Out of Date bu Paul May

It is incredible how fast children's books can become dated, especially if they're realistic fiction with a contemporary setting. 25 years ago I wrote a short football novel that referenced Michael Owen and held up Brazil as the team that exemplified a style of football that's now more associated with Spain. I wrote my first books when mobile phones were a novelty and there was still a phone tethered in the hallway in most houses. I always did my best to avoid writing dialogue in imitation of contemporary slang because I knew how that would seem out of date by the time the book was published, but I had no idea how fast the world would change. I see now why children's writers love fantasy and historical fiction.

An adult reader will pick up a John Le Carré novel and they'll recognize a past they've lived through. They won't be puzzled by characters having to visit a library or an archive to find information that today is available in a couple of clicks; they'll understand that, in a crisis, the hero can't just whip out a phone and call for help - they'll have to find a phone box, they'll need money . . . Jason Reynolds said in his film Dear Dreamer that he thought if his books were still being read forty years from now, 'I've failed.'

'Forty years from now we ain't figured out new books yet? Language is living, it's growing, it's changing, it's evolving . . . Books have to do the exact same thing in order for me to see eye to eye with the young people.'

Jason Reynolds isn't worried about his books dating because he wants young people to be reading new books all the time. Well, he probably doesn't want them reading the new stuff ALL the time, but it does mean he doesn't have to worry about being out of date. And there might come a time, but who knows when that will be, when 'out-of-date' turns into 'vintage' and then into 'classic'. And sometimes, even in realistic contemporary fiction, writers manage to nail something universal in their characters, or something so appealing in their stories, that their books never go out of print, no matter how dated they seem. I'm thinking of Noel Streatfeild or Arthur Ransome for example.

Maybe it'a a bit like the way you don't worry too much about a word you don't know if the plot's propelling you forward or you're desperately involved with the fortunes of a favourite character. Then you won't stop to worry about why they haven't made that phone call or sent that message.

Jason Reynolds has a point though. Everything these days is so instant and young people are tuned in to a constantly changing stream of information. Books are so slow. They're out of date before you've even finished writing them. It can take years to get from the first idea to the published book, and the potential readers of your book might not even be born when you have that first idea.

Thank You to Bookmarks - Joan Lennon

If you're like me, the whole thing of going cold into a bookshop and saying to the person behind the counter, 'Hi, I'm X and I've written a book called Y and I'd be happy, um, you know, to sign any copies you... have... um, er... I brought my own pen...' while they stare, blank-faced at best, deeply suspicious at worst,* and the hot flush rises to your hairline, isn't fun.

This is where having bookmarks come in. Instead of staring at you, for a few moments they're staring at the bookmarks and the picture of the cover is right there, saying 'Look at me - I'm legit!' A few moments during which they just might journey back from the foothills of disdain, start checking on the computer and possibly crack a smile. If they don't have a copy, you can still be Lady Munificent and give them some bookmarks. And if they DO have a copy that they produce for you to sign, well, you've got your own pen.

Revolution! 12 Seismic Shifts that Changed the World! by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, published by Templar Books

*This is more of a big book chain kind of response. The little independents warm up way quicker!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

THURSDAY 1ST OCTOBER - and it's NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2026 !

    Hooray! Thursday 1st October, is POETRY DAY 2006 . . . 

. . . a date the National Literacy Trust has chosen for exploring poetry in all its forms, a day for celebrating all rhymes and rhyming picture books in Storytimes, for re-reading and sharing familiar poems they have enjoyed before, discovering new poems and new voices, and even writing poetry and sharing their work and thoughts with others. 

This year's National Poetry Day is WONDER AND LOCAL COMMUNITY, a theme that invites students to explore the world around them them, to consider all the people, the places, the stories and the moments that make their environment unique.

The National Reading Agency offers a great online collection of poetry resources, all chosen to support the writing, reading and performing of poetry in schools, all designed to showcase poetry as a way for students to grow in confidence, creativity, empathy and self expression, and a language form that can easily be accessible to all students, whatever their age, and hopefully for more than a single day. 

In fact, at the end of the month, between 2-6 November, comes Young Poets Week, with the Young Laureate scheme offering some schools and pupils free poetry resources, online masterclasses and all sorts of ways of playing with words and poetry. For information on the new Young Laureate scheme, go to https://literacytrust.org.uk/writing-for-pleasure/poetry

Naturally, this is the time of the year when publishers highlight poetry books for schools. Among titles I've come across are 'Cosy Poems', Gaby Morgan's anthology for 11+ students, and Attie Lime's 'Poems on Toast' for KS2 children. Michael Rosen's website has videos of the poet performing his own poems, of course. My choice for the youngest children, though not strictly 'poetry', would probably be a rhyming picture book, such Rosen & Helen Oxenbury's charming 'Oh Dear, Look What I Got!', or a book I heard again recently: Kes Gray & Jim Field's very first 'Oi Frog!'

                                    Do you have any titles to suggest?

                       Happy National Poetry Day! 

Penny Dolan

Two writers in one house?! by Sheena Wilkinson

This week I played a part in a book launch, standing onstage, telling the audience -- and it was a packed house -- about this wonderful book they should all buy and would certainly enjoy. No, it wasn't my own book this time. This book, Punters on Tour: Around Ireland in 26 Racecourses is by my husband, Seamus Hynds. So now we are two writers in one house! 

the latest literary power couple? (photo: Raphael Mason)

Will we suddenly become like Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard? Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? I don't think there's any danger of that -- Seamus has always said it would be 'one and done', whereas I can't imagine ever stopping writing. 

this is what it's all about 

Back in 2016, when we were just pals, Seamus, a massive fan of horse racing, told me of his plans to visit every racecourse in Ireland and write a book about it. Now when you’re a writer, as many readers of this blog are, people are always telling you about the book they’re going to write. Most of the time you never hear another word about it. But Seamus is a man of his word and, by the start of 2019, after a major life event (being widowed) he tentatively shared a few chapters with me, knowing that, as a very honest person and a professional writer, I would give him helpful feedback. 

the finished book -- cover design by Emma Pass 

What he didn't know was that by then, I'd started to fall for him, so I was terribly nervous reading those first chapters. I knew I'd find it hard to be in love with someone whose writing wasn't good! The fact that we've now been married for almost five years should tell you all you need to know about the quality of the book.

I'd been through the self-publishing route last year myself with Miss McVey Takes Charge https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/03/awfully-big-adventures-in-self.html, but unlike me, Seamus always planned to self-publish, and it was refreshing for me to see someone so focussed on simply writing the best book he could, without worrying about the market. Luckily, being married to me, he had an editor on tap, though we also engaged someone else for a line edit. My friend, the writer Emma Pass, designed a fantastic cover. 

some of the audience at the launch (photo: Raphael Mason)

The launch was fantastic, with about a hundred people from all aspects of Seamus's life packing out the Seamus Heaney Home Place, one of Northern Ireland's best literary venues. Seamus, first as a supportive old friend and latterly as a partner, has been to all my book launches, so it was fantastic to be at his -- actually I MC'd it: it would have been even more surreal to have been simply in the audience! 

I'm proud of all my own books, but it's been lovely to be a kind of midwife for this one. Every day Seamus is getting messages from people who are enjoying it, whether racing fans or not -- there's a lot in the book about grief, recovery and friendship -- and it's wonderful to see him experiencing that connection with readers, which, as we all know, whether we write fiction or non-fiction, for adults or children, is what it's all about. 

It's my turn to publish the next book, though!

 

The Company of Writers

Just over a year ago, a member of the Society of Authors who lives in Amsterdam, thought it might be a good idea to bring other Netherlands-residing members together. More than 30 people turned up, and not all of them from Amsterdam, but from all over the country. It was a lovely, convivial encounter and one that has led to more. 

We now meet once a month or so. The numbers have dropped off since that initial get-together and are now confined – mainly – to people who live in, or near, Amsterdam. (There’s talk of holding a meeting in another city, in a bid to relieve the capital bias.) At most, 10 or so people attend. And they’re not all writers of fiction. We have translators, educational writers, journalists, writers of guide books, historians. A good, wide mix. (I’m the only writer of fiction for children.)

There’s no fixed setting. Last week, we met in an old, converted warehouse next to the water. It's now shared work spaces.

And they've left the gloriously worn-down staircases.

Nor is there a fixed agenda. Recently, Ben Coates was invited to come along to talk to us. About his work, his research, his juggling both with family life. (He’s the author of – among others – How the Dutch are Different, which is a terrific read even if you don’t know a thing about the country.) A month from now, we’ll be talking about fantasy fiction. At other times, we just meet to chat and swap stories.

What I enjoy most about the group is the chance to talk to people who ‘get it’.* Who understand about cranky publishers, being ghosted, struggling with the taxman. Who don’t need to be told about how hard it can be confronting that empty page. We all write, and we know what it’s like, and that shared experience is something I find both enjoyable and encouraging. I leave every meeting feeling better. More optimistic. It’s a great feeling.

*The SASSIES get it too. I don’t deny that. But you’re almost all in the UK and as much as I enjoy following you on Facebook and here on the blog, I do miss the chance to just talk. In person.

An Ordinary Man - by Sue Purkiss

 

 

In my book, recently published by Writers Review, the hero, Harry Pilgrim, was captured back in May 1940 on the way to Dunkirk. By this time - the end of September - he is in a POW camp in Poland, in what is now called Torun but which was then known by its German name, Thorn.

He, and many others, reached the camp after a punishing march across the north of France in the summer heat. They were given very little food: they slept in the open, occasionally in barns. If you couldn't keep going, you were shot. They didn't know where they were going or what was going to happen to them. They eventually reached Trier, in Germany, where the streets were lined with scarlet banners emblazoned with swastikas and the people jeered and pelted them with stones and rotten vegetables. Then they were crammed into cattle trucks and entrained to Poland.

Much later, when things were more organised, their families would be notified where they were, and they would begin to receive letters from home and Red Cross parcels which would augment their meagre rations. They would be sent out on work parties - some of which weren't too bad: my father, on whom Harry is very loosely based, really quite enjoyed working as a forester.

But for now, there was nothing to do, except to sit around and wonder just how it was that they'd ended up here - wherever 'here' was.

My father - and Harry - came from Ilkeston, an industrial town between Derby and Nottingham. His father, who had worked at Stanton Ironworks, died of lung disease when Dad was about 14, which was also when he left school, leaving a wife and six children - five girls and Dad, the second youngest. They were a close family. The older girls were already working and bringing in money, which was just as well, because there was no other money coming in.  Dad worked in a coal yard - there were lots of pits around - eventually graduating to driving a lorry. When the war started and he joined up, that's what he did - drove a lorry in the Royal Army Service Corps.

When I began to work on this book, it really struck me what a culture shock the war must have been for a twenty year-old who had never been further from home than on a church trip to Blackpool. Would he even have known where Poland was? Would he have had any idea what had led to the war - apart, of course, from what he'd seen on news reels at the cinema? (To which, in any case, as the son of an evangelical family, he was not supposed to go.)

What a setting in which to do his growing up. But there he was, as were so many others, for five years.

He came through. But not without scars.

To find out more about Harry and what happened to him, you can find the book here.

And to all those of you who have read the book already, and sent kind messages or written reviews - thank you!

The creative writing PhD is all but done, so what’s next? - Rowena House

On the Monday this post is published on ABBA, I’ll be trying [again] to upload my completed creative writing doctoral thesis to the university website and saying goodbye to a big phase of my writing life. 

Hurrah! But also, oh heck.

The future just uncurled, stretched, and looked me in the eye.

So, what’s next? Another novel? Non-fiction? Different adventures entirely? It’s too soon to know, but that’s okay; thinking time is a big part of decision-making.

When I started to write this post yesterday, I focused on the past, trying to express some sort of preliminary judgement about the overall value [and downside] of writing an historical novel in my particular academic setting.

One thing I can say with confidence is that the university’s formal reporting requirements and supervisor feedback kept me going through tough patches. After an intense month completing the thesis, it also felt as if the seventeenth-century witch trial manuscript was the main output of the past six-and-a-half years.

The story is now a respectable 80,700 words, having been cut back circa 7K words in the latest edit over this summer, with 1K +/- new words added. Whether this is the version I’ll query agents with is yet to be seen. I’m hoping to find the stamina for a read-through on the iPad where I can’t fiddle with it. On the laptop, I can’t help but edit. It may need professional editing, but I’ll probably test the agent waters first.

However...

This morning I remembered that the critical commentary that accompanies academic creative writing is also a significant output. As are six-and-a-half years’ worth of ABBA posts, mostly honest snapshots of that month’s ups and downs. Together with Facebook diary entries and dozens of notebooks, that’s a lot of data.

Within this data, I have made many useful discoveries, like where exactly the creative process mostly happened: first, when planning via synopses templates [which I’ve written about often here before] and second, AFTER a planned scene got rejected by my inner editor-critic in the act of typing it.

While these scene setbacks were frustrating at the time, they were also the moments when the imagination worked hardest, and not just consciously: by asking the subconscious to consider why a plan hadn’t worked, creative epiphanies happened.

Or at least, pre-dawn musings on why I couldn’t move forward.

These early morning ‘thought-edits’ became a kind of auto-workshop, where the inner editor-critic negotiated with the planner-craftswoman and more intuitive [and more elusive] creator-artist. It happened a lot over the past month, during the intensive final phase of editing. This morning, for example, the five am slot reminded me of an idea that I wrote about here [or on Facebook or in a notebook] years ago: my process notes might make a book. Write, Think, Create or something more gentle and English.

It’s well known that mistakes are better learning opportunities that happy successes, so looking back honestly should illustrate where I went wrong and what, if anything, fixed it. An example is planning synopses, which in the early years I felt convinced were the secret to nailing the story. I blush at this from my ABBA post in May 2022 about John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 

"Among its many excellent features is a recommendation that rather than developing the main character arc from its beginning, better to plot backwards from the protagonist’s psychological self-revelation near the end. Intuitively, I wanted this to be ‘right’, partly because I’ve conspicuously failed to make progress by starting the current seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress with Chapter 1."

That turned out to be nonsense. Plotting backwards didn’t work. The story evolved in the writing: start, plod forward, fail, start again. Sure, I needed a plan; without one, I waffled. In the end, what these synopses provided was direction, a theoretical map of where the story could go. Where it went proved to be more intuitive – but I needed a plan to divert from. No wonder it’s taken six years. But it’s good to recognise paradoxes and take comfort from irony, right?

Anyway, more nonsense from May 2022: 

"For most of this year I’ve been using template synopses to outline the WIP, including (at last) a full Story Grid for the protagonist’s A-plot, plus the detailed backstory of his wound and its implications, thrashed out during Jeff Lyons’ intensive Anatomy of a Premise Line online course. Truby, then, is the third leg of this stool: a way to check my workings before moving on.”

Oh, the confidence! OK, knowing an emotional wound might need healing was useful for the protagonist’s character arc, but again it was the writing, not planning, that led me to his psychological weakness and its consequent moral flaw.

Another howler from May 2022:

“Proof that [synopsis-based plotting] is helpful for subplots as well came this morning when I was reviewing my preliminary notes about Truby for this post, and suddenly found myself in the middle of the spontaneous creation of the best working outline of Beth's B-plot I’ve managed in two long years.”

I spiked Beth entirely as a point-of-view character in 2024. Sigh.

So, which writing guru would I go back to if there is another novel? All of them! Truby especially. His equation Weakness x Action = Change remains the single most useful thing I’ve ever read about character-led story development.

Truby also insists there can only be one core action per story. Luke FIGHTS to defeat the empire. My pamphleteer WRITES his way out of brutal group-think about witches. Whether or not any publisher picks up this manuscript, it’s internal coherence as a story is largely due to Truby’s equation.

Another constant in all these years of revision was James Scott Bell’s advice in Write Your Novel From the Middle. Deciding on a midpoint crisis and ‘mirror moment’ of deep self-reflection for the protagonist was the most critical milestone of this project. With this one pivotal scene in place – a gruesome one, as befits a story about injustice – the plot had a structure, even if the exact route to and from that moment remained fluid.

[As late as this August, I cut out the ‘mirror moment’ when the protagonist articulated his big change of heart. I trust a reader will get that it without me spelling it out.]

So, my current verdict on using synopses to plan? They’re invaluable testing grounds for ideas, but not story templates. If X doesn’t work, go back to the synopses and explore the consequences of Y without necessarily rejecting what came before or what had been plotted to happen next. Frankly, I can’t imagine how to write a story without them.

Had I picked a different ABBA post to compare ‘now’ with ‘then’, no doubt I’d be writing a different conclusion. Every post will have a story to tell. Hence Write. Think. Create. Or not. 

Meanwhile, yesterday’s pre-dawn debate yielded one firm decision: to attend the annual Folly Farm gathering of the Scattered Authors Society in January 2027. It’s been so tempting to go in recent years, but by New Year the retreat budget was always spent and the tax man was knocking. Now, I’ve got a big decision to take, HMRC can shove off for once.

What’s next? I’ve set Folly Farm as the time and the place to decide.

 Rowena House Author on Facebook.