writing day

March 2023
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March 2023

Everything moved towards this in April.

Most of this month was spent ‘brain-storming’…

When you think that nothing you do matters, then, as they say, the only thing that you do matters.

Do I still want to be a Writer?

That is a kind of ‘I am writing’, so I must want to… The problem is that too much ‘wanting’ to crushes the ability to travel into story worlds.

I have used art practise to move around all kinds of mental blocks for a couple of years, and the end of March ’23 has proved the worth of that again; my Mum has hit a crisis with her dementia and is in the local hospital as I write this. Unfortunately, I had just decided to challenge myself to finish a story I started pre ‘Open House Surgery’ during Camp Nanno this year.

If you ring and speak to someone or visit that hospital to see a loved one, you can process what is happening. But, at the moment, Mum is quarantined, and the situation is such that you get put through to the ward, but either no one answers or you are told that someone will phone you back – which doesn’t happen. So that triggers the brain to make you keep calling or has you on tenter hooks in case they ring, resulting in overwhelming and paralysing anxiety. The ways I can deal with this are to:

a) ‘Sucker punch’ the general switch board once a week with ‘Is my mother dead?’ – which gets instant phone backs !_! 🙁  I don’t do it more often.

b) Put my phone on aeroplane mode. This is awful, but it’s the only way to take your mind off what might be happening and get on with anything. IMO they don’t ring me now that she lives in residential care as they don’t need to send her back here – Next of Kin or not. 🙁

c) When I wake up, I reconnect the phone, and I get straight on with setting up planning, plotting and character stuff in a bag till sunrise. As the sun rises, so does any anxiety about what Mum might be enduring, and ‘The Need to Know’ takes over. But I have moved the wheel towards Camp Nanno regardless.

The story I want to attempt to finish in April is a light-hearted paranormal adventure. I had initially planned it at 60K. There are Bank Holl’s in April, and OH is off for one week doing lorry stuff, so he will be at home. Even allowing for those things, there is time to finish ‘Moonshine’ if I keep showing up first thing’. At the moment, I barely remember the plot, let alone the characters, so this week, I will refresh those notes and my memory. I will see if there is any magic left.

I very much hope my poor mum and the other poorly folk in that hospital are being treated kindly.

 

Progress 😀
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Progress 😀

Big sky kind of thinking and place.

Renewed web hosting this week. Bit of a non event.

Got to grips with scattered files in terms of versions to use to edit from. Result was some time spent story editing and revising something I had already done. I worked out what was going on eventually and then back tracked via external hard drives and did it all again so about 2 k words edited. Am back feeling consciously incompetent but at least I am editing.

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Blog Newsletter Schedule…

Newsletter Scheduling…

TBH I haven’t ever blogged, regularly, enough to work out what a Newsletter is – the most I have ever done is to get Mail Chimp to send an email to me ( only subscriber) to tell me I had remembered how to use the thing. However, things have fallen into place having, as someone prompted me yesterday ( Orna Ross Blog Post https://www.ornaross.com/the-most-creative-answer/?fbclid=IwAR3WUsU59cPeKxhuP8A-mMyk5NWgkoefM1cTg1T6euFhIl_Kn-NbKN-6S98    Re Living with the question a while) So, I ventured to log in to Mail Chimp and change – for myself – the delivery dates of the ‘campaigns’ – setting various time spans leaving me free to get on and use the blogs and know that I am not bombarding – my self at least –  subscribers with email each time I do.  The worst part of this, for me, is that calling things ‘Newsletters’ and ‘Campaigns’  – at my stage of this ‘business’ feels horribly pretentious – and as I still do’t have a product to sell so it always feels too early – even though that is the most common piece of advice I hear – followed by, ‘of course Blogging is dead’.  Well, dead or not, I have these things and I might as well use them for what ever I will do regularly rather than looking at them – unused – waiting to do something other folk tell me I should, because it ‘worked’ for them – last year.

Having scheduled the ‘campaigns’ I then entered them as ‘publication dates’ on my paper calendar and  my hard copy desk diary and my Google calendar. I feel I can do what I like now – and anyone who finds the Blogs and wants to sign up will get a newsletter of what I am doing either once a month or weekly – depending which Blog – and if I haven’t posted then no mail will be sent but if I have spent time blogging everyday they won’t get pissed off with an avalanche of email  as I find my way around.

Next: Editing and Redrafting begins…

 

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( Version B As dictated to Dragon) :)

Or The One Where Dragon Sits On Me…

My writing day.

Dragon 13 professional has finally taken flight and it has, without a doubt, saved my life. Scott Baker has been appearing on a few pod casts recently to support the launch of his Dragon Training School and his book, and also which joined the dots for me because I had been trying to get Dragon to dictate or transcribe Q3 and Q4 and it was hopeless.

Several weeks ago I actually went and bought paper notebooks – because I decided it was I might as well give up trying to get my Indie dream to work – and just write more longhand – as this is obviously just a friggin hobby – so the stories don’t need typing up!

I took them back and got my money back – and that was hard because I wanted to sit under a tree and just write on a proper bit of paper with a friggin pen…

I resigned myself heavily to the fact that I was going to have to sit down and do the 1500 – 2000 – 3000 even words/day to get Q3 and 4 typed up – because there was no point spending money on external editing by an Editor if those things hadn’t happened.

There it was – and it was always going to stop me. The fact that it wasn’t typed up and the fact I don’t touch type.

So Five/Six weeks ago this worked out at 11 ‘finished’ words per minute typing and that was fast as I could get – ‘finished’ = typed, spell-checked but not line edited  (as-I-wrote-it) copy that is also divided into Word Chapter files and Scrivener, Ywriter, and Novel Factory and printed and filed – which means that my remaining 175 K was likely not to be done this side of next Easter!

The thing that was very, very doubtful was whether or not I was gonna be prepared, to do the typing at all and that meant at best I was going to have to move the deadline of being ‘ready’ by a year Sept.

In which case I felt I was gonna lose all my credibility not just with perhaps other people, but with myself – and that’s hard. You can’t push yourself when you don’t want to be pushed because you think you’re making a mistake worse.

SO I’d got Dragon 13 out the box again – I’d done plenty of training last year out and about with it and the transcription was quite good then – but – I was really horrified to find that after the first three or four weeks  I printed it up what had looked pretty clean on screen (using Grammarly and Word Spell Check with just a glance at it) Only to come back to in high spirits and see the stuff that I thought was fine was absolutely full of what I christened Dragon Shit, it was horrendous.

Yes – the spelling was fine – I had searched the things I knew it did like calling ‘Doug’ dog or dug – but other these things I was word blind to and couldn’t ‘search for’ and they weren’t highlighted as they weren’t ‘wrong’ . It had changed the tense regularly – messed up when, were, where and will and added whole sentences of correctly spelt gibberish that it thought I said – I picked it up first when I printed out and 2nd when I got my kindle to read it to me OUCH!!!!

I couldn’t understand it because this time last year when the Scrivener iPhone App came out I was using Dragon REC with my RODE MIC and it was really good and I was very accurate – with it like that.

I couldn’t understand why now it suddenly was atrocious. In fact, when I applied my equation to it factoring the massive clean up time – the best I could do was three finished words a minute. I mean, that’s terrible.

Enter Scott Baker doing the rounds on the podcasts – Jo Penn’s, Mell Hammond’s and the SPP’s and SPF’s – the breakthrough came when he pointed out the best thing to do was to plug in your good microphone to your iPhone and use the free recorder application because the speech recognition software in your iPhone is better than is on the laptop!

I realised that the thing that had changed was WHERE I was – last year I was outside walking about using the iPhone and this year I had plugged the RODE into the Laptop as I happened to be at my desk !!! At that moment, I had a Ka Ching moment and I plugged it in and away I went and I discovered that I could get anywhere between 25 and 75 ‘finished’ words a minute and over the last five weeks I have been hammering away at it and I have now completely transcribed the whole of the remainder of the series.

I have about 10 chapters at the end left just to go through and divide up and print because I was doing one scene/ time read in/ transcribe it/ lightly edit/ divide it up/ run upstairs and print and file away/ write the count down and move on; but it appeared that I had rather more time at the weekends than I thought to actually do some work – but when there was no transcription ready I couldn’t do it – so  had  3 days I think of just simply reading and then transcribing to get to this point where it’s now done.

It’s an amazing feeling to have achieved something has been hanging over my head since I finished writing it three years ago and to achieve it apparently ‘just like that’- even though I’m completely knackered – and throat sore – it has opened up a realm of possibilities that I just had never thought of and the major point is that now I probably can be in a position to have that series, mostly edited, covered and ready to go out by 2018 autumn – 13, 14 months time –

If I had given up failing this wouldn’t be the case… but –

There’s no reason why I now can’t do that other than my own fear and inhibitions which have all come crowding round me. I must admit I am getting a whole range of negativity – might succeed/ might fail/ look stupid/it’s rubbish/ how embarrassing you now have to do this etc etc are coming at me thick and fast at the moment and I’m trying to deflect that.

So yeah that’s been a lifesaver – Dragon 13 professional and my iPhone and Scott Baker have saved my life. 🙂

I noticed that Scott had said something else that latched in my brain; I had a notification from the iPhone -like you do – which said that Dragon REC App might not work when the phone updated…and I know that Dragon is going towards a subscription thing for recording microphone and etc and it’s quite expensive and it isn’t as accurate etc etc and as far as I can tell is very expensive. . . So I figured that that is a distinct possibility that it might be the case that the Dragon record thing might not work with the iPhone at some point in the future – and also I’m very aware that my iPhone might pack up – in which case, I’d be stuffed and trussed and in the oven. . .  I noticed what Scott said about using and ordinary dictaphone and I remembered that when I bought  Dragon- I also bought a dictaphone.

It was £9.99 on Amazon and is a tiny little thing it’s not even got a brand I think it’s called Steel, back in the day I had no idea what I was doing and it was still in the box in the desk. I fished it out and tried it and it works as good as the iPhone J

So there’s no reason why – should anything happen to my iPhone I will be stuffed J

Scott Baker also brought a Dragon training course – and I’ve already bought it because he’s already helped me and there is going to be more!!!

On the train of thought about life without an iPhone I have also taken a good look at my old camera – a little Olympus Traveller 14/25 – I saw that Darren Rowse’s team have a 31ay spin off about taking better photos and learning to use your camera so I printed out my 65 page manual and signed up. One thing that gets me blogging is activity and a picture – when riding the horse I can’t use the iPhone as it doesn’t have a wrist strap even to guard against it falling and it is quite big to hold etc – my camera just hangs on the saddle in a tough bag and if something happens it isn’t my life handler that has just cantered off without me or been trodden on….:)

Now I have achieved the impossible type up and publication is a real possibility if I show up and keep working on it I think it is time to get on with the two big courses I have but haven’t started – 1st 10,000 Readers and Mark Dawson’s similar one – both very expensive courses I got  because I think that they will both be utterly relevant to what need to do but haven’t started as they weren’t relevant to ‘typing/transcribing’.

Holly Lisle has plenty to keep me busy as well that is new for me and I found a ‘new guy’ – Scott Teague, another from the Alli website and he’s got lots of how-to videos -all very pertinent to my next stage/steps and he has a great podcast I am already binging on J

Goals and Plans?

My long-term goals – and my short-term goals – have largely featured the fact that this ‘thrilling’ 350,500 words had to be typed up!

It’s been a feature of my goal setting for three years and was finally what made me jump from a day job I really enjoyed as a carer for our local authority Social Services…And it also played a part in me getting rid of my sheep flock and ‘standing down’ as an active farmer.

Now that mass of words is transcribed – bar enough of the rest of the Quest series and Hacked that I can use them when I’m playing with Scott’s course so I’ve got something fresh to do  that isn’t  huge – I need to re calibrate everything.

There’s also the fact at the moment I have not finished writing the first drafts of Hacked Apart or Hacked To Bits – but then my goal for them was to finish by Sept 2017 – and that IS still doable and I am still on course…

Editor Eileen is saying that she will invoice me next week for the story edit read through of Hacked Off – I’m very keen to keep that going just on the story level. It will help me with HA and H2 B but mostly it will help with the revision and editing of the Quest series  as I am bound at this stage to have made similar mistakes.

I want to be revising and editing Quest from Sept onwards – and booking someone for the long haul of editing that series with me these next 14 – 16 months while I also  . . SO those of the ways my goals are starting to re- emerge so far

I’ve repurposed the Extensor laptop with Vista as a second screen. It might not last forever, but it should last for a while.  I threw out lots of software from it and  I’ve just put back in the software that I actually need so that when I’m using Dropbox so it will open the files – it’s also – I think going to really bring in the capacity to have a whiteboard on the table because I got Scapple and Free Mind on it and at the very least I can put either the to-do lists for plot points or ideas up on it – so I don’t have bits of paper everywhere – it’s is not wholly portable because it it’s too old now and it needs it needs power, but equally it fits the space and is big enough for me to see things clearly and has a brain – unlike a separate screen.  And yes, it’s got Vista so – bits of it may stop working at some point but as long as I don’t do any actual writing on it – it will be fine J It is important to have a bigger second screen because my eyesight is not good.

I have also got around the horrendous experience of finding my Broad Band was too slow – and the 4Gee too expensive – for me to move stuff out of Dropbox to work on my spare machines with when my main machine needed a fan clean – by getting 2 separate Seagate 1TB hard drives – I use one one week and one the next so the off site stored one is never more than a week behind

SO/ 🙂 That’s my update for my writing day…

This morning  I’ve dictated this and I will go in  and  edit it – take the horse bit and post that in ‘Riding’ and this bit I will post later  in ‘Writing ‘ – what I want to do is go in and actually sit and write a ‘pantsed’ normal blog update with the same subject – and then I will post this ‘dictated to Dragon version with a light edit’ later just to compare the two –

If you have read both you can see what I see – I talk way too much!!!!!!!!!!

So if I am thinking of using Dragon with a few plot cards in my pockets to do first draft on – if it follows this non fiction voice/style difference then the ‘voice’ of HA and H 2 B will change drastically and they will rival War and Peace in length!!! Because in a 38 min walk I ‘wrote 4270 words!!!!! Happy Days!!!

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Trust emergence?

Dreams

Been moaning about this blog editor and Dashboard, as when looking back at Blog Library the titles were verticle – but given my seat of pants approach to life, let alone blogging –  a few verticle titles aren’t enough to make me get the Blog Spanners out. Today, I decided that I would spend 15 min checking the blogs and thinking about getting back to regular posting  – and the first thing I noticed – and ignored – was verticle titles and groaned ‘no change there then!’ and then, I ‘just wondered’ what would happen if I reduced the screen size on the Google bar to 90% – low and behold – my Library re appeared. 🙂

Lessons learnt from this?

Could be that if you don’t know what you are doing; don’t tinker till you have an idea. Trust emergence, as just ‘pushing buttons’ can take you places you don’t want to be – for as long as it will likely take to get back where you started – wiser about many things; excepting the issue in hand.

On the other hand, if I waited till I knew what to do, I would not act at all; and in the course of acting I eventually get the result I want – sometimes it is a long journey – but I get the result.

How to tell the difference between the time to wait and the time to act?

How important is it to the goal that this thing get sorted now? If life can continue – only inconvenienced – by the failing, then it is best to carry on: if life has stopped because of it, then act regardless.

Friday’s child … Is a long way from finished testing Mail Chimp!
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Friday’s child … Is a long way from finished testing Mail Chimp!

It’s time consuming, learning anything new…

At least I had the sense to snap shot all the changes I made so that I could return to that which was working – if not pretty. The new one was just plain bad as it didn’t include the post and folks would have to click through.

I have at least made myself more familiar with the controls and means I can finally open up Nick’s 10k Readers Course which should help me fill in the rest of the blanks, meanwhile I will carry on the as and when blogging with the generic Word Press template – well I hope I will I guess I will see as soon as I hit publish now if today is going to be spent outside ‘filling buckets’  ( this is still a farm…) Or in here wishing I had sat on my hands and not tinkered with any of it – here goes …:)

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Been line editing and little else …

Good ol’ Scrivener…

I have mostly been getting to grips with the use of snapshots which make version control much easier.

I am also working on my ‘workflow’  in terms of developing an effective and reliable system that lets me ‘switch off’ when I leave the desk so I can enjoy my surroundings; not infuriate my family – by being constantly distracted; and be emotionally congruent enough that my horses don’t run away when they see me 🙂 Some days are better than others. 🙂

 

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Editing Software

Editing with Hemmingway App.

Playing with bits of software…

All jolly good fun! Except when it isn’t.

Grammarly – paid version.

Pro Writing Aid -paid version.

Auto Crit – paid version ( Ouch!)

Hemingway App – paid version.

Initially, they produced panic as I fumbled around and then they produced versions like toads under a tarp.

Then I tried to please them till I decided that to do that till the coloured lights went out meant just having a blank page.

Yes learn and stick to one punctuation style – British English in my case. Yes find the repeats and long sentences…. but then INTERPRETATION is your game OR your manuscript goes from verbose to signage a two year old can read…

I worked out that I needed comparison before I re wrote the MS  so I typed in chunks of random novels and got reports on them  till I could see the ‘proportions’ of their manuscripts (finished, edited many times and published…)

No software will check out description, character or plot and it will only use words like ‘then’ to indicate ‘telling not showing’ – it will use sentence length to indicate pace and it won’t know what exposition is…. So based on its interpretation of the words you mostly use it will give you an indication of their effect. Unless you have access to a lot of stats of many other books in your genre and age group this will not mean that much.

These bits of kit are useful but will not replace an edit and are most use when they work out of the word processor you use is in my case MS Word – so Grammarly and Pro Writing aid. As extra steps are time wasters and printing out these reports is uneconomic on a novel of 130K! Not to mention impossible to then use… having all of them on screen at once is like using a stack of iPhones and I like some distance in editing ie I like to see more text rather than less as then you can correlate the data with the pattern on the page you see…

My experiences of the Tech Help at ProWriting Aid were appalling as I was told that it was ‘obvious what the colours related to…’ when I asked about a key for the colour code. That is a shame as that one was economical of time and money – but only if I understand the colours… Auto Crit guy, on the other hand, was amazingly helpful and sent me a screen film of him sorting out the issue – so I was sorted out in no time at all. ( If using Google Chrome screen size for this laptop is 67%)

Hemingway App is OK but without interpreting the four points it highlights with comparison to similar texts will reduce prose to signage promptly.

I have however, learnt a great deal these last two weeks and with Beth Hill’s Magic Of Fiction to hand as well it is engrossing me enough to continue.

I have also started actively thinking about and talking to Editors about the work so I am incentivised to get on with it:)

Not making time to Blog much as the broadband here is awful and I do like to include a photo – but not to the extent of waiting all day for it to load…

Happy Writing Days then 🙂

 

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Great Start :)

Peddle Power.

Trying not to multitask unless…

I am listening to PodCasts, watching demos, reading blogs. Even then I get distracted and stop peddling – the ‘keep fitter’ plan is struggling to compete with stuff I am really interested in. I should probably not multitask but what are you supposed to do when riding a stationary bike and it is too dark to see outside?

Otherwise the writing month?

Went very well. I had some firm goals set and several calendars to organise me – this meant I had scheduled a ‘five-day’ edit of the manuscript I’d finished second drafting before Christmas. This was to take place in the first five-day week of the new year, and I had planned to do a continuity sheet and edit my dialogue punctuation – however, I checked out Grammarly, and some pennies started dropping on the Grammar and Punctuation front and I invested some time and money in some supporting textbooks and also Hemingway App which complements it nicely – and today I added Pro Writing Aid which is similar and complementary, but different.

No, I haven’t gone mad – I have just started to ‘see’ my mistakes and be able to apply the explanations to my work on a practical level – something that up until now I couldn’t do and I could only hope that this day would come!

The difference I find is that I can learn by doing and it instantly tells me I have a solution. It isn’t quick, and using separate systems is awkward and heavy on the print outs, etc.

The support books elaborate and assist, and I can see  I am making real progress in my levels of understanding, and I think adding value to the manuscript at this point – so that when I write on with the first draft, I can start to practice writing this way from the beginning.

I’m not sure how long this process will take – maybe a few weeks – but I think it is worth seeing through, so though I have rescheduled the calendars to allow for the extra work.

I have actually done a fair bit of brainstorming for the next two books in the series so all in all I am pleased with my progress in January 2017 🙂

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04/01/17

Wed 04/01/17
Phew – I often seem to start a post on these lines – a blog post for me has a gestation and birth followed by a tidy up and slap on the bum to get it to take a breath. I am not conscious of this process so it isn’t painful to write it – only may be to read 🙂
I have worked hard recently on my levels of organisation within and without Scrivener and have made a big step forward in my understanding of the settings – in both Non-Fiction and Fiction Templates – and worked out how to use downloaded ones, design my own and save them for my use.
This means that today I have settled to write this not using the Blog editor in WP but in the Blog Post Scrivener file – only thing is that I can’t do formatting and layout or pictures at this stage. It remains to be seen if I do cut and paste this out and use it.
In order to help give me ‘an audience’ I have split the screen and uploaded some photos which are in Corkboard view above which I can use to stimulate me / make it feel more ‘live’ – the thing about writing straight on to the editor was the buzz of a ‘live performance’ often unscripted ad-lib based on the week or ‘a thing’/ photo etc – hassle with tech and photo’s often put me off the text .
Also cutting in an out of external outpost Blog editors is often too wild to handle between slight tech ‘finger tennis’ protocol issues and my rubbish BB which get in the way of the ‘performance’ – I have realised that while I plot my fiction and lay it out with structure, I am a ‘Pantster’ when Blogging – or as the Spell Checker suggested a ‘Panther.’
Well, may be not … as that suggests ‘Cougar.’ Not quite my demographic… ‘Hippo’ may be…:)
Anyway I digress, I now do have a functioning Series Bible for the Hacked books and individual project files with matching templates – woo woo LOL 🙂 This means that the hard copy very old notes and the old notes kept on a variety of iterations of software from Ywriter to One Note, Red Note Book and Evernote are now imported as are a whole array of ‘cast’ photo’s and images from all over the place – I have even got some little icons in the Character profile for the horse cast and the dog cast to have representations of each on their own files – that is way too cute to last – I am bound to stop doing that!
Am not planning on using the icons on the Blog or in media or the photos -unless they are mine or I have bought stock ones that licence me to use them – my new decorations are purely to pretty up the place and stimulate creativity and help me get through the ‘dark corner’ ( Primrose Cummins) to the other world where I play and work 🙂

 

1st Edit Resumed At Last…
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1st Edit Resumed At Last…

2016-11-10-18-00-34

Phew…

I joined in with Holly Lisle’s live writing room that she had set up to support her students during NaNoWriMo and wrote a new first scene for this book based on the work I had done the last few months – I am pleased with it.

I have been collecting information and advice on big casts of characters – or ‘handling teams’ as I prefer to think of it 🙂 and I have a suitable pile of books, audio and ebooks to get through – I have gone towards more screen writing advice areas as most ‘How To Write…’ books say ‘avoid multiple protagonists and big casts’ – fine if you read those books first – and want to write the next Jack Reacher or James Bond, Marple or Poirot – but I had already written 6 books and series when I started looking at such advice 🙂 and personally I think that as I grew up with TV shows of multiple characters – from Scooby Doo to NCIS and GOT it would be a surprise if I did want to write about one character – and the books I read also tend to be big casts and long series of what ever genre.

Student Is Ready And Teacher Appears…

I have just finished back to back reading of the Winston Graham series Poldark – I am old enough to remember the first TV outing as well as this current remake so I thought it would be a good exercise to read them through – I did no research before doing this and it ended up being fascinating – it took me all the time my dog Brin was poorly and then just past his death – so 5 weeks to read through – and after I had finished with a (very) few questions in mind I googled the Author – I was amazed to find that the first had been published in 1945 and the last in 2002 the year before he died aged 95 – as some one who is writing series – though not adult historicals – I learnt a great deal about what the reader sees in terms of continuity and story line – the few hiccups I felt as I read coincided with a gap in production or characters growing up, a few references to action we never saw and wasn’t relevant and getting Ross to go else where to be a hero and superimposing a murder mystery at the end that didn’t really involve any main character etc etc which even they were so slight that had I read them on publication I doubt I would have felt them and in a series written over 60 years I thought it was an immense achievement of entertainment – I felt at the end of Bella as if there could have been one last book left to finish the tale – but that all in all one could guess the likely progress of them all so it didn’t really need spelling out:) The set piece scenes were so well researched they lived on the page and the humour was Laugh Out Loud – especially Pruddie and Jud – and I felt that the depiction of the Cornish native and working environment every bit as good as the Dorset ones of  Hardy.

And So To Work… 🙂