A Funny Old Journey in Children's Publishing - Joan Lennon

It began back in the 20th century with writing short stories (and I still recommend that as a really useful place to learn, especially for writers who want to write novels) and peddling them to Cricket Magazine. They would take maybe 1 in 3 of what I submitted. Enough success to keep me going.

Stories grew into novels. I had an agent who was, well, useless. And then I was taken on by Fraser Ross Associates. Best move I could have made!

Over the next decade or so, my agent (Lindsey Fraser) worked her tiny socks off, and got my books accepted by different traditional publishers at a rate of 1 or 2 a year. (Different publishers liked different kinds of books from me, so that's the way it went, since I kept writing different kinds of books.)

The grass was green, and time passed.

And then, it stopped. Getting published dried up. I hadn't run out of ideas. I wasn't writing worse (I think I was writing better - well, I mean, it'd be pretty sad to have spent all that time and effort and not got better.) I still finished things on time (I understand that deadlines for writers are hard even when deadlines for publishers are squishy soft), took editing on board, wasn't a diva. I'd done school visits, festival events, taught creative writing workshops, blogged and been polite online. My agent worked hard and harder. But that particular stage had come to an end.

My last YA novel Walking Mountain was traditionally published in 2017. It was nominated for the 2018 Carnegie and went out of print. And though I've gone on writing and my agent has gone on submitting, nobody since has said yes.*

Sound familiar? I know I'm not alone in all this!

So I'm nailing my colours to the mast: once I've finished the current WIP, I will have 2 young adult and 2 adult novels ready and raring to go, and they and I will be setting sail on the sea of self-publishing.

The next stage. Interesting times...**

* I'm talking about children/YA fiction here. Because of a kind invitation from Joan Haig to join her in collaborative non-fiction books, there have been 3 non-fiction yes's from Templar: Talking History, Great Minds, and a solo venture Revolution! (out later this year).

** Since writing this blog, I have been wallowing about in contradictory information and advice about different self-publishing routes - DIY, aggregators, retailers, etc. - and how and if the way the world is going suggests NOT going down the Amazon/Kindle road. Onwards, regardless!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

FEBRUARY FIRST by Penny Dolan

February, and I'm pondering on why it so often seems a hopeful month.

Perhaps it's because all the December and early January festivities are over? The glitter, the tinsel, the lights and decorations are packed away in boxes. The guests have come and gone, and all the events and outings enjoyed. Rooms have been righted, sheets and duvet covers washed and dried, and spare pillows stowed in the linen cupboard. Even that Ghost of January's Past - the haunted dread of the tax return - has been faced, sent and paid. All is done and over, and the new year has truly begun.

Today, the first of February, is a traditional Irish celebration known as St Brigid's Day or, in older traditions, as 'Imbolc'. The feast falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and marks the start of the lambing season, the time for plant new seeds and, with the growing daylight, the beginning of Spring.

February 2nd is Candlemas, a day in the Catholic calendar associated with the blessing of candles and candle-lit processions. This feast is also known as the Presentation, the day when the Holy Child was taken to the Temple for the first time. Liturgically, Candlemas is also the conclusion of Christmas season, so any fading fir trees or sets of nativity figures should definitely disappear from view.

Meanwhile, February 2nd, in America, is also famous as Groundhog Day and not only for that film. From a Pennsylvanian-German 'hibernation' tradition, this day is when a groundhog emerges from its burrow. If the groundhog - or, back in Europe, a bear or badger - sees its own shadow, the animal will retreat into its den, and winter will continue or six more weeks. However, if the groundhog pops its head out and sees no shadow, spring will be arriving early. 

What? This 'shadow or no shadow' idea puzzled me: who wouldn't want sunshine and a bright day? Who'd want weather that was grey, overcast and with no sun or shadows? 

The answer, it seems, lies in a traditional belief that a bright, clear Candlemas day would herald a prolonged winter. Though there's a pleasure in playing with such old cultural beliefs, I feel sure, in America, there are more things to worry about right now.

But, here and now, what do all those hopes and traditions tell me?

That if I - or you - didn't make or keep those start of January hopes and resolutions,  worry not! Today, the beginning of February is the moment to begin again. This is the time when the daylight becomes stronger, and when spring starts springing. Today, early February, is the real 'start again' season. 

If you are not already settled and busy - as I know some ABBA bloggers will be, the amazing souls - what and where will you be going? 

Is it opening up your big novel project, making more time for 'fill the well' experiences, joining an online writing course or group, sorting through that file of scrappy ideas, deciphering those scribbles on the run still in your pocket notebook, finding that file of hidden, half-forgotten poems, or even wandering through one inspirational book or another.

February feels very much a month for beginning, for finding some sunshine, with or without shadows. Good luck! 

(And of course - oh bother - there's always St Valentine's, available from all good and less-good supermarkets, stores and screens near you . . . Ignore?)

Penny Dolan

The Wrong Handle by Sheena Wilkinson

 Writing is so weird. 

This time last year I finished a book. Nothing weird about that; I'm a writer. My agent sent it on submission. Nobody bit in the first round – sadly, nothing weird about that either, these days. But this wasn’t the usual ‘it’s too quiet to be commercial and too accessible to be literary’ verdict. Instead there was a suggestion that the book lacked something more fundamental; people didn’t even like the pitch.

I wasn’t thrilled, obviously: in my mind I had written a fine historical novel, women-centred, gritty and heartfelt. Exactly the kind of book I – and, I thought, thousands of women, liked to read. But that didn’t seem to be what editors were picking up on. My agent was keen to pull the book from submission rather than flogging a dead horse. I was working on three something elses – True Friends at Fernside and Miss McVey Takes Charge, which came out in the second half of last year, and an untitled and troublesome dual timeline, so the fiction-writing-and-editing part of my brain was not idle.

Sometime, my agent and I agreed, I would have a good look at the abandoned book and see if I could rejig the pitch to make it more appealing/commercial. I didn’t envisage having to do a major rewrite. 

And then, on retreat in December, I read the book again for the first time in months. Not only did I now agree that there was something fundamental missing; I knew was it was. Not only that, but all the ingredients to make the book hookier, tenser and darker were already there. Always had been. There was even – something new for me – a murder. Or rather, there was a death which I – the writer – hadn’t realised was a murder. As for the murderer? Well, she’d been there all the time too. 

my view on retreat 

I’d love to say that I rewrote the book quickly, that my agent fell upon it with glee, that six editors went into battle for it and that it sold at auction for squillions and became the book that revolutionised my career and my fortunes. I mean, that might happen; if I didn’t believe that such things were possible I wouldn’t still be a novelist. So far, after that wonderful week on retreat when so much revealed itself to me, it’s been a matter of trying to steal an hour here and there in between mentoring, teaching, report-writing and school visits.

the kind of thing that stops me writing all day every day 

But every few days I realise something new about the story – sometimes I even wake up with it in my head, and I feel so glad of the chance to remake it. I’m reminded of Cousin Helen’s advice in What Katy Did. Not everything saintly Cousin Helen says has stood the test of time, but her idea that ‘Everything in the world has two handles… One is a smooth handle. If you take hold of it, the thing comes up lightly and easily, but if you seize the rough handle, it hurts your hand and the thing is hard to lift’ fits in very neatly with my book.

I had got hold of the story by the wrong handle and I couldn’t grasp it easily. Now I have the right handle and it’s only a matter of time. 

There's still hope for those squillions! 

 

Puzzling

I wonder whether other SASSIES suffer from the same problem I'm regularly confronted with?

I have an idea for a story. I start to write and the ideas flow. I'm enjoying myself. But when I reach - roughly - the halfway point, the ideas that got me going just... dry up. I sit there, trying to think of ways to proceed and everything I come up with feels wrong. I might even write it. But it keeps feeling wrong. 

And I know it.

What started out as fun becomes anything but.

I haven't found a solution yet.

An Ordinary War

 This year, I am planning to publish a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's inspired by the experiences of my father during the war: he was one of those who didn't get away at Dunkirk. He was captured on the way, and was a prisoner of war for five years.

Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, when I started writing seriously, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland all those years ago. Often, the stories were the same ones repeated: sometimes, his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "You don't know what you're capable of until you've been really hungry." And then lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.

Some time after he died (which was in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.

And it was fascinating, and immensely rewarding.

I will write more in future posts about this process. But in this one, I just want to tell you about one little thing - the thing that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what was a spark into a flame.

I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostell, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a book I was reading called The Last Escape (a wonderful book, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.

They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.

They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have.

So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me tat the records were not complete: everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I felt sure.

The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect now that everything's online, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.

But then, there it was. Reginald Bernard Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The answers were brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice.  I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.

Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. it told me where he'd been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.

And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail.

On deadlines & writing deliciousness - Rowena House

Oops! Long time no post. Apologies. My excuse: I’m finally on a deadline after nigh on six years nibbling away at my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, with three (max four) months to get Draft 1 developed, polished, and proof read, including an entirely new narrative perspective on the same events, told in alternate chapters, decided upon last year.

So, about one quarter to one third of a novel to write in three/months. That’s do-able, right?

The writing gods are [ATM] being kind in letting me get on with it, but that’s very unlikely to last on recent form with life duties, so I’m writing and editing daily whenever I can.  

Updates on RowenaHouseAuthor on Facebook if anyone feels like joining me for this last dash, followed by more reflective thoughts about the story, its history, how I’ve bent history and invented stuff, and whether that’s justifiable etc. That’ll be from May-September as I write the critical commentary for the PhD, of which the novel is the main part.  

More good news. I have four readers! Two supervisors and two examiners. Hurrah. While not exactly No. 1 bestseller stuff, four readers are enough to order myself not to waste their time with any residual Draft 1 slop (slop being a 2026 version of Hemingway’s more graphic/honest description of Draft 1). 

Luckily, last November, when I should have been writing an ABBA post, I was en route to one of the classiest, most instructive and motivational retreats I’ve ever been on.

It was a week at the Moniack Mhor writing centre in the hills outside Inverness, Scotland, a place that lots of fine writers have recommended and was high on my wish-list even before they announced that the historical fiction retreat would be led by Lucy Jago, author of A Net for Small Fishes, set just after mine and a lovely, very well-researched read, and Andrew Miller – squee – fresh off the Booker shortlist, whose Land in Winter was the winner in bookshop if (sadly) not on the podium. His Pure has been a touchstone for the voice of this WiP for years and a comfort go-to read for more than a decade. 

To top it all, the other retreaters were super talented, including a dear writer friend off the MA in writing for young people at Bath Spa, Eden Enfield, whose prose for both young people and adult I vastly admire. Honestly, who needs to get published when such deliciousness awaits?

To keep the deliciousness going, I’m thrilled to have been invited by another writer-for-young-people-turned-adult-historical-novelist, Liz Flanagan, to one of her launch events for her English civil war novel, When We Were Divided. 

So looking forward to celebrating its publication with her up in Heptonstall next month (where I haven’t been since 1985) and then getting lost in her story.

Happy writing, editing, reading, plotting, dreaming.

PS I got both copies signed. :0)

Turning an argument around? By Steve Way

 

Hello. I hope it’s not too late to wish you a happy, healthy, prosperous and well published 2026!

Just sharing a few idle thoughts, the tenuous link between them being that they are linked to the fascinating way we use language, often in ways that don’t make logical sense.

For one thing, why do we insist on calling it a ‘duvet’ when the French call it ‘une couette’? If we’re going to steal from other languages, we could at least do so correctly! For years the adverts for Audi cars ended with the phrase ‘Vorsprung durch technik… as we say in Germany’. I once asked a German student what that phrase meant and he looked at me blankly. He’d never heard that phrase before and insisted that they would never say it in Germany!?!

This morning, quarter of an hour before I was due to give an online lesson to a couple of Spanish students, we had a power cut and therefore no internet connection. I sent an email explaining the situation to the teaching agency I work with. The reply asked me whether I thought we should cancel the lesson, or whether I would be able to sign on in five or ten minute or not. I wasn’t sure if I should feel complimented or exasperated at the thought that they believed I could psychically predict how long a power cut would be.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard used many times, though one occasion that sticks particularly clearly in my mind was when I heard a lady passionately describing a heated discussion she’d had and declared, “And then, she turns around and says…” My first thought was to wonder if that meant that the lady she’d been arguing with now had her back to her. How rude. No wonder lady number one was upset. Alternatively, was object-of-derision lady originally facing away from deriding-lady and had she now turned around to confront her? More bizarrely, did she perhaps spin around balletically through 360 degrees, believing this would add drama, weight and credibility to her cause? As on other occasions I was too timid to interrupt deriding-lady, who was now if full flow, to explore these options with her, which on reflection was probably for the best.

I also find it funny when people say things like, ‘It was the last place I looked’. Would you continue looking for something you’ve already found? When someone for example ask a lady, ‘Can you give me your number?’ I always want to say ‘One… there’s only one of her’. Do you perhaps want her phone number?’ I’m also tempted to pick a chair up off the floor when someone says, ‘Pull up a chair’. Shouldn’t it be ‘pull along a chair?’ My long-suffering wife often insists, when sharing a cake or such like, ‘you have the bigger half’. Well in my defence on that last one, I do sometimes teach maths. Wouldn’t it be somehow wonderful though if the concept of ‘the bigger half’ could be introduced into the GCSE syllabus? Technically inaccurate, though real life.

A comment that amused my wife recently was when she asked about the length of a coat being sold online. The brilliantly unhelpful response was, ‘Well, I’m five foot two and it comes down to my knees’. In my case I can’t help wondering if those are metric knees or imperial?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve just self-published what’s effectively a work of many years, a compilation of ideas I’ve used to inspire creative writing called ‘Reluctant Writers Resource’. What amuses me most, as it contains many sections, is that the paperback version weighs over a kilogramme!*

The original idea was to provide ‘an idea a week to stimulate creative writing’, with the aim of giving teachers springboards for writing to encompass the 38 weeks of the school year, though in the end there are a lot more than 38 sections. The example pieces used to get the children’s creative juices flowing vary in length and complexity but the core of them are deliberately short, with the aim of not outfacing the children and supporting them in believing they could write pieces of similar length. I’ve road tested the ideas in many schools in the UK and abroad and they’ve always worked well. Many teachers told me that they’d never seen their children, including the reluctant writers, produce so much work!

*At least there’s one way in which it’s a weighty tome!

 

 

Kindle ASIN : B0GF8RQ7WX

Paperback ISBN : 979 – 8241950987

Hardback ISBN : 979 - 8242528680