Anna Jones Buttimore

On Sunday as we sat in church waiting for the service to begin, I asked my husband how he was getting on with reading Wool  by Hugh Howey, a book I have been raving about recently and had enthusiastically recommended to him. "I'm struggling with it," he admitted, "Because I can't get past all the swearing." Swearing?  I didn't remember any swearing, and told him so. He opened his Kindle and showed me and indeed one character swears constantly. I was shocked that I hadn't noticed. Only a couple of months ago I refused to finish reading one of our book club assigned books because of all the bad language in the first couple of chapters. (If you want to know why I object to swearing, read this post .) My first thought was that the fact that I hadn't noticed the swearing in Wool  was testament to how well written it was. I must have been completely engrossed if my brain glossed over it. Maybe, like an addict in denial, my mind had refused to...

Imagine, for just a moment, that you grew up in a world where everyone believes in God and respects His laws. Your culture, society and traditions are based entirely on God's holy directives, and the lives of all citizens are dedicated to following His path. In your society the fallen nature of man is well understood, in particular with reference to his carnal desires, and so your society protects men from themselves (and women from men) by putting in place strict rules and laws. Sex outside marriage is illegal. Women are protected from leers and lasciviousness by a protective barrier of fabric which they wear whenever they are among men. This "safety barrier" covers them from their glossy and alluring hair down to their fine ankles, so that no man can look upon them with lust. Maybe they are accompanied by a husband, father or brother, or some other man who can protect them whenever they venture out. Women know that their bodies are sacred and to be enjoyed, visually a...

I don't play an instrument, can't sing in tune, have no skill in any sport, and what little ability I had in drawing and painting has long since waned. The only talent I have is for writing. I have always believed that this is a talent which is in every way as valuable as being able to act, dance or sing. The importance of being good with words was brought home to me recently because I have had to write two very important pieces. The backstory is that I discovered recently that Essex County Council is undertaking a consultation on the future of my daughter's school. Like many of the parents, staff, and pupils I found out not from the Council, or from the Headmistress, but from a leaked document on the website of a neighbouring school which had apparently been asked by the council whether it could take the displaced pupils should my daughter's school close. Within a few days a protest group had been put together and a petition was circulating. My daughter loves h...

The ebook revolution is upon us, and with free publishing now available to everyone the landscape for writers has changed dramatically over the last ten years. Anyone, anywhere, with any level of skill can now write a book and publish it, at no cost to themselves, and it will be indistinguishable from a book published by a large, established publisher, like Penguin, HarperCollins or Macmillan. Many authors, including established authors with traditional publishers, are celebrating and embracing self-publishing. Some are putting out their out-of-print back catalogue in ebook format, while others are eschewing traditional publishing altogether and going for the bigger royalties percentage promised by self-publishing. And yet I continue to send my work out to agent after agent, publisher after publisher, again and again. I have now clocked up fifty-two rejections for my sci-fi magnum opus, Emon and the Emperor, and despite the regular assurances (often on the rejection slips) t...

The lot of a writer is one of long hours hunched over a keyboard in a dimly lit room with nothing but a cat for company. Shut away from the real world we pull faces and make hand gestures as our characters do, mutter dialogue to ourselves, and live in a strange environment peopled entirely by creatures of our own imagination. Alone we face the frustrations of edit after edit, and the crushing disappointment of rejection after rejection of our precious offspring. It's little wonder that many of us seem to be a little eccentric, if not downright mad. As least, that's how it used to be. These days writing is no longer the lonely and solitary profession. Today a dear friend and fellow author is coming to my house to work on her next novel, Race for Eden,  and do some pre-publication work on her sci-fi dystopian  New Earth: Beginnings. She's coming partly because I have a spare desk and she won't be tempted to do housework in my house (although I've told ...

I discovered, pretty quickly, that one of the problems with running a group of generous and kind authors prepared to edit other authors' work for free ( like, say, The Authors' Editing Co-operative ) is that those not used to having their work edited can very easily take offence at what they see as "criticism" of their work. It's very easy to see why. You send off a manuscript you have laboured hard over, honed and polished until it gleams, filled with characters you love and lines you are, frankly, very proud to have penned. Two weeks later it comes back with every little mistake, typo and misspelling brighly highlighted in bold red. Comments  may say "this sentence is unclear", or "this word is redundant" or (if it's anything like my first manuscript) "POV" many, many times. It's heartbreaking to see your precious manuscript torn to shreds. Here's what you need to remember: Every manuscript has errors. Usuall...

I've just woken up to the news about the explosions at the finish line of the Boston marathon. Whatever I was going to blog about today is forgotten, because, to be honest, when this sort of senselessly horrendous thing happens everything else seems really trivial and petty. So I'm stuck with having to write a blog about this traumatic atrocity but for all my writing credentials really having no words to make it better. That's because there are no words to make it better. There are no platitudes or soundbytes which can make any sense of this terrible tragedy, or explain away the evil which is evident in events like this. However, one of the marathon participants who was there inadvertently gave what I think constitutes the best advice to those of us reeling over the shock of this event. She told of how she had come to the finish line to find it full of carnage and horror, and race officials told her to "Just keep running". Imagine it for a moment. You have traine...