ANITA DAVISON - THE DISORGANISED AUTHOR

Annie Samantha Peregrine-Goode spent her early life dragged around motels by her ne’er-do-well father always one step ahead of his dubious associates as well as the police. On her seventh birthday, he drives her to his family home, Pilgrim’s Rest, now owned and lived in by his older sister Sam. He tells Annie that her birthday present is in the barn and drives away, leaving the bereft child to crawl into the seat of ‘The King of The Sky’ a Piper Warrior that has seen better days and dream of the time he will come back for her.

But Jack Peregrine doesn’t come back, although he apparently keeps in infrequent touch with his sister who always forgives him for his criminal ways and his neglect of his daughter.  Annie is brought up at Pilgrim’s Rest by Sam, and her friend, paediatrician Dr Clark Goode, the closest thing she has for parents.

As a tribute to her father whom she tries hard to hate unsuccessfully, Annie joins the navy and becomes one of their best test pilots.  She marries the …

I Love Editing - Is she mad? do I hear you murmur? Editing is hard work and certainly not considered the fun part of writing a novel.
It is when you are a disorganised author.
I can read and reread a chapter ten times and still not see where the weak spots and clumsy phrasing are. But when a critiqued chapter or a corrected manuscript arrives, I cannot wait to examine the ambiguous, the weak and the plain wrong those red comment boxes point out. Then of course they are glaringly obvious and take no time at all to tweak into flowing prose - I hope!

Those tiny edits, sometimes no more than a question mark or a highlighted word, make me read specific passages with finite attention to detail and even if I don't always agree with the suggestions, I am able to recognise the need for improvement and can usually come up with one of my own. The disadvantage is, I start changing whole sections of formerly acceptable narrative - but I'm learning to focus - slowly.

Living with a novel f…

I refer to the recent libel case lodged by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien against Steve Hillard, the American author of self-published novel, Mirkwood, because he did not seek permission to make references to Tolkien in his novel.

Dana Celeste Robinson, of newly launched Knox Robinson Publishing says: “When I began this publishing house, I had no idea that the question of whether one could libel the dead was still moot........ coming from an academic background, I can attest that for those who research history, academic works are a mixture of fact and conjecture. Indeed, if we can no longer imagine how an historical figure may have made the decisions they made during their lifetimes or delve into the aspects (both good and bad) of their lives, then history as a discipline is dead.”

A ruling in the Tolkien case could set a precedent for or against an author’s rights to create fictional works involving real people, and the powers of an estate to control the use of names in works of fict…