Anna Jones Buttimore

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 We have therefore decided that this book will not be published u...

[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 abou...

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 m...

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 ha...

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 symp...

I'm going to come right out and say that I loved this book. It was well written, meticulously researched, and beautifully brought together at the end with one shock revelation after another. It made many great moral points about social injustice without being either preachy or irrelevant to the modern reader, and it was very satisfying to see some of the more arrogant characters get their comeuppance. I thought the dialogue was especially good, and I warmed to Winnie and Wills from the beginning. I particularly loved the handling of the romance between servants Simon and Anne, and I found myself really liking Genevieve too, despite being convinced that I shouldn't because she was betrothed to Wilfred, our dashing hero. I enjoyed how that little love triangle worked out. To be completely fair I usually try to find something to criticise in the books I review, but was hard pressed to do so here. I did get confused by the large number of characters and occasionally had to ...

No time to blog today, I have to: Link to my new book ( No Escape ) on Shelfari so that it appears on the widget on my blog Update my Facebook page with a reminder to enter the competition to win a copy of No Escape. Read a recently published book and post reviews on Amazon, Shelfari and Goodreads so that the author will return the favour and give me some publicity for No Escape. Add an Amazon link to my blog so that readers can buy No Escape. Fix a problem with my author website which has lost the side menu. Update said website  to announce the release of No Escape. Arrange to have my profile put on LDS Author Network Send a chapter of a current work-in progress to a beta reader Beta read two novels and report in detail to the authors regarding suggested improvements. Research the cost of antique suits of armour for Blackwood, a work-in-progress about an antique shop. Organise a launch party for No Escape. Look into the possibility of doing a blog...