Anna Jones Buttimore

Here's an admission - I have started tuning to Radio 4 occasionally. I am officially middle-aged. I listened to Radio 1 until I was in my early 20's, and have been devoted to Radio 2 ever since. Growing up, my mother had Radio 4 on constantly (the theme tune to "The Archers" is the soundtrack to my childhood) so I associate it with, erm, slightly older people. But Radio 2 gets very boring in the evenings when it focusses on music genres I don't like, so I tune to Radio 4. Which is where I found this gem from American author Adam Gopnik about how to respond to a bad review. It's well worth a listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01jxw57/A_Point_of_View_What_to_do_about_a_bad_review/ I'd like to say I've never had a bad review. Unfortunately that wouldn't be entirely true. Maybe I'll just say that I've never had a bad review in print, but on Goodreads a couple of people were unimpressed by my books. One gave Honeymoon Heist one star ...

Here it is - your chance to read the first chapter of my latest book, No Escape. Menai Bridge, Wales. An island, forty miles wide, sits in the Irish Sea. A lush and green gentle quilt of fields divided by walls of large mushroom rocks is knotted with villages bearing names that defy pronunciation by the English-speaking world. Historical home of the Celts and their druidic traditions, the island’s southeast coast is edged by the sparking ribbon of the Menai Straits, spanned by a wide concrete railway and road bridge and a narrow, elegant, steel suspension bridge. The graceful bridge forms part of a 260-mile-long roadway linking the northwest portion of the island with the capital of its ruling neighbouring country, and was built by Thomas Telford in the early nineteenth century, a time when grandeur, elegance, and ostentation mattered more than practicality. At the landing point of the bridge is a town—a narrow high street interlaced with roadways and lanes, with tightly packed s...

I mentioned about a month ago that I had decided that my current work-in-progress, a challenging and controversial religious exposition, would be published anonymously and I wouldn't therefore be talking about it again. But after further debate and discussion, my co-author and I find we're not sure whether this is the right choice. At some point we need to make the decision. But what are the pros and cons of using a pen-name? Advantages of Using a Pseudonym On the offchance that your book becomes a rip-roaring success, you can retain your normal life (albeit with more money) and not get pursued by obsessive fans. (Because, like, that happens to writers all the time.) If you've written anything, (say, a challenging and controversial religious exposition) which is likely annoy crazy folk then they won't be able to come after you with an axe. If you happen to be a woman (or two women) and want men to buy your book, you can pull a JK Rowling and have your name mask y...

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 deliberatel...

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...