Asking a small favour…
My author website is now sitting, all shiny and new and out there live now. And this has left me wondering what more it needs.
So far, it has the usual: links to socials, what the novel is about, a little about me, plus some articles covering favourite books set in the period, non-fiction books I used for research, and photo inspiration. But I’d like to add more.
And who better to ask, I thought, than you, dear subscribers. What do you like to see when you visit an author’s website?
What do you think?
What I've been up to recently
It’s been a long and blissful summer, with just enough freelancing work to keep the home fires burning. Because of all the family time we’ve spent over the past couple of months, there has been less writing, too, though.
I am still working on tidying up the second half of the novel (slow but steady wins the race?) and getting pages ready for my beta-reading group. But having spent two weeks in France — cycling, walking, running, eating, and drinking — I really need to crack on with it now. Otherwise, they are going to be faced with pages littered with my notes, saying things like “Expand on this” and “More here” and “Like this, but better”…
But it feels like things are coming together, especially as I received an email in mid-August letting me know that my novel has been long-listed for the 2023 Page Turner Awards’ Writing Mentorship Prize.
As you can imagine, I am thrilled. I haven’t entered too many prizes — a couple last year and three in total so far this year — so this makes me believe the changes I’m making to the story are only making it stronger.
And in other book-related news, the Fodor’s travel guide that I worked on last year has now been published in the US (back in June) and Europe (in August), so I’ve been able to hold a copy in my hands, flick through the pages, and feel proud of the work I did on it.
What I've been reading and watching recently
One of the best parts of summer for me is all the extra reading time. I ploughed through a few books this summer and started a whole batch more.
Violets - Alex Hyde: This charming short novel is the story of two different women called Violet, each living very different lives during the Second World War. The writing in poetic and lyrical and easy to read, but I did struggle somewhat a first with the two protagonists having the same name.
The Hidden Letters - Lorna Cook: I liked this story set during the First World War, but I didn’t love it. I picked this book up because, like my own novel, it is based during war and features letters as a plot device. I really enjoyed her characters and the build-up of the story, but the big reveal in the story fell flat for me, unfortunately, and the ending felt a little rushed.
Pandora - Susan Stokes-Chapman: I was excited to read this one as there had been a lot of marketing devoted to it when it was published in early 2022. Again, this was one that I liked but did not love. The supernatural elements fell a little flat for me in the end and some of the characters seemed somewhat caricaturish (a word I appear to have just invented…).
The Women of Chateau Lafayette - Stephanie Dray: This is one mammoth book (almost 600 pages!)… I went back to see how it took it me to finish it and the answer is twenty months. And I must confess that the only way I could do that was by largely skipping one of the three story timelines and skim-reading those pages. The writing was excellent and the other two storylines hopped along well, but the foundational story about Adrienne Lafayette simply didn’t grab me enough to keep me interested.
Diary of a Provincial Lady - E.M. Delafield: And here’s another one that took me an age to read — almost two years, but for a different reason. This is the perfect book to dip in and out of: funny, charming, packed with a cast of eccentric and loveable characters. That said, I read the second half of the book over a few weeks rather than months. That could be the book or it could have been my mood.
Mrs Porter Calling - A. J. Pearce: This is the third Emmy Lake novel from A.J. Pearce, of whom I am a big fan. She manages the balance between funny and heartbreaking with aplomb and her characters jump off the page throughout their amusing adventures. All three so far have, of course, been set during the Second World War. But I hardly needed to tell you that, did I?
Until the next time,
If you like this newsletter, you can buy me a virtual coffee - coffee always keeps me going ☕