HOW TO STRESS LESS by Penny Dolan

The start of March, and a quick post to finish off a couple of very busy weeks.
                          

Recently, I walked into town for some real-world shopping: not for the usual loaf and lunch items but for something that seemed far more stressful. I was after a gift for a very young relative and, as the present would be crossing to Canada, I needed to choose something easily packable.

Something soft and light, perhaps? A particularly sweet, fluffy teddy bear caught my eye for a while. However, I recalled an image from the last family party and how a menagerie of stuffed animals in all shapes and sizes ran along the nursery shelves already. Another furry teddy, no matter how cute, was probably not what was needed.

                                      
Clothes, maybe? I walked through the racks of cute outfits, and sighed. The designs and fabrics were all so much more beautiful now! Regrettably, delightful winter garments still seemed too small or too big for their particular age-label, and way too small to use as hand-me-ons after the autumn came around.

Besides, do children (or their parents) like bright primary colours or do they prefer pale neutral tones now? Do the children have to look as if they work, visually, with the décor in this social media age? It felt like a nightmare! The whole gift-shopping task was, as they say, stressing me out . . . 

And so I did the only wise thing possible. I went to, and deep into a good, nearby bookshop.              

                             

As soon as I was there, standing among the quantities of books, I felt the tension fading away. Phew. Breathe out. Relax. That’s so much better! A bookshop - or a library - will do this for me every time.

Although I did enjoy all the looking, I ended up with a couple of well- beloved board-books whose stories should fit perfectly and comfortably, and also be welcome for far longer than one season. The books are usually a size that fits all, as well as being easily packable and postable too. Job done.

                     

What a pleasure it is to think of the two lovely books going halfway across the world to reach their destination, even if the parcel won’t arrive until well after the UK’s World Book Day on 6th March 2025.
                                                              
Happy reading, everyone, whenever and wherever you are! Onwards . . .
Penny Dolan

Tell a Fairy Tale Day by Claire Fayers

 What's your favourite fairy tale?

The 26th February is Tell a Fairy Tale Day and March 1st is St David's Day in Wales so this seems a good time to revisit my favourite Welsh fairy folk. These draw on British Goblins by Wirt Sikes, a nineteenth century American journalist and folklorist, but the fairy creatures of Wales go back much further than that, of course.

The Tylwyth Teg

Probably the best known of the Welsh fairies, their name means 'Fair Folk' or 'Fair Family.' They are ambiguous creatures, morally grey and known for their illusions. If anyone is stolen by the fairies, it's probably the Tylwyth Teg. They do seem to have a thing about kidnapping people. 

Elen Caldecott's Carnegie nominated THE BLACKTHORN BRANCH brings them magnificently to life.

The Pwca

Shakespeare's Puck possibly came from the same root. The pwca is generally depicted as a mischievous shape-shifter, often known to lead people into dangerous places by waving lights at night. I have an image of a man stumbling home from the pub soaking wet and saying, 'Sorry, dear, the pwca made me fall in the river. Definitely not because I'm drunk.'

See also the Cornish Bucca and the Irish Puka.

The Bwbach

This one is my favourite. The bwbach is a small goblin who likes warm places and pudding and so when people move into Wales, it moved into their homes with them. It'll even do some housework for you, especially if you leave it a slice of cake and a bowl of milk. But there are loads of stories about what happens when someone annoys a bwbach, and it never ends well for the humans.

The Coblyn

The word comes from the same root as goblin but I always have the Disney seven dwarves in mind. The coblyn lives underground in mines and tunnels and will often help human miners by alerting them to danger or leading them to the best seams of coal. There is a Pont y Coblyn (Coblyn's Bridge) in Caernarfonshire, though I haven't been able to find any stories attached to it.

The Ellyll

Wirt Sikes describes them as pigmy elves who dine on poisonous toadstools and fairy butter "which they extract from deep crevices in limestone rocks." Who knew limestone rocks could be so useful? In other accounts they appear to be interchangeable with the Tylwyth Teg, drawing people into their dances and taking revenge on any humans who annoy them.

Fairies in the Landscape

One of the things I love about these stories is the way they are so deeply embedded in the landscape. If you'd like to waste an hour or two, go to the List of Historic Place Names in Wales You can search for specific words or pick an area and study the place names. If you type in any of the fairy folk names you'll get a list of places that are associated with them.

This could be a great world-building exercise. Choose a location in your work in progress and attach a folktale to it. It doesn't even have to be tied into the plot, it can just be there to add a sense of depth and history.

Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins by Claire Fayers is Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year.

I know we could all argue about the implications but...

... it's an interesting thought

Michael Cunningham (The Hours) came to Amsterdam several years ago to give a reading. After he was finished, he invited questions from the audience. I asked whether there were any subjects a writer should avoid; anything that just shouldn't be tackled.

His answer was no.

Except, he went on, the repetition of dull clichés long past their sell-by date. He offered as examples, silly women who go all panicky and collapse in times of stress. Limp-wristed, useless gay characters. Men for whom no challenge can't ever be met. And so on.

Keep away from them, he said. But otherwise, nothing's off the table.

The Hunt for the Golden Scarab, by M G Leonard

 

I first became aware of M G Leonard through her Adventures on Trains series of books, each of which is set on a different famous train and features the young hero and his uncle solving crimes which have taken place on the train. (Clearly, train travel is much more dangerous than I'd realised...) One of my grandsons is a huge fan of trains, so this series was ideal for him - and it's great fun, so I enjoyed it too.

So I was interested to hear of M G's new series, which features time travel. Sim discovers that his mother, Callidora, can travel through time - and place - by opening special doors, which Callidora does by means of playing a tune. Sim and Callidora live next to Sir John Soane's house, and the first time that Sim becomes aware of these doors and his mother's ability to open them, they go into the past to meet Sir John - and to hide from dangerous hunters sent by a body called the Council.

In their flight from the hunters, Sim and his mum go to seek shelter with Sim's uncle, Emmet, and Sim meets his cousin, Jeopardy, for the first time. The hunters are searching for a magical amulet, the Golden Scarab, which is said to be able to prolong youth, and Callidora is determined to stop them from finding it. It belongs to an ancient Egyptian queen - so the action moves to Egypt and the pyramids.

It's an exciting story, full of colour and interest. The characters are vivid, energetic and resourceful: M G has created a likeable 'gang', which I'm convinced is one of the main things you need if you're going to write a series which will collect a band of loyal readers: and the set-up enables her in future books to take her characters wherever, and whenever, she likes. It's very enjoyable, and I'm sure it will find lots of enthusiastic readers.

Creative empathy in a dangerous world – by Rowena House

What have witch trials and Donald Trump got in common?

Horrifically, I think it’s perfectly possible we’ll learn about a direct link via his so-called Christian supporters before his presidency is over. But short of that ghastly prospect, there have this past month been deeply uncomfortable parallels between fervent belief expressed in ‘alternative facts’ – e.g. whether the USA or Europe has given more to Ukraine – and seventeenth century English witch beliefs, which are the subject of my novel-in-progress.

Outside politics, which I don’t want to talk about here, there are also extraordinary parallels in terms of the psychology of belief, or more accurately disbelief, and how people – some people, anyway; let’s call them us – deal with unbelievable change, denial being one of our first ports of call.

As in, I can’t believe this is happening.

One of the best expressions I've read about how this manifests was in The Guardian last Monday, February 17th 2025. (Yup, that’s the kind of us I mean. Sorry if that offends).

In it, Zoe Williams discusses the paralysing shock that for her accompanied evidence of fascism within Trump’s Administration and her deep unwillingness to name it.

‘You’re dumbstruck for ages, not wanting to call the thing what it is. It starts off feeling like embarrassment or coyness – what kind of hysteric runs around shouting “fascist”? A very silly one, surely.’

For her, this feeling morphed ‘into something more superstitious – don’t call the thing what it is because that will only embolden the thing.’

I haven’t felt that superstition personally, but I do understand her sense of mental paralysis.

As she says, ‘If you can’t respond to the news, you can’t look at the news ... When you’re averting your eyes, you can’t even think your way into next month’ because that ‘feels like asking for trouble. Frozen feels preferable to adapting to a new reality.’

So, what has all this to do with writing fiction?

The connection is creative empathy and the use of extreme experiences as research into character – characters like us.

Firstly, with such horror in the world, a caveat.

I would say that the loss of post-WW2 certainties that the USA and Europe share fundamental values does count as an extreme event, one that causes deep psychological disturbance. It is nothing, nothing, nothing like the suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, Sudan, DRC and Ukraine etc. But even listing those war-torn places illustrates how much suffering we are exposed to these days - all of which will be impacted by the altered reality of the world order implied by Trump.

For those of us off the front line, it is valid, I believe, to monitor how I, we, you (as in Zoe Williams) react to this change. Do we freeze. Deny. Look away. Have nightmares. Lose hope. Most of all, do we disbelieve?

For several years now, I have attempted to empathize creatively with a real person from seventeenth century London who believed in witchcraft in an effort to understand and recreate the (fictional) conditions in which he (actually) wrote about a series of witch trials as necessary and just.

It’s very hard at times to think positive thoughts about him. Instinctively I ask, how could he have been so irrational and cruel? How could he have been so gullible? 

Currently, I’m giving him a horrible shock to his profound Protestant faith when King James I/VI had his Catholic mother re-interred in Westminster Abbey, with an elegy claiming she and not Elizabeth I was the rightful heiress to the English throne. His reaction? Paralysis and disbelief.

But analysing ‘our’ reactions to comments by Trump and his Administration which totally contradict everything we ‘know for a fact’ – AKA our most profound beliefs – I am trying to find ways into my protagonist’s mindset that I couldn’t have explored without the existential threats from Trump.

Such creative empathy can also be turned on its head: Witch trials happened. James I/VI did that weird stuff. Trump and Vance are going to act on what they believe. The world just changed. Reality flipped. It ain’t about to flip back any time soon...

Cumulatively, I think this sort of thinking can help lessen the power of I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening and open us up to the reality of change.

As I’ve waffled about on ABBA before, neuroscience and behavioural psychology tells us that human minds aren’t very good at objectivity. We perceive what we expect to see. We map new information onto existing knowledge. We rely on experience. Hence, we feel lost when experience fails us as a guide.

Thus, if all fiction is at some level about human experience, reading it and writing it with imaginative empathy might/will/should help us adapt to altered realities.

Yay. Now back to hating on ‘them’. [Only kidding.]

Still on Twitter @HouseRowena

Still on Facebook Rowena House Author

A waste of time - by Lu Hersey

 My last post was about trying to get my book out in time for Christmas, so I could give a copy to my dad before he died. Turns out it was a really stupid thing to do. Debbie (editor at Beaten Track) had to jump through hoops to finish editing in time, my print copies hadn't arrived and I ended up ordering him one through Amazon - but hindsight is a wonderful thing. 

What was I trying to achieve anyway? It's only now I realise it was vanity on my part, a final attempt to make my dad proud of me, which was totally misguided. Close to the end of life, as he opened the present, painfully and slowly, I think he was hoping for a gripping crime novel he hadn't read. He spent a good few minutes staring at the back cover trying to read the blurb, before handing it back to me, disappointed. I understand. When you've only got a few weeks left to live, reading something that doesn't interest you is a waste of very valuable time. 

What he really liked was the photograph album I'd compiled for him, and fair enough. In your final days, you're far more likely to want to look at the story of your life in photographs, so you can remember things, family and friends in happier times, than read anything at all. And so at his funeral this week, I've arranged a tribute montage of 40 photographs of his life as part of the service. I think he'd have liked that. 

Meanwhile, I now have the print copies of the book, but I've totally failed to do anything about promoting it. Maybe when the funeral is over - or maybe it's already too late. But if anyone wants the copy I bought off Amazon, let me know and I'll send it to you for free.

 

PS. It's not a crime novel. 

Lu Hersey

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Admiring 'Lessons in Chemistry'. Steve Way

 

It’s funny isn’t it that sometimes themes go in waves? Last week one of my Spanish students who is learning English told me about how his daughter is part of a group of girls who are participating in STEM based projects, such as making robots and designing apps. Later in the week I was speaking with another student who is a Vice-Chancellor of one of the universities in Barcellona.* She talked about how the number of women in senior roles has gradually increased from practically zero to a few during her career as a palaeontologist. Progress has been made but clearly much more needs to be done to achieve parity.

In between times, I stood in for a colleague and found myself teaching three young women who work for a cosmetics company. The first student arrived several minutes before the others and on introducing herself and her role as a training manager for the company said, “It may seem strange that I work for a cosmetics company because my background is in chemistry.” However, I could see the connection and it sounds as though the industry is doing more to develop products that work in harmony with the natural chemistry of the body, which seems encouraging. Asking her about her interests, she told me that she loved cooking and then emphasised that part of the attraction of cooking for her is that the process is essentially practical chemistry in action.

I could hardly believe it! She sounded like a modern-day version of Bonnie Garmus’s wonderful character, Elizabeth Zott, in her novel, Lessons in Chemistry!  I had only just read the book a week or so before! All the way through reading it, I kept telling my wife how brilliant and original the book is. Apparently this is Garmus’s first novel. If she keeps going like this then phew!

The novel is set in 1960s America, in an environment largely unsupportive of a determined and brilliant female chemist. However, despite inevitable challenges Zott progresses unstoppably and unpredictably, most notably by becoming the unlikely presenter of a cooking programme, in which, you’ve guessed it, she focuses on the chemistry underlying the cooking process. Not only is Zott an inspiring, formidable character but she is accompanied in her absorbing journey by a diverse cast of supporting characters, including her laser sharp daughter, an exceptionally intelligent dog (named Six-Thirty), a neighbour locked into an awful marriage and her agonised producer who is initially desperate for her to conform to the stereotypes of the time.

I think anyone with even a smidgen of interest in science and women’s roles within it would absolutely love this book. It might particularly inspire older teenagers to consider the idea of a STEM career, which would be wonderful if it sometimes succeeded in doing so. However, I also think it would reinvigorate interest in anyone, who for whatever reason lost interest in science. Having taught maths and science in the past, as well as English, I think nearly everyone has had negative experiences at some stage in either or both of these subjects, with girls especially being told that, ‘this subject’s not for you’. I went to university to do a biology degree and couldn’t have been more inspired after completing my A levels. Three years of generally awful teaching squeezed every ounce of enthusiasm from me and was only restored after, thankfully, someone asked for some help with the subject, which gradually revived my interest, so I know how powerful the negative experiences can be. (Also I gave up chemistry as soon as I could at school because the teacher knew my dad and picked on me.**)

As you may have gathered, I highly commend this remarkable book! I hope you enjoy it should you decide to read it.

*I know! She could of course run rings around me on most topics but has the humility to take lessons from a simpleton like me, who’s only advantage is being a native speaker of English!

** To be fair, I pushed back strongly so gave as good as I got – he was probably pleased I gave up the subject too!

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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Penguin Random House UK ISBN 978-1-8049-9092-6