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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

Too much too young: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

4/8/2023

7 Comments

 
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Dickens’ David Copperfield brought to contemporary South Virginia is a worthy winner of both the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize. It’s a story of inequalities, addiction, child protection failures and attachment to community and land.
 
Demon’s voice grabbed me from the first page and never let go and the tragedies of his early childhood – kidult mother; dead-end education; foster carers starving the children and working them like slaves – wrenched my heart. True to the source material, it’s not totally bleak: people do care for Demon, although not always with the power to put things right.

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7 Comments

9 recent reads and a 99-word story inspired by one of them

11/11/2022

4 Comments

 

A couple of jewels and a few disappointments amongst these nine recent reads, including a rare one-star for a Booker-prize shortlisted book. I’m happy to recommend The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (which I came across on TikTok) and Mrs England, but do browse through the others – you might find something that appeals.

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4 Comments

What makes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections my perfect Christmas read?

3/12/2021

8 Comments

 
On Christmas Eve last year, when many were struggling to adapt to a curtailed coronavirus Christmas, I was in my element with a long walk in the Peak District followed by settling down with a mince pie to reread one of my favourite novels. This would be the third time I’d spent the festive season with the Lamberts, and I relished their company as much as the first time I met them in the freshly-published hardback I gifted myself (with money from my mother) almost twenty years before. I love this book at the sentence level, at the level of the eternally disappointed characters, and at the level of the ridiculously sprawling 500-plus page plot.
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8 Comments

A woman of substance: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

19/2/2021

6 Comments

 
Claudia Hampton is writing a history of the world, and of herself, but only in her head. Lying in a hospital bed, she is visited by memories of a rich and vivid life, beginning with scrambling up a cliff on a Dorset beach as a child in 1920. Narcissistic to the core, she seems to prefer her dreams to the flesh-and-blood characters who sit intermittently at her bedside: her daughter, Lisa; Jasper, her former partner and Lisa’s father; Laszlo, her semi-adopted Hungarian son. But the only two people she’s ever loved are dead: her brother, Gordon, and Tom, the soldier she met when she was a journalist in Cairo during the Second World War.
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6 Comments

Families under pressure: Kololo Hill & The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

18/2/2021

4 Comments

 
Both these recent reads have complex family dynamics at the centre, while addressing wider political issues in very different ways. In the first, we follow a middle-class Asian family forced to migrate from Uganda to Britain on the whim of a tin-pot dictator; in the second, three siblings re-enact their childhood rivalries around their mother’s deathbed as bushfires envelop their country and the world colludes in its own extinction.

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4 Comments

Beat the lockdown blues with a book

10/11/2020

6 Comments

 
As night arrives ever earlier across the northern hemisphere, and Europe returns to lockdown, there could hardly be a better time to curl up with a book. If you have a UK address, you can enter a competition to win a signed copy of one of my novels and five other novels I’ve read and enjoyed.

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6 Comments

Enmeshed: My Devotion & Burnt Sugar

16/10/2020

8 Comments

 
I’ve recently read two novels about women whose damaging childhoods lead to adult relationships  where they can’t manage to separate psychologically from someone who fails to meet their needs. In the first, a French translation, the enmeshed relationship is with a man who is less than a partner but more than a friend. The second, set in India, centres on a toxic mother-daughter relationship, a common theme in my reading and writing, which has sparked this week’s 99-word story.

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8 Comments

Money, mothers and marriage: The Other Bennet Sister & Dominicana

25/3/2020

4 Comments

 
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother in fear of penury will sacrifice a daughter in marriage to a man she does not love. Jane Austen famously satirised such mothers two centuries ago; Janice Hadlow’s debut novel gives Mrs Bennet’s unloved middle daughter Mary a makeover in similar style. Angie Cruz, while perhaps not intentionally channelling Pride and Prejudice, draws on the painful mother-daughter dynamic in her Women’s Prize longlisted novel about 1960s migration to New York from the Dominican Republic.

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4 Comments

A few things I’ve learnt through my first foray into self-publishing with a short story e-book freebie

15/2/2020

10 Comments

 
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Big round of applause, please people! The year’s still in its infancy and I’ve already achieved one of my aims for 2020. On the other hand, in terms of literary or commercial benefit, I’ve spent way too much time putting together my little e-book of short stories as a giveaway for subscribers to my newsletter. But, once I got going, I enjoyed most of the twists and turns of the journey, with even the hairpin bends and U-turns a chance to admire the view. As a small-press published inbetweenie author, I’ve always tried to stay abreast of what’s happening in self-publishing, but there’s a huge gap between reading about something and doing it yourself. Let’s see if I can consolidate my learning by describing the process and perhaps helping others to reach the destination without too many wrong turns.


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Drastic solutions to infertility: The Testaments & One Part Woman

17/12/2019

4 Comments

 
What happens when childlessness develops from being a personal matter to a problem for society as a whole? In Margaret Atwood’s imagined Gilead an alarming drop in the live birth rate calls for Draconian measures, building a society where a woman’s mind and body are subservient to her reproductive potential. In Perumal Murugan’s rural South India, childlessness is a threat to the established order, with friends and neighbours pitching in with advice and criticism, indifferent to the infertile couple’s private grief.

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4 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

Can you write a fractured fairy tale?

25/10/2018

6 Comments

 
It’s rutting season out on the moors again. The first time I heard a bolving deer (no, that’s not a mistype), I thought it was a motorbike. On Sunday, it made me think of the troll who hides under the bridge to scare the billy goats gruff. Or maybe not, if it’s the poor misunderstood creature in Norah Colvin’s fractured fairy tale. Now she’s inviting you to write one too. But beware, you have only 99-words to play with and I’ll be helping Norah, along with children’s author Robbie Cheadle, to select the best.
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6 Comments

Can you recommend a #reading #charity for me to support through my #booklaunch?

22/10/2018

12 Comments

 
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When my publisher suggested releasing an anthology of my short stories, I didn’t plan to do much promotion. In the UK, short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell. But when I thought about the unpaid time and effort she’d put into editing, and the money into another gorgeous cover, as well as the enthusiasm of my readers for a third book, I reconsidered. My short story collection, Becoming Someone, scheduled for publication on November 23rd, deserves as much chance as any other book. So I got creative.


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12 Comments

Literary ambition: A Ladder to the Sky & Less

20/10/2018

9 Comments

 
Fictional writers can be tricky on the page; sometimes I suspect a character’s assigned the job because the author’s unfamiliar with more run-of-the-mill kinds of work. But, like anything else that’s slightly iffy, if you’re going to go for it, it’s best to go for it big time. That’s what Irish writer John Boyne does with his larger-than-life antihero Maurice Swift and American Andrew Sean Greer with “failed novelist” Arthur Less, both simultaneously managing to address the wider issues of human vanity and what constitutes a well-lived life.


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9 Comments

Not all may have prizes … but how does funding play a part in who enters the race?

16/10/2018

8 Comments

 
With the Man Booker Prize winner announced tonight, my fingers are crossed for Washington Black, although I’d raise a cheer for either of the other contenders I’ve reviewed (The Mars Room and Milkman). Right now, my thoughts are also with those authors who not only don’t succeed in dazzling the judges, but don’t even get the chance to step onto the stage.
 
You’re familiar with those email scams, aren’t you? Congratulations, you’ve won a prize! Just send us a cheque to cover administration costs, and we’ll deliver it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Until you wonder whether the winnings will cover your fees. But that wouldn’t happen in the literary world, would it? Awards are dispensed purely on merit, surely? No paying for prizes there?

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8 Comments

Does your inspiration come mostly from inside or outside?

4/10/2018

7 Comments

 
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October brings the Flash Fiction Rodeo to the Ranch, with the weekly challenges suspended and the ring cleared for competitive wrangling words. Now, I’ve entered writing competitions in the past – and even won one or two – and, after initial scepticism, I’ve grown addicted to submitting my 99 words. But last year, unable to bring the two together, I could only watch from the sidelines. This year, I’m joining in.


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7 Comments

The toddler in my laptop

3/8/2018

8 Comments

 
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Imagine a virus has attacked your vocal chords, when your livelihood – not to mention your sanity – depends on clear communication. You can create sounds, but they are incomprehensible to others – a jumbled babble. Then, one day, as you jabber in frustration while preparing your children’s tea, your toddler’s voice rings out, perfectly articulating what you were trying to say.


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8 Comments

Celebrating the small successes

28/7/2018

6 Comments

 
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I concluded a recent post on mourning our writerly disappointments with a reminder that we need to celebrate our small successes too. But do I heed my own advice? Well, maybe sometimes, but standards can slip. If we’re not careful, our small achievements can be diminished by our much bigger ambitions. We need to beware of viewing them as if through the wrong end of a telescope. But how to make them matter without aggrandising every little thing?


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6 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

BBC National Short Story Award: Q&A with Cynan Jones

3/10/2017

7 Comments

 
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The winner of this year’s BBC National Short Story Award will be announced this evening. Of the five shortlisted stories I’m rooting for “The Edge of the Shoal” by Cynan Jones. You can listen to the story on the BBC website or get the collection from Comma press. Thanks to Frances Gough for arranging my review copy and Q&A with Cynan Jones.


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7 Comments

LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

12/2/2017

4 Comments

 
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Award announced last month, is a story of migration and massacre; of bravery and brutality; of family, friendship and gender fluidity told in the unique voice of an Irishman in 1850s America.

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4 Comments

Beyond the slave plantations in novels by Colson Whitehead & Vamba Sherif

16/12/2016

4 Comments

 
As the first African-American president approaches the end of his two terms of office, the politics of the creature waiting to replace him send shivers down many a spine. So timely to remind ourselves how western wealth was built on the trade in human beings with two novels about the slave trade between Africa and America and its aftermath. It’s not an easy subject to write – or read – about and, although I’ve read a couple of good ones (Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo and Property by Valerie Martin come to mind, but there may be others), I believe these are the first I’ve reviewed.
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4 Comments

Planning for pantsers?

25/10/2016

10 Comments

 
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Although, like many writers, I find autumn to be the best time to tackle major writing projects, I’ve never yet been tempted to register for National Novel Writing Month. For me, the pace is too fast and the outcome too limited, but there’s nothing to stop me joining in informally, which is what I decided to try two years ago. Starting with three character sketches and a rough idea of the main plot points, I averaged a thousand words a day from the beginning of November onwards and surprised myself with a rough first draft of just under 80,000 words by the middle of January.



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10 Comments

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain & Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

10/10/2016

6 Comments

 
I was pleased to mark World Mental Health Day last year with a post on dignity in fictional representations of mental health. This year’s theme is dignity in mental health first aid. Now, although I perceive therapy as a longer term project rather than first aid, its foundation in active listening is fundamental to our initial response to others in distress. And, as no-one can engage in therapy unless they actively want to, it’s an approach that bestows dignity, so what better day to celebrate my series on fictional therapists by introducing you to a couple of new ones? As a finale, I’ve got a piece of flash fiction on combining short-term and long-term solutions to mental ill-health.

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6 Comments

Prickly characters

4/10/2016

8 Comments

 
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We all know a prickly character, someone around whom we need to tread carefully so as not to get stung. In our social lives, we might keep them at a distance but, in therapy, they’re often intriguing and we might relish the challenge of discovering what lies underneath that porcupine skin. In fiction, they can also be appealing but, like the shy character with whom there might be an element of overlap, they aren’t so straightforward to write.


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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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    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
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