It’s time to thank you for following my blog during 2021 and to wish you all the very best for the coming year. As a way to wind up events, please find some photos of our travels since release from lockdown.
Our itinerant life continues in 2022 and I look forward to sharing more of our experiences with you. In the meantime, here’s wishing you and yours all the best for 2022.
Towards the end of each year, Emma Welton at Damp Pebbles invites book bloggers, bookstagrammers and published authors to choose three must-read titles published in that year. There are 50 posts in total for 2021 and currently there’s over 110 individual publications listed including This Much Huxley Knows. Thank you so much to Julie Morris at A Little Book Problem who recommends my novel and says:
This is a book that will have slipped under many people’s radar as it isn’t published by a mainstream publisher and I think that is a great shame because I don’t think I have ever read a book that so clearly describes life from the point of view of a child or captures so brilliantly the joy and pain of being a seven-year-old that doesn’t quite fit in. This is such an individual book, both saddening and uplifting to read and it deserves a really wide audience. I hope including it encourages more people to pick it up.
In other pre-Christmas news, I was interviewed by Melanie at Grab The Lapels in one of her regular Meet the Author posts. The interesting questions generated discussion amongst readers which you can follow here.
We’re away over the Christmas week (all being well) but we still decorated our tree. Doesn’t it look pretty?
If I don’t post again before the holidays, please accept my good wishes for Christmas.
Over the weekend, I was delighted to present a workshop and talk at the Mani Lit Fest in the Peloponnese, Greece. The invitation came as a good excuse to continue our itinerant lifestyle and we’re spending the next month roaming around the country. Stoupa makes a delightful starting point and the Mani Lit Fest was a wonderful event to be involved with. I delivered a Get Creative! workshop where I shared prompts and exercises to generate ideas for short fiction. One of the participants had read This Much Huxley Knows and throughly recommended my novel to the gathered group. The following day, I gave a talk about my experience of being published by small presses. This was well received and an email arrived soon after from a member of the audience who said my input was thought provoking and reassuring.
There was a real buzz around the Lit Fest. The highlights for me included a talk from James Heneage (founder of the Chalke Valley History Festival and Ottakar’s bookshop chain) who shared stories from his new book The Shortest History of Greece. Carol McGrath gave a hilarious presentation on Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England (the name of her forthcoming non-fiction book) and then there was a delicious introduction to the cookbook Salt and Honey from Nicholas Tsakiris and his daughter. (David followed a chilli lentil recipe last night which was very tasty.)
The Lit Fest was held at a local restaurant where the venue created a cocktail in honour of Huxley. A non-alcoholic drink (Huxley is only seven years old) can you guess what it contains?
There was also delicious cake (enough for two) called Ekmek Kataifi. It’s made with a layer of syrupy shredded filo pastry, another of vanilla custard, a layer of whipped cream and topped with pistachios. It goes very well with Greek coffee although I think it’s also good with tea.
If you’d like to enter the Mani Lit Fest Flash Fiction Competition (I’m the judge), send up to 1000 words on the theme of return. The competition is free to enter and is open until 30 November 2021.
For those of you who aren’t active on social media, I’d like to share the news that my work-in-progess has been longlisted in the Novel London Literary Award. This competition invites international submissions for complete works of fiction, which may be unpublished, self published or newly published. As my manuscript is up against published novels I don’t expect it will get any further in the competition but it’s good to see my details on the publicity poster. Well done to all longlistees.
I’m continuing to work on the manuscript following feedback from beta readers. I’ve also changed the title from Little Swot to Extra Lessons which better reflects the novel. Here’s the draft blurb:
Read the rest of this entry »We’ve had a wonderful time staying with an old friend in central Cambridge. Although we’re here for another fortnight, I wanted to share are the highlights so far:
Cambridge Shakespeare Festival
Open air theatre is a particular delight and when plays are staged in Cambridge college gardens, there can be few better venues. Over a six week period we’ve seen plays that I know and love including Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, A Comedy of Errors and two plays which were new to me, Richard III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Richard III wins the prize for the most gruesome and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a sheer joy.
I came across Sundy Flor’s Twitter account when I was investigating book bloggers online. I checked out her website, Books Unfold, and was impressed with the beautiful graphics she creates to accompany her posts and the interesting format for her reviews. I contacted Sundy Flor to see if she would be interested in reading and reviewing This Much Huxley Knows. She agreed and absolutely loved the novel, you can read the review here. We’ve had several email exchanges since then and it occurred to me readers of The Writer is a Lonely Hunter might be interested in learning more about book blogging and the new fangled Bookstagramming. Who better to ask than Sundy Flor?
Q&A with Sundy Flor from Books Unfold
Can you tell readers about yourself, where you’re from and Books Unfold?
I am Sundy Flor from Davao City, Philippines. I am an avid reader of books from Fantasy and Young Adult to Nonfiction. Books Unfold is my blog where I share my thoughts and the things I learned from books.
Read the rest of this entry »It was a fortnight ago that This Much Huxley Knows was released. Since then, lots has happened including a Twitter launch which involved some love authors sharing their experiences of childhood to celebrate my seven-year-old narrator, Huxley.
There’s going to be a Twitter launch party at 3pm BST on Thursday 15 July to celebrate the release of This Much Huxley Knows. Everyone is welcome, especially you!
Twitter launches are a lot of fun and provide the opportunity for readers and writers to mingle virtually and chat about books and reading. To join, all you need to do is use the hashtag #ThisMuchHuxleyKnows in your tweets to follow the conversations. It’s best if you use a social media management programme like Tweetdeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com) which allows you to filter tweets with searches on hashtags or specific accounts.
This is what my Tweetdeck looks like and you can see from the columns what I’m following.
If you’d like to start using Tweetdeck, Twitter provides two excellent step-by-step guides covering both the basic (here) and advanced features (here). YouTube is also a great source for user generated how-to videos about using Tweetdeck, such as here or here. (Thank you to Women Writers’ Network for the links.)
I’d love to have you join the Twitter launch for This Much Huxley Knows. It lasts for just one hour and there’ll be questions to put everyone at ease and start chatting. If you need a little more advice or encouragement, do get in touch by emailing gail@gailaldwin.com.
It’s been a long time coming, but today sees the release of This Much Huxley Knows.
the writer is a lonely hunter 