 | Each time I’m baffled by a heavily-hyped but mediocre novel from one of the Big Five, I’m tempted to restrict my reviewing to small-press published novels. Not that there aren’t a fair number of turkeys among them, but at least the publishers aren’t screaming at us to read them each time we walk down the high street or go online. I know so well from my own experience with Inspired Quill how hard it is for the small publishers to get readers to take notice, but I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff that the heavyweights are putting out. |
It’s a drop in the ocean, but when I started my author newsletter recently, it occurred to me that I could do a little more to support my fellow small-press published authors beyond Twitter and this blog. Although the point of my newsletter is to promote my own writing – and, right now, especially the Kindle promotion to mark my book birthday, running until the end of this month – that doesn’t preclude my promoting other people’s too. For each quarterly addition, I aim to link to up to six of my favourite independent-press published novels that I’ve reviewed in the previous few months. If you follow this link, you can see which novels I’ve chosen this time round, and watch my interview with Bay TV.
| It’s a bit of a stretch from my whispered recommendation to flowers in the desert and back to voices of sanity among political posturing, but that’s what I’ve chosen for my response to this week’s flash fiction prompt. I wasn’t sure about it initially, but having been outed as a political writer, I thought I might as well, especially when Charli posted this follow-up to the prompt, on the courage to care. Driving out the goats  It’s hard to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you. It’s hard to govern from a place of ambiguity, not black and white, but grey. It’s hard to divide resources fairly when the rich insist they need a bigger slice. The quiet voice of reason reminds me of one of the most beautiful compliments I had from one of my therapy clients, although I’m not sure how much I’d earned it. He said, You don’t take sides. You’re on the side of sanity. I wish I had the wisdom and courage to take that position more often. Meanwhile, do be so kind as to check the progress of my birthday blog tour. |  Frankly, they had funny beards and they stank, so we rallied round the perma-tanned figure who promised to make them go away. Someone tried to tell us other animals had horns, but we were too busy driving the goats off the farm to care. Sweaty and satisfied, we cheered as they tumbled into the gulf. Five minutes, maybe ten, we basked in blissful silence, honey scenting the air. A sudden bellowing made us startle. As the bull ploughed through the crowd we thought he looked familiar, but we were too busy running to ask why he’d turned on us.  |
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