Books, Serials and Serial Killers

I’ve managed to squeeze out a tiny bit of writing in a fit of New Year resolve. It’s only a letter to Writers’ News, but I haven’t sent anything to them for a long time, and it’s a good muscle flexing exercise (now there’s so something I haven’t tackled for about three years, but this is not the time for too many new resolutions). I’ve also completed a story for one of the WN competitions and I’ll be reading that out to Guildford Writers (http://www.guildfordwriters.co.uk/) which starts up again tonight, and if all’s well, will send it off before the end of the month deadline. I am of course, slowly working through the editing of Tainted Tree, but not too much panic on that, because publication isn’t till May.

A Bottle of Plonk, in the meantime, is working its way up the list of books published in 2007 in an online poll created by Editors and Creditors http://www.critters.org/predpoll/. Many of these books were published on line, but Anne Brooke’s print book A Dangerous Man is at 5th place under novels (mystery). Mine, which like Irene’s was published on line by Virtual Tales (http://www.virtualtales.com/) is in the Romance section; Irene’s The Moon’s Complexion is in Other Novels. Please, if you’ve read or liked any of our books, go to the site and vote for us. This is not a case of winning prizes – we don’t want or expect them; it’s simply to raise the profile of our books to the online community. If you haven’t read the Virtual Tales books, you can download them very cheaply and even read them as a serial.

I’m currently listening to We need to talk about Kevin, the serial on Woman's Hour on Radio 4, having read it a couple of years ago. The author, Lionel Shriver (a woman) has never had a child and doesn’t want one. I imagine she has projected her feelings into the middle class mother of a serial killer in this novel, and has imagined that not having maternal feelings might affect the child. I don’t think this is true, because I wasn’t maternal when I had my son. I learned to be a mother over time. Even so, though it is a painful and shocking book to listen to, it’s marvellously written, with a remarkable lightness of touch – and even humour. Don’t be put off, because you think you won’t like it.