Issue 8 – June 2021
Letter from the Editor
After Thursday’s announcement from the Transport Secretary, combined with more than sixty thousand fans being able to support England’s brilliant win against Denmark on Wednesday, it finally looks as if the tide is turning against Covid. Or are we being naive? Nonetheless, there is definitely a positive vibe tentatively buzzing as things begin to return to a new normal.
I hope your month has been as positive as mine, I completed work on a book of short stories for Gordon Clarke. Gordon is a fascinating author and has been writing for many years, he’s penned sufficient short stories for more than one book, together with a couple of other full length books, which he plans to publish through SilverWood Books. You can find out more about Gordon on his author page – coming soon.
Additionally, I’ve been able to complete much of my agent database of UK agents. I hope to be able to support authors with a personalised list of agents to submit to, which is tailored to their genre and the type of book the agent is seeking. Any authors wanting to pursue a writing career through a traditional route – watch this space. I have already added more than 200 agents to my database and am more than halfway through. It’s been an enjoyable and productive month!
This month’s writing prompts are all holiday based, have fun with them.
Happy writing,
Lesley
Contents: writing prompts, book reviews
Writing Prompts
With a pop her suitcase opened midway across the airport concourse, discharging …
Footsteps shrouded in the moonlit golden sand, he crept closer to the couple petting in the dunes …
Her fingertips rattled along Craig’s shoulder blades. He turned and was disappointed, she was a good five year’s older than him.
‘Dance?’, she queried tremulously, biting her lips. A look of desperation stretched her features taut …
Book Reviews
Murder on the Beach, by D. E. White
I really enjoyed travelling to Bermuda through Daisy’s latest book. Her characters were believable and the main characters wedding with its media hype and promotion heavy PR were all too believable.
Daisy is great at contrast characters, whose lives heighten the action and sense of fear and this book benefits from these skills too. It’s perfect escapism and a wonderful summer read.
The Dressmaker’s Gift, by Fiona Valpy
This book deals with an often untold area of WWII, that of the resistance movement. As you can see from the cover, this book is set in Paris and deals with the resistance helping both political and foreign personnel to escape capture and persecution from the occupying German army.
The sections based during WWII are powerful and evocative and centre around three friends from differing backgrounds and parts of France who work for an ateliers in the centre of Paris. Their resistance work is particularly dangerous because the only people with any money to spend on couture fashions are the occupying forces. The girls work in different areas of resistance and so the reader is able to see the various types of resistance work undertaken. This also effectively highlights how ordinary people felt compelled to work for a free France and not to be subjugated, regardless of the risks – of which they were all too aware.
The modern day was handled through Harriet, the granddaughter of one of the resistance fighters, who had travelled to Paris and had deliberately got a job working in the same atelier as her grandmother. When she joins the story, she knows nothing of her grandmother and we learn her story through Harriet’s research and also through the knowledge of one of the other resistance fighter’s granddaughters, Simone. At times this is handled with a slightly heavy hand, which borders on exposition. But the author has juxtaposed WWII against the terrorist troubles in Paris in 2017, which is very clever and works exceptionally well in helping Harriet to understand some of the fear her grandmother lived under. For this reason too, it builds on reader understanding of this environment of fear because the terrorist troubles were also a part of all of our recent past.
Definitely recommended, and for all writers: read pages 164-165 to see how this ‘almost exposition’ might have been handled with a slightly lighter hand.