Kevin Booth's Blog, page 4
September 21, 2014
Readings at Chorleywood
I’m excited to have been chosen to read at the Indie Author Fair, part of the Chorleywood Literary Festival, on 16 November. Organised by the Chorleywood Bookshop, Triskele Books and the Alliance of Independent Authors, forty authors will be on hand to talk to you about their books, sign copies, give readings, and I’m sure offer generous discounts. Some of the best writers on the Indie scene, including Carol Cooper, Jane Davis, Helena Halme, Dan Holloway, Rohan Quine and Orna Ross will be at the British Legion Hall in Chorleywood on Sunday 16 November, from 2pm–5pm.
My reading will be the last in the 15:30-15:45 slot, but I’m posting the full list of readers below.
14:30 – 14:45
1. Geoff Gudgion (thriller)
2. Jane Davis (literary)
3. Marisha Pink (contemporary – Southeast Asia)
4. JW Hicks (dystopia)
15:30-15:45
1. DJ Kelly (docu-fiction)
2. Liza Perrat (history)
3. Jane Turley (comedy)
4. Kevin Booth (contemporary – Spain)
16:30-16:45
1. Debbie Young (Flash fiction)
2. Rohan Quine (Literary)
3. JD Smith (history)
4. Ellie Stevenson (supernatural)
This is going to be a great afternoon, so post it in your diary now! See you at the Indie Author Fair, in the British Legion Hall, Chorleywood, 2 pm–5 pm on 16 November!
September 9, 2014
Best of San Telmo Street Art
Originally posted on ¿Qué Sé Yo, Argentina?:
San Telmo, the oldest barrio in Buenos Aires, is known for antique stores, milongas, cobblestone streets, traditional cafés and old school parrillas. A barrio where the retro-cool hardcore kids live in their high ceiling, historic apartments. My favorite thing about San Telmo? It houses some of the best street art in the city. Ditch the crowded San Telmo Feria, flocking around the B-level Tango street performers, and check out the great street art. Here are some of my faves….
September 1, 2014
A Letter to Amazon
I love this and agree entirely! Though I publish through Amazon, their condescending, misquoting, factually incorrect letter inspired me to incorporate sell buttons onto my own site and prioritise the other online retailers I use like Kobo, B&N, iBooks, etc.
Amazon, writers tend not to be stupid, whether traditionally or independently published!
Originally posted on lucybluecastle:
Dear Mr. Bezos,
I was very excited to receive your Email request this morning, asking for my help in your battle against Hachette. Not since Carrie White got invited to the prom has a girl been more pleasantly shocked to be included. And you’re right; those big publisher types are just fuckers. I was a mid-list romance author for Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster all through the 2000s, and let me tell you—
Oh, right, sorry, you want to talk about your thing. No, yeah, of course; it’s totally fine. So anyway, okay, Hachette and its other big nasty “media conglomerate” friends have been being all hateful to you at Amazon about your e-books. I heard about the whole collusion thing – those bastards! You and the Supreme Court are so right; I don’t blame you one bit for being upset. I mean, I know in my heart that if you…
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August 17, 2014
What Does Being “Cis” Mean For A Woman?
Originally posted on Week Woman:
Today I got a bit cross. I do that occasionally. I have been watching the non-binary versus feminism wars getting increasingly heated and thinking, one day, I’ll write a considered post on this. It is an important issue that deserves my time and effort – but it is such an important issue that it deserves time and effort that I simply don’t have today. So days go by and I say nothing. I tweet out articles by women far more cogent and intelligent than I am. I endorse them in the strongest possible terms. But it doesn’t feel enough. I feel like I’m ducking my feminist duty: the duty for women to SPEAK. To not feel scared and cowed. To not suffocate under the weight of not saying anything until that mythical perfect moment when all her ducks are in a row, when the sun is at the right point…
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July 19, 2014
Red Devils: Republican Women Under Franco
A friend recently asked me about the situation of women sympathetic to the Republic, who, after February 1939, were condemned to endure the harshness of the Franco regime. The case of the men is well documented. Many of those who didn’t make it to Latin America, the USSR or Britain were sent by the Vichy government to Nazi concentration camps such as Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Other ex-combatants were persuaded to accept a supposed offer of pardon from Franco and, on arrival in Spain, summarily tried and executed, or condemned to work as slave labour for the Franco government, the Catholic Church and private enterprise.
However the situation of Republican women was markedly different. While men avoided reprisal by fleeing to the mountains, most women were forced to remain in their homes where they had to care for children and dependents. So they were in a far more vulnerable situation.
Historian Loida Díaz Jiménez, on the website CuartoPoder, states that “women during the Second Republic found themselves identified with a pattern of behaviour that enabled activity, decision-making, the active and necessary participation required of them—whether as mothers, or as militia when war broke out— in a profoundly innovative way.”
Women from Oropesa, Toledo, their heads shaved for belonging to Republican families. (sbhac.net)
The conservative and fascist forces behind the coup saw this as a “monstrous deformity” which the Republic had wrought in morality. The fascist mentality viewed the humanitarian ideals flourishing under the Republic as a malaise or cancer to be surgically removed from Spain’s ailing corpse. Women, seen as embodying the morality of the time—as many contemporary posters illustrate in which they represent the ideals of justice, peace or patriotism—became the target of a zealous crusade in moral reform.
Contemporary poster for the UGT union: “She is alert against fascism”
As the “liberation” of villages and towns by the Francoist army progressed, exemplary punishments were meted out. Paul Preston, in The Spanish Holocaust (Harper Press, 2012), emphasises the high numbers of men suspected of Republican sympathies who were tortured then executed. It was a campaign carried out with “gratuitous cruelty”.
But the punitive measures against Republican women tended to focus on scenes of public humiliation, rape, sexual abuse and the permanent marking of women’s bodies. A common practice was to shave the victim’s head, force her to ingest castor oil to produce constant diarrhoea and then parade her around the main streets of her village or town in a macabre spectacle. “Red” women were portrayed as “red demons”.
After the war, according to Díaz Jiménez, “rape and sexual abuse became commonplace in police stations, civil guard barracks and prisons in an attempt to objectify and dehumanise those whom the victors considered the root of Republican wickedness”. In the early post-war years, thousands of women were subjected to cruel physical and psychological abuse.
However, cases of Republican women being shot and buried in shallow graves, similar to their male counterparts, also occurred. These include cases of pregnant women.
The practice of separating children from their “red” mothers was common. The historian José Pizarro documents the situation of María and her daughter Rosario, along with seventy-three others, who were tried for being members of the anarchist CNT union and the leftist Frente Popular government of Seville. They were given a summary trial and convicted in June 1938 to twelve years of hard labour. Twenty-year-old Rosario died of tuberculosis in prison in 1941.
María remained a prisoner while her other children were separated and sent to different provincial orphanages. The family was able to reunite in the early forties, but María, weakened from the poor health conditions hunger and overcrowding that were standard in Francoist prisons, died in Cádiz in 1944, aged just fifty-five.
As Silenciadas, a documentary by Pablo Ces
Another interesting source is As Silenciadas, a 2011 documentary by Pablo Ces about the struggle of women in Galicia against the violence and repression of the Franco dictatorship following the war.
So the situation of women was far from easy. Throughout the forties and fifties, the Franco regime promoted an image of the Spanish woman based on Andalucian cultural stereotypes, a figure who was passionate yet demure and home-loving—a strong mother though one who bowed to her husband and authority in all things. And it is an image of Spain that has endured internationally, in detriment of a richer, more complex understanding of Spain’s many varied cultures.
May 17, 2014
ALLi London Creative Critique – it’s on!
It’s all go! The first meeting of the ALLi London Creative Critique will be at 6.30pm on Tuesday, 20 May at
The Star of Kings
King’s Cross, London
126 York Way, London N1 OAX
This is a group for members of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi). Our focus in the main part of the session is on the creative aspect of being a writer. The latter part of the night will consist of a more informal networking session, where members can meet and discuss any aspect of the author-publisher (self-publishing) sector, including outsourcing, editing and proofreading, formatting, cover design, marketing and distribution. Non-members are welcome to turn up to an initial session.
Bring along a piece of writing that you would like to be critiqued, something you can read out in under five minutes. It may be a key scene in your novel, a character description, or even a plot outline. The group will then spend several minutes offering feedback. We’ll divide the time available between the members who attend, but we will aim to have about ten-fifteen minutes per person. It isn’t mandatory to offer something to be critiqued, you may just want to contribute to the discussion. If this section becomes very popular, we may need to have some sort of pre-booking process, since in 90 minutes, we’ll have time to critique just six or seven members’ work.
After the critiquing and a brief break, we’ll move into a more relaxed mode, discussing anything to do with author-publishing, passing on marketing or sales tips, new initiatives of interest to authors, the ins and outs of formatting, cover design processes, etc. This part should last around thirty minutes.
We’ll start at 6.30 on 20 May. For the first meeting we’ll be seated at the back of the Star of Kings pub in Kings Cross. A pub quiz will be starting at 8.30 so we need to start punctually. Later meetings will be at the same time on the third Tuesday of every month, but in the upstairs function room, which is quieter.
http://allianceindependentauthors.org/?affid=674″; >
March 28, 2014
Raise the quality of your writer’s voice with professional editing
Kevin Booth, member of ALLi and Associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), will be available at the London Book Fair to talk to members about editing and translating their books, websites and author pages, along with other aspects of the author-publisher process.Give your words the professional polish they deserve.
Trading as Poble Sec Books, I provide editorial services to author publishers to ensure your project shines – specifically developmental editing, copy-editing and proofreading of your novel or non-fiction book. You owe it to your readers!
Send your message further.
Two decades of experience in the professional translation sector gives Poble Sec Books the expertise to translate your book, website or author page into any language. I translate and project-manage fiction, non-fiction, author bios, press releases, websites and more.
I’ll be circulating around the Author’s Lounge over the three days of the LBF, so if you would like to have a chat about editing, translation, or any other part of the self-publishing process, feel free to contact me prior to or during the fair on +44 (0) 77944 74642, send a message to kbooth@poblesecbooks.com or via Twitter at @kb003500. Otherwise, go to the website at www.poblesecbooks.com and use the links there.
See you all at the fair!
Raise the quality of your writer���s voice with professional editing.
Poble Sec Books provides editorial services to author publishers ��� specifically developmental editing, copy-editing and proofreading of your novel or non-fiction book.
Kevin Booth, member of ALLi and Associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), will be available at the London Book Fair to talk to members about editing and translating their books, websites and author pages, along with other aspects of the author-publisher process.
Give your words the professional polish they deserve.
Trading as Poble Sec Books, I provide editorial services to author publishers to ensure your project shines ��� specifically developmental editing, copy-editing and proofreading of your novel or non-fiction book. You owe it to your readers!
Send your message further.
Two decades of experience in the professional translation sector gives Poble Sec Books the expertise to translate your book, website or author page into any language. I translate and project-manage fiction, non-fiction, author bios, press releases, websites and more.
I���ll be circulating around the Author���s Lounge over the three days of the LBF, so if you would like to have a chat about editing, translation, or any other part of the self-publishing process, feel free to contact me prior to or during the fair by��sending a message to kbooth poblesecbooks.com or via Twitter at @kb003500. Otherwise, go to the website at http://www.poblesecbooks.com and use the links there.
See you all at the fair!
Raise the quality of your writer’s voice with professional editing.
Poble Sec Books provides editorial services to author publishers – specifically developmental editing, copy-editing and proofreading of your novel or non-fiction book.
Kevin Booth, member of ALLi and Associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), will be available at the London Book Fair to talk to members about editing and translating their books, websites and author pages, along with other aspects of the author-publisher process.
Give your words the professional polish they deserve.
Trading as Poble Sec Books, I provide editorial services to author publishers to ensure your project shines – specifically developmental editing, copy-editing and proofreading of your novel or non-fiction book. You owe it to your readers!
Send your message further.
Two decades of experience in the professional translation sector gives Poble Sec Books the expertise to translate your book, website or author page into any language. I translate and project-manage fiction, non-fiction, author bios, press releases, websites and more.
I’ll be circulating around the Author’s Lounge over the three days of the LBF, so if you would like to have a chat about editing, translation, or any other part of the self-publishing process, feel free to contact me prior to or during the fair by sending a message to kbooth poblesecbooks.com or via Twitter at @kb003500. Otherwise, go to the website at http://www.poblesecbooks.com and use the links there.
See you all at the fair!
February 28, 2014
The Seven Stages of the Creative Process
This week, as part of the IndieRecon Online Writers’ Conference, I joined writers Roz Morris and Jessica Bell for a discussion hosted by Orna Ross, author of the Go Creative books. We talked about “The Seven Stages of the Creative Process”. If you missed it, you can catch the full recording here.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch with me at www.poblesecbooks.com
Have a creative time!
This shot in Málaga inspired me: empty resorts, fun fairs and the like seem to brim with untold stories and emotion.
