Category: Matilda Windsor

January marked ten years since I started this blog and last October I published my 1000th post. Whether or not that’s a good thing, I’m minded to celebrate. How about a retrospective?

I achieved my dream of becoming a novelist almost 8 years ago, but I want this post to go beyond my bookshelves. Yet, when I look at the world outside, with the climate crisis and increasing inequalities, the view is bleak.

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Matilda’s multiple identities

20/10/2022

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast, reading from and talking about my novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. Whilst preparing for the session, I hoped I wouldn’t embarrass myself by sharing a version of my character from a different book. Launching the prequel novella, Stolen Summers, in the same month as checking the edits to the currently nameless sequel, I could all too easily have got my various Matildas confused.

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Nine mini reviews

11/8/2022

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It's not often I showcase a bunch of exclusively male authors, although there's no reason why not. This includes two translations, a short story collection and a crime novel in addition to my usual literary novels. Of the latter, two prioritise illustrating 20th-century sociopolitical changes in England over story. The other three take us to Punjab, Yemen and and fantasy library midway between life and death. Read on to see what I thought of them.

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A Matilda Windsor film fest

5/11/2021

It’s been another busy week of book promo, with two live-stream online interviews and two which were recorded in September debuting on YouTube. But I’m blaming Charli Mills for the title and narcissistic content of this post: you’ll have to read – or scroll – to the end to find out why.

While I enjoy these video conversations, I do get nervous to the extent of wondering why I put myself forward. But when I get a positive review from someone who finds a strong personal connection with the novel, as I did this morning, I feel extra motivated to do my utmost to introduce Matty to more potential readers.

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In the public eye: Trust & Blue Skinned Gods

28/10/2021

Here we have two novels about (celebrity, and the darker side of men whose virtue is part of their fame. In the first, translated from the Italian and set in Rome, an author, teacher and public intellectual can never completely relax into his positive reputation for fear a secret he shared with a former lover will be revealed. In the second, set in New York and rural Tamil Nadu, a young man brought up to believe he’s a living god has to decide whether to continue in the role his father and his followers have given him when he discovers the truth about himself.

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The Memory by Judith Barrow … a review and a videoed conversation

20/10/2021

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Irene is eight when her sister Rose is born, and she can’t understand why her mother isn’t more excited. Her family used to be fun, laughing and playing, but now her mum hardly does anything, leaving Irene, her dad and her nanna to attend to the baby.

Presumably, Lillian, the mother, is suffering from postnatal depression, but this drags on and on. She can’t accept that she has a daughter with Down’s syndrome. As Irene takes on the mothering duties, Lillian seems less and less part of the family.

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Mental health advocacy through fiction

5/10/2021

The sun was a bonus on yesterday's walk for my own mental health

As a reviewer of my recently published novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, commented, fiction can both educate and entertain. I’m grateful for how much I have learnt about other cultures and lifestyles as a reader, and aspire to do likewise as a writer. Given the stigma still superglued to the issue, I’m particularly keen to advocate for mental health. But can I? Do I? How would I know if I was?

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Fear of flying?

28/8/2021

Pigs will fly before I board a plane again. It’s not that I’m anxious, it’s that - even before the pandemic - long-distance travel no longer felt worth the effort.

Diana, the narrator of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, wasn’t afraid of being airborne either. So why did I send her on a Fear of Flying course? Because, while not averse to flying in a literal sense, she was grounded by inhibition. Fear of intimacy, fear of sex, fear of revealing her true self. When she wouldn’t fly out to Cairo to visit Simon, her friends assumed she was phobic, and clubbed together to pay for her cure.

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How my hometown feeds my writing

31/7/2021

I grew up in a small coastal town in north-west England, and left to go to university at eighteen. It wasn’t the prettiest of places, but we had the Lake District to the east of us, sandy beaches north and south and a view across the sea to Scotland.

I wrote in secret when I lived there, stories set in some undefined elsewhere. Fictional towns no more interesting than the one that made me, except that they gave my mind room to roam.

It felt significant that I began writing my first published novel, Sugar and Snails, on returning from a long-distance walk of almost 200 miles that began near my hometown. It cemented the idea of having to leave it behind to write.

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The camera never lies

4/7/2021

A black-and-white photograph links two of the three point-of-view characters in my new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. In Henry’s interpretation, it shows a father, his glamorous teenage daughter and his young son on holiday at Blackpool, a popular English seaside resort. Matty’s version has a ragged edge and shows only two people: an unknown woman in a polka-dot dress holding the hand of a boy with the Eiffel Tower sprouting from his head. If these two renditions of the same events can be reconciled, perhaps brother and sister will be reunited. Perhaps Matilda Windsor will make it home.

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Interiority: The Performance & Nervous System

17/4/2021

Let’s consider two novels published this month which direct the reader’s gaze towards the characters’ inner lives, mentally and physically. The first, set in Australia during the recent rampaging bushfires, focuses on the characters’ wandering minds as they watch a play. The second, set in the Americas, looks in on the body and outwards to the stars.

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A writer’s journey through the hero’s journey #amreading #amwriting

13/4/2021

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What an honour to be name-checked in Charli’s post introducing the latest flash fiction challenge on rethinking the hero’s journey. Having been obsessed with my reservations about this story structure in the past, and equally obsessed with recording random ideas for the blog, I went to my drafts folder to look for something I could revise. Step forward Unheroic characters, grief, ambivalence and mourning. Right, okay? Except I find I’m no longer so obsessed. Never mind, some of what I dictated so earnestly a couple of years ago can be salvaged.

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Rereading Mr Loverman & The Secret Scripture

5/4/2021

These two recent rereads focus on older characters who have been diminished by their culture’s punitive attitudes to their sexuality. In the first, a contemporary Londoner has hidden his love for his closest friend on account of the Caribbean community’s homophobia. In the second, a woman has been ostracised in twentieth-century Ireland because of the misogyny and genophobia among the powerful Catholic clergy. Yet a degree of redemption is offered to the characters, albeit late in life.

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Wanderers: Salina & The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

26/3/2021

Salina roams aimlessly through the desert, sequentially accompanied by each of her three sons. Harold is physically and mentally unprepared for his epic journey, although he does have a specific destination in sight. Salina’s story unfolds in a newly-published novella, translated from the French; Harold’s in a deceptively light bestseller, published in 2012.

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Have I swallowed a horse to catch a fly?

22/1/2021

If I can't tell whether I'm coming or going, it might be because I'm doing both. Promoting my first novel while checking proofs of the next is making me dizzy, but there's a logic to it. I think.

My next novel is my best yet and I want as many people as possible to read it. In order to read it, people need to be aware of it, and the ideal way of bringing it to the attention of potential readers is through email. So I set myself the objective of finding 100 new subscribers by April.

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How would you answer the covid novel’s call?

28/6/2020

History can’t have got the memo. The virus destined to put the world on pause has had us glued to the news: first with the exposure of right-wing government incompetence, then with the spotlight on racism we can no longer ignore. Whether this depresses or delights us, it’s hard to keep up. What’s the role of the writer – particularly writers like me with a tiny readership – in historic times? Should novelists switch to facts from fiction? Should we try to shape historic discourse or step back and observe?

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On rescuing and burnout: are you trying to save the world?

31/5/2020

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A new Twitter follower picked up on my post on self-compassion and flagged her own about the urge to rescue other people when the one who really needs rescuing is herself. Well, that got me rethinking a familiar theme which might account for why my email inbox is clogged and my to-do list is endless when the world is meant to be on pause. Apologies to those struggling with a loss of human contact and structure but, from where I stand, there’s a surfeit of life-belts in an extremely small pond.

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The politics of unkindness and our collective mental health

18/5/2020

I was ready for mental health awareness week early this year, with a post prepared on the proposed theme of sleep. Fortunately, before pressing publish, I checked back on the Mental Health Foundation website to discover that, on account of the pandemic, they’d abandoned sleep for kindness; but it wasn’t too much trouble to write another post. There’s no doubt that receiving, doing or witnessing acts of kindness raises the spirits, something we all need right now. And while I wouldn’t want to detract from the heart-warming generosity of neighbour helping neighbour, there’s another side of the story that needs our attention. The culture of both the UK and US as we went into this crisis was one of massive unkindness; an iceberg that clapping for carers can’t possibly melt. And it’s disastrous for our collective mental health.

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In which Anne disappears down the rabbit hole

11/5/2020

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Image by Prawny from Pixabay

At 15.55 one Sunday in mid-April, Anne decided to go stark raving bonkers. Of course she was conscious of the contradiction: madness that’s chosen, isn’t madness at all. Nevertheless, she was earnest in her objective, if unclear how it would be achieved. She even made a note to that effect on the information sheet for the novel she’d just been reading. The novel about depression with rabbits in the title that had just made her laugh out loud.

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Sleep, insomnia and mental health in contemporary fiction

3/5/2020

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Early this year, I was prescribed a course of antibiotics. While I’m grateful to live in a time and place where such things are available, this medication did not like me. Not only did they leave a nasty taste in my mouth, they disturbed my sleep to the extent of fleetingly fragmenting my mind in a manner akin to psychosis. So I don’t need convincing of the importance of getting sufficient sleep to our psychological (and physical) well-being; but we can also get too hung up on sleep such that the associated anxiety can be almost as damaging as not sleeping. I drafted this post back in February when I saw that sleep was the theme of this year’s mental health awareness week; although that's now changed to kindness, with many suffering insomnia in lockdown, this post on sleep in my own reading and writing still seems worth sharing.

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Unrecognised: Rabbits for Food & Miss Iceland

24/4/2020

Is there discrimination against women writers? (Is there even more discrimination against older women writers?) Probably but, there being even worse things to get hung up about right now, I’ll gloss over the fact that these two novels about under-appreciated female writers – one in 1960s Iceland, the other in 21st-century New York – come from fairly successful female authors. With a couple of caveats, either or both would make great lockdown reads.

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The positives of pessimism as we await the pandemic peak

10/4/2020

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What character have you played in the early chapters of the dystopian novel we’re all living? Were you the sensible one whom the others ridicule or were you, like me, the seven-stone weakling who follows the trail into the ramshackle warehouse without telling her colleagues where she’s going or charging her phone? Although I’ve contracted no symptoms and stuck to the letter of the law, I look back in horror on my attitude of only a month ago; I ought to have been more cautious right from the start.

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Discovering interesting echoes of our current crisis as I edit my novel

5/4/2020

I desperately wanted my third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, to be published this year. For one thing, I like the ring of 2020. For another, I’ve been working on it long enough. Begun with three character sketches in autumn 2014, I completed an 80,000 word first draft in January 2015 and, after various ups and downs, including ballooning to 130,000 words, had it ready for reader feedback three years later.

When Inspired Quill, who published my first three books couldn’t find space in this year’s schedule, I considered self-publishing, and, for a whole week in January was convinced I was going with a pricey but prestigious assisted self-publishing outfit until it became clear that, even setting aside printing costs, I’d lose money on Amazon sales unless I ratcheted up the price. Now, of course, with events cancelled for the next several weeks, I feel remarkably lucky to have finally signed with Inspired Quill for May 2021.

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What’s your favourite novel about mental health?

8/10/2019

Having spent the bulk of my wage-earning life in mental health care, it’s not surprising that the theme crops up in my writing. But, as a reader, my professional experience can make me more picky. For World Mental Health Day this week, I’m asking for your favourite novels about mental health, sharing some of my own reading recommendations and illustrating how I’ve drawn on the theme in my fiction. Continue reading also for news of how to be in with the chance of winning a signed copy of my next novel, which is set in a psychiatric hospital in the process of closing down.

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Writing isms: would you risk causing offence in your fiction? #amwriting

13/5/2019