R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 9

My heart bleeds for the Syrian children Cameron has agreed to take into Britain. These children will be in the care of local authorities. They’ll be “in care,” and if there’s one thing that children in care rarely experience, it’s care.

When I wrote Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, my hero, Billy, survived his time in care and went on to triumph. I wasn’t writing out of ignorance. There are successes among children who’ve been in care; some have been public figures and some you may know personally. For every success – for every Billy – there are hundreds failed by the system.

Don’t blame the social workers; social work departments are underfunded and understaffed, and they can’t win because they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That goes double for care homes. It wasn’t a social worker who showed Billy the way out – it rarely is. In his case, it was a teacher. I could (though I won’t) name the real-life teacher I based Miss Taggart on. As Billy himself says when someone fails to understand his background, ‘I was lucky. More lucky than you can ever imagine.’

In a few years time, I don’t doubt that we’ll hear a few – a very few – heart-warming stories about people who arrived here as child refugees and have made their mark in broadcasting or the arts or some other field. We’ll also, if we can be bothered to listen, hear about hundreds of others: the girls who are on the street and the boys who are doing drugs and thieving. Weep for them. They’ll have received an inadequate education which will have fitted them for no other form of life. Just like the innumerable products of care we have on the streets and in the prisons today.

If you imagine that many of these children are going to be adopted, you don’t (and I speak as the father of adopted children) know much about adoption in this country. If you think that, after the initial well-publicised burst of activity, the care system is going to be adapted to suit their needs you don’t know much about that, either.

It will end in tears, and the children will be the ones crying them. And what will we hear then from the virtue signallers and the self-promoters and the politicians? Nothing. Not a damn thing.

Two women who have never met each other before and never will again exchange glances one fraught morning in wartime Rome. Wordlessly, they make a pact concerning the seven-year-old son of one of them. This book is the working out of the results of that pact.

Today is the 30th of April, I finished the book last night, there are two thirds of the year still to go and I cannot believe that in all that time I will read a better book than this one, or one that gives me more enjoyment. Virginia Bailey is a wonderful writer and she has gone to the very heart of this story. The characters live and breathe in every sentence, the events are totally believable, and anyone who by the final page is not utterly absorbed is an oaf who should never be allowed to open another novel.

It is only looking back that I see (through my tears) how brilliantly done the complex structure is. Very few writers make it onto my list – that special list that says “You must read everything this author writes.” Virginia Bailey strolled onto it with ease.

Return To Reviews Of Other Writers’ Books

Writer for Hire John Lynch

Freelance Writer For Hire

When I retired from my job in international sales, I planned to write full-time. I still do – but it isn’t as simple as that, because the first few months on my own have shown me what I am missing. I’m a gregarious person, and one of the reasons I continued to travel the world for work was that – I thought – I enjoyed meeting new people and solving new challenges. I now know that that was only a partial explanation. It’s not just enjoyment; I need the interplay with other people. And so, as well as continuing to write fiction, I have gone back to something I have done before: freelancing as a writer for hire.

I’ve addressed this aspect of my work here, put examples of some of my previous freelance work here and on this page I set out the terms on which I take on assignments as a writer for hire.

Join my mailing list by filling out this form and I’ll send you a FREE Guide to Finding a Freelance Writer. [contact-form]

Yesterday, I placed here a post that I’d taken from the Mandrill Press blog. Here’s another. I do get asked from time to time how I came to be mixed up with my two Mandrill Press co-authors. I’ve even been accused of being Kat Carlton and Suzie Hopkins in disguise — a suggestion I take exception to. This post attempted to explain to Mandrill Press subscribers the (wide) differences between the three of us.

Mandrill Press: Three Very Different Writers
What to expect from the three Mandrill Press authors

Our regular readers know this, but there has been a significant influx of new subscribers to the site over the past few days and – given the very different writing styles and worldviews of the three Mandrill Press authors – it’s probably a good idea to set out for the new subscribers exactly what they can expect to see here.

John Lynch

My name is John Lynch, I’m (with Suzie Hopkins) one of the two founders of Mandrill Press, and I handle all of the admin for the three of us so the chances are that you will hear from me more often than from anyone else. I write contemporary fiction and historical fiction as well as non-fiction and working as a writer for hire. You’ll find a description of my currently published books here.  Of the three of us, I like to feel that I’m least likely to cause offence because I don’t write what the others call “erotica”.

SF Hopkins

Suzie Hopkins is Canadian but currently lives in Abu Dhabi where she is a Marketing Manager. You can find details of her published books here. I mentioned erotica earlier; some of Suzie’s books are quite frankly and straightforwardly rude (The Binding and The Transformation of David) while the best way to describe a book like Lovers in Their Fashion is to say that it’s a strong contemporary romance that does not shrink from describing its characters’ sexual doings. In detail. Oh!

KC Carlton

I suppose, if I’m honest, that to tell you about Kat Carlton (and that could, perhaps, be rewritten as “to warn you about Kat Carlton”) is the reason for this post. Kat writes what she calls Erotic Christian Romance (see her books here) and her work is explicit. If seeing the word “Christian” makes you think, “Oh, well, if it’s Christian it can’t be too filthy”, you had better read what Kat says here. And here. As well as love between man and woman, Kat specialises in LGBT and M/M – that is, love – physical love – between two men. If this is not for you, I suggest you stick to the other two.

There you are. You have been warned. Now I’ll stand back and just say, take a look at the books. See what we have that you might like.

Enjoy!

Christmas Discount Offer

I lifted this off the Mandrill Press blog — and, as it’s about my books, why not? If you like, you can see the original here.

Christmas Discount Offer
40% Discount, postage and packing free, wherever in the world you may be

Our Christmas Market is open! These three books would make wonderful Christmas gifts for your book-reading friends; buy them together and instead of the normal list price of £33.47 you’ll pay only £20. That’s a discount of just over 40% — and free post and packing is included, wherever in the world you may be. They’re all in stock and we’ll despatch within one working day of receipt of order, so click the button and that’s three gifts you won’t have to worry about. Read about the books here and order them here.

 

Make things easy for yourself this Christmas. You know people who like to read – buy them a book! And do yourself two favours by (a) doing it all by mail-order, so you don’t have to do hack your way through the stores and (b) getting a 30% discount and free post and packing anywhere in the world while you’re about it.
http://www.mandrillpress.com/?page_id...

A Just and Upright Man is a crime and romance novel set in the northeast of England in the 1760s. I’m in the process of recording the audiobook version and you can listen to Chapter 2 here.

That’s my voice you’re listening to; the reason I chose to record my own book is that I was brought up in the northeast of England, so I know the accent is authentic :-)

The audiobook won’t be ready for a while yet, but you can get the paperback here (post and packing free wherever in the world you may be) and the Kindle version is here.

 

Strange events in ordinary lives

I bought this book on a whim at the Hawkesbury Upton pop-up literary festival and I was glad I did. I have always loved the short story form – not everyone does and if you’re one of those who don’t this may not be for you but if you like short stories you should enjoy this collection. Ellie Stevenson writes about real people from the inside – which, considering the surreal nature of the characters’ experiences, is an achievement. The stories are varied and entertaining and offer an insight into the odd ways apparently normal people behave, with some very strange occurrences in ordinary lives. One is left at the end with the feeling that the author’s head must be an interesting place to inhabit.

Return to Reviews of Other People’s Books

I first heard of Maud Gonne in 1960 when I was 17. She seemed like someone from the far past and I’m astonished now to realise that at that time she had been dead for only seven years. The introduction came from Charlie Richardson, one of my A level English teachers, who told the class that she was the muse of WB Yeats with whose poetry I had just fallen in love (an infatuation that continues to this day). He also told us that: she had refused several marriage proposals from Yeats; that he had also been turned down by her daughter Iseult; and that we should all be grateful to Maud and her daughter because without this unrequited love Yeats’s poetry would never have reached the heights it did. He did not tell us: that Maud married a right-wing French politician; that the son she bore him died; that she then made her husband (from whom she had been estranged since the death of the child) make love to her by candlelight on a freezing cold night in the funeral vault where their son lay buried so that the dead child’s soul would migrate into the child she would conceive there; or that most of us, on meeting her, would have decided that she was as mad as a hatter. In Her Secret Rose, Orna Ross fills in these gaps to great effect.

The title of the book comes from Yeats’s collection of short stories, The Secret Rose, which in this edition is bound with Ross’s story. What I admire about Ross’s work (I have previously given a good review to her novel Blue Mercy) is her ability to put you into the minds of her characters so that you feel as well as see – you have the why as well as the what – and to structure a book in the best way to bring out what she wants to say. In this case, we watch proceedings through the eyes of a female Irish domestic servant who sees people (and especially Gonne, Yeats and the French politician, Millevoye) with a clarity and at the same time a lack of judgmental bias possibly not available to people of her own class.

At the end of the book, did I feel any deeper understanding of Yeats’s poetry? No, probably not. But I had had an exhilarating read. An excellent book by a writer of the first rank. I recommend it strongly.

It’s probably very bad form to laugh at something you wrote yourself. I can’t help it. This is Chapter 7 of Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper and, whatever this says about me, I love it.