Hurrah! A milestone passed - by Rowena House

Hurrah! On April 7th I got to type The End at the end of an 87k-word development edit of my witch trial work-in-progress. That is, a year and a day after I finished the first full draft and (whisper it) six years after starting this project.

Actually, it's cheating to say it’s done as the new subplot still needs developing, but it was a big enough milestone to warrant a series of pub dinners with my other half, culminating (tonight as I type this) in a family dinner in a local restaurant with fantastic views over the south Devon coast.

A huge thank you to my wonderful son and his lovely partner for arranging it.

So, what’s next?

A six-week cooling off period for the manuscript before the subplot development edit and whole manuscript line edit during which I’ll edit down nineteen thousand words of codswallop written last year and nominally entitled a PhD critical commentary on the novel.







Luckily, my faithful Elements of Reasoning, a gift from my dad in the 1980s, is already suggesting a logical structure to this commentary that might – might – help massage the codswallop into something less rambling. And it’s always better to edit than stare at a blank screen. Isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I treated myself to Richard Cohen's journey into writerly minds as an escape from depressing academic histories of witch trials. Happily, Cohen flagged up something I hadn’t realised: both plotlines for the WIP turned into ‘rebirth’ stories in Christopher Booker’s schema of seven basic plots.

I’ll have to re-read his tome – or rather, the relevant chapter/s – after being disappointed to find on first reading (in circa 2021) that I didn’t seem to be writing one of his universal stories. It’s comforting to think my witch suspects unconsciously wandered back into that fold as, tbh, I still find it difficult to be certain I’ve written a story, rather than storified history, albeit with extra bits of herstory.





Then in May, I’m off on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank about getting published in 2026 which I’m hoping will lift the gloom that squats over the whole business of querying and submissions etc. In my dreams, there’s a friendly little independent publisher somewhere that still does hardbacks.

Anyway, sorry this is another short diary entry. It’s laundry time if I’m going to have anything clean to wear tonight. And we’re out of bread and milk. And it turns out to be lunch time. Breakfast? Oh, well. 

Happy writing life, one and all.

I'm still raging over on Twitter @HouseRowena. As Rowena House Author, you'll find me playing with photos on Instagram and diarising the WIP on Facebook

Creating a new (very small) world - by Lu Hersey

 It all started with the house leeks. Or maybe it was when I bought that bowl in a charity shop. the kind of thing my mother would have considered unbelievably tasteless but my grandmother would have loved. In fact, maybe it all started over half a century ago, and I can blame it on my grandmother.

Back in the time before she came to live with us, among many wonderful treasures in her bungalow, (my mother's opinion of them differed) she had a potted cactus garden which I absolutely loved. Hidden between the cacti there was a tiny ceramic bridge over a mirror pond, and a tiny ceramic Chinese pagoda nearby. I always wished there were tiny people to go with it. Maybe that's what makes us start writing, creating fantasy lands in stories, like capsule worlds we can control. Unlike the news.

Anyway, because of the bowl, the house leeks or my grandmother, I strayed into a whole new universe. Turns out there must be countless others out there, like me, creating fantasy worlds, whether it's for model trains, mini dinosaur parks, or tiny tanks and soldiers for war games. We start sensibly in places like ebay and etsy, then tumble right down into a snake pit called Temu. Beware! Temu can suck sensible people into rabbit holes it's hard to escape from. There is literally no end to the fascinating awfulness that Temu can produce.

And even as I worried somewhere at the back of my mind about the poor Chinese people who work creating bizarre stuff no one needs and which will inevitably lead to the collapse of Western civilisation, I found it almost impossible to stop searching for tiny objects to put in my new fairy bowl universe. 

Fortunately I was saved by the cat, demanding second breakfast. She started yowling loudly and consistently, just as I was about to hit PAY on Temu. 

As I grumbled downstairs to appease the beast, it suddenly occurred to me - I already had everything I needed! I'd only needed to leave the Temuverse for a moment to remember. Even better, I realised what I had was much classier (in my opinion - others might disagree) than anything my online search had come up with. 

A quick hunt after feeding the cat unearthed some glow in the dark forest spirits from Princess Mononoke which had been lurking under a money plant downstairs for so long, they'd almost vanished into the compost. They look very happy to be rescued.

Even better, I remembered a magical Christmas present, handmade for me by my friend Dandelion and buried somewhere behind a pile of notebooks on my desk. It's perfect. (If you like it, he sells all kinds of wonders in his Glastonbury shop, Dandelion Dreamz, which are also available online),

It might need a bit of tweaking (and occasional watering) but I'm quite proud of my new, Temu-free, magical universe.

And having finished procrastinating, suppose it's time to actually go and write something...

Dandelion at work

Lu Hersey

web: https://www.lu-hersey.com/

Floating a few more ideas By Steve Way

 Hi all, Suddenly it's my day to post again and I've been up to my eyeballs this month, so I hope you don't mind, I thought I'd share a few more daft signs I've thought up since last time, plus a comment inspired by a statement regarding sunken ships...

Welcome to DERRY Sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding. Yes, you can get milk here but much more besides.	Welcome to LONDONDERRY Where we like to keep a record of events about what’s happening in London.
Welcome to BELFAST So, we can’t ring it unfortunately.	Welcome to The Isle of Mull Where we like to think things over carefully.
Welcome to BOLTON Though we don’t know why we’re running… and what from…	Welcome to STOCKPORT It’s a delicious rich, fruity drink, which why we recommend keeping plenty of it.
Welcome to GLOUCESTER We suggest not coming here when it’s raining, particularly if you are in the medical profession.	Welcome to ST IVES A town in which many people share the same surname and where cats are mollycoddled.
Welcome to The Mull of Kintyre Where we also like to spend our time thinking things over, though it can be fatiguing for your family.	You are now leaving MIDDLESBROUGH Why not visit FIRSTBORNBROUGH or Always-been-the-baby-of-the-family-even-though-he’s-in-his-40s-now-brough?
PAR IS The goal of most amateur golfers.	Welcome to ROME Feel free to wander through our city. (Superb mobile signal by the way.)
MOS COW She stood still in the rain to often…	U KRAINE Me dumper truck
BARCE LONA Available from Barce Financial Services.	S PAIN The extraordinary allergy to the letter S.
I TALY You call out the numbers.	CORN WALL A surprisingly good building material.
PO LAND Jokes about bears we can live with, but toilet jokes not appreciated.	FIN LAND Though we’re wider than you’d think…
CANA DA Not at that price anyway. But if you make me a better offer?	HO LLAND Pst… Forget Lapland… Father Christmas comes from here really…
BRAZ IL Who would have thought an item of clothing could become unwell?	See our Non-sunk submarines Famous for being able to ‘float’ near the bottom of the sea…

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

'It started like this. A Mrs Jones lived next door to Mrs Jones.'
A study of the absurdity of runaway consumerism. Mrs G Jones continuously competes to outdo her neighbour Mrs J Jones. Firstly it's furniture, clothing, then it's exotic pets, cars, extensions, holidays, cosmetic surgery... meanwhile their children are forgotten and run wild and their husbands work 24 hours a day to pay the bills... finally Mrs GJ actually commissions a white elephant while Mrs JJ builds an ivory tower*. Not surprisingly it ends in disaster.
*Actually made out of marble, so it's not all bad.

Available on Amazon Kindle

ASIN: B0GGXTQQXV  (The 0 is a zero)

Tiger, Tom & Tinkle, by David Wood, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

        I couldn't resist ordering through Waterstones this book about three of my favourite children's book creating women; Judith Kerr, Philippa Pearce, and Kathleen Hale. David Wood is a brilliant adapter of children's books for the stage, so this book is the result of his working with those three creators towards theatrical and animated performances for child audiences over several decades. 

    I found the correspondence between David and Judith Kerr concerning turning that absolute classic picture book, The Tiger Who Came To Tea, into an hour-long show the most fascinating part of this book. The real understanding of what engages and appeals in that story, milking the anticipation of the moment that all are waiting for - the arrival of the Tiger! - by having other characters ringing the doorbell before we get to him, is brilliant! As is the magic employed to let that huge but friendly Tiger seem to actually eat all that food, and the water from the tap. And the Tiger is played by the actor of Dad. Humour, music, excitement, all there with adults playing children and props made large to fit those proportions.

    Unsurprisingly, Judith Kerr comes across as delightful and really interesting, as do Philippa Pearce and Kathleen Hale. I found the quantity of correspondence between them and David Wood published here a bit repetitive, losing my interest enough to make me skip a bit over the many pages of similar stuff. 

    But, for those who love these creator characters, and are interested in how book stories are adapted for stage and screen, I suggest this is a book to ask your library to order in. It's self-published so not stocked as generally as a traditionally published book would be.  

Back to basics (1): I am not a robot — Anne Rooney

 

Last month, Hachette pulled Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, the first case of a major publisher cancelling a book because the author used gernerative AI in its creation. Last month, also, the Society of Authors launched its Human Authored initiative, a scheme to allow authors and publishers to declare that a book has a human author.* There are other marks and schemes that also aim to protect and recognise the value of human creativity. It's very sad that this is needed, and that we can't instead get AI-generated content labelled as such, but that's the world we are in right now and this is better than nothing.

Most contracts that an author signs with a respectable publisher  require a declaration that AI hasn't been used to produce the book. There is a huge debate to be had about what constitutes using AI to produce a book, with some people saying they 'only' use it for plot problems, suggesting names or places, correcting grammar, or any other isolated (or not so isolated) task in the whole process. My view is that you shouldn't be using it for anything. If you can't work out a plot and write grammatically, you're not up to being a professional writer yet, so go learn. But there are a wide range of views, and I'm not here to argue the case. The point here is that if you have signed a contract that says you won't use AI, or even adopted a mark that claims you haven't used AI, what happens if you are asked to prove you wrote the whole thing yourself? What if Mia Ballard were wrongly accused? (I'm not suggesting she was, by the way.) How do writers protect themselves from the accusation that because they use em dashes or triplets or some other spurious bit of 'proof', that they 'obviously' used AI to write their books? It's a question that has been clogging up writers' spaces on the web for a while now. 

Drafts — you worked to improve it!

One obvious thing you can do is to keep drafts. These are dated and show the slow build-up of your book over time. Another is to note all your sources. My drafts are heavily footnoted with sources for everything that isn't such common knowledge that it doesn't need to be verified. 

I usually write non-fiction, but when I write fiction I also footnote anything that comes from research. Originally, this was so that I could check facts, or deal with queries from editors and translators (and sometimes readers), but now it serves a useful additional purpose in proving I did actually do the research and the sources do exist, unlike those invented by ChatGPT and other LLMs. 

Books — show where you got the info

 

 Sources are often books, with page numbers included in the reference; I don't see LLMs being able to do that accurately, even if they tried. If it's a book I have, I don't include edition details. If it's a book in the library, the footnote includes the library classmark so I can get the same copy back if necessary. All these footnotes are deleted when I send the MS to the publisher, but I have them if I need them.

 

Cards — very analogue, very niche

Another thing I've started doing recently is making more handwritten notes and plans. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book on extinct animals and, after many years of duplicating the same research, I've decided I need my own card index (not a database on the computer — a physical object) of organisms through time. It will have everything I need for the animals that might be in this book and I can add to it later for other books. It's on the computer as well, but I print out the entries and stick them to cards. They're easy to shuffle, sort, annotate and pick out for different purposes. 

I keep too many notebooks, so scraps for different books tend to be spread around, but I'm going to start at least colour-coding them so I can hook them out if needed. I have a proper paper trail, in the original sense of the term. I'm also occasionally posting to Bluesky and Instagram photos of ongoing work and commenting on where I've got to with things. This, too, will be evidence that I didn't knock up a book with a few crafty prompts one rainy afternoon.

I hope none of this will ever be needed, but if it is, it's there and hard to contest. I suppose I could have gone to the trouble of getting AI to do all this and then cutting it up or writing it out by hand and doing all this over a period of many months, but it would be more work than just writing the book (and would produce a rubbish book). I hope other writers, worried about this, are doing similar things. Please share your tips in the comments. And it's honestly nice to return to a less digital way of doing things. Cut and paste with scissors and a glue stick, just like the old days. (Though it was Spraymount and a scalpel when I was last being paid to do cut-and-paste, back in the dark ages.)

 

* The SoA scheme does allow limited use of AI in preparatory work, but not in generation of the text or images, following the precedent set by the Writers' Guild

Anne Rooney

Website
Bluesky
Instagram

Out now:

 

For adults; Arcturus, December 2025

 

 

For children; The Magnificent Book of Microscopic Creatures, February 2025 (I like the French cover better than the UK/US cover, but you can also get it in English! 

Hard Streets by Jacqueline Riding review by Lynda Waterhouse

 

 A few days ago, I went to The Cinema Museum for the book launch of ‘Hard Streets, Working-Class lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London,’ by Dr Jacqueline Riding.

The Cinema Museum is housed in what once was the Lambeth Workhouse where Chaplin had been placed as a child. It is an atmospheric place that’s well worth a visit. https://cinemamuseum.org.uk/

The event began with a screening of some archive footage of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s as he revisited some of his childhood haunts and where he strolled mostly unrecognised in a bleak post-war landscape.

On the film I spotted Charlie in West Square, where he had lived as a child in relative comfort before his circumstances changed for the worse.  As part of my community project, ‘Capturing memories before the Elephant Forgets’, I’d heard accounts of life in West Square at this time so it was fascinating to glimpse some footage. It’s also close to where I live so this book has a particular resonance for me. I walk these streets every day.

Chaplin’s childhood experiences of poverty were central to his work for the rest of his life and this can be seen in his creation of the iconic figure of the ‘Little Tramp’ and in the evocation of place seen in films such as ‘The Kid.’  

The book also tells the story of another local lad, George Tinworth, whose unpublished handwritten autobiography Riding discovered in Southwark Archives.  George Tinworth, a neighbour of Chaplin’s grandparents and mother, started life a poor wheelwright and became a renowned sculptor, ceramic artist and modeller at the royal Doulton Factory at Lambeth. His talent was nurtured by the Lambeth School of Art which had been established in 1854.

Riding also provides a fascinating account of the Settlement Movement, particularly the Browning Settlement founded in Walworth in 1895 with its Christian socialist principles, and links to the newly formed Labour Party.

Alongside the many instances of poverty and suffering the book also illustrates the resilience and sheer hard work put in by both Tinworth and Chaplin in order to take advantage of the opportunities that were to be found in the area. With hard work and a sprinkle of luck you could survive and succeed. A career in the performing arts or attending an art college, could provide a good life.

This book highlights both the impact of poverty and the importance of the arts in shaping meaningful lives, something I hope the current Labour movement is paying attention to.

ISBN 9781800818644

Profile Books

Members' News April

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. Spring is finally here! March was a whirlwind month of school events for many people. I think (I hope!) we all survived. And thousands more children are now reading books thanks to in-person visits, which is definitely worth celebrating.

On to April and a few belated congratulations.

Kelly McKain's Unbridled, was published in February.

Bethany Wheeler's How Not to Kiss a Prince was published last November. (Welcome to the Sassies, Bethany).

And last, but not least. Congratulation, Savita Kalhan, whose latest book deal was announced in the Bookseller.

Let me have your news for the next round-up. 

Claire

www.clairefayers.com