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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

Fish out of water in Nevada #99WordStories

23/1/2024

6 Comments

 
Charli tells us this week she feels like a fish out of water in Nevada. If she – a Californian – feels estranged, what would it be like for this Brit?
 
As it happens, I’ve been to Nevada. I had a major life event there. But, as I’m sure Charli would tell you, Las Vegas doesn’t represent the whole state.
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6 Comments

Wrecking Weather: A sorry tale of robotic helplines and a cli-fi flash #clifi #99WordStories

16/1/2024

2 Comments

 
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At the end of last year, Storm Gerrit brought down our internet / telephone cable. When we texted our service provider, we expected we’d have to wait for a repair. Ours wouldn’t be the only household that had lost that vital connection. Not hearing back from the engineers and, with a bank holiday looming, Mr A managed a temporary repair.

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2 Comments

Severe illness from the inside: Body Kintsugi & Rocking with the Reaper

7/10/2022

4 Comments

 
Here are two recent reads about a woman’s experience of serious illness and associated treatments and surgeries. The first is a translated novella and the second a chunky mélange of memoir, popular psychology and self-help. But, genre aside, what distinguishes them is their tone: the first, distant and matter-of-fact; the second, unashamedly emotional. See which you prefer.

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I’m mourning my lost identity as physically healthy

25/7/2022

14 Comments

 
I pulled out of a leading one walk through Jane Eyre territory when Mr A remarked I was breathless just getting from a hospital bed to the bathroom. I pulled out of the second (scheduled for tomorrow) when, although much improved, I realised I couldn’t walk, talk and carry a backpack simultaneously, especially not uphill. Now even the dog walkers have noticed I’m tramping the fields uncharacteristically slowly. How to explain to acquaintances that’s not the real me?
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Meadows for butterflies

1/7/2022

4 Comments

 
The English garden is in constant flux at this time of year. Plants shed their flowers as new ones begin to bloom. Fruit ripens and beanstalks snake up bamboo poles. Shrubs double or triple in size and greenery colonises every inch of bare soil.

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4 Comments

Micro fiction and 9 micro reviews

18/5/2022

6 Comments

 
This latest batch of micro reviews – the first of this year – features a Nigerian classic novel; a non-fiction book about Britain’s black communities during the First World War; a novella about the bond between a woman and her granddaughter; a psychological thriller set in a care home; a memoir about psychiatric abuse; a novel about love against the odds; a classic novel about a young woman’s breakdown; a whimsical fantasy and an Indian retelling of King Lear.
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6 Comments

Kinds of caring: Marzahn, Mon Amour & Here Again Now

8/3/2022

6 Comments

 
Here are two books featuring different kinds of caring: the first a translated memoir about a healthcare professional who looks after people’s minds along with their feet; the second a novel about an actor who opens his home to his struggling father and to his childhood friend.

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Ten more mini reviews and a fun flash about the flying penis

26/11/2021

10 Comments

 
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These ten new reviews might be condensed, but the books they represent are vast in scope. The settings range from a small town half an hour’s drive from me (where I hope to go tomorrow to sing choruses from the Messiah) to Scotland, Belgium, Libya, Southern Africa, the Philippines and North America, from past atrocities to a hi-tech future. Themes range from scarred families, writers’ fragile egos, identity, corruption and the climate crisis. My selection includes one memoir, one literary translation and two novels aimed at young adults. Let me know if any take your fancy.


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10 Comments

Otherwise forgotten: The Girl Behind the Gates & Stephen from the Inside Out

5/9/2021

10 Comments

 
I’m sharing my reflections on two books I read recently, which I enjoyed despite not being my usual reads. I bought them because they relate to my interest in mental health issues, but there must have been more than that. Both are based on true stories - the second is actually creative non-fiction - about the author’s friendship with someone who has a psychiatric diagnosis and has been subjected to a care system that is often uncaring. Like my latest novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, they celebrate marginalised lives.

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Memorial Memoirs: Absolutely Delicious & Apprenticed to My Mother

7/12/2020

7 Comments

 
I’ve recently read these two memoirs which celebrate the fortitude of the authors’ mothers, especially in later life. Both stories are precipitated by a death: in the case of Alison Jean Lester’s memoir, it’s her mother’s confrontation with terminal cancer; for Geoff Le Pard, it’s the revelation of a new side of his mother’s character on becoming a widow. Both are touching tributes, peppered with poetry and humour.

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Adoption aftermaths: Helen and the Grandbees, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? & Red Dust Road

30/10/2020

4 Comments

 
I suspect I’m drawn to adoption narratives because of the way they can make concrete a vague sense of loss and yearning some of us feel as a result of early maternal neglect. It’s one of the themes of my forthcoming novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, and its follow-up, 100 Candles, my current WIP. In fact, I read/reread the two memoirs reviewed in this post as research for the latter. The other book is a debut novel offered to me by the publisher.

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The therapy journey and narrative structure

13/10/2020

11 Comments

 
Three years ago, I left my therapist’s consulting room for the last time. Stepping out into the street, I felt a rush of panic. What the hell had I done? My regrets at bringing an extensive therapy to a close lasted all of two minutes, or maybe three, and haven’t returned. Nor have I entertained a moment’s regret at the hours I invested in the endeavour, or the numerous cheques I signed to pay for it. A decent outcome, you might agree, but why am I telling you this? Because my reflections on my journey through therapy has a bearing on my thoughts about narrative structure.

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11 Comments

What are you reading for Black History Month?

6/10/2020

6 Comments

 
Black History Month comes after a summer of confronting the legacy of white interference in black history. Painful for many, from my safe distance the toppling of the statue of the flavour in Bristol has been a beacon of hope in a crazy year. It’s even altered the course of my WIP. But will we learn anything? Will we take the lessons of 2020 into the rest of the decade? Will reading – fiction and non-fiction – keep these issues where they need to be, at the forefront of our minds?


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6 Comments

Seeking sanctuary in strange places: Dolores & I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

27/12/2019

6 Comments

 
In these two novels, a teenage girl needs a safe place to retreat from the world, but the sanctuary she’s chosen won’t easily let her go. In the first, a convent provides shelter to a girl fearful of the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy; in the second, a psychiatric hospital offers a welcome respite from the strain of appearing sane. It’s pure coincidence that the main characters’ names – Dolores and Deborah – begin with the same letter and that both remind me of my forthcoming novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.


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6 Comments

Celebrating Women in Translation 2019 #WITMonth #amreading

30/8/2019

3 Comments

 
In my post for women in translation month last August, I flagged seven qualifying books I’d read over the previous twelve months. The stories took me around the world to Europe (Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland) and beyond (Iran, Oman and Japan). But I thought I could beat that between September 2018 and August this year. It’s looking like I have!

Read on for bite-sized summaries of these 24 books, roughly in the order I read them, with links to my longer reviews if any take your fancy.


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3 Comments

Desperately seeking elixir? #amwriting

7/5/2019

4 Comments

 
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I wrote recently how, after a few uninspiring months, I’d been infected with a new novel idea. A few weeks on, I love the characters, the situation and the potential quirkiness of one of the voices, but I’ve tried to rein in my enthusiasm to nail the plot. As one of my writing goals of 2019 is to reflect on where I’m placed in the marketplace and in my writing journey, I’m exploring how to make my fiction more commercial (as well as more literary), which means not embarking on projects that might lack wide appeal.

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4 Comments

The Enigma of Gender

23/4/2019

11 Comments

 
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Women love shoes and shopping, or so the stereotype goes, but since I prefer tramping the moors in my walking boots, I can’t be one of those. But, given that I’m not so keen on getting drunk while watching football, I can’t be a man. That’s the problem with binary categories, they don’t allow for “a bit of both”. They reduce the world to black or white, no room for shades of grey.


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11 Comments

The personal is political: Happening & Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

13/2/2019

6 Comments

 
Two books using the author’s personal experience and celebrity (although I’d heard of neither) as an entryway for exploring and publicising important socio-political issues. The first is a memoir about abortion; the second is a hard-hitting analysis of race and class discrimination. Which balance of personal-sociological do you prefer?

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6 Comments

Teenagers in exile: Shadows on the Tundra & The Key

23/1/2019

10 Comments

 
Two books about teenage girls forced from their homes in what initially appear to be very different circumstances. In the first, a fourteen-year-old Lithuanian is transported to the Siberian tundra in 1940; in the second, a nineteen-year-old is compulsorily admitted to a psychiatric hospital in mid-1950s England. The first memoir, the second fiction, both books are about the struggle to survive in alien environments.

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10 Comments

Becoming Someone is coming to an armchair near you!

19/11/2018

6 Comments

 
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I’ve been so busy with preparations, I’d forgotten how it feels when that first box of books arrives. So I was especially touched when the delivery man remembered bringing my debut more than three years ago. If a man who doesn’t even know me could connect with that excitement, surely I could too. If that weren’t enough to celebrate, this is my 700th post!

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6 Comments

From Asia to the USA: Immigrant, Montana & America Is Not the Heart

16/8/2018

5 Comments

 
Two novels about young Asians migrating to the USA: in the first, an Indian man receives a cultural, sexual and political education in New York; in the second, a woman has been stripped of wealth, lover and purpose when she leaves her native Philippines to shack up with relatives in a poor part of California.


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5 Comments

Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

20/7/2018

15 Comments

 
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The writer’s life is rife with disappointment. One of the main factors differentiating the successful from the unsuccessful is not the degree of failure they encounter, but the ability and willingness to scrape oneself up from the ground and carry on. But how do we do that? The blogosphere thrums with posts on adopting an almost military discipline, but that’s not right for everyone. It’s not right for me.


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15 Comments

I’m not telling you

19/6/2018

8 Comments

 
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I’m in a children’s playground, awaiting my turn at the top of the slide. I sit, push off with my hands, and down I go. Wheeeee! There’s no-one to catch me at the bottom, but that’s okay. I sit and wait, scanning the faces of the grown-ups, wondering which one of them will come and claim me. It’s only as the light begins to fade that I get nervous. As the metal beneath my buttocks cools. That’s when I realise no-one’s coming, and get up to wander alone through the world.

This episode came to me the way my stories sometimes do: vivid, urgent and determined to be told. But this wasn’t fiction. This was a
metaphor for the origins of me.


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8 Comments

Learning to write

23/2/2018

17 Comments

 
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School was a shock. Where did all those children come from? Would I wet myself or brave those dark outdoor loos? As a timid child, and an obedient one, the structure of the classroom seemed easier to manage. And yet.

The teacher stood at the blackboard etching row upon row of noughts and crosses in coloured chalk. We sat at desks, copying the figures into our books with fat wax crayons. This was school? At home, colour meant drawing however the inspiration took me. Already programmed in compliance, I crushed my creativity along with my rage.


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Women taking stock: Mirror, Shoulder, Signal & Making Space

23/11/2017

8 Comments

 
The common theme in these two recently published novels is a woman experiencing an existential crisis, taking stock of where she’s got to in life by ordering the elements that make up her external world. Sonja, the older of the two, does this through taking driving lessons, and it’s no coincidence that she struggles to take control. Miriam, past adolescence although not yet fully fledged adult, tries to achieve something similar by jettisoning her surplus possessions, and through those of a compulsive hoarder she’s employed to help. Needless to say, neither woman’s path to a more comfortable accommodation with herself is straightforward. Curious? Read on!

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    Free ebook: click the image to claim yours.
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    Available now
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    The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
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    About Anne Goodwin
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    My published books
    entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
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    My third novel, published May 2021
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    My debut novel shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize
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    My second novel published May 2017.
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    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.
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    Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.  
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