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
  • First two novels
    • 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
    • The accidental 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
    • Lyrics for the Loved Ones
  • 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
  • Main site

Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Rediscovering ordinary: Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston

31/10/2015

6 Comments

 
Picture
Over the course of a fiercely hot Texan summer, the five members of the Campbell family struggle to rediscover ordinary life. For Mum Laura, father Eric, grandpa Cecil and brother Griff, it’s as if their prayers have been answered: Justin, the teenage boy abducted four years earlier, has been found. But change, however much desired, requires a challenging adjustment. Will they ever be an ordinary family again?

I found this an extremely poignant return to the territory of abduction (as portrayed in Pretty Is and The Girl in the Red Coat) and family divided by grief (like Everything I Never Told You and A Song for Issy Bradley) as the members tiptoe around each other in an attempt to ease each other’s pain. The slow pace allows for evocative description and emotional depth, for example (p211):

Read More
6 Comments

Talk of the Toun by Helen MacKinven

29/10/2015

4 Comments

 
Angela has been best friends with Lorraine since their first day at St Philomena’s primary school aged four. Though Angela is from the council housing scheme and Lorraine a more affluent area where plastic lions grace the ends of driveways, her intelligence and ability to mop up her friend’s tears has made Angela the more dominant of the pair. But now, at seventeen and with the option of leaving school for a job at the local factory, it’s looking as if Lorraine has the greater social capital, and not only in attracting the boys. As her friend begins to pull away into the arms of former Borstal boy, Stevie, or, perhaps more shockingly, seduced by the pro-life horror movie, to hang around with Pamela, a.k.a. Little Miss Brown Nose, Angela feels betrayed. Can she eat her way to happiness or will a week with her parents and gran at a caravan site in Filey save the friendship?
Picture

Read More
4 Comments

Lost in translation? An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

27/10/2015

7 Comments

 
Picture
On the first day of every year, Aaliya has begun to translate one of the great works of literature into Arabic. What began as a personal challenge has become an obsession, with her thirty-seven translations stacked in boxes in the never-occupied maid’s room of her Beirut apartment, seen by no eyes other than her own. Unloved by her family, married at sixteen and liberated from that marriage three years later, her one female friend long dead and her one male friend disappeared, now she’s retired from her job at the bookshop these translations, along with the city in which she’s spent her entire life, are all that give her life meaning, all that keep her sane. Or do they? With her blue-dyed hair, with her emotional outbursts and fierce defence of her solitude, she seems on the brink of severing her ties to reality, increasingly alienated from all but the life of the mind.

Read More
7 Comments

Why read? The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood

25/10/2015

2 Comments

 
Why do we read fiction and why do we need a literary critic to comment on what we read? Seduced by a review in the Guardian and beguiled by the title, despite feeling distinctly unqualified, I thought I’d give this short book, a blend of memoir and criticism, a go. I was looking for ideas on how to improve my own fiction writing and reviewing and, failing that, insights into why so many of us have a passion for books.

The latter was the subject of the first section and, for me, the most engaging. As a child, James Wood found in fiction, as I did, “an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered” as a refuge from the restrictions of the religious culture of his home. Wood argues that, while in principle we have the freedom to think what we like, we’re afraid of that freedom: “we nervously step up to the edge of allowable thought, and then trigger the scrutiny of the censuring superego” (p11). Fiction lets us explore that otherness in a containing manner, the fictional characters whose minds we are privileged to inhabit, holding our hands along the way.
Picture

Read More
2 Comments

Flogging the first, fixing the second and rewriting the third: Am I now a novelist?

23/10/2015

14 Comments

 
Picture
This post marks three months since the publication of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, and a possible a transition to another stage of my writerly identity. A few weeks before publication I wrote of my ambivalence at claiming the title of author but, once my book was out there, and people were saying nice things about it, I felt less of a fictional fictioneer. Now, as I start to soft-pedal on the selling (for non-British readers, flog is slang for sell), get ready to edit the next one (another contract is signed and Underneath is scheduled for May 2017) and revisit the fast first draft of what I hope will be my third, I’m wondering if author is big enough to encompass the size of my ego. With three novels in mind, am I now a novelist?

The analogy isn’t very original but, like many clichés, it’s one that works: like children at different stages of development, these novels require different kinds of attention, fluctuating amounts even, as they venture into the world. Of necessity, my firstborn has been the priority over the last six months and, while it’s always going to need me, it can stand on its own two feet as I snuggle up with the baby, and the middle one prepares for its turn in the limelight.

Read More
14 Comments

All is not rosy in South Korea: The Defections by Hannah Michell

20/10/2015

6 Comments

 
Belonging matters in South Korea towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, so dual-heritage Mia, with an absent English mother and mute and severely disabled Korean father, is never going to fit in. Bullied at school and, at thirty, still resented by her stepmother for whom Mia’s green eyes and pale skin are a constant reminder of her husband’s transgressions. With a lifetime of unhappiness, Mia has idolised the English, ever grateful for her job as a translator at the British Embassy, and particularly in awe of her boss. But Thomas is not as admirable as he seems. His career and marriage already at risk through his alcohol addiction, complications abound when he becomes both emotionally and strategically entangled with Mia, putting them both in jeopardy.
Picture

Read More
6 Comments

Serendipity, coincidence and luck: The role of chance in fiction

18/10/2015

17 Comments

 
Picture
Keep at it! You’ll get there in the end if you try hard enough. How often did I come across such words as I struggled to find a publisher for my novel? And, now I’m published, am I going to regurgitate the mantra to others on the way up? No, I’m not, because – do you know what? – it’s bollocks. While writing a good book, and investing time and money to make it better, and treating each rejection as a trigger to try again, no doubt improve our chances, there’s no magic formula. Success doesn’t happen without an element of luck.

They mean well, those published writers who perpetuate the mythology. After all, the great unpublished are hounding them for scraps of encouraging advice. Looking back on their own rocky road to publication, all they see is hard graft and talent. If that got them through, why wouldn’t others achieve the same result? But history is a story told from the point of view of the victors. The voices of those who worked equally hard without the golden ticket go unheard, save a few brave exceptions. Although his emphasis is marketing, Dan Blank proves himself an ally of the disaffected, picturing success as a function of writing talent, author platform and luck.


Read More
17 Comments

Psychologists Write: Gerald Alan Fox

17/10/2015

 
I first embarked on a career in pharmacy on a P&O liner, followed by running a small group of pharmacies. The rare combination of pharmacy and psychology degrees led me to work with pharmaceutical manufacturers in the UK and Europe on psychotropic medicine and registration files. Concerned by the illegal drug scene, and the cavalier but legal use of tranquillisers and anti-depressants and sleeping tablets, I helped set up a drug helpline, a benzodiazepine dependency group, and gave a series of talks, on prescribing those drugs, to doctors in general practice (GPs) and hospital psychiatric units. I practised psychotherapy for over thirty years. I began analytically after two years at the receiving end and gradually moved towards gestalt and insight directed therapies eventually combining all disciplines with CBT. This eclectic approach adapted well to individual needs and tended to shorten the course of treatment.
Picture

Read More

Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 19. The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt

14/10/2015

6 Comments

 
Picture
The Sorrows of an American takes us through a year in the life of New York psychotherapist, Erik Davidsen, and those who are close to him: his mother; his sister, Inga; his niece, Sonia; his patients; and his tenant, Miranda, and her beguiling five-year-old daughter, Eglantene. It’s a glimpse of ordinary life which shows us the extraordinary twists and turns of the human condition. It’s also a fine example of what a talented and committed author, prepared to do her homework (with impressive acknowledgements of psychiatrists and psychotherapists consulted and the author’s supervised voluntary work in a psychiatric hospital) can make of this strange profession.

Like many therapists, Erik is vulnerable, although this vulnerability is woven so well into the story we hardly label it as such. Middle-aged, lonely after his divorce, his father’s death – and the discovery of his old diaries – prompts an investigation into his own back story. He can take things to heart, such as when he’s snubbed by his tenant (p40-41):

Read More
6 Comments

On book pricing: a cautionary tale

12/10/2015

7 Comments

 
Picture
One of the things I was careful to check before signing up with my publisher, was the proposed retail price of my book. I’d come across other small presses where the paperbacks were the price of a hardback from one of the Big Five. While I appreciate that small print runs contribute to the higher unit costs for the independent publisher, most readers wouldn’t understand. Why should they pick up a paperback from an unknown author and publisher when they could get a discounted hardback from a household name and half a dozen fancy bookmarks for the same price? How could I entice friends and family to support my launch if they had a sneaking suspicion they were being ripped off?

So I was delighted when debut novel, Sugar and Snails, came out priced at the lower end of the scale. With its beautiful cover and quality printing, people queued for signed copies, a few buying an extra one or two for friends. They were happy, I was happy, my publisher was happy – until I spoke to some booksellers.


Read More
7 Comments

World Mental Health Day: Dignity in Fiction?

10/10/2015

13 Comments

 
Following on from last month’s post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m marking World Mental Health Day on Annecdotal this weekend. The 2015 theme is dignity, so I’m highlighting sympathetic portrayals of mental health issues in fiction. I’ve blogged elsewhere about the mental health themes in my own novel, Sugar and Snails, including the development of the false self to protect one’s vulnerabilities; insecure attachment; and invisible vulnerabilities and self-harm; as well as my personal connection to those issues in the struggle to find a mind of my own and my post on Stigma Fighters about being a wounded healer. So I won’t repeat that here (but do follow the links if you haven’t already); focusing instead on the ways in which my recent reading provide insight into the mental health challenges we face across the lifespan.

The fragility of early parenthood couldn’t be captured better than in the character of Ari in After Birth by Elisa Albert. Still traumatised by an overly medicalised birth, she’s lonely and she’s angry at the structures that estrange women from vital sources of genuine support. This should be considered a prerequisite of a healthy society, not only for the sake of the struggling parents, but for the future well-being of their offspring. Cuts in public spending in these areas hurt us all.

Read More
13 Comments

Traumatised teens: After the Bombing by Clare Morrall

7/10/2015

6 Comments

 
Alma Braithwaite, a thirty-something music teacher at a girls’ school in early-60s Exeter, lives alone amongst the dust of the house where she grew up. Orphaned at fifteen by an air raid that also destroyed part of her school, Alma seems stuck in the past. That’s certainly the view of the new headmistress, Miss Yates, whose reforming ways Alma seems determined to resist. But, though now elevated to the role of teacher at her old school, there’s a part of Alma that’s still a traumatised teenager, dependent on the former structures for her sense of self.
Picture

Read More
6 Comments

Creation myths: Returning home in my reading and writing

4/10/2015

17 Comments

 
Picture
Many of us are fascinated by where we came from: the parents and places that made us who we are. While it seems we need to leave home, either physically or geographically, to become ourselves, at some point we’re drawn back to reconcile ourselves to the gap between the reality of our personal origins and the myths we’ve been sold or created. Ambivalence about home is such a core feature of my own reading and writing, it’s a struggle to condense it into the ninety-nine words Charli Mills has requested this week on the theme of returning to a place of origin. Join me on a tour of my literary bookshelves while I contemplate my own take on the prompt.


Read More
17 Comments
    Picture
    Free ebook: click the image to claim yours.
    Picture
    Available now
    Picture
    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 third 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

    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    March 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    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 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, joshtasman, tedeytan, striatic, goforchris, torbakhopper, maggibautista, andreboeni, snigl3t, rainy city, frankieleon