characters walk out there in the world.

Oh joy!  The time has come for me to start floating free again in the outside world, catching gossamer words and images in my mind that will eventually provide me with an organic core for an exciting new novel which will keep me alive and kicking, thinking, imagining and writing for the next eighteen months.

I am realising now that the nature of my floating-free process ensures that each novel is distinct from the others; a different species perhaps. This difference keeps me fascinated and- I hope – my valued readers intrigued.

Below you can see samples of  initial  art Work in Progress for the cover of    The Bad Child who  will be out there in the world walking alone in late August with a launch in early September.

 Links

You can observe these differences on my Amazon collection.  As you see, every novel is different. That's part of the fun

Writing at the Maison Bleue Contemporary novel set in the Languedoc On Kindle: and In Paperback  

The Pathfinder. On Kindle and In Paperback.

Historical novel set in the cross-piece of Celtic Society and Roman occupation of Britain)

  

Clive Johnson Editor/Proofreader

SIBLINGS STRUTTING THEIR STUFF

  

At last, after one or two to production hiccups, my new collection Siblings is now live for interested people on Amazon. Producing my own volumes is the most exciting late-life experience for me. Since Theft, my first published novel in 1972 (one keen reader remembers this novel here )  my novels have been produced by major publishers accompanied be a small army of accomplished proof-readers and marketeers.

I was always happy with their work, although sometimes the covers – beautifully painted - were more saga-esque than I would have preferred. I remember one editor telling me that if there was a woman on the cover – there was always a woman on the cover – this could produce thousands more sales. And if the woman was accompanied by a child, that could mean thousands more. The same applied if there was gold foil on the cover.   

In those days I just wrote my novels alongside the many other things – children, husband, demanding profession - in my life. These novels would be long - often running to 80 or 90,000 words.

However, in recent years the world around me has changed radically:  it has shrunk and slowed down, dominated as it is now by my role of full time carer. However, writing is my vocation, and I am still writing – now rather slimmer volumes -  and publishing them myself through  Amazon Createspace. 

 As my Auntie Alice (aka Eirwyn in my newest book Siblings…) wrote in my autograph book circa 1951. ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’

This is never more so than my new collection of short stories, Siblings.  

These later volumes are slimmer and perhaps do not appear so genre-specific as many of the early novels on my list. When I first started on this private publishing gig (see Damselfly )  I continued to produce in the  long fiction form. – Becoming Alice – The Pathfinder – An Englishwoman France – without deliberately meeting the protocols of genre fiction. (One of these books - the novel The Bad Child features an extra perceptive middle child who resembles Ayla, the central storyteller in Siblings.) Other recent books feature short prose (Kaleidoscope) and  poetry (With Such Caution) turning more and more to the seductive melding  of memoir and fiction about which I have written here on Life Twice Tasted before. Of course there have been those larger novels one was Becoming Alice the other one The Bad Child. And I have another one in plan.  

I am happy with them all. Writing and producing books in this way is not dissimilar to having children, in terms of the protective pride one feels as they venture out there in the world

I am feeling that now in the case of Siblings, out there, strutting her stuff.

So here I am - rather weirdly with my editor’s cap on - talking about myself in the third person on the back cover of Siblings:

In this collection Wendy Robertson dances the borders between memoir and fiction, exploring the lives of seven siblings presided over by their mother who was widowed in the First World War. Their separate stories begin in the year 1922 in a mining village in South Durham. Each of the five sisters and two brothers has an individual story unique to themselves. The storyteller here is observant Ayla, the middle child in this talented family.

 

She tells us: “This collection of short stories is dedicated to my mother Barbara and her siblings. Her family of storytellers embroidered their often-told stories not only into the history of their own family but also significantly into the history of the 20^th Century.”

 

She has published many novels and several books of short stories. Many of these reflect the history, landscape, and personalities emerging from County Durham, where she has lived most of her life. In that time she has also travelled researched, written other novels set in London. Coventry and North Wales and far afield as Singapore, America, and France. Discover more about these novels on her blog at http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/

 

 

See her essay about dancing the borders between fact and fiction, 

ORDER SIBLINGS HERE 

 

 

 

 

Time and the Writer

We all have a lifetime’s training in time and waiting. 

On Amazon PB 
On Amazon Kindle 

Waiting to start school. Waiting for exam results. Waiting to meet The One. Waiting for medical news. Waiting in vain for someone to turn up. Waiting to give birth. Waiting for your child to start school. Waiting for your article to be in the paper. Waiting for your publisher to make a decision.

This lifetime’s training in waiting and time is useful to a writer.

 ‘How long does it take to write a novel? A short story?’ is a regular question when meet people in talks or workshops. I resist saying how long is a piece of string? I do mention that Barbara Cartland wrote dozens of novels a year and JK Rowling apparently took five years to write the first Harry Potter novel. 

My own answer is that it takes about eighteen months for me to research and write each novel. I can only conclude that because I’m looking back at quite a few.

A big part of the novelist’s toolkit is the management of time. I was reminded of this recently when editing my latest novel The Bad Child.

Questions of time for the editing process 

·     

      How does time feature in lives of the characters for the duration of the novel?  A day? (See Ian McKewan’s Saturday)  A month? (See JL Carr’s A Month in the Country.) My own new one  takes place over a year in the life of twelve year old Dee. A generation? Almost any saga of families of high or low estate. Of course embedded within these novels – such is the magic of fiction – is the whole of the lives of the characters within them.

·    A most important time question in the editing process is how does the narrative deal with time? Does it jump backwards or forwards in invigorating leaps? Does it run forward smoothly, almost unnoticed? Most importantly how will this work for the reader?

·    Then there’s an important question regarding the timescale of the background of the narrative. War campaign? A political campaign?  The duration of a strike? (See my novel Lizza.) A day of festivities such as Bonfire Night or the Coronation? Your decision is whether you mark this element of time as a distinctive aspect of your novel or let it act as an unobtrusive background, perhaps making the story more generic, more universal.

     

     Importance of time in the editing process.If you have let the novel grow organically as I tend to, it’s really only at the editing stage that you realise just what you’ve done and how you’ve done it. This is when you make sure that it will work for the reader. It’s something like   fiddling with the innards of a clock to make sure it will tick away accurately on the background of your life. Once the job is finished, you don’t need to see the works of a clock to feel that time is significant in your life. The reader doesn’t need cues and clues to notice the passing of time in a novel unless the background is essential to the way the narrative works.

Stop Press:shiny copies of my new novel The Bad Child have just arrived. Early readers have commented that it ‘races along’. I was not so conscious of that when I was writing it. My preoccupation with the passing of time must have bitten deep into my soul and the pace of this novel – one year in a child’s life - is at the level of writer’s intuition, which is where it should be.

Narratives and Magnetic Ideas.

My new novel The Bad Child is  at last out there now strutting her stuff  (I hope you're taking a look at her...) And I've just about completed my creative contribution to the fascinating Damselfly Books Website.  

And now, like other professional writers I find there's this nagging question in my ear. So what next, Wendy. What next? The usually cluttered storytelling attic that is my head is disturbingly empty. But the truth is that the creative nature abhors a vacuum and ideas are beginning to settle in up there, coming into a new life. There they are, swirling about, making patterns in the air.

It seems to me that once an idea has settled there firmly in  my attic  head, it begins to attract fragments of memory and the urge to make notes, read books and absorb further inspiration. These things are like iron filings dancing around in the dusty air, making shapes around the intensely powerful magnet that is the new story idea. The shapes are not fixed. They can change with every movement of the magnet. The iron filings may consist of historical sources, images, artefacts, songs, stories, maps, photographs  and actual landscapes.

This was very much the case  with my Celtic/Roman novel The Pathfinder. The first

The Book
The Kindle

fragment settling clinging to a wall in the attic was an article I read about what are called  Lines of Desire.  Then, somehow, I kept bumping into elements of  this idea in different books, articles in the press and on the Internet.

The term Lines of Desire refers to the facts that, for several thousands of years, straight  roads and pathways were naturally formed by the foot-tread and the wheel marks of generations of men, women and children making their way - not just through Britain -  but throughout Europe and even further afield. These pathways were established as travellers and traders, families and individuals, made their way through the landscape, going about their business of their daily life.

Lines of Desire is still referred to today in urban planning to describe the roads that are made on new ground as people find their own straight way usually the shortest distance between two points in a landscape.

Of course, this ie very efficient,  as the Romans demonstrated this merely two thousand years ago, when they used many of the old straight British paths as the basis for  their straight roads throughout Britain. Of course the business the Romans were going about was the conquest of the then known world. Their roads were certainly their own lines of desire.

In the beginning my novel The Pathfinder was actually entitled Lines of Desire. But as I moved the magnet again around my attic as the story grew, I began to think that title ambiguous, too off-piste

I was becoming fascinated by the complex and interesting lives of the original Pathfinders, often left in the shadow of the powerful Roman definitions of early British history. One more shake of the magnet and out stepped my heroine   Elen,  a great Pathfinder, daughter of another Pathfinder, a powerful British tribal trading king, in in the land we now call Wales.   

At last I could see that my job as a writer was to use my imagination to bring to life this landscape, these people those times, these forefathers of my readers, these unique people. My prose has to allow my readers to experience the reality of Elen’s world, her powerful father, her artistic mother, he warrior brothers; the brother who was a poet and a song-maker. I had  to breathe life into her the man who became her husband, husband a Roman general, and trace their joint pathway through the history of their times. to trace their impact on history,

And now at last I have come to the end of another two years and finished the next

Book and Kindle

 entirely different story The Bad Child. I have spent a year or so in the modern world alongside the rebellious Dee Belasis who has decided not to speak. But she can draw. Boy can she draw!  

But the magnet does its magic again. I was halfway through the novel - still inside  Dee’s un-speaking head - when by accident I heard a Radio 4 programme about drawing and the making of meaning and idea which fitted my story like a glove. It gave another player to the whole narrative.

It’s a funny way to make a living isn’t it?  Playing iron filings and magnets to make my stories swing into real life,.  

And what, you may say, is the next Magnetic Idea ?

I was just asking that myself.

The Writer as Outsider

 

 For several years now, perhaps triggered by the isolation engendered by the Covid situation, I have spent much of my time - as I say in a recent blog post (scroll down) - dancing on the border between memoir and fiction.

One outcome of this has been my new collection This has resulted in at least one distinct collection called Siblings: seven distinct stories of a family of seven siblings. The stories are all told by the middle child – called Ayla. She is the storyteller.

This book will be published in the spring but you can listen again to these stories on Bishop FM. 

I have written elsewhere about middle children – for example in my novels The Bad Child and Becoming Alice. Inevitably some observers will say that is this is a deep reflection on my own role as the middle child in a diverse family who relishes the role of the outsider.   

But I would assert that this outsider feeling transforms itself to a creative resource when one is a writer who can reflect on the events going on around her.

There is a poem about this feeling in my book WithSuch Caution – a Life Glimpsed in Short pieces. 

I thought you might like to read it. Here it is, Wx

Outsiderness

 

Being the third child of four

I was bred to be an outsider.

Being the new child from a far town

I was labelled outsider.

 

Talking with the wrong tone

I was seen as a verbal outsider.

Being the cleverest child in class

made me an outsider.

 

Working alongside men

I was the female outsider.

Writing stories made me

a mendacious outsider.

 

Living with a man doesn’t see

I have become an invisible outsider. –

Learning to make myself comfortable

In this ultimate containment.

 

Now, living through to older age

I am an intimate outsider, even

the ultimate outsider, relishing

this … Outsiderness.

 

The Writer and the Shoreline Ape

One midnight recently I was beguiled by a pair of radio programmes by David Attenborough about the controversial Waterside Ape Theory. (I instantly transposed it in my head to the Shoreline Ape Theory which I like better and I will use here.) These programmes challenged the received and scientifically respectable theory that man evolved from a hair covered quadruped to a smoother skinned bi-ped by surviving on the dry plains of the African Savannah in the end rearing up onto two legs as he went about hunting prey and making bloody scraps available for the less skilled females and children so they could survive into the next generation.

But now the ‘rather suspect’ Shoreline Ape theory has emerged in the last thirty years, supported by the discovery by palaeontologists of fossil remains of hominid bi-peds on the lake and sea shorelines of Africa.

The thought is that here on the shoreline the apelike quadrupeds evolved  into upright ape-like bipeds  supplemented their resources on the lake and sea shorelines by  diving in the shallow waters, harvesting and eating the freely available shellfish from the rocks.  There is logic in this. Standing up on two legs was much easier in the water; finding food to survive in this way reduced the life risks and the hard labour of hunting for food by chasing and killing animals across the threatening savannah.

For the hunter gatherer this easier less physical work meant that as part of this stage of evolution he- or she (now it was very commonly a she) became accustomed to holding their breaths for long periods as they dived for their prey underwater. They developed tiny bones to protect their eardrums, not unlike those developed by modern deep sea divers.

It seems that the shoreline ape-like bipeds, unlike their land based hunting ape cousins, are the only species that has a layer subcutaneous fat under their skins. (Protects them from the cold in the water of course.) Modern women too have this helpful layer of fat.  In this perhaps the shoreline apes were more like their seagoing mammalian cousins, the whale and the dolphin.  This gives us an image of the females buoyed up by water. Even while heavy or pregnant the females could hunt and swim for food to provide for their families on a more than equal footing with the males.

This element of evolutionary theory hints that there is another narrative about how we all evolved. This theory tells us that at least alongside the master-hunter male 'Tarzan' figures of the African Savannah we are also indebted to the much less macho shoreline ape for the fundamentals of our human identity.

This is on my mind now because here I am in the sun on the shores of a sea-lake that leads to the Mediterranean. After that, Africa! In all my life I have taken every opportunity to spend time by the sea, or within sight of other kinds of water such as lakes and rivers. I feel at home there. I have an intense affinity with water.

It so happens that I’ve just published my new novel, The Bad Child, where water and swimming is very significant. In order to get the details of my story right as well as all this palaeontology, I’ve researched our human relationship with swimming, reading in particular contemporary sources which refer to the increasingly popular culture of Wild Swimming where people swim in ponds, lakes and in the sea, seem to find it a deeply satisfying way to spend their time

.

The literature of Wild Swimming is obsessive, poetic, and even euphoric. Some writers allude to pre-memory memories of water being not just there around and above them but as their natural habitat.

So sitting here by the shoreline I am feeling natural affinity with Dee, my heroine. And my million times grandmother the Shoreline Ape. 

Link to the insightful Elaine Morgan who as a non-scientist has made good sense of these theories. See her book  The Descent of  woman

Linkto David Attenbrough’s 2 Radio Programmes 

Creative Process and Planning in the Writing of a Novel

After thirty years of writing novels -  now embarking on a big project – my unique writing process is very much on my mind.

Writing is about the process – the organic growth over time of a whole new world. It is equally about the prose – the right illuminating word in the right place.

And writing is about creative planning. This is not planning that chokes the life out of the idea to make you, the writer, feel safe. Creative planning is a tough demanding process which involves making human insightful decisions and logical connections to create an original compelling narrative.

Inevitably in my case this has meant that each story is very different to the others. The only things my novels have in common is – I hope – the quality of the writing and the human values at its heart. I am so happy that clever readers recognise this and come back for more.

My three latest novels might illustrate this for you.

On Amazon

The Bad Child focuses on the life of Dee, an urban middle class child who is seen as disturbed but who is the architect of her own recovery as she swims lakes and travels through England. We see her story and the o0ther characters  through Dee's eyes.

On Amazon

Writing at the Maison Bleue  is about the unravelling lives of a group of very different and variously successful writers who meet and write in a house in the Languedoc. Their stories weave together to make an historic story of murder and betrayal.

On Amazon

The Pathfinder, set as the Roman occupation of Britain crumbles, when the original people of the island – the makers of the old tracks and paths – emerge to take back their own. At the centre are the true figures of a Cambrian tribal princess and the last military leader of Britain, later a ‘usurper’ of the title of Roman Emperor.

On Amazon

A Woman Scorned. Based on the true story of so called (not by me…) ‘serial killer’ Mary Ann Cotton, this story – see through the eyes of London outsider, based on all available evidence – comes to a very different conclusion that those who condemned her  in a curiously modern chorus of gossip, stereotype, envy, primitive forensics and press sensationalism.

As you will see, these stories are very different to each other. Each evolved its own unique identity through time in the process of creative planning. And each novel, I hope, shares with the others some great, unique characters, the values of historic insight, a feeling for justice and an abhorrence of the cruelty of stereotyping which exists in our own present day.

Truth And Fiction Like Two Hands Clasping…

Buy?     Click Here

 Early Days

When the majority of my books – around 15 - came to life my only contribution was to take an intense  year to research and write each novel and deliver my completed manuscript to my publisher on  November 30 ( the date agreed in the commissions). I dealt with two major publishers - Hodder & Stoughton and then Headline – now Hachette.

I posted my  precious manuscript – which some writers may tell you becomes like a baby in your life – to my talented editors, Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans  (now a successful novelist herself). I would get it back from them by Christmas. complete with some changes inspired by their  insightful comments.

Interestingly enough Anne always insisted that they were suggestions, not instructions. Through time I had great advice from both Anne and Harriet which has entered my permanent writing process.

After that I returned the amended manuscript  to my editor  who entered it into  post- editing production involving formatting and cover design processes. I don't think I was aware then that it takes more than a  village to raise a novel. Since I have started going it alone I am very aware of that.

The production safely  in process, I would then begin to  prowl around my shelves, my growing pile of heavily scored notebooks - and  in the busy universe of my mind - to ponder an  arena of  people, life and history that would be the basis for my next novel. This was - and is still - my professional habit and routine through a many years.

By the time the novel appeared in the Spring I would be writing again, always voyaging into very different territory. In the meantime my  publisher's marketing department took care of the (rather limited - I wasn't famous after all...) promotion process. 

The novels were well reviewed - mostly in provincial presses across England and in  some magazines, although they never reached the magisterial heights of the literary broadsheets. I was from the North, after all and I had come from a working, rather than the literary background. I notice that this issue of being ‘from the working class’ is quite a trend nowadays. When I was first writing  I was distinctly pre-trend: there were no literary festivals therefore no platforms for my kind of writing. There was no Internet and no metropolitan networking - this  was strictly for already established writers. I had no contacts – my novels were published, as it were, out of the blue by Headline in its earliest days. I have my then editor Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans to thank for that.

As each book came out I would write some articles about the ideas underlying it,  I would do a few presentations.  But really I was free to get on with writing the next - very different - novel. This was, of course,  as well as working at my full-time job, as well as being a companion for my hard-working husband and nurturing my two children. Of course they are very big people now. Bonjour  @lickedspoon 

When i became a professional writer, the writing of popular novels was a virtual cottage industry before it became corporatised and monetised, with - it seems to me - increasing distance from the intense personal creative activity which had been all about dreaming up  stories and writing them down. In had became clearer that my thriving career  could not survive, based as it was on  instinct and a powerful storytelling imperative, rather than the somewhat rigid and perhaps stereotyped perceptions of The Market.  

 Going It Alone?

I had always made a living alongside my profession but never expected to make a fortune through my writing. (I think people tend to hope this nowadays…). The professional and artistic satisfaction for me was always the possibility of seeing the novels out there being read, and hearing readers response to my stories.

And this is why and how – my children grown and flown - I began to explore ways in which I could still write my novels and shepherd them into the market myself. So I started to write novels for myself, creating a very tiny imprint called Damselfly Books in order to locate them. 

So I proceeded to  publish Paulie’s Web – a novel emerging from my seminal experience as writer in residence in a women’s prison. I wrote The Pathfinder – a novel exploring my inner fascination with my Celtic roots which keep re-emerging in my philosophies and ideas - and in my novels. This always seem to me to be begging for some fictional expression. I went on to write the novel called The Bad Child, focusing on my work as an educator and the fact that middle children – (I myself was one and I was observing my niece, also a middle child, as another) – could be independent, rebellious and self-activating – rather different from their siblings. This is how my very special  Demelza came to life in this novel.

Becoming Alice emerged from my increasing professional interest in the complex connections between what appears to be pure fiction and what seems to be true memoir. This novel was to be the first of three novels set in the arc of public and private life between 1941 and the Millennium. It is no accident that this time-span just happens to be the arc of my own life fully realised in the life experience of a girl called Alice. At the moment the second and third novels in this trilogy are just at the brainstorming/note-writing/plot-planning stage now.

I was now realising just how much the focus throughout my writing life had been  - rooted in my own life experience - transformed through fiction  - eventually appeared on the page. But I realised that my life experience was not unidirectional or set in a neat narrative; rather it was fragmentary – incoherent shards and fragments which took different shapes depending on how I cast my story-net. This, I thought, was rather like the toy kaliedescope that has sat on my mantelpiece for more than twenty years. Now I had my title! This was when I began to write and publish some short stories which reflected this concept more directly.

The Workshops

So it was that  last Spring -  one year ago - I presented a series of workshops on the connection between memoir and fiction. The participants were both enthusiastic and inspiring. That was when, in serious earnest, I began to pull together my stories and to write new ones which would illustrate an  original fusion of objective truth and pure fiction. This was why and how I wrote the stories one by one over this last year. And then laid them out and then I surveyed them to see just what I had created.

And now I turned to Damselfly to publish this new collection to be called Kaleidoscope - Stories from the Frontier.  This subtitle – like the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys. I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best. So I had my sub-title.  

In my publishing process I’ve used the services of Word-2.Kindle   to ensure the technical standard of the text. This company were both patient and helpful, which is just what I needed as I was going it alone.  Inspired by the Kaliedoscope on my mantelpiece. For the cover design I joined forces with my artistic, literary friend Avril Joy and we designed the cover together.

The blurb on the cover of Kaliedoscope took some thinking about. It has so many functions for any new reader. Referring to oneself in the third person is truly odd. Anyway this is what I ended up with:

In this collection of short stories Wendy Robertson acquaints us with the life of career writer Ruthie Evans - rooted in the North, travelling from Ireland to Singapore and Soviet Russia, featuring characters who reflect their Twentieth Century times. In the stories Ruthie emerges triumphant – complex, highly intelligent, conflicted and full of joy: a unique and special memoir, exploring the relationship between memoir and the short story.‘…truth and fiction like two hands clasping… A rare glimpse of what it’s like to be inside the process of writing… ‘Kathleen Jones: biographer‘More than just a memoir… a masterclass in the writing process.’ Sharon Griffiths: Columnist & Author‘A powerful writer.’ Mail on Sunday.

I truly hope you enjoy reading Kaliedosope. If you like the idea of this adventurous combination of memoir and fiction you might be inspired to write a story yourself - a story which could leap out the truth of your own experience. And then another. And another.

It seems to me now that this present lock-down situation could be perfect for anyone, writer or not, to embark on such a self-enhancing and satisfying project.

Buy?     Click Here

Also read two earlier posts  where I discuss  the complex relationship betweem Memoir and Fiction.

Here
https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=memoir+and+fiction

 and here 

https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Kaleidoscope.+A+creative+view+of+the+literary+connection+between+memoir+and+fiction.

If all this has made you curious about the stories. Here for you is the contents list:

Kaleidoscope: The  Stories

Keong Sak.................................................................... 1
‘I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’ Tim Rice
Watching and Feeling............................................... 18
‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison
unless the five senses are fully developed andopen.’ Jim Morrison.
Masculinity............................................................... 27
‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that maybecome a man; / Who dares do more is none.’Shakespeare.

This Working Life...................................................... 44
‘Nothing will work unless you do.’ Maya
Angelou

Patchouli...................................................................  53
‘There is nothing automatic about political
change, about liberation.’ Gloria Steinem.
Bandages................................................................... 63
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like
fear.’ C S Lewis
Ruthie’s Rant............................................................. 74
‘Even though I was shy, I found I would get
onstage of I had a new identity.’ David Bowie.
Rudder and Bridle..................................................... 79
‘The faculty of the imagination is both the
rudder and the bridle of the senses.’ Simone
de Beauvoir.

Brown Velvet............................................................. 83
‘I think writers are, at best, outsiders to the
society they inhabit.’ John Irving.]
The Woman Who Loved Jesus.................................. 95
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Educating Tegger..................................................... 104
‘The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.’Carl Rogers

Governess............................................................... 118
‘.… it is the duty of the poet to obtain
citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions.’ Ágnes Nemes Nagy
Going By Train......................................................... 152
‘I have learned how faces fall to bone/how under the eyelids terror lurks…’ Anna
Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House......................................................... 165
‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted, and human love will beseen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice......................................... 179
‘My daughter is one of my greatest
inspirations. Every day she surprises me andteaches me something.’ Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass - Parts One, Two & Three.....185
‘The first lie in fiction is that the author givessome order to the chaos of life.’ Isabel Allende.

Big Issue.................................................................. 212
‘Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinishedbusiness, that’s what.’ Salman Rushdie.

Tiananmen.............................................................. 231
‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your
balance you must keep moving.’ Albert
Einstein. 

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