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 We have therefore decided that this book will not be published u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 about the family bu