Rhoda Baxter's Blog, page 38

Goodreads Book Review: The Santa Next Door by Stephanie Cage

The Santa Next Door by Stephanie Cage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the run up to Christmas, I tend to read a lot of Christmas novellas. The Santa Next Door has been sitting on my TBR pile for a while and I finally got to it.

Sue is bringing up her daughter Trudi on her own. Bryn is the reclusive conductor who lives next door. A chance meeting with Sue and Trudi helps Bryn find the inspiration he’s been searching for to complete his latest composition.

All three main characters are well rounde...

Goodreads book review: The Fairy’s Tale by F. D.Lee

The Fairy’s Tale by F. D. Lee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This partly a story about free will in an Orwellian state… and partly a story about stories.

Bea is a cabbage fairy who wants to be a fairy godmother. Fairies aren’t usually made godmothers… least of all cabbage fairies. In the meantime things are going wrong in the state – the mirrors are breaking and the human belief in Fae is fading.

This is a well thought out, well realised world. It’s also funny. Bea is a bit of a bumbling Everywoman...

Goodreads Book Review: The Boys of Christmas by Jane Lovering

The Boys of Christmas by Jane Lovering

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a wonderfully Christmassy tale! Mattie is running away from a nasty controlling relationship. Her aunt has left her a house, on the condition that she scatters her ashes (the aunt’s, I mean) over ‘the boys of Christmas’. Mattie and her best friend Toby end up in the spooky old house, in the middle of a snow storm, just before Christmas trying to figure out just who these ‘boys of Christmas’ are.

There’s snow, freezing archaeo...

After the draft -time to edit your book

Did you do NaNoWriMo? Did you hit your target? Brilliant! Well done.

I’ve never done NaNoWriMo. My kids are still small and disappearing into my room to write for hours on end seems a terribly indulgent thing to do right now. I take the slow and steady plod approach because it fits well with my life. Either way seems to work. The important thing is getting the writing done.

Anyway, the point is, you’ve written a whole novel. Take some time out to celebrate – not many people make it this far....

Pat’s Pantry – short novella set in Yorkshire

A little over a year ago, I wrote a long-ish short story for a competition. I didn’t win, but I ended up with a rather nice story that was too long to send out to magazines and too short to send to my publisher. At around the same time, I’d started wondering if I could try this self publishing lark. I’ve always wanted to be a traditionally published author, but… well, increasingly, you’ve got to do a lot of the book promotion yourself. It used to just be stuff like chatting to book bloggers (...

Drawing parallels between writing reports and writing fiction – and why characters are everything.

Last week, I was asked to give a talk to a group of counselling trainees at my local FE college about creative writing and academic writing. The contact came through my local writing group, The Beverley Chapter. I was suggested to the FE college because I once belonged to the world of academia and still do a lot of technical writing and, as you know, I write fiction.

Totally irrelevant picture of Stormtroopers carrying chocolate.

The brief I was given was fairly vague and I found myself stan...

It’s time for another colouring in advent calendar

A few years ago, I started drawing an advent calendar to colour in at work. I usually ask my favourite muse (who blogs over at The Inspiration Highway) for a theme. This year, it’s foxes. So here’s my foxy advent calendar to colour in. Have fun. Don’t forget to tweet me your colouring in pictures!

Download the PDF:2016-christmas-colouring-in

Filed under: random silliness Tagged: advent calendar, books, christmas, colouring in

Goodreads Book Review: I Found You by Lisa Jewell

I Found You by Lisa Jewell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. I picked this book up on Netgalley because I’ve read other books by Lisa Jewell and loved them (especially Vince and Joy. I adored that book). Alice is a generous, slightly flaky, woman who finds a man who has lost his memory sitting in the rain and gives him a place to stay. I liked that Alice’s family were sceptical and slightly scared. It wouldn’t have been realistic otherwise.
‘Frank’ can’t remember anything. He seems like a nice per...

Film review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I’m not a huge fan of the Potter films. I adore the books and am a fan of the world, but the films felt… rushed. They had so much information to cram in that, if you hadn’t read the books (or, hadn’t read them in a few years), you had to scramble to keep up.

The great thing about Fantastic Beasts was that you went to it without a world already in your head. There was no book to compare it to. So you had to take the film as a self contained story in itself. It worked beautifully as a story.

Th...

Goodreads book review: The Velvet Cloak of Midnight by Christina Courtenay

The Velvet Cloak of Moonlight by Christina Courtenay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve just realised I hadn’treviewed this book. I finished it weeks ago, so my memory is already fading. (This is why I joined Goodreads – to keep track of what I read!)

This is a lovely story. It’s time slip/ ghost story. Sometimes, in time slips one of the stories over shadows the other (usually the one in the past is the more compelling one). In this case, both stories are equally compelling. I liked that a lot. Al...