The White Road and Other Stories has been reviewed by Jen Michalski in the Winter Issue of the JMWW Journal, and a very nice review it is too:

" Hershman's other strength is her ability to keep the reader on her toes. She weaves the warbly, neon threads of magical realism together with the steel rods of science, and the effect often is very satisfying."

Read the full review here.

And - I have arrived at the final stop on my Virtual Book Tour, at Debi Alper's blog (which I invite you to read more of, she is a very fine writer and very candid about her life and her writing)...........

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I've been thinking about structure a lot, lately, and one thing that keeps coming to mind is a story I wrote ages ago, which didn't really work for all sorts of reasons, mostly to do with my novelist's tendency to keep trying to squeeze not just a quart - that's easy - but a gallon into a pint pot, and partly to do with the fact that historical short fiction's a tricky beast at the best of times. It covered a long stretch of years, which is never easy in a short story, and as a way of placing and anchoring the big architecture of the story (see how the metaphor's coming along already?) I used the building of a bridge in her home town, pier by pier, arch by arch, until it reached the far bank at the end of the story. It sounds static, though, and the thing about prose is that it only really exists - can be experienced - in time. As if my unconscious recognised this, at one point in the writing, I had an absolutely clear vision of the piers of the bridge being a giant's legs, planting themselves in the river bed, splashes and little whirlpools and all, as he walked to the other side. What I was doing in writing the story, I realised, and what the story was doing for the reader, was like those time-lapse film clips: I was actually building the bridge to the other side.

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I read somewhere that Horror-genre films reflect society's contemporary pre-occupations. Maybe that's true, too, of History-genre ones.


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I trust you all had a decent Xmas and New Year? It's good to be back, I've neglected WriteWords for a little while, but I hope to have some work up here again soon.

Ja ne~

It is with a great amount of pleasure that I welcome novelist and friend, Emma Darwin, to my blog.

So, here's what she's had to say about, amongst other things, her new novel, A Secret Alchemy, Shakespeare, writing historical fiction, and not being derailed.





So Emma, A Secret Alchemy, who’s it for and what’s it about?

It’s about the people who brought up the Princes in the Tower – their mother and her brother – and the Wars of the Roses world they lived and died in. I suppose it has a core audience in everyone who’s ever seen Shakespeare’s Richard III on film or on the stage, or read Josephine Tey’s detective story The Daughter of Time. But it’s really for anyone who likes fiction rooted in real, ‘big’ history, or liked my first novel The Mathematics of Love.



Why did you write it?

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Blogs are a bit like pets. You think it would be nice to have a dog, then once you discover they’re easy to look after, you think it might be nice to get a rabbit too, and the species start to accumulate. This is what is happening to me.

I’m very excited to announce two new blogs today.


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Once more, it’s time to take stock of the past twelve months and work out how to make the next year count – in terms of being more productive, more happy or, like me, by finally understanding that five-a-day doesn’t apply to mini Twix bars or units of Chardonnay. It’s that time of year when we writers resolve once again to… Simply improve? To network on the, er, Net? To get to grips with the position of the apostrophe after a name ending in S?
Well that’s all well and good and bravo to anyone who hopes to achieve the above. What you don’t want to do is make the resolution I have written down every year, since embarking on my quest for literary success:

THIS YEAR I SHALL GET PUBLISHED.

I suspect at this point some of you are cringing – but don’t. It’s an obvious goal for a writer, just like a forty-year chain-smoker resolving to give up the fags. Only a stash of rejection letters will make you realize such grand declarations are pointless and a bit like me resolving to be the next Bond girl à la Ursula Andress. Even if I spent the next six months in the gym, got the obligatory boob job and pumped my face full of Botox, I would still need to kidnap Barbara Broccoli, hold her to ransom and only then might I be in line for an audition (failing a prison sentence)...

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Crawled out of bed at sunset on day one of JaNoWriMo. Come on. It was New Years Day and I was very ill (OK - yes, it was self-inflicted). Consoled myself thinking - ah an evening to think it all through. Broached this notion to friend who said no, just write. Regard her as ‘wise woman’ (and published writer) so open new blank document, format said document, name it and save it. Phew ... [more]

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This time to a piece by Bruce Holland Rogers on Expressionism, Surrealism, Magical Realism, and Fantasy for Flash Fiction Online, which I thought interesting.

***

And no sooner had I proclaimed I'd sent off my first submission of the year when - can you guess what happened? - I received my first rejection of the year. Which made the link I posted below even more useful, especially this line:

"Just because that market doesn’t like my style doesn’t cancel out all those that do".

Because it's true.

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At one end of a huge lake a fountain still played and ducks swam about in the dusk. The Palm House, bulked like a grey whale against the darker sky, was closed.

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