The past month has seen my book buying habit go into overdrive. But then the number of hours I’ve spent reading each day has increased stratospherically – and since shops have been no-go areas to me since I foolishly mistook my step on the Old Brompton Road en route to the tube and permitted my...
Author: Jude Hayland (Jude Hayland)
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Who Wrote What and Why?
As a member of all sorts of Facebook fiction reader and writer groups, I daily read comments, reviews, conversation and just general chatter about books. Lately, with more enforced time to scan through these as a result of a fractured shoulder and, counting my luck that it’s my left arm held firmly, rigidly, in a...
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Write What You Know …
…or at least that is advice vaguely handed out to people who claim they want to write. And to a certain extent, it’s probably a good starting point. After all, if someone can’t write convincingly of their immediate surroundings and experiences, they are unlikely to be able to conjure imagined worlds and scenarios. But after...
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Bookish Joys
Learning to read is one of those rites of passage that, unless it’s a particular struggle, goes unnoticed. And as someone who has never quite mastered numbers in any form, doing her lifelong, level best to avoid their challenge I sympathize hugely if words cause the same barrier as numbers provoke for me. But if...
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It’s All Starting Over Again …
Spring! And the start of my New Year. January has never felt an appropriate time to mark the end of one year and the start of the next since it seems only the calendar displays any difference. Wake up on January 1st and the day is as short and probably as dark and dank as...
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A Poem is Worth a Thousand Words …
I am one of those rare creatures who loves poetry. Who actually sits down and reads it. Perhaps I’m wrong – and I hope I am – but I seldom if ever meet anyone who loves it the way I do. For whom poetry is, indeed, so often worth more than pictures, more than prose....
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It was so very different for Jane – and Charlotte, Emily and the rest …
All right. So they had to write their books without access to keyboards. Without the facility to cut and paste a line, a paragraph or even a whole chapter to shift it into a different position to help the narrative flow. And the only convenient clouds they had at their disposal were the ones floating...
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That Loving Feeling …Valentine’s Day and all that
Hearts and flowers and all things romantic tend to divide opinion radically when it comes to literature. Mention the word, ‘romance,’ and many people think immediately of Mills and Boon. Of unlikely handsome heroes and beautiful, loving heroines who will find each other after various obstacles have been conveniently removed from their respective paths and...
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RECLAMING OUR PASTS
When does the past begin to be interesting to us? I don’t mean history. I am not talking about Tudors and Stuarts and all those wives of Henry V111. Nor that litany of Medieval kings or various wars and battles and disputes: Crimean War, Tolpuddle Martyrs, Corn Laws and Luddites and the like. I’m talking...
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Goodbye 2021 and All That …
Already, 2021 seems like a distant and unpleasant memory. But perhaps that’s being unfair to a year that, unlike its predecessor, did give us a few gems: The Vaccine. Wimbledon. The Olympics. The Booster. The historians in a few decades ahead will no doubt link the two – the years marred by The Virus. And...