My Over and Overs.

I love discovering new authors, I really do. There’s nothing better than finding a great book which sweeps me away. And if I’m really lucky, my newly discovered favorite author has a backlist that I can voraciously consume. Trends in fiction change, so it’s important we writers read widely, read outside our comfort zone, and be mindful of the fiction market in general. 

But we all have our favorites, the books I like to call my mac-and-cheese/comfort food reads, or my “over and overs.” These are the books I can re-read or re-listen – as I mostly listen to my books these days – and discover something new about the characters or plot or some new technique that I missed in previous readings. It’s my pleasure to share this list with you. In turn, I hope you will comment and tell me your favorite books and why you like them.

The Thirteenth Tale. This gothic favorite landed in my to be read pile by accident, but I was captivated at page one and am still amazed by the beauty of this book today. Written by Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale is an amazing story told through the eyes of book lover and biographer, Margaret Lea. When the reclusive yet famous writer, Vida Winter, calls on Margaret to write her biography, Margaret is thrust into a world of secrets which need to be laid to rest. Margaret Lea writes Vida Winter’s story through the lens of her own childhood pain in this richly woven story. 

A Discovery of Witches/The All Souls Trilogy. 

A Discovery of Witches takes the “forbidden love” trope often seen in vampire stories and uses it to draw attention to human short comings by exploring racism and the way humans are damaging their own environment. The story is superbly researched and beautifully written. The audio version is really good and is currently at the top of my over and over pile. 

The Clock Strikes Twelve. Make no mistake about it, I love a good British mystery, which is my go-to genre. Although Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors, I also have a soft spot for Patricia Wentworth, whose Miss Silver Mysteries are every bit as clever and well written as Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple series. The Clock Strikes Twelve is a quick and easy read. If you prefer audio books, you won’t be disappointed. All of the Miss Silver books are narrated by Diana Bishop, who does a superior job at bringing the story to life. These books are a series, but can be read out of order.

The 4:50 from Paddington. The first Jane Marple book, this is one of my all-time favorite Agathas. The cover shown here is a stunner. 

Save the Cat Writes a Novel. I have a lot of how-to-write books. Every year I pull them out and reread them with an eye towards giving my skillset an intensive tune-up. Save the Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody has totally changed my writing game. The book takes the screenwriting ethos made famous in Blake Snyder’s best-selling book on screenwriting and adapts the methodology for novelists. This book breaks the novel writing process down into easy steps. Jessica Brody provides beat sheets, discusses genre, and helps writers make decisions about their story that will clarify the process. I have this book in paperback and audio. When I’m getting ready to start a new novel, I relisten to it a couple of times. It has really helped me and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you're interested in this fabulous book, you can find out more about it here. 

So what do you think? Tell me about the books you read over and over in the comment section. 

Happy writing!  

On baking bread

Imagine your June 2020 self travels back in time a few months to meet your March 2020 self. June passes March a jar of sour-dough starter.

'Here, you'll find this useful,' says June.

March stares at it in bewilderment. 'Why?'

'Trust me,' says June. 'Oh, and here's a recipe for banana bread. You're gonna need that, too.'

During this pandemic, it feels like everyone's been baking bread.

We began the lockdown with a tried and trusted recipe for soda bread - my husband's Irish and developed a good recipe years ago. It's delicious when fresh, especially with cream cheese and smoked salmon (if we happen to have those in the house). We love it toasted too. His recipe uses buttermilk, a mixture of flours - plain white, wholemeal and malted - and he adds pumpkin seeds and linseeds to it.

We also have a breadmaker we've used on and off in bursts of enthusiasm over the years. With both grown-up sons staying with us for the duration, we realised we'd need a lot of bread, so why not dust it off and use it? Favourite recipe is based on a French bread recipe from the instruction booklet, but uses a mix of flour including malted flour.

If I were more organised and was writing this post in advance, this would be a photo of bread we've made at home. But the post is being put together at the last minute, so the photo is from BBC Good Food and is a loaf made by Paul Hollywood.

Back in late March and early April, there was a Great Flour Shortage across the UK. With everyone baking, the flour mills, while they were producing enough, weren't able to quickly switch from packing it in large sacks for commercial use to the 1.5kg bags sold in supermarkets. We especially struggled to find our favourite malted flour and in desperation my husband eventually ordered a large quantity of it online.

Yeast too was a problem. Its street value rose to more than that of cocaine at one time. I posted a lament on Facebook about our lack of it and ended up with two friends posting me some and another local friend telling me that a nearby deli stocked it. (This deli was also selling flour bought by the sack and repackaged into small paper carrier bags to sell to the public. Life-saver!)

And then there was the sour-dough. I need to make a confession here - it is not me who makes any of these breads. In fact I've never made a loaf in my life. My husband and I don't follow a traditional split of pink jobs versus blue jobs - he does the food shopping and most of the cooking; while I mow the lawn and put the bins out. So I am writing here from a point of view of near-ignorance in all things baking-related.

In the absence of a time-travelling June self visiting us in March, we did not have a sour-dough starter, so my husband watched Youtube videos to discover how to make his own. Apparently you only need flour and water, though he did invest in some special jars.

For weeks now, my husband's alternated between using the breadmaker, making soda bread and making sour-dough. The breadmaker just requires you to chuck in the ingredients and press a button: three hours later it's done. Soda bread is quick too - turn oven on to preheat, mix ingredients, whack the dough on a baking tray, slash the top 'to let the fairies out' and bake. But the sour-dough takes all day. Mix, knead, prove, stretch, fold - God knows; I keep well away from it all! Tastes good, though.

This is a writing blog and I've been talking in a rather uninformed way about bread-making. So I'll round off with a (slightly tortured) analogy to bring it back to writing. Making sour-dough bread is like writing a novel. You need a starter - an idea. You can't use that immediately - it needs to ferment for a while, and you must gather other ingredients. You need to mix it all up, creating the dough - writing the first draft. It must prove for a while - put the novel aside before you attempt to edit it. You'll need to stretch, fold and reshape it. Eventually you must commit: put the dough in the oven; send the novel to your publisher. The baking process is the publisher giving the book a cover and blurb, turning it into something enticing that people will want to read/want to eat. And then you just hope that all your hard work pays off and people will enjoy your finished product!

TODAY IS . . . WHAT DAY?

Anybody else remember standing on street corners with a collecting tin and a box of flags trying to raise money for a worthy cause like the Red Cross, the local Brownie troup, or Save the Whale? No? Just me then, a long time ago. Those Flag Days had to be organised well in advance and permission granted by the local council. I guess nowadays everone supports their favourite charity or organisation via PayPal.

Flag Days as such may have disappeared but they have been replaced in this modern world by numerous events throughout the year. Lots of worthy causes have their own days, week or month throughout the year but as we slowly come out of lockdown after three months, I thought I’d tell you about a couple of the more light-hearted event days for June 2020 in an effort to raise our spirits. 

National Hug Your Dog day happened on June 4 but it was also National Moonshine Day! I mean moonshine? Who makes the stuff these days? On June 6 we could all be children again on YoYo day. I’m sorry I missed that one. 

Soon on the 19 we will have Wallace and Gromit Day - feel free to binge watch as many episodes as you can take! 

I’m used to working with a cat on my desk and a dog at my feet but that will be official on the 22 and 26 of this month when it’s Bring Your Cat to Work day followed by Take Your Dog to Work.

                                                         
We writers even have a National Writing Day on June 24 - the premise behind this is, ‘everyone has a story to tell and sharing it can be a source of pleasure and power.’ Not sure about that word power.

To refer back to the title of this blog, today is June 13. Its not only National Cupcake Day it’s also National Rosé Day. I’ll raise my glass to that and wish you all a good weekend and happy writing.

BOOKISH THINGS IN STRANGE TIMES by Victoria Cornwall

Although the lock down restrictions are being eased across the country, there will be many people whose lock down is far from over so I thought I would share the few bookish things that made my time in lock down a little more bearable.

The first was Cider with Rosie, a memoir  of Laurie Lee's idyllic childhood in the English countryside.

I read it first as a teenager in English class... not by choice. At the time I found it boring simply because I didn't find a book that mirrored my own father's childhood experiences interesting. Like most teenagers it was my own childhood that was important to me not someone else's... unless it involved a fast paced plot, an unsolved mystery or the capture of a criminal. So when my book club gave out Cider with Rosie as a our next read just before lock down, I was intrigued to find out the plot as I could remember nothing about it... indisputable evidence that I must have spent the entire reading lesson staring out of the window, daydreaming. As it turned out, it was the perfect read - gentle escapism from the stark repeated warnings on the radio and television to stay home, protect the NHS and save lives, not to mention the daily rising death count.

Cider with Rosie has no plot (and don't wait for Rosie to appear as her moment of stardom is fleeting). This book is just a gentle journey through Lauri Lee's childhood, with exquisite, vivid, descriptions of each phase of his life, pre-school, school, childhood friends, teenage life, eccentric country characters and his relationship with his siblings and mother. Strangely, it reminded me of my own childhood in many ways despite being approximately four decades apart. Children in themselves do not change and I suspect the teenage Laurie Lee, with his zest for life and adventure, would have also spent his English lesson daydreaming by the window if he had been forced to read it as a developing teenager. As an adult trying to escape a stressful day, well in my opinion Cider with Rosie was perfect.

***

Those people who are lucky enough to have a garden or outside space, found themselves doing a lot more gardening than they had done previously. Whether your an expert or a novice, gardeners are learning all the time. My garden certainly had a lot more attention, and I wonder if my plants were quaking in their soil when they first saw me coming. They had no need to fear, because I was armed with the Royal Horticultural Society Gardening Through The Year book.

Precise, clear and simple, this book gives a step by step guide on what needs doing every month. I felt an expert by just reading it!

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The second book I used rather a lot during lock down was Mary Berry's Baking Bible.

Once again, precise, clear and simple, this book provides a variety of things to bake which are divided into sections such as celebrations cakes, loaf cakes, tray bake cakes, children's bakes, with ingredients that can be found in a well stocked cupboard. I made quite a few and, unfortunately, gained several pounds in the process. In the end even my husband, concerned about all the extra calories we were scoffing, asked me to reduce my baking. There is no finer testament to a cook book than a man realising he has no resistance to a Mary Berry cake and in order to avoid temptation he has to resort to gently asking his baking obsessed wife (who is dangerously armed with an electric whisk) not to bake quite so many.

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The third thing I found helpful is not a book at all, but a sort of virtual book corner. I consider myself a slow plodder regarding adapting to technology. Lock down made me delve a little deeper into the world of podcasts. There are so many to choose from, but the one I am about to recommend is a wonderful bite-size escape. It is precise, clear and simple (there seems to be a trend here!), but also comforting and relaxing. Sandi Toksvig, a TV presenter and comedienne, has a voice that is easy to listen to as she invites us to join her in her 'room of books'. We Will Get Past This are 10 minute musings which provide a safe space of time where you can relax, find yourself smiling at her wit and anecdotes, and learn about 'some forgotten (and unforgotten) characters in history; some heroic, others comedic and a few who are just downright idiotic'.

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The Gutenberg Project was introduced to me via Sandi Toksvig's podcast. The Gutenberg Project is a library of over 60,000 eBooks... all free to download or read online. The eBooks are mainly older literary works published prior to 1924 and where the U.S. copyright has expired. Books are added to the Project Gutenberg archive only after it has received a copyright clearance, and records of these clearances are saved for future reference. 

The Gutenberg Project is, therefore, different to illegal free download sites, where the copyright still belongs to the author and if the author or publisher have not given their permission for the free download, the act of downloading the free eBook is equivalent to the reader/online site stealing the book. Yes, it might be hard to admit this but free downloads are, under normal circumstances, stealing. The Project Gutenberg, as I understand it, is not like this so I am happy to mention it here.

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My final recommendation is another podcast. The Worried Writer is a free monthly podcast packed with advice and conversation especially for those writers with self doubt, which is basically every writer who has ever lived. If you like to write, read or just listen to someone chatting while you put your feet up or go about your daily tasks, I suspect you might enjoy the window this podcast provides into a writer's mind... and you never know you might just find it educational and helpful too.

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I hope you have found my recommendations useful. If your own personal lock down has eased quite significantly to the point you are working again and rushing around after the family, it is still important to take time out and escape. Stay well, stay safe and stay sane with the help of all things bookish. 

Victoria Cornwall

Books by Victoria Cornwall