Losing my Voice

At present I'm writing a deeply spiritual and complex novel about how religious issues destroy a loving relationship. There are two first-person narrators, and the tone is intended to be one of analytical thoughtfulness with only the occasional light moment for relief from the heavy themes.

I am also reading a particularly delightful chick-lit romance written in a whimsical tone with many hilarious asides and lively moments.

Unfortunately the two don't really go well together. I'm finding that my serious and challenging book is taking on a certain lightness, that my characters are having rather too many comic asides, generally in italics, and that I am someone losing the gravity of my original narrative voice and replacing it with that of the book I am reading.

One of the reasons would-be writers are encouraged to read a great deal is because that's a great way to pick up on the tone, talent and tricks of a skilled writer, and subconsciously as well as deliberately emulate their style. And apparently that's what I'm doing, entirely unintentionally.

So I think that for now I had better stick to reading serious and scholarly treatises. That is, until I go back to writing my chick-lit novel, Finders Keepers, at which point I plan to immerse myself in Marian Keyes.

Who Am I?

I'd like to formally introduce myself. My name is Anna Buttimore. However, the name I write under is Anna Jones Buttimore, since my first two books were published in the name of Anna Jones and my publishers wanted to hang on to those readers. So now I have an "author identity", and that's quite useful - it helps me keep my personal and writerly endeavours separate.

I am soon going to be creating a new author identity, however. A book I am working on is going to be quite controversial. I hope it is going to help a lot of people, but it is also going to be challenging and upsetting to many. My co-author and I anticipate it causing quite a stir in certain circles, and there will be many people who will be extremely upset and angry at us. Some of those people could get somewhat vocal and may feel the need to confront us in unpleasant ways. As peace-loving folk, we're not too keen on that possibility.

We have therefore decided that this book will not be published under our own names, but using pseudonyms. We've already picked the names we will use and it's quite fun dreaming up a new identity and making plans to set up a new blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of anonymously promoting this book.

However, it is going to be difficult to publicise a book when I can't be "me". No book signings, no radio interviews, no badgering established readers and friends to buy it, not even talking publicly about the book. I'm probably going to self publish this book (it's the first time I'll have self published, but my usual publishers have said that they can't touch something so controversial) so publicity is even more important since it's only me (and my co-author) doing the promotional work.

Any and all ideas are welcome!

I have mentioned this particular book on here before, and on my Facebook page, but no more. I anticipate it being published around a year from now, so it's time for me to "go dark". This is the last time I will connect myself with what is shaping up to be quite an eye-opening and exciting story. But I hope you'll read it, enjoy it, think about it and maybe, just maybe, wonder whether I wrote it.

The Buttimore & Jones Family Christmas Covenant 2012

[Sorry, another post that's not about books or writing. Normal service will be resumed next week.]

We love buying presents for our friends and family for Christmas. We love taking time to carefully choose gifts which will both surprise and delight. But it’s not always easy to choose the right present, and it’s always expensive. Apparently during January about £3.2 million worth of unwanted Christmas presents are returned to stores each year, because sometimes gifts aren’t things which surprise and delight, but pointless tokens which obligate people to buy equally pointless tokens for others, even when they can ill afford them. 

So this year we want to take a completely different approach.  We’ve seen websites like The Advent Conspiracy and blogs like Is it time to ban Christmas presents, and we’ve thought about how we might make Christmas 2012 a little more special, less commercialised, more focussed on the Saviour, and much less likely to leave us worrying about the family budget in January.

If you’re a child don’t worry. We will still buy presents for the children as usual.

 

If you’re an adult, however, we’d like to make a pact with you. We will give you gifts which we have made, or which otherwise have cost us very little. And we’d like you do agree to do the same for us. In fact, we’re going to set a maximum budget of £2 per gift per person. Alternatively, if you’re a family with children, we could buy you all a family gift – a board game, a DVD, or something the whole family can enjoy together.

To make this even easier, below you’ll see two gift lists. The first list is items you might ask us for – things which we can make or do for you. Feel free to choose, and let us know what you’d most enjoy. But get your orders in early – especially for craft items, since these can take months to make. That’s why we’re making public our Christmas Covenant now – I can’t sew five Family Trees in December!

The second list is things that we need. Many of them can be bought from your local pound shop, charity shop or even dug out of your attic. We don’t mind “regifted” items, and we’ll even be happy with something you got free, such as a McDonald’s Coke glass. Many cost nothing more than time.

Thank you so much for joining in this covenant with us, and we look forward to having a wonderful, meaningful , and inexpensive, Christmas 2012.

Anna and Roderic

GIFTS WE CAN GIVE TO YOU:

• A book of our best family recipes, including the ever-popular Tatws Pum Munud
• A basket of home-made fudge, mint crèmes and chocolate truffles
• A cross-stitch picture. Choose from a Family Tree, birth sampler, London Temple, or suggest your own design.
• A basket of ironing done
• A home-made Christmas Yule log delivered to your door on Christmas Eve 

GIFTS WE WOULD LIKE

• Toaster bags (available in Pound shops)
• An Amazon and Goodreads review of one of Anna's books (I can lend you the book)
• A couple of car washes
• A bookshelf built to fit our alcove (we will supply the materials – this has to be from the Humphrey family!)
• A week’s dogsitting
• Decorating/mending services

Leave McDonald's Alone!

This post is nothing to do with books or writing. Sorry about that. Once in a while I wander off topic.

You've probably seen the picture circulating round Facebook and elsewhere on the net of some gooey grey-pink sludge coming out of a factory pipe. The tag line asks us to guess what McDonald's food product it is. Strawberry milkshake, we hope, until told that it's actually the mechanically recovered bits of chicken, including feet and eyeballs, used to make McNuggets. There are probably several comments below along the lines of, "I would never stoop so low as to eat at that dreadful place, the food is terrible, and the staff are little more than brainless slaves."

So there.

Well, bully for you, you great hoity-toity food snob commenters. The picture of the pink slime is a hoax, of course. (McNuggets are made only of chicken breast meat.) Many other malicious rumours circulate. A friend recently informed me, in all gullible conviction, that McDonald's milkshakes are made from the used oil from frying the chips.

I wish people would stop using McDonald's as a whipping-boy and thinking that it's somehow fashionable or popular to be disparaging about it. Here's why I love McDonald's.

• You can take three small children out for dinner as a treat, and still have change from a tenner. (Can't beat a 35p ice cream cone.)
• The food is delicious. It just really is. The breakfasts are particularly good, and the Big Tasty is well named. But for my money (all £3.49 of it) you can't beat a quarter-pounder with cheese, regular fries with extra salt and barbecue sauce, and diet coke. 
• The kids get a toy! It was Roald Dahl books that came free with a Happy Meal not long ago. How fabulous is that!
• I love randomly winning stuff in McDonald's Monopoly.
• Students get a free cheeseburger or McFlurry with every meal.
• It's varied. Wraps, fish, salads - it doesn't have to be a burger. I did three months as a vegetarian a couple of years ago (as an experiment) and discovered that McDonald's vegetarian offerings are excellent too.
• It's healthy. Yes, I did say that. Read it again. McDonald's were one of the first restaurants in the UK to include the calorie content on the menu, so I can make healthy choices when I want to. Their salads are generous, delicious, and under 300 calories. Perfect with a fruit bag and diet drink. Yes, many of their foods are high in fat and calories, but McDonald's is a restaurant, it's meant to be an occasional treat, not a replacement kitchen. And it's not McDonald's job to care for our health, it's ours.
• I have two friends who work at McDonald's and they are far from brainless (in fact, they are both college students) and are reasonably paid and have good perks, starting with a free meal each shift.
• McDonald's do a lot to support the local community, including sponsoring local football teams. I particularly admire their charity which provides Ronald McDonald Houses for parents and siblings to stay in when children are in hospital. Having stayed in hospital with two of my children I know how important it is that families can remain together at these times of crisis.
• It's fun and relaxed for families. It is lovely to go to a restaurant where it doesn't matter if the children are a little noisy or get up and run around. Some even have play areas, and even those that don't provide colouring pictures and crayons. A visit to McDonald's is always a happy occasion.

Go on, mention Morgan Spurlock. He had two very stupid rules in his "Supersize Me" documentary. The first one was in the title. Every time the staff asked whether he wanted to supersize his order, he had to say "yes". Well, they always asked, and he always ended up consuming twice the fat and calories he otherwise would have done. He also decided to do no exercise at all. He was trying to show why Americans are so fat and unhealthy, but that didn't need to be done. It's because they eat far too much fast food, make poor menu choices when they do, and don't do exercise.

I would dearly like to repeat Mr. Spurlock's experiment but with my own rules. I would, like him, have to eat all my meals at McDonald's. Unlike him, however, I have no car, so I would have to walk or cycle there three times a day. I would have to have everything on the menu at least once, but, unlike him, I wouldn't have to bow to everything the staff suggest. I bet that if I did this for an entire month, I could be shown at the end of the month to have lost weight, and be healthier than when I started.

Anyone want to sponsor me to do that documentary so that I can once and for all silence all the annoying and petty naysayers?

The Books that Mean the Most

A few days ago I re-read a book I had first picked up as a fourteen-year-old and which had completely stunned me at the time. If anything it was more powerful almost thirty years later and I am still reeling from it. We all have books we enjoy and that have meant a lot to us over the years, but I suspect we have just three or four which have had a great impact on us or changed our lives and outlook. Restricting myself to fiction, I'm going to tell you about the books which mean the most to me.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is that book my sister bought home from Southend High School for girls in 1982 and which evidently never went back. Although you have to pick it up from the clues because it doesn't state it outright, it's set in a dystopian future of post-nuclear winter and tells the story of a boy, David Strorm, who is different in a world which doesn't tolerate "mutants, blasphemies and abominations" including David's little friend, Sophie, who has six toes. It is chilling and absorbing, and firmly fixed my love of science fiction. It has dated only slightly (compared to much of John Wyndham's other work written in the 1950s) and I recommend it to everyone.

I read Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy at University and it took me a week to recover from the shock and the injustice. I loved all of Hardy's books, but this was the one which most moved me. Vanity Fair by WM Thackeray was another book which showed me exactly why the classics are classics, and just how unsurpassed they are.

The next book to take me by surprise was The Heart has its Reasons by Kerry Blair. I had read two LDS novels prior to writing my first, intending to get a feel for the market. My overwhelming impression after reading them (and I won't name them) was "I can do much better than this!" I decided that the LDS market was easy to break into because the standard wasn't very high, and lo and behold, Haven was published. I had a 40% author's discount with my publisher, so I bought some other books published around the same time and was blown away by the quality of Kerry's writing. It made me realise how lucky I was to have broken into the market at all and how very good fiction by LDS writers could be. And as an added bonus, I got to make a wonderful new friend, and Kerry in turn introduced me to many other supportive, talented and lovely LDS writers.

Finally, as as much as it may make you wince, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer sucked me in and captured my imagination just as it has for so many other people. Like them, I have a hard time explaining why it is so very compelling. The writing is good but not brilliant, and yet somehow it is completely absorbing and enthralling.

There are other books I love, of course. Pride and Prejudice, The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, Harry Potter and a great many more. But I think that these five books are the ones which had the most profound effect on me, and most shaped my enjoyment of reading and my view of the world.

Book Review: Rearview Mirror by Stephanie Black

I'm a big fan of all Stephanie's books, and this one didn't disappoint. In part, however, it was because it included so many elements I'm familiar with, and appreciate, in her work.

She usually has a large cast of characters, and on this case there were so many that I had to keep flipping back to remind myself who they were and how they were connected together. But it means that she can use them to full advantage to place plenty of red herrings, and it sets the scene and breaks up the action extremely well. (It's something I struggle with in my own books, so I admire the way she can juggle so many different personalities and voices.) The heroine was a little too self-effacing and saccharine sweet for me to warm to her particularly, and my favourite character was Carrissa who was flawed, and yet somehow still very likeable.

Another thing I appreciate about Stephanie's work is that the people who are murdered are usually bad types, so I don't waste my sympathy on them. Not evil, nasty criminals, necessarily, but overbearing and controlling mothers, obsessive psycho-stalker types, and guys who flirt with married women with no thought to the sanctity of marriage. I like my murder-mystery-thrillers light rather than heart-rending, and every little helps. Yes, I know that's a little odd.

Although, to my mind, this isn't Stephanie's best (I think that honour goes to Methods of Madness) that's only because she sets her own bar so very high. It remains one of the best LDS novels currently on bookshelves, and her writing is effortless and perfect. Highly recommended, and I won't be surprised if Stephanie wins yet another Whitney award.