Friday is writers day.....

Anybody remember the Readers Digest and a little section in there called 'Towards more picturesque speech'?

I remember writing an essay at age maybe 15 and using about four of their quotations conjoined. I am not going to remember much, but do recall writing about 'hills round-shouldered with age dipping their feet in the lake' and much more similar crap. But the English master thought it was OK.

I have no idea. I don't even know if the Readers Digest is stil around.

I used to get flyers from them a long time ago telling me I had won a prize. Pretty good since they had spelled my name wrong and sent it to a mish mash of my address. Wise postmen of old....

I have written quite a few true tales that have happened during my life. I am NOT into fiction because I lose the plot but I had a book published about the first 20 years of my life that takes the reader through from 1930 when I was born to when I got married in 1949.It tells about my early childhood and then through the war and being bombed out twice apart from being machine gunned twice and becoming an evacuee.
All proceeds from it have gone to my local Childrens Hospice.... www.rainbows.co.uk/
I had SO many folk from worldwide, who I had got to know through my WW2 website, wanting to read it I had it put on my website after it had made a good sum of money for the above hospice.

Like it Arena, a good chuckle is what I needed. Been a bloody awful couple of weeks with family like plates spinning on sticks, some of which have fallen to ground.

A good friend of mine, Bob Baker wrote a book a couple of years ago and I have a signed copy. It is called 'K9 stole my trousers' and is effectively the story of his life, well crafted and well written, and also very interesting even if you don't know him. Well it would be well crafted as he writes for among others Aardman!

Bob is not young, I would guess at around 70 and I asked him if he had kept a diary. No, he is just blessed with a remarkable memory for names places and detail. And the book is remarkable for the detail.

I will admit to having had a very poor memory for particularly names all my adult life. I recall working next door to two very nice chaps and often sharing a beer with them, Len and Pete. The only way I remembered in the end, after many gaffes was to remember Len was the lean one!

I've just found this lovely thread.Like most of us,I have dabbled with the idea of becoming an author.
I often think that if I had been short of money I may have achieved something,but I am too lazy.
I write a bit of doggerel and I did start a book about my Grandmother's remarkable life.
My problem was that I was trying to write LITERATURE not tell a story,consequently it all got too flowery and OTT.
On another forum I wrote about some episodes from my life as a sort of blog.It went down well,though it could never be called literature.

I've never read Mills and Boon, but I do admire their writers. A well known literary writer once wrote a piece about how the plot of one of his books was plagiarised by a Mills and Boon writer, and because of that she lost a lot of work. I think - hope - she sued him: in any case, all she had done was what the literary writer had done, and used the plot of North and South: she was no more a plagiarist than he was: they'd both ripped off Mrs Gaskell.

I do have one Mills and Boon book. It's by Jack London, and it was published in about 1920, or earlier. I can't remember the title, but it might have been Into the Abyss: it is not a romance, not even in the old sense.