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.

Beauty in decay - by Lu Hersey

This year has spun by, despite the never-ending cold, wet January and the bake-us-all-alive summer - and here we are at the autumn equinox already. A brief point of balance in the year, when night and day are of equal length. It always makes me think of TS Eliot's Four Quartets (even though I never really understood them) and a few lines of Burnt Norton that resonate:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 I find it a good time of year to reflect and gather in ideas, create a store of projects to ponder and to work on during the darker days of winter. Outside, there's already the smell of fermenting apples under the trees, and the dawn Avalon mist has started forming over the Levels. The leaves are turning and soon will be in full autumn display, a swan song before they shut down for winter. 

There's a haunting beauty in decay. Something new always comes from it. At the recent twenty-five year memorial for 9/11, I revisited a programme I'd first heard on the radio when I went to register my father's death last year. An episode called Momento Mori on Radio 4's Sideways. 

The programme introduced me to the extraordinary sounds of the Disintegration Loops, a series of albums made by musican William Basinski. He'd been trying to transfer tape recordings he'd made earlier onto CD - only the initial magnetic recording tape he'd used had decayed. Instead of giving up in despair, he found beauty in the remaining sounds, and from the tapes created the Disintegration Loops - one of the most haunting soundscapes you're likely to come across. 

The part of the programme that really sticks in my mind is about half way through - when Basinski talks about playing the Disintegration Loops, which he'd just finished recording, through loud speakers on his NY warehouse apartment roof, while watching the cloud of dust that followed the collapse of the twin towers. A totally surreal experience. He later dedicated the entire four albums to the victims, and the Disintegration Loops hold something of the haunting sadness of life passing. You can get a flavour of it here - not to everyone's taste, but extraordinary none the less:

Autumn brings an acute awareness of the year passing, with hints of that haunting feeling of decay. Here in Glastonbury, people gather on the tor to celebrate the equinox (the autumn equinox is one of eight fire festivals in the wheel of the year), and the bongo drums play on well into the night. While I appreciate the importance of community celebration (honest!), I prefer to go the coast to find a beach away from it all. If possible, timing the visit to coincide with either high tide or low tide (depending on daylight hours and the journey time it takes to get there). When the tide is either right out, or right in, there's often a patch of relative calm, like a breathing space when the world stops for a moment, before the tide turns. When you can catch a sense of that still point in the turning world. 

It doesn't really matter what I'm writing, or trying to write back home - or what I will write in future or have written previously. For a precious hour or so, I don't worry about any of it. 

Then it's time to go back and prepare for the winter to come.

Lu Hersey

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

The signs are there By Steve Way

 Hi, I hope all is good with all of you. It's been that crazy beginning of term time again, so I haven't made time to write something more substantial (presuming I ever write anything substantial!) so I'm sharing some more sill signs and limericks that I doodled down in amongst tasks. I hope you enjoy them!

BATH Can you take a hint? A shower would do…	Now you’ve been to STONEHENGE Why not visit BEATLEHENGE?
DORSET So we can’t get in or out, unfortunately…	CHESTER Somewhere great to buy furniture.
MEDWAY A great place to rest on a long journey.	DORCHESTER Even more stock available than in Chester!
COVENTRY Visit the tree popular with witches.	MANCHESTER For all your specifically masculine furniture requirements.
COVENTRY Where you’ll always find someone to talk to. (If you’re already here, no one can send you here.)	WINCHESTER Wardrobes to be won every week!
Coventry Riding School Yes, we’ve heard that suggestion hundreds of times…	Welcome to the city of EN-SUITE ‘Even posher than Bath’.
Welcome to CIRENCESTER A noisy place	Welcome to SWAFHAM A town largely free of flies.
Welcome to the city of BILBOA A magnificent city with much to offer but with absolutely no connection with ‘The Hobbit’.	Welcome to the city of BATH Soak in the sights.
Godalming v. a harmless but pointless activity involving turnips (M.Eng) ‘Verily we went a Godalming amongst the turnip fields’ Shakespeare The lost plays
There was a daft fellow from York, Who travelled to Leeds on a stork, The problem he found, When reaching the ground, Was losing the power to walk.	There was a young man from Leeds, Perpetrator of nefarious deeds, Pleading ‘not guilty’ at court, The witnesses thought, He’s done for however he pleads.
There once was a girl from Dunblane, Who hiccupped again and again, Her mum tried a scare, By releasing a bear, Before realising her idea insane.	There once was a huge man from Maine, Who suffered a curious pain, When asked where it hurt, He pulled up his shirt, Where he’d clearly been hit by – a train!
An inept inventor from Rhyl, ‘Invented’ a curative  pill, He went on to say, ‘forget RNA’, For my cure-all is here to stay’. But doctors use RNA still.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Surprising things happen to 'Bongo the Armadillo', usually when he is sitting in his garden having a cup of tea. The 'Bongo the Armadillo' children's stories are short narrative cartoons where anything can happen, no matter how surreal. In this volume Bongo is visited by two flags, with the wrong nationality inside them, the British Army (who have had all their tea stolen), all the snails in the world, a squirrel-shaped elephant, himself five minutes ahead and behind himself and the three brass monkeys, who don't think they portray enough senses. After that some very strange things happen. The stories are particularly designed to grab the interest of reluctant readers who would be put off by lengthy texts but who enjoy the ridiculous and quirky. The stories all have a reassuring repeat structure, which also supports reluctant readers. I have also used the stories to support reluctant writers who can lean on the stable format in which to inject their own ideas. (I can provide templates if required.) 

As Bongo often says, "That didn't happen yesterday." Enjoy Bongo's unique and unusual world!

Liliana the Strong, written by Quentin Blake, illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

What a delight of a book! No earnest message imparted, just the joyful idea of a small child able lift and toss a whale, bend iron girders, stop a steamroller about to squash a crowd of people, simply told and beautifully, joyfully illustrated. A book to release both laughs and imaginations. A book that I'm giving to a particularly determined very small person in my own life!

New ways with old dead things - Anne Rooney

 

Card index and cake — back to the 90s!

The very best stage of a new book is when the idea arrives, flaunting its pretty possibilities. It's full of shiny promise that hasn't yet been tarnished by reality. And then as you start to work it up, it's still exciting and you keep thinking 'and I'll add this; and this!' piling on more insights and tricks until the idea truly sparkles.

And then you get down to work. You bump into reality. The book as you exactly want it comes to a number of pages that can't be accommodated, like 77 or 109. Do you pad it out to 96 or 128 or cut it down to 64 or 96? And your book is a new concept. Publishers prefer things which are a familiar concept even though they say they are looking for the next new thing. They're really looking for the next new take on an old thing. How are you going to explain it without rambling on for longer than their attention span? I'm obviously getting old and jaded as these issues occur to me earlier in the process than is healthy. I don't want them to kill my enthusiasm for the shiny new thing. I try to ignore them and hope the page extent will somehow fix itself further down the line and I will suddenly be blessed with astonishing explanatory and marketing skills.

Wiwaxia, 520 million years ago, stained glass 2026

This is actually my second time with this New Thing. No sooner had I started it in spring when I had a couple of new commissions which took over that bit of time and headspace. But now I'm back with my old dead things, and my book that spans 500 million years. And back with my paper database that is part of the I-didn't-use-AI paper trail, should it be necessary to show that [sigh]. Autumn is a good time for a new project.  The black squirrels squabble outside, and often on top of, my garden office, the rain (at last!) drums on the roof, and escaping to the house would mean getting wet so I'll stay a bit longer. The light filters through the trees and then through the stained glass hanging in the windows, and as the stained glass is all of extinct animals it's just further encouragement. Give these old dead guys their moment in the sun again. Or the rain. I add 'rain' to the artwork notes. 

 

Anne Rooney

website
bluesky

Out now: Science Museum 2027 Space Annual

 

Members' News September Special Edition

 Hot on the heels of the last September round-up, come two more pieces of celebratory book news. Do check them out.

SOMETHING IN THE DARKNESS by John Doherty, illustrated by Matt Schu, is a spine-tingling treat for 3-5 year-olds. Packed with suspense, this unputdownable story will keep young readers on the edge of their seats, eventually revealing that some things are more frightening in the darkness than they are in the light.  

Published 17th September from Post Wave Children's Books.

SPOOKY STREET by Jonathan Emmet with illustrations by Ingela P Arrhenius is a spooktacular, rhyming lift-the-flap alphabet book that is also a play scene and a Halloween frieze to decorate your room! 

Published by Nosy Crow on September 10th.

Congratulations, both!

Members' News September

The long, hot summer is finally over and we can look forward to huddling under blankets to write, and the Scattered Authors winter retreat in January - there are still places available so get in touch if you're interested.

This month we're celebrating the publication of three books and a special edition. Please do take a look at them and give them a shout-out on your social media. If you have anything you'd like included in October's round-up, send the details to Claire Fayers.

Congratulations, Michelle Lovric, whose new adult novel comes out on October 8th, from Salt Publishing. 

Michelle is the much-loved author of The Book of Human Skin and a former Women’s Prize nominee. Known for her lyrical prose, dark wit and impeccable historical detail, she now turns her gaze to Venice in 1817 – a city of intrigue, revolution and romance.

In The Puffin, a disfigured traitor, a revolutionary milliner, a sadistic assassin – and, yes, a puffin – become entangled in a plot to ransom a Habsburg princess. The result is a heady mix of radical lovers, poets, smugglers and spies. By turns thrilling, tender and gloriously eccentric, it is historical fiction at its most seductive.

Full details here

Sue Purkiss's first novel for adults has just been released by Writers' Review Publishing. An Ordinary War, is loosely based on her father's experiences as a prisoner of war, after being captured on the way to Dunkirk. Our hero Harry Pilgrim encounters cruelty, near starvation and betrayal - but also lasting friendship and even love. 

Publisher link

Next, a book for younger readers. Yvonne Banham's third book for young adults, Delores Mackenzie and the Dead of Winter, will be published by Firefly Press on October 8th.

The third in the Delores MacKenzie series sees Delores facing her greatest challenge yet, chasing beyond the Arctic Circle in search of a mysterious book, a legend and a killer.

Publisher link

Cover: Nathan Collins

Finally, my own Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins from Firefly Press is getting a special limited edition for Christmas. The larger format hardback has a bonus Christmas goblins story, ribbon bookmark, and every story has a new illustration by Becka Moor. 

Publisher link

Cover: Becka Moor

Congratulations to everyone celebrating this month.

Claire

Book Launch - Joan Lennon

Book launches are a worry. Will anybody come? Will the venue sell enough books? Will I forget everything I know about my book and quite possibly my own name?

Despite the worrying, the book launch for Revolution! went ahead and none of the disasters happened!

 

Big thanks for everyone who came, to Lindsey Fraser for making the conversation flow, and to my favourite bookshop The Edinburgh Bookshop for hosting the event with such warmth and charm. 

Book launches? Worth every worry!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Mountain, Sea, Holiday, by Paul May

By the time this very short post is published I'll be somewhere in North-West Scotland. It's probably fifty years now since I first heard the poet, Norman McCaig reading a poem on the radio, and forty years since I wrote out one of his poems on an index card and pinned it to my noticeboard. It has been pinned to various noticeboards ever since, along with a couple of other items that have somehow survived.

Here is the fisherman's cottage on the shore at Diabaig in Torridon where I spent a week with a friend in 1993. We paid £30.

Then there is this little cutting from The Guardian from a similar era which I bring out from time to time when I want to show someone the wonderful possibilities of the language of football. 

But the poem is a different kind of thing:

Between mountain and sea 

Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell, 

as in the long ago, as in forever. 

The days pick me up and carry me off,

half-child, half prisoner,

on their journey that I'll share 

for a while. 

They wound me and they bless me

with strange gifts: 

the salt of absence, 

the honey of memory. 

McCaig spent a lot of time in Sutherland, in north-west Scotland, and had a special relationship with the strangely-shaped mountain, Suilven, that rises from the watery moors behind Lochinver. I recommend that you go and climb the mountain from Inverkirkaig, where you'll see the moving monument which the Friends of Norman McCaig have erected at the start of the path. You'll also have a wonderful day out, if the midges aren't biting and the weather is fine. 

The Poems of Norman McCaig, edited by Ewen McCaig is published by Polygon/Birlinn

September - and a Library I knew long, long ago.

At the foot of Jolly Butcher’s Hill was a busy crossroad, where long-gone tram rails were still embedded in the tarmac. On one corner was the almost-Art-Deco Wood Green Tube station, where a warm nicotine fug seeped out into the damp air.

Across Lordship Lane, on the other corner, was a basic brick ‘retreat’ for drivers from the big Bus Terminus,which intruded on the more ancient and interesting expanse beyond. This was Spouters Corner, with its weekend flower stall. Here, strange men stood on boxes, ranting about diet, grievances or God while pigeons circled overhead or dived for crumbs. The third corner, to me, was merely a row of bus stops, and a narrow public house.

But the fourth corner? That held our destination, Wood Green Public Library, whose Victorian facade was decorated with ornate carvings and pillars and, at least to my eyes, glorified by the beautiful green copper dome above the entrance. The library was,to me, a book palace from the times before, when there had been no rationing or grimness.

I followed my mother up the steep stone stairs, through the carved door to the mosaic floor into the library, and then life felt safe again. I could feel the power of the library, the silence, the rows and rows of books and the sense that, for a while, nobody could get at you. Almost like a church, it was, without the hymns and statues. My mother gave me a gentle push, and trotted off up the short flight of steps, through the double doors with their stained glass panels, and into the vast mysterious space where only adults were allowed.

Down the echoing stairs I went, with their green tiled walls, to the basement, where the Junior Library welcomed me with its whispery silence. A subterranean daylight seeped through half-moons of wired glass high along one wall, where the passing feet and pram-wheels created flickering shadows from the outside pavement. But I was here, now, in this calm other world, rarely reached by sunshine. The room was wide and generous, with shelves around all four sides: one wall for my ignored non-fiction, and three satisfactory walls for the fiction, in alphabetically arranged rows.

In the centre of the carpeted floor stood the Librarian’s desk: a square wooden fortress, with a creaky gate to keep children away. With her tight rolls of mousy locks, pinned in a net, she reigned grimly over wooden trays of tickets, her date stamp, pens and ink pad at the ready, and her eyes watching for any child who stayed too long. Good behaviour, silence, few chairs, power & suspicion.

I recall no enticing prints or paintings hung high on the grey-washed walls. The only glow was over by Non-Fiction where, beyond the impressive set of encyclopaedias, was a table, holding a bubbling tank where tiny fish hid under loops of water-weed. Nearby there were books with pictures, made for children who could not yet read yet. Imagine that?

The books on the fiction shelves were bound in subdued tones of cloth: drab browns, faded blues, weary moss-green, withered rose, with gilt letters sparking on spines here and there. Occasionally, small black images were embossed on the front covers, hinting at the line drawings of the illustrations within. Occasionally, a coloured frontispiece appeared facing the title page. But, for the most part, then, colours came from the pictures that words made in your imagination.

Though the stock was old, that barely mattered; the books on our three shelves at home were old too. Newness was not something that mattered in books, other than the fact that ‘old’ writers like Dickens were revered. Did the book have pages? Yes. That was enough. 

(No wonder I found a recent ‘Get them while they’re hot!’ message, posted on a current fiction site, such an abomination. Don't stop for that: move on to this or be a failure!)

The books had probably been purchased when that Junior Library was created, part of the inspired movement for Children's Libraries and Children's Librarians pioneered by Eileen Colwell during the Twenties and Thirties, and which received much support, especially from the poet John Masefield, and which also led to Storytelling and Storytime sessions in libraries. But by now that original starting stock was a lot older. 

Book publication, and books available in schools and libraries, would have been affected for Wartime Rationing Restrictions some years before and taken a while to recover. Certainly this was the era of all the second-hand bookshops along Charing Cross Road.

George Orwell, writing in Tribune in 1944, protested about the severity of the cuts in paper allocation:

‘A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole of the book trade put together . , . At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed "classic" is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of textbooks, new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published.’

(Oh, just two years? Might just go check on publication waits now . . .)

However, back then, as a quick and early reader, I sped through fiction greedily. I re-borrowed and re-read favourite stories, although now I remember few titles specifically from the library. Black Beauty? Call of the Wild? Christmas Carol? Children of the New Forest? The Silver Skates? Heidi? Arthur Ransome? Where did I come across all of those?  My strongest passion was for myths and legends and fairy stories. I loved Andrew Lang’s famous Blue, Yellow, Green and Red Fairy Tale collections, which I borrowed time after time.

Another fondness was for the ‘Twins’ series, such as ‘The Dutch Twins’, ‘The Cave Twins’, ‘The Irish Twins’ and others. Recently, I found the books were written by an American, Lucy Fitch Perkins. She wrote the first – The Dutch Twins - in 1911, to help children and families understand the homelands and cultures of all its immigrant population. The last title of her 26 book series, ‘The Dutch Twins and Little Brother’ was published in 1938. Below is a 'library edition', not one of the more beautiful versions.

 

I did say the books in Wood Green Library were very old when I came across them, even then, but maybe some of that Lucy Perkin's cultural understanding would be useful in the States now.

My job, while my mother chose her latest crime novel and my father’s new cowboy adventure, was to behave myself, keep quiet, choose which three books to take home and, I’m afraid, to avoid thinking about needing the toilet as there were none available. So I waited and read on, basking in that bookish library scent until I was collected.

That beautiful copper domed library was a huge and significant part of my life, or whoever my self was trying to be just then, but three things happened, at almost the same time.

One: As a very good reader, I was granted an adult ticket, taken to find John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrims Progress’ among the cavernous adult shelves, and carried it proudly all the way home with me. How or why I seized upon this heavy tome and title as the book my young self needed to read, I do not know, other than my delight in the alliteration of the title. Afterwards, I felt in a sort of limbo, neither of the unfamiliar adult nor the junior library and lost heart. That children’s librarian was probably pleased that I disappeared.

 

Two: I had another birthday and another school report, All at once, my time at home was strongly directed away from burying my head in books and towards the pages of the Progress Papers for the 11+ Exam booklets. Over and over again. Saturdays disappeared.

Thirdly: The Progress Papers exercises worked. I became a pupil at St Angela’s Convent Grammar School, where I had to learn a whole new culture of homework and subtle religious snobbery, and that there were ‘wrong’ authors and 'wrong books'.

And we moved away, to another area. So there were no more visits to that Wood Green Public Library. Soon, there could be no more, as the library was transferred to a new, accessible open-plan site within the vast Wood Green Shopping City nearby – for all sorts of valid, rational reasons, I know - and my lovely, copper-domed building was demolished. Please note: in pictures,it doesn't, look as big as it felt.

Those ancient slippery tram lines? My mother, cycling back down Jolly Butcher's Hill on her way to work one rainy day, caught her front wheel in a tram line and the bike crashed down. Luckily, thankfully, she was not run over by any bus or lorry but had mild concussion and suffered a bad back for ages afterwards. Double luckily, she had already delivered my young brother off at his nursery school and so the child seat was empty. I think they have since been removed.


Penny Dolan

Up to my elbows in flour by Sheena Wilkinson

This will be a short post because this week has found me mostly up to my elbows in flour. The reason? I am baking, not for a book launch this time, but for a charity coffee morning. 

current state of kitchen 

One of my best friends, Susanne Brownlie, died recently from a brain tumour. It is most heartbreaking of course for her family, but the loss of a close friend is horrible: we lose  a shared language, an esoteric frame of reference, and a particular way of being ourselves. 

That frame of reference for us was books. Susanne and I met through our mutual interest in the Chalet School and that love was at the heart of our decades-long friendship. She was always my first reader; long before I was published we used to share our works-in-progress, and though I was the one who went on to be a professional writer Susanne was a fine writer too. In fact we collaborated on a Chalet School 'fill-in' story, Robin Heeds the Call, which was published in 2014 by Girls Gone By and before she died Susanne self-published her own historical novel, Courage to Love.

Susanne's novel, with cover design by Emma Pass

Our birthdays were a fortnight apart, and we always had a joint treat halfway between the dates (22 August and 4 September). Women of modest, bookish tastes, our  outings generally involved book-shopping, having a cuppa or (best of all) once visiting a litter of puppies which my sister had thoughtfully bred around the right time of year.

tea and chat 

As this year's birthday approached I decided to do something in Susanne's memory, in aid of Marie Curie, the charity which gave her such wonderful care in their Belfast hospice for the last seven months of her life. I'd already done a couple of sponsored walks so I decided on a coffee morning. She would have been the first to offer to help. 

What has this to do with books, reading and writing? Not much perhaps. I started writing it mostly as an apology: I have been so busy baking (and cleaning!) that there's not much else on my mind -- apart from Dolly Parton, but I'm guessing that by Saturday everyone else will have had their say about the wonderful Dolly. 

Susanne, unlike Dolly (and me) was a very private person -- she would be mortified by this public post, but I think she would forgive me. I offer it not only as an excuse for having nothing more literary, but as a reminder that the friends we make through books -- and what is Awfully Big Blog Adventure if not friends made through books? -- are very much to be cherished. 

the dedication to Name upon Name (2015)