Category: Stolen Summers

6 positive social changes in my lifetime: trans visibility; deinstitutionalisation; reproductive rights and more

23/2/2023

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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How did I do in 2022?

21/1/2023

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Yeah, I know I’m late with this – most people have moved on from 2022. But I thought I’d do a quick recap of my reading and writing year. Although I didn’t achieve everything I’d set out to do, I think I did okay, especially with losing several potentially productive weeks to illness.

Publication

The year’s main achievement is the publication of my novella, Stolen Summers, the prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. This didn’t only mean completing the manuscript and working through the edits, but also learning about self-publishing – which has put me in good stead for my next book.

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Are toilets visible in fiction?

21/11/2022

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People often think I’m joking when I mention World Toilet Day every 19th November. But 3.6 billion people living with inadequate sanitation is no laughing matter. Unsafe and unsanitary toilets can damage people’s health and inhibit access to education. They also pollute the environment.

The theme for World Toilet Day 2022 was making the invisible visible. Although the invisible in question is the human waste leaching into rivers, lakes and soil, it could also refer to a pet project of mine.

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What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron #review #99wordstories

14/11/2022

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A husband and wife have travelled for days from New York to an unnamed town in another country, masked by a blanket of snow. The woman has terminal cancer and they’ve come to adopt a baby before she dies. The anxieties they’ve brought with them wax and wane in response to the alien culture, the frosty weather and the interference of other guests at the strange hotel.

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Breaking the cycle? The Bread the Devil Knead & Everything Calls for Salvation

5/11/2022

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I was unsure how – or whether – I’d connect these two recent reads until I was pondering my response to this week’s flash fiction challenge. Although very different stories, both address how difficult it can be to find an escape route from repeating patterns of self-destructive behaviour. In the first, a woman approaching middle age faces up to her tendency to fall into abusive relationships. In the second, a young man admitted to a psychiatric ward wonders if his own future is written on the faces of his fellow patients, stuck in a cycle of relapse and remission. The wheels keep turning – will they manage to jump off?

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When and where was Britain’s first Black policeman?

30/10/2022

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I love the freedom fiction gives me to make things up, but I also enjoy the facts I discover in the course of my research. In my novella, Stolen Summers, I gave my character, Matilda, a dancing partner who attracted and intrigued her, partly because he came from a different background.

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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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Friends can be found in the darkest places

1/10/2022

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Yay, it’s publication day for my novella Stolen Summers. Despite the unseen obstacles of my first self-publishing project, the book is on sale in both e-book and paperback formats and it’s already getting some fabulous reviews:

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Mental health and the tyranny of positivity

24/9/2022

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I’ve shed more tears than usual in the past few months. Shall I tell you what helped me most? It wasn’t reminders of the many good things in my life. It wasn’t unfounded assurances things would turn out fine. What helped most was a straightforward acknowledgement of my feelings and that I had every right to grieve.

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Feel free to judge my new book by its cover

15/9/2022

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As mentioned in my previous post, things aren’t going swimmingly with my first novella and first book-length self-publishing project, my forthcoming novella, Stolen Summers, the prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. But I still expect to be able to publish at the beginning of next month. So where else would I go with this week’s flash fiction challenge to write a 99-word story about balloons on a bumper?

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Swimming through Stolen Summers

10/9/2022

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When the prompt arrived for this week’s 99-word story, I immediately thought of my character Matty. Not only because I’ve been reading and rereading and scrutinising a part of her history I want to publish next month, but because swimmingly is exactly the kind of word she’d use (although I don’t think she ever has).