Over the hills and far away

It’s now countdown to my operation – about 16 days to go now - when I’ll be disappearing from here for a while – or until I’m comfortable typing. In the meantime, I saw the orthoptist just over a week ago, and she’s very satisfied with the result of the other operation – as I am too. If I’m fit enough, I will report back on how I’m feeling. It may be of use to other people who are having a hysterectomy.

This weekend we went to Cambridge to see the Son&H and his womenfolk; the two little ones are getting bigger and bigger and GD1 is now a very trendy (or perhaps I should say ‘cool’) 11 year old and looks down on me; she’s 5ft 4 – sorry I can’t translate that into metric.

We Goldenford girls went to Brighton on Wednesday last and did another presentation of our Sense and Sensitivity Workshop at the Brighton Fringe Festival. About a dozen people attended and we had lots of fun – and walked down to the sea front too, before we started. The journey was interesting to say the least, as I had to balance a tray of jelly on my lap, and tried to control it over the hills of the North and South Downs. Tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Guildford Writers’ Workshop, and of course, this will be my last presentation for a couple of months at least. However, you can still buy my books from Amazon, even if not from me in the flesh.

Talking of books, the reading circle met up last week, and we discussed Margaret Forster’s ‘Keeping the World Away’; some people described it as a gentle read; for me it had insufficient drama. At about the halfway point, I was finding it difficult to work up enthusiasm to continue, although I have to say that some of the heroines and some of the stories were more interesting than others. The book is not a straight novel. It uses the device of the painting by Gwen John to introduce new characters and move on to new stories. There are six heroines, and the link from chapter to chapter is tenuous. I had a similar device in my novella, A Bottle of Plonk, but I never regarded it as a true novel. Nevertheless, tt seems that more and more authors are using this sort of device now – that is – taking what are essentially short stories and weaving them together into a long book. This may be because we know that short stories sell less well than novels.

In the case of Notes from an Exhibition, the mother was the link between the chapters, which were frequently unrelated, though it was all sewn up fairly neatly at the end.

In Margaret Forster’s novel, to be fair, the heroines have quite substantial stories, so I can’t really label them as short stories. But at the end of one, there is nothing to propel you into a new narrative. I hope I did better with A Bottle of Plonk, simply by letting the previous heroine, or in a couple of cases, hero, to take you on into the next story.

There was also so much narrative, compared with the amount of dialogue, in ‘Keeping the World Away’, that mostly, I felt the story never came alive at all. In Creative Writing classes, etc, one is always being told, ‘Show, not tell.’ I tend to feel that one should listen to these rules, then break them. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a novel – or story – should have a mix of narrative and dialogue, with enough white space on the page to tempt you along. And on the whole, this to me didn’t have it.