annethology
  • Home
    • About Annethology
    • About me >
      • A little more about me
    • About my books
    • Author talks
    • Contact me
    • Forthcoming events
    • World Mental Health Day
    • Privacy
    • Sign up for my newsletter
  • Sugar and Snails
    • Acknowledgements
    • Blog tour, Q&A's and feature articles >
      • Birthday blog tour
      • S&S on tour 2022
    • Early endorsements
    • Events >
      • Launch photos
      • Launch party videos
    • in pictures
    • Media
    • If you've read the book
    • Polari
    • Reading group questions
    • Reviews
    • In the media
  • Underneath
    • Endorsements and reviews
    • Launch party and events
    • Pictures
    • Questions for book groups
    • The stories underneath the novel
  • Matilda Windsor series
    • Matilda Windsor >
      • What readers say
      • For book groups
      • Interviews, articles and features
      • Matty on the move
      • Who were you in 1990?
      • Asylum lit
      • Matilda Windsor media
    • Stolen Summers >
      • Stolen Summers reviews
  • Short stories
    • Somebody’s Daughter
    • Becoming Someone (anthology) >
      • Becoming Someone (video readings)
      • Becoming Someone reviews
      • Becoming Someone online book chat
    • Print and downloads
    • Read it online
    • Quick reads
  • Free ebook
  • Annecdotal
    • Annecdotal blog
    • Annecdotal Press
    • Articles >
      • Print journalism
      • Where psychology meets fiction
    • Fictional therapists
    • Reading and reviews >
      • Reviews A to H
      • Reviews I to M
      • Reviews N to Z
      • Nonfiction
      • Themed quotes
      • Reading around the world
  • Shop
    • Inspired Quill (my publisher)
    • Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
    • Amazon UK
    • Amazon US
    • books2read

About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

It's World Tourism Day

27/9/2013

5 Comments

 
Picture
It's great to travel, to experience different cultures and/or take a relaxing break from the drudgery of home.  Writers especially seem to relish getting away. But how often do we recognise the impact of our holiday on the communities we visit?  This year's World Tourism Day draws attention to the importance of water in sustainable tourism.  The British charity, Tourism Concern, highlights the problem of water inequity and provides some useful guidance on using water responsibly while on holiday.  While I try to do my bit, I'm more of a dreamer than an activist, so my contribution to the day has to be a couple of stories about the ethics of rich world / poor world tourism: Silver Bangles, published by Amarillo Bay, and A House for the Wazungu, coming soon from Chuffed Buff Books.

Coming next month (hopefully) on Annecdotal:

# my tottering TBR pile

# character motivation in the debut novels featured in my author Q&A's

# the third instalment of my feature on fictional psychologists and
psychotherapists


# how the elephant god got his head: on storytelling versus story writing

And maybe more.  Do come back and enjoy!
5 Comments

Are writers especially empathic?

22/9/2013

4 Comments

 
Picture
Reviewing my latest interview with a debut novelist,  I’m wondering how come I keep selecting novels where the protagonist goes hungry.  Is this about my drive to connect writing with my garden produce, or the authors’ own obsession with food?

As I tuck in five-year-old Pea alongside twelve-year-old 
Haoua, I’m hoping the grown-up protagonists of the other novels, like the anxious but hands-off adults in The Night Rainbow, will offer her something to eat.  Yet, somehow, I don't think Futh will notice that Pea’s mother’s forgotten to feed her, and I’m really not sure how patient Grace would be with small children, but perhaps Satish could get his mother to rustle up some party food. I’ve read some of Pea’s interesting thoughts on food, but does she like chakli?  I suppose he’d be willing to try anything, as long as Margot goes first.

Nutrition isn’t only a biological necessity; in life, as in novels, food symbolises care, and so fiddling around with it serves to make life harder for the protagonists. Writers sacrifice the desires of their characters in favour of the reader’s love of narrative tension.  On one level, the thwarting of even imaginary people seems harsh, yet one of the things that struck me across the five Q&A’s I’ve completed so far was the authors’ empathy for their creations.  Claire King told me she
loved the way I could make myself feel emotions with fiction I had written myself
and, over on The Literary Sofa, she highlighted one consequence of writing from a child’s point of view as the need for plenty of tissues.  Shelley Harris was so wrapped up in her character’s psyche that she chose
his career unconsciously, as he would have done himself.  The impetus for Gavin Weston’s novel was his concern about the fate of a  girl his family had sponsored; its completion has driven him to take a more
active role in relation to the practice of child marriage by becoming an ambassador for FORWARD.

While we might expect writers to empathise with their child characters and/or those who have been treated unjustly, their empathy for their more prickly protagonists was also apparent:

Read More
4 Comments

When may writers recycle their words?

17/9/2013

6 Comments

 
Picture
A writer is someone who edits, not just culling the dross but being brave enough to throw out the good stuff if it isn't earning its keep.  All that waste would horrify Selina, the central character in my newly published short story, Fat Footprints, whose close relationships are in jeopardy due to her taking the mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle to the extreme.  So it's on her behalf I'm asking if there's ever a way of reusing those unwanted words.  Like taking our fashion mistakes to the charity shop and wilted vegetables to the compost, is there ever life after death for our redundant sentences?


Read More
6 Comments

9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 2. The Rapture by Liz Jensen

12/9/2013

2 Comments

 
Picture
In Liz Jensen's apocalyptic climate-change thriller, Gabrielle Fox is a new psychologist in an adolescent forensic mental health unit.  Taking up the post on the rebound from a personal and professional crisis of her own, Gabrielle is no match for the disturbed and disturbing teenager with whom she becomes entangled.  Bethany Krall, a matricidal religious maniac (PS– not her actual diagnosis), is about to embark on a psychological and geographical journey and is determined to take Gabrielle along.

Gabrielle's backstory is compelling, drawing the reader in, but I found her professional persona somewhat confusing.  She is described as a psychologist but she’s come to replace a
psychotherapist and the nuts and bolts of her work would position her more as art therapist.  As mentioned in the
introduction to this series of posts, such subtle distinctions between the various professions can be difficult to untangle from the outside, and may not matter so much to the average reader, but for me it was as jarring as a switch of point of view mid-scene.  But setting these brand distinctions aside, her credibility as any kind of mental health professional is questionable and, I'm afraid, detracts from an otherwise page-turning plot.

Read More
2 Comments

Writerly Kinesthesia

7/9/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
A good actor reveals a great deal about the character they are portraying even before they open their mouths to speak.  It's not just down to clothes and make-up, but how they inhabit their bodies, how and how much they move.  A writer faces a similar challenge in embodying her characters but, being cerebral creatures, we might pay more attention to imagining ourselves
into another mind living through another situation than writing from the appropriate physical perspective. 

In the wonderfully wacky film, Being John Malkovich, a puppeteer discovers a portal into the actor’s head.  While I’d hesitate to imply I understand what such a complex story is  about, the motivation for returning to the portal seems as much about controlling another’s mind as his body.  Rather like a writer, don’t you think? 

For the movie’s female characters, there’s the frisson of gender-bending sex that makes me think of the female writer writing from the male point of view. I don’t know about other female writers, but when I’m a male narrator, unless he's having sex or going to the toilet, I tend to think of the dangly bit between his legs in symbolic, rather than  flesh and blood, terms.  

Yet at some level we need to convey our characters’ gender, age and physique through their bodies as well as their minds, and to experience those bodies from the inside out.  Does a fat person occupy a chair differently to a skinny one: the first squeezing into a confined space and the second getting bum-ache if you leave them sitting too long with insufficient padding?  Would a short person notice different things to a tall one as they walk down a street because their gaze is at a different level? 
What difference does it make to have big feet, or small?  To piss from a standing position or sitting down?

Complicated stuff?  It might be easier, in some ways, to create characters with unusual or distorted bodies, than to write from an ordinary body that is not one’s own.  But woe betide the writer who lets her attention lapse, even momentarily, and retreats into her own physique.  

I had great fun writing about Tamsin, a young woman who wakes up on the morning of her wedding to find that her neck has grown as long as her arm. But with every revision of the story I had to check on the physicals, walking about the house with my hand in the air where I reckoned her head would be to ensure I hadn’t fudged the mechanics.

How is your own writerly kinaesthesia and do you have examples of convincing and unconvincing literary bodies to share?

1 Comment

Annecdotal gets a new header

2/9/2013

0 Comments

 
While published novelists will often blog about their new book covers, I get to announce the earthshattering news that I’ve changed the masthead on my website.  What do you mean, you didn’t notice?  I’ll assume that’s
because you’ve been too dazzled by my words. To be fair, all I’ve done is swap one row of novels for another. Side-by-side you might mistake it for a children’s spot-the-difference puzzle:
Picture
Picture
On the left, the random sample of my favourite novels culled from my bookshelves that made up the old header; on the right, the bones of the new one: a selection of books that have had at least a walk-on part on the blog, or will do soon.  Apart from a couple of novels I hadn’t even read when I made my first choice back in April (Harmattan; The House of Sleep; The Orphan Master’s Son – and I certainly wasn’t consciously planning to position them together slap in the middle), I’m surprised there’s so little overlap (only Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto springs up in both, although Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin also meets the criteria).  Clearly, my mind works differently when I’m picking works to illustrate a point or a theme.  But I wouldn't want to make too much of that: in all honesty what constitutes my all time favourite novels varies from one day to the next.
Picture
In fact, less than a fortnight after I launched it, the new masthead is already out of date, with significant omissions such as Claire King's The Night Rainbow, the latest addition to my interviews with debut novelists.  But if I tried to update it every time I read a new book I'd
never get any writing done.

That said, I thought it would be fun to have some dialogue around my selections, and got carried away with the idea of quiz before I noticed it’s enough of a challenge to identify some of the novels from the photos, never mind answer questions about them.  So if anyone’s still reading, here are the titles:

Notes on a Scandal
The Book of Daniel
Room
Bel Canto
Small Island
The Corrections
After the Fire a Still Small Voice
Unless
Middlemarch
Hope: a Tragedy
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Gulliver’s Travels
The Other Hand
The Other Side of Silence
Those Who Save Us
Hide and Seek
Brick Lane
The Spire
The Lighthouse
Pure
The Other Side of You
The Lifeboat
Harmattan
The House of Sleep
The Orphan Master’s Son
The Rapture
Jubilee
Disgrace
Bel Canto
The Crimson Petal and the White
Regeneration
Quarantine
Now, here at last, three questions, one each on the themes of author, character and setting:

1.  How many debut novels are represented in each picture?  (Clue: not all of them have featured in my author interviews.)

2.  How many novels feature a psychological therapist as a main character?

3.  How many novels have predominantly British settings and how many don’t?

I’ll come back with my answers in a couple of weeks – and then we can argue who’s got it right.  In the meantime, do share your opinions on my selections.
0 Comments
    Picture
    Free ebook: click the image to claim yours.
    Picture
    OUT NOW: The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
    Picture
    Find a review
    Picture
    Fictional therapists
    Picture
    Picture
    About Anne Goodwin
    Picture
    My published books
    entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
    Picture
    My latest novel, published May 2021
    Picture
    My debut novel shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize
    Picture
    Picture
    My second novel published May 2017.
    Picture
    Short stories on the theme of identity published 2018
    Anne Goodwin's books on Goodreads
    Sugar and Snails Sugar and Snails
    reviews: 32
    ratings: 52 (avg rating 4.21)

    Underneath Underneath
    reviews: 24
    ratings: 60 (avg rating 3.17)

    Becoming Someone Becoming Someone
    reviews: 8
    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.56)

    GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4 GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4
    reviews: 4
    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.44)

    The Best of Fiction on the Web The Best of Fiction on the Web
    reviews: 3
    ratings: 3 (avg rating 4.67)

    2022 Reading Challenge

    2022 Reading Challenge
    Anne has read 2 books toward their goal of 100 books.
    hide
    2 of 100 (2%)
    view books
    Picture
    Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.  
    Picture
    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
    reader, writer,

    slug-slayer, tramper of moors, 
    recovering psychologist, 
    struggling soprano, 
    author of three fiction books.

    LATEST POSTS HERE
    I don't post to a schedule, but average  around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), 
    some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books.  

    Your comments are welcome any time any where.

    Get new posts direct to your inbox ...

    Enter your email address:

    or click here …

    RSS Feed


    Picture

    Tweets by @Annecdotist
    Picture
    New short story, “My Dirty Weekend”
    Picture
    Let’s keep in touch – subscribe to my newsletter
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture

    Popular posts

    • Compassion: something we all need
    • Do spoilers spoil?
    • How to create a convincing fictional therapist
    • Instructions for a novel
    • Looking at difference, embracing diversity
    • Never let me go: the dilemma of lending books
    • On loving, hating and writers’ block
      On Pop, Pirates and Plagiarism
    • READIN' for HER reviews
    • Relishing the cuts
    • The fast first draft
    • The tragedy of obedience
    • Writers and therapy: a love-hate relationship?

    Categories/Tags

    All
    Animals
    Annecdotist Hosts
    Annecdotist On Tour
    Articles
    Attachment Theory
    Author Interviews
    Becoming Someone
    Being A Writer
    Blogging
    Bodies
    Body
    Bookbirthday
    Books For Writers
    Bookshops
    CB Book Group
    Character
    Childhood
    Christmas
    Classics
    Climate Crisis
    Coming Of Age
    Counsellors Cafe
    Creative Writing Industry
    Creativity
    Cumbria
    Debut Novels
    Disability
    Editing
    Emotion
    Ethics
    Ethis
    Family
    Feedback And Critiques
    Fictional Psychologists & Therapists
    Food
    Friendship
    Futuristic
    Gender
    Genre
    Getting Published
    Giveaways
    Good Enough
    Grammar
    Gratitude
    Group/organisational Dynamics
    Hero’s Journey
    History
    Humour
    Identity
    Illness
    Independent Presses
    Institutions
    International Commemorative Day
    Jane Eyre
    Kidney Disease
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Live Events
    Lyrics For The Loved Ones
    Marketing
    Matilda Windsor
    Memoir
    Memory
    Mental Health
    Microfiction
    Motivation
    Music
    MW Prequel
    Names
    Narrative Voice
    Nature / Gardening
    Networking
    Newcastle
    Nonfiction
    Nottingham
    Novels
    Pandemic
    Peak District
    Perfect Match
    Poetry
    Point Of View
    Politics
    Politics Current Affairs
    Presentation
    Privacy
    Prizes
    Psychoanalytic Theory
    Psychology
    Psycholoists Write
    Psychotherapy
    Race
    Racism
    Rants
    Reading
    Real Vs Imaginary
    Religion
    Repetitive Strain Injury
    Research
    Reviewing
    Romance
    Satire
    Second Novels
    Settings
    Sex
    Shakespeare
    Short Stories General
    Short Stories My Published
    Short Stories Others'
    Siblings
    Snowflake
    Somebody's Daughter
    Stolen Summers
    Storytelling
    Structure
    Sugar And Snails
    Technology
    The
    The Guestlist
    Therapy
    TikTok
    TNTB
    Toiletday
    Tourism
    Toxic Positivity
    Transfiction
    Translation
    Trauma
    Unconscious
    Unconscious, The
    Underneath
    Voice Recognition Software
    War
    WaSBihC
    Weather
    Work
    Writing Process
    Writing Technique

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Picture
    BLOGGING COMMUNITIES
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from havens.michael34, romana klee, mrsdkrebs, Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It., adam & lucy, dluders, Joybot, Hammer51012, jorgempf, Sherif Salama, eyspahn, raniel diaz, E. E. Piphanies, scaredofbabies, Nomadic Lass, paulternate, Tony Fischer Photography, archer10 (Dennis), slightly everything, impbox, jonwick04, country_boy_shane, dok1, Out.of.Focus, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Midwest Region, Elvert Barnes, guillenperez, Richard Perry, jamesnaruke, Juan Carlos Arniz Sanz, El Tuerto, kona99, maveric2003, !anaughty!, Patrick Denker, David Davies, hamilcar_south, idleformat, Dave Goodman, Sharon Mollerus, photosteve101, La Citta Vita, A Girl With Tea, striatic, carlosfpardo, Damork, Elvert Barnes, UNE Photos, jurvetson, quinn.anya, BChristensen93, Joelk75, ashesmonroe, albertogp123, >littleyiye<, mudgalbharat, Swami Stream, Dicemanic, lovelihood, anyjazz65, Tjeerd, albastrica mititica, jimmiehomeschoolmom