Anna Jones Buttimore

My latest book, Fields of Glory , went to press last week, so today I'm thrilled to be able to reveal the cover. I love it. I think it conveys the era perfectly, and the colours are both bright and harmonious. And here's the text from the back cover: Thundersley, Suffolk, 1942: A young man named Jim Walker shows up at Westleigh Farm, home of the Field family, demanding to be taught how to be a farmer but reluctant to reveal anything about himself. When Thundersley Hall is bombed by a German spy, and Violet Field is taken into custody by the Ministry of War, it is up to her daughters, Patricia and Eleanor, to work out the connection between their new farmhand and the spy. But suspicions in wartime run deep. Everyone seems to have a secret, even the Hall’s owner, the aristocratic and handsome Alex Farrell. If his romantic intentions toward Patricia are sincere, why is he so unwilling to help her discover the truth? And can Eleanor trust her growing fondness for the t...

I awoke to snow this morning, but nevertheless set off for Chelmsford to take part in Essex Authors Day, part of Essex Book Festival. Anything to encourage readers to engage with authors, and buy books. The event was well-organised. Apparently it happens every year, although this was the first time I'd been invited to take part. I took along a bag of my books which I put on display. At 10.20 I took the microphone and spoke for fifteen minutes about the process of writing my new book, Fields of Glory, and about the issues presented in writing historical fiction generally. I hadn't prepared anything (apart from printing out a chapter of the book) but my years as a Latter-day Saint have made me comfortable and confident with public speaking.  I wasn't nervous, and was able to wing-it pretty well to a tiny audience of maybe twenty people. (Possibly due to the weather, or maybe the early hour, the event was somewhat poorly attended.) Speaking to the other authors was ...

My one and only flying feet picture. Basildon parkrun 2017 I've been running for about three years. As an overweight middle-aged woman, I'm often asked why I started. Quite simply, I don't know. I think I just woke up one morning and decided I wanted to be a runner. I do remember asking my super-fit neighbour for tips for a beginner, and she didn't have any to suggest. So, a few years down the line, here's what I wish I'd known when I started. 1. You don't need lots of expensive equipment, but you do need the right equipment.  You can run in anything comfortable, light, and weather-appropriate, but a good sports bra (if you're a girl!) and a decent pair of trainers are essential. Trainers have to be replaced regularly according to how many miles they've done. I did not know this  when I started, and only found out when I started having serious pain in my foot--pain which put paid to my running--and a sports shop assistant showed me that the cus...

Following my post last week about the five tools no writer  should be without , here are five more you might like to consider.  getcoldturkey.com This nifty little site/app blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest or whatever your primary distraction is for a set period of time, so that you can get on with your work. It's not free, but you choose what you pay and up to 90% of it goes to charity. An Editor With more and more self-published books flooding the market, good editing is more important that ever. The manifold errors and myriad typos in them give them away as a cheap and shoddy product, and that's very damaging to the industry. I read a book with a spelling mistake  in the title,  for goodness' sake! If you want your book to look professional, it needs to be well edited. Of course, editing is expensive, but  check out this blog post  to find out how you can get bargain basement editing. Grammarly's Plagiarism Checker App...

My first novel was published thirteen years ago and I'm now working on my eighth. During that time I've come to rely on several tools which I couldn't imagine writing a book without. Now, I'm not talking about the obvious things like a computer and spell-check. Let's take those as read, shall we? But if you don't already know about them, these five things may just enhance your work as a writer. Dropbox ( www.dropbox.com )  Dropbox is cloud storage, like Microsoft's OneDrive or Google Drive, but it happens to be the one I'm most familiar with. It's free to use unless you want to have mega amounts of storage space and it means you can work on your novel anywhere, and you'll never lose it, even if your computer dies and you lose the entire contents of your hard drive. Grammarly Grammarly are sponsoring this blog post (thank you!).  You can go to the Grammarly website and paste in some text, and it will check it for all sorts of grammatical pro...

Only the second book by Wm Paul Young, author of surprise bestseller The Shack , Cross Roads is an incredibly complex and ambitious book which needs to be read slowly, carefully and thoughtfully, and ideally with a notepad to hand. Tony Spencer is a character I had problems getting to grips with. At the start of the book he's ambitious, sociopathic and paranoid. A brain tumour leaves his body in a coma and his soul, or maybe his spirit (the book did explain the difference but not in a way I could understand) wandering in a wilderness which represents his mind and interacting with Irish Jack, Jesus, and a Native American Grandmother who turned out to be the Holy Spirit. He responds by breaking down in remorse, and later he shows depths of compassion which seem at odds with the character built up in the first chapter. He also seems to take all the strange things that happen to him entirely in his stride, and knows a vast amount about Christianity for someone whose only relig...

Harold Fry is sixty-five years old, the sort of man who thanks the speaking clock, a gentle-man in the truest sense. Six months into his retirement he spends his days sitting in a chair, and he and his sour wife Maureen barely speak. When he learns from a letter that a dear friend is dying, he sets out to post a reply to her. And then he just keeps walking, in his yachting shoes and without his mobile phone, towards Queenie's bedside six-hundred miles away. Before I picked up this book I felt the premise of Harold's journey was somewhat far-fetched (maybe even "unlikely"), but the book handles it well and makes it seem strangely plausible. Anyway, it hardly matters whether or not a sane man would decide to walk six-hundred miles in order to save a friend's life, because it's not the journey itself which is of interest. What really resonates with me, even weeks after reading it, is what Harold considers and learns as he thinks about his life. It addresses th...