Category: Pandemic

The old woman and the beast # 99WordStories

14/4/2023

Charli Mills’ call for 99-word stories pairing an old woman and a beast hit the sweet spot this week. A month away from publication of my novel, Lyrics for the Loved Ones, there’s only one old woman on my mind. Matty confronts several beasts in this story, set across thirteen tumultuous months beginning in June 2019. I’ve captured two in my contribution. I hope it whets your appetite and doesn’t give too much away.

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A chance to win a copy of my next book

23/3/2023

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Today I’m revealing the cover of my novel, Lyrics for the Loved Ones, which will be published on May 15th. As the novel is set mostly in a UK care home during the pandemic, I thought the anniversary of the first lockdown would be the perfect occasion to show off the gorgeous design.

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Pandemic fiction: The Fell & Wish You Were Here

28/11/2022

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I’m busy working towards the publication of my next novel, Lyrics for the Loved Ones, the sequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, in May 2023. It’s set mostly in a care home leading up to, and in the early weeks of, the pandemic. So I’m happy to showcase a couple of other novels on the theme, with the bonus that they feature places I’ve been. The first is set during the second UK lockdown in November 2020; the second in North and South America when the world closed down in March that year.

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Together apart: Hare House & Our Country Friends

10/1/2022

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We can choose our friends but not our neighbours, unless we happen to own a plot of land with cottages to rent or offer free to selected guests. In which case we should choose carefully: in a crisis, out in the countryside, we might have to rely on our neighbours more than we’d expect. But as renters and guests we might not have a say in the matter, as these two novels highlight. The first is about a woman unsettled by the folk beliefs of her neighbours in rural Scotland; the second about a temporarily covid-free community in upstate New York.

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Post-truth worlds: A Time Outside This Time & Scary Monsters

2/1/2022

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When I selected these books for my first reviews of 2022, I thought all they shared was their UK publication date of January 6th. I was wrong. Both are unconventionally structured novels by and about migrants, from the Indian subcontinent, to rich countries founded on the genocide of their indigenous populations, where truth is sometimes sacrificed on the altar of populist politics and the realities of racism and the climate crisis denied. Read on for the different ways these authors handled their theme.

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Memories and mothers: The Leftovers & Small Forgotten Moments

22/9/2021

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The human mind has a wonderful capacity to protect us from unbearable memories, but there’s always a cost. As the narrators of these two novels discover when circumstances compel them to spend time with the mothers from whom they’ve grown apart. Read on to see which takes your fancy; I can heartily recommend reading both.

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Belatedly cancelling Christmas is a missed opportunity for growth

20/12/2020

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How lovely to see the Prime Minister’s delusions of Churchillian grandeur cast aside as he’s forced to adopt his rightful role as Scrooge. Sadly, not because he required a twenty-three-year-old footballer to pinpoint the appropriate response to childhood hunger but, in this year of disappointment and deprivation, we must grab consolation where we can.

How distressing, however, for the millions whose hopes for Christmas gatherings are scuppered with little time to make alternative plans. But hey – silver lining alert! – we can use it as a dress rehearsal for a no-deal Brexit, this Liar of Liars’ principal vanity project. As he didn’t say at a recent press conference: What, no croissants? Let them eat sovereignty instead!

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Dreaming of a coronavirus Christmas?

6/12/2020

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Ho Ho Ho, bah humbug! This blogger who feels a misfit each December, finds herself, in topsy-turvy 2020, miraculously on track. Or is she? (Am I?) If everyone’s having an alternative Christmas, am I once again out on a limb? If I always opt for a minimalist Christmas, then my festivities will be (unlike most people’s) little different this year to last.

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Mental health, Brexit, and political displacement projects

9/8/2020

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Mental health’s a work in progress for most of us. Tougher for some, easier for others, yet there must be few this pandemic hasn’t wobbled. Years of therapy have killed off some of my demons, and given shape to those that will dog me to my dying days. Normally that dog will walk to heel, chase a ball and even raise a smile. Alas, it’s recently escaped the leash and is running rabid, baring bloody fangs. Everything’s harder with that monster circling me yet, while defeated by a trip to the supermarket, I can still, intermittently, report to my laptop and write.

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From lockdown hair to Buxton Fringe

3/7/2020

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For those fearing lockdown more than government mismanagement of the pandemic, July 4th is England’s Independence Day. (Apart from Leicester, where restrictions have been tightened due to a sudden surge in coronavirus cases.) If the response to the reopening of inessential shops is anything to go by, a mass of masked and unmasked people will flock to pubs, restaurants and hairdressers, but I won’t be among them. The former would never have been a priority, but I’ve hesitated over the third: I’m fond of my hairdresser, I’ve missed her through three missed appointments, but I’ve grown surprisingly attached to my lockdown hair.

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How would you answer the covid novel’s call?

28/6/2020

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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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Racism, entitlement and political protest in the age of covid

12/6/2020

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Recently I was first-world-problems moaning about the deluge of emails from individuals and organisations offering to fill my apparently endless lockdown free time. Now it’s people shouting their condemnation of the murder of George Floyd and either flaunting their antiracist credentials or vowing to do better. My immediate reaction was: does it need to be said? On the one hand, if you’re sitting in my inbox, abhorrence should be your default setting. On the other, white people’s silence could be taken as support for the status quo.

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Lockdown dis-easing and risk assessment, personal and political

5/6/2020

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Arrive late, leave early! Excellent advice for fiction writers pruning the unnecessaries from our scenes. Equally useful for introverts who quickly tire of socialising. But for a public health initiative in a pandemic? The UK is showing the world how not to do lockdown, introducing it too late and loosening the restrictions too early. Could it be that the occupant of number 10, having achieved his ambition of becoming prime minister has been using his undoubted spare time to brush up his skills in creative writing? Could it be that covid-brain has mangled his already

muddled pathways so that he’s imposed a strategy for achieving his next unlikely ambition – if a man of his talents can “lead” first a capital city, then a country, why not go for the Booker Prize? – upon the one of which he’s tired?

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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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My locked-up novel’s #lockdown #bookbirthday … and virtual choral singing

25/5/2020

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The writer’s life is riddled with disappointment, so we need to celebrate the successes when we can. When I’ve remembered – which I haven’t always – I’ve marked the publication-day anniversary for my books. For my second novel’s third birthday this month, I had in mind to write something on the theme She never intended to write a thriller, echoing the opening line of the blurb: He never intended to be a jailer, but the universe knew better. (As it did on this novel’s first anniversary – I don’t know what happened to the second – when I was so moved by the warrior women of Ireland coming home to vote for reproductive rights, I threw the plan away and wrote about the importance of normalising abortion in fiction.) This year, I’m wondering about the parallels between a fictional character who seeks to resolve a relationship crisis by keeping a woman captive in a cellar, and our current experiences of lockdown.

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The politics of unkindness and our collective mental health

18/5/2020

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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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Moral issues: The Strange Adventures of H & Upturned Earth

6/5/2020

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I’ve recently read two historical novels about morality with surprising echoes of our current pandemic. The first is a fun story set in 17th-century London about a young woman concerned about losing the respect of her relatives when she turns to prostitution after becoming homeless during the Great Plague. The second is set in a copper mining community in 1850s South Africa, where lives are lost because the owners put profit before people.

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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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My first month of lockdown reading and recommendations

28/4/2020

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After a full month of lockdown, am I any closer to answering the question I posed to myself at the end of March: Do you read differently in anxious times? Of course not! While my preference for fiction remains, I’ve enjoyed both long and short novels this month, both sober and comic, and, as for theme, read wherever I took my fancy from my dwindling TBR shelf. I’ve shed cathartic tears in response to a political satire – thank you Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony – and laughed deep into my belly reading a novel about the experience of depression – Rabbits for Food. We’re strange creatures, we human beings!

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I’m fuming (furious, irate, incensed, enraged, seething, mad, livid, cross)

17/4/2020

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Life’s changed so quickly, it’s been hard to keep track. I’ll admit my initial response was childishly self-centred. Woe is me, my favourite conference is cancelled; I won’t be able to give my talk and sell half a dozen more books. But, soon after, I saw the point when large gatherings were banned (although it was a shame my Wednesday afternoon choir couldn’t do its final concert). Next came concern for the mental well-being of those whose lives were restricted and livelihoods lost.

I felt grief when schools and pubs and restaurants were closed, despite not having much use for any of them; and guilt when a minor health issue kept me from my usual outdoor volunteering, with staffing already low as the over 70s were advised to stay at home. I welcomed the lockdown in bringing some order to an atmosphere of chaos and confusion, despite being appalled when I saw it happening to my publisher in Spain. I found a host of silver linings and even admired the most egotistical prime minister and the most extreme right wing government’s management of the crisis. And then the doctors and nurses began to die.

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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

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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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Do you read differently in anxious times?

29/3/2020

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As I said earlier this month, in a more optimistic – or head-in-the-sand mentality – there are good things about the coronavirus pandemic, an obvious one to this blog’s readers being more time to read. On the other hand, while we might find unexpected gaps in our schedules, anxiety consumes vast quantities of headspace, reducing our capacity for, on some days, anything more taxing than watching cat videos and repurposing unloved paperbacks as toilet tissue. So I’ve been wondering whether I, you, or anyone else, reads differently in times of high anxiety. What do you think?

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Silver linings: 9 good things about the coronavirus pandemic

20/3/2020

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These are strange times, scary times, depressing times. If the virus doesn’t get us physically, we’ll be hurt psychologically through anxiety, grief for lost loved ones and the claustrophobia of social isolation. It will harm us economically and socially too. But there are silver linings and, although they might not balance the negatives, these potential benefits are real.