Category: Dorset

I’m busy practising my signature for the launch of my new novel, Plashy Fen, which happens this coming Saturday at Washingpool Farm Shop, on the north western outskirts of Bridport.

As I write fiction under my pen name, my signature can be anything I want it to be – but I do need to make sure it fits and looks right on the page.

I had a short story published in My Weekly magazine last week, which features one of the characters from Plashy Fen who, in the novel, is an elderly widow by the name of Beattie Dominey, who talks incessantly and unashamedly to her late husband.

In the My Weekly story, entitled A Feast for Michaelmas, Beattie is a young newlywed in 1959 who fears her goose may well and truly be cooked if she doesn’t stand up for herself very soon.

It’s the first short story I’ve ever submitted to a women’s magazine – one, because I have an innate fear of rejection and, two, because I’ve been such a snob over the years by dismissing short stories in popular magazines as being pulpable rather than palpable.

It’s taken me a long time to untie my prejudices and cast off the sneering voice of an old acquaintance who poured scorn on me landing a weekly column in a national magazine eleven years ago because it was The People’s Friend, which clearly didn’t measure up to her literary tastes.

I had been buoyed up by being emailed out of the blue by the editor who had seen my old blog online and told me: ‘I think you might just be the writer we’ve been looking for! I like your ability to write with humour about the minutiae of daily life, but with a touch of emotional depth, too.’

To be approached like this by the world’s longest-running weekly magazine for women is something which still makes me smile. Especially when D C Thomson also publishes the Beano.

Their publications reach real people. Lots of them.

There is so much snobbery around fiction. And I can’t stand pretentiousness, superiority and massive egos.

Something I saw recently on Instagram by writer Matt Haig stopped me in my tracks.

Yes. This.

It’s so true – there are books and genres for everyone.

I don’t know about you but I like all sorts of fiction and writers. I prefer coming-of-age stories set in small towns, fast-paced thrillers and exquisitely written prose by quiet writers like Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett in which universal truths and common humanity are found in the everyday and mundane.

And I like whip-smart, contemporary novels that make me laugh, science fiction by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King and classics such as The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and, my all-time favourite, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald.

We’re all different but the main thing that connects us readers – and writers – is the very act of reading itself.

The luxury of immersing ourselves in a good book and being able to escape from all the dross life can sometimes serve up is just priceless.

So. here’s to happy reading and writing for all, whatever your preferences may be.

There is no such thing as good or bad taste – it’s just someone else’s.

And if you’re around Bridport way on Saturday, please pop in and say hello. There could be cake.