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All About Unlocking a Novella-in-Flash, the new craft guide book by Michael Loveday

Michael Loveday judged our Bath Novella in Flash Award in 2019 and 2020 and has run many courses on writing in this form, and given feedback to and mentored those writing novellas in flash. We were delighted when he agreed to write a guide book on the subject. He’s been working on it for around two years, some of the time with the support of an Arts Council Grant, and it’s published next week, Tuesday May 17th, with our small press Ad Hoc Fiction and available then in paperback from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop as well as in paperback on Amazon, worldwide. Like the well-known writers and writing teachers who have given Advance Praise within the book, we believe it will become a classic in this genre. You can preorder Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash at a 25% discount until Monday May 16th. from Adhocfiction.com. Last week we published an extract on this site, to whet your appetite. Here Michael describes how writers might use Unlocking the Novella in Flash and more about his work as a mentor. Michael is also teaching two workshops on the novella-in-flash at the Flash Fiction Festival weekend, 8th -10th July in Bristol, U.K. and signed copies will be available to buy there. Read in Full

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Q & A with Louise Mangos, first prize winner, Feb Award. 2022

In this interview, first prize winning writer, Louise Mangos from our twentieth Award, judged by Karen Jones, tells us how her winning piece came into being. We learn more about how she began writing flash, there’s a link to one of her first prize wins (illustrated by her) from the weekly 150 word story contest run by Ad HocFiction. Before the contest had to stop in 2019 when Ad HocFiction began publishing books in a big way, Louise won it six or seven times. She also tells us about her crime/suspense novels and other projects on the go. Her latest suspense novel,, The Beaten Track is launched in London in a couple of weeks (hope Londoners can get there!) We’ve also wonderful pictures of the Swiss Alps where Louise lives and great tips at the end for flash fiction writers. If you are coming to the flash fiction festival in July, you will meet Louise there and hear her read this story. Read in Full

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Q & A with Robin Thomas, author of Margot And The Strange Objects

Robin Thomas’s novella-in- flash fragments, Margot and The Strange Objects is available from our short fiction press, Ad Hoc Fction on pre-order at a 25% discount on the cover price until this coming Friday, 25th March, when our small press is publishing it, along with David Rhymes’ novella in flash, The Last Days of the Union also available for pre-order on discount and Flash Fiction Festival Anthology, Vol. Four, (more details on this anthology coming soon). A great trio of books for the Spring. Here, Robin tells us more about his novella, the process of writing it and more about one of the other absurdist novellas he has been writing in the last months It’s really heartening to know how creative writers have been in the lockdown period and how many different styles of very shortfiction are illustrated in these three books. We love the cover of Robin’s book, shown here. It was designed by Ad Hoc Fiction and we think perfectly conveys the odd and intriguing characters and relationships in this unusual novella.

  • At Ad Hoc Fiction, we’ve described your novella, Margot and The Strange Objects as in the absurdist tradition and Michael Loveday, in his cover endorsement, suggests its style is in the same arena as the writings of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Can you give a synopsis of the story lines and characters? And did that style of writing influence you?
    Margot has been left a peculiar collection of ‘strange objects’ by her aunt and is on a quest to find out something about them. Helping or hindering her or engaged on some other project entirely are: two men with a burden called Nimrod, a group of children in search of sardines and ice-cream, a taciturn man with a mysterious hat, a schoolboy who’s good at asking questions, a small dinosaur, a brace of giraffes, an August Personage, George the Oak Tree (a Portuguese-speaking arboreal author), a talking building, a camel, an interfering author and Nobody. Each of these has his, her or their own story line which make minimal contact with each other until the last few pages when they all come together.

    I have always enjoyed all kinds of the absurd and surreal – Lear and Carroll certainly but also surrealist painters like Magritte, the writings of Beckett and Borges, the films of Bunuel etc. I think all these and many others influenced me but mostly unconsciously. I think I probably have absurdity in my soul.

  • What motivated you to write your novella?
    This is very interesting – a few years ago my wife and I were watching a tv programme about Phillip Pulman. On hearing that he aimed at writing a certain number of words a day Mary, my wife turned to me and suggested I do the same. I ended up writing 400 words a day for several months. After a while it looked like it was turning into a story. And that, with many changes, deletions, additions and many helpful comments by others, became Margot.
  • Margot and the Strange Objects is a novella in flash-fiction fragments, rather than in stand-alone chapters of flash fictions. Some of the individual pieces are just a couple of sentences long. How did you go about building it and arriving at the final structure?

    My unconscious must take much of the responsibility for the content. Consciously, I had to make sure that each of the story lines made ’sense’ in its own right, made contact with the other story lines at appropriate moments and played its own part, being neither dominant nor subservient. An important stage was adding titles to each ‘fragment’ which really helped me ensure that the structure was properly balanced. I had to do quite a bit of work to bring it all together at the end. This involved a lot of trial and error and a lot of checking that no loose ends had been left.
  • What were the most challenging and the most satisfying parts of this process?
    he most satisfying part was undoubtedly the writing of the 400 word fragments every day. In this phase of things I tried not to look back too far so that each fragment had a chance to develop by itself. Most challenging was the need to delete some parts that I thought worked in their own right but didn’t fit the emerging whole. Checking for inconsistencies, red herrings, things that just didn’t sound right and as I mentioned, pulling it all together at the end of the novella was also very challenging and time and energy consuming.
  • You have had several collections of poetry published. Can you tell us more about them?
    I’ve had four collections of poetry published now. I like to write about history, family, paintings, music, especially jazz and like to mix up the serious and the less serious with quite a few excursions into the absurd. My last book Cafferty’s Truck, published last year, is a kind of shaggy dog story with one leg in the absurd, the other in the diurnal. Cafferty himself never speaks, the action centring on his truck which goes ‘from here to there and there to here’. It shares some genes with Margot.
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  • What are you working on at the moment?

Apart from poetry, which I work on every day I have a number of novellas in flash or fragments on the go: there is Lord Merrichip’s Foray which is most advanced and which has something of a similar structure to Margot. It involves a literature and philosophy loving elderly military man and lord of the manor, his gardener cum butler with exemplary knowledge of philosophy, a pair of commoners, Pontius Pilates who habitually speaks in verse and Maid Mary-Anne who speaks in down to earth prose, her mother, who thinks she is rather posh and whose means of advertising it is to speak in Franglais, Mary-Anne’s dad, who has been working in China and who has become an expert on Confucius, Jenny Renne, an inventor responsible for No.17 which is a bad-tempered electric logic chopping machine, Ralph, a vegetarian lion and victim of a category mistake who speaks mainly Cow and whose best friend is indeed a cow – Bets-y-Coed, ducks, sheep, a tram which rides the old Spice route and others. Then there is an absurd novella about the doings of society and club members on the memorable ’Societies Day’ in suburban Loughton in Essex and a novella about Peter, whose soul is in for its yearly service. There are and one or two other novellas in very much an early stage.

Robin Thomas completed the MA in Writing Poetry at Kingston University in 2012. His poems have appeared in many poetry anthologies. He has published four poetry books with Eyewear, Cinnamon and Dempsey and Windle. Margot and the Strange Objects is his first novella-in-flash. He currently has two more simmering away.

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Interview with David Rhymes about his new NIF, The Last Days of the Union

    David Rhymes wrote his brilliant novella-in-flash The Last Days of the Union over several years, as he describes below and it is a very interesting read about a real life incident just before the break up of the Soviet Union. The timing of the book going on pre-order, which co-incided with the Russian invasion into the Ukraine was, as David says in the interview, totally unplanned. David talks about his process in writing the novella and the angle he chose to take. Those who came to the February 26th Flash Fiction Festival Day will have heard him read a moving story from the novella and he is attending the next online day on March 26th to read a further story from it.The Last Days of the Union is published the day before, 25th March, 2022. And you can pre-order it now at a 25% discount from Ad Hoc Fiction. On publication, it will also be available in paperback from Amazon worldwide. We also heartily congratulate David for his first prize win in the Retreat West Novelette-in-Flash Award, judged by Mary-Jane Holmes, with Monsieur, another beautifully written book,which I (jude) have been fortunate enough to read already. This is based on another real-life historical character. We’re looking forward to seeing that in print too. Both highly recommended reads.

Interview

  • Can you talk a little bit about the background to the Last Days of the Union? 
    When I started the project in 2019, people asked me, “Why is a Brit living in Spain writing about the Soviet Union at end of the Cold War? What got you interested in that?” I told them I was fascinated by the story of Mathias Rust, the young West German aviator who, in 1987, rented a Cessna sports plane, and flew it all the way to Moscow, landing, by a series of small miracles, alive in Red Square. He was hoping to speak to Gorbachev about peace.
    As a youth I saw this on TV and thought he must be crazy. This was the time of “Protect and Survive”, when everyone was terrified of nuclear meltdown, just one year after the Chernobyl disaster. We were only just beginning to get an idea of what was really going on in the Soviet Union.

    Later, I learned from an article in the Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine that a bizarre string of mix-ups and miscommunications were what lay behind Rust’s unlikely success, his having flown unharmed through the much-vaunted “Russian ring of steel.”
    I thought, “What about a historical novella-in-flash in which the main protagonist hardly features at all? A story told obliquely via related narratives, like beads on a thread, in a kind of post-modern mosaic? Stories about sleepy air traffic controllers, distracted missile silo watchers, helicopter pilots, even Gorbachev and Reagan – all connected in some way to (or by) the main thread of the journey? 

    I knew Gorbachev had turned Rust’s flight to his advantage, used it as a pretext to fire key defence leaders, to purge many of the hardline Soviet military opponents to reform. How this had enabled him to move forward on the issue of nuclear de-escalation, and eventually make faster progress towards ending the Cold War.  In later drafts, I centred in on this period of uncertainty, Gorbachev pondering how to use Rust’s flight to his advantage, to precipitate change.

  • With unplanned synchronicity, pre-orders for your novella opened on the very same day Russia invaded Ukraine. How did you feel about that?
    Dismayed. Like everyone, I’m praying the situation resolves quickly and that the current wave of solidarity with Ukraine continues and does not pale and that her people and European democracy come through this tragedy with the least possible suffering.
  • Does your book deal in any way with the contemporary political situation?
    No, not really. “The Last Days” isn’t really a political book at all, or even a book about Russia now. I was exploring a very specific moment in history, a period of tension in the eighties, in which a number of Cold War myths and assumptions were starting to crumble. The world was pole-axed by Rust’s story; leaders immediately began distancing themselves. A torrent of speculation followed in contemporary press sources – Was he a terrorist? An agent of the CIA? An anarchist? A Dada artist? I became interested in this process, how speculative narratives were “spun” warped, exaggerated by people on all sides. A good part of the novella dramatises the many in-the-moment speculations on the meaning of events.

    But of course, I was very aware throughout the writing of the fragility of the post Cold War settlement, of Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and now, in Ukraine, of Putin’s pychosis. Also, the contemporary problem of Russian “dezinformatsiya” and fake news saturating the airwaves.

  • What attracts you especially to the novella in flash form?
    I love the freedom to switch angles, to use jump cuts, white space, the power of juxtaposition. I think a lot about the Kuleshov effect, the way two disparate pieces or settings or shots or whatever can be laid alongside one another to create a third effect, to generate meaning from the interaction between the parts. So the quick changes between short pieces suit the way my mind works, as if the material were hyperlinked in some way. The form suits my restlessness.
  • How did you go about developing the manuscript?

    The first draft shortlisted in the Bath novella in flash competition, and in the wake of that I worked with Michael Loveday to develop the story further. There was an understanding that when Michael signed it off, Ad Hoc Fiction would publish it. My writing buddy Jupiter Jones helped me with the structure. Finally, I went back to Michael again for copy-editing. Michael kept me going when I was ready to give up, even mailing me a reminder to get on with it in lockdown, after I’d been months without writing a word. So to any other writers at work on longer pieces I’d say this – just keep going, no matter what.
  • You recently won first prize in the Retreat West novelette competition. Your story Monsieur will appear in the anthology some time in the summer. Are there any elements in common between the two stories?
    Both stories are about outsiders. Interlopers. One is an aviator, the other a mariner. Both are about journeys, one by sea and one by air. In “Monsieur” Jeanne Baret travels to the South Seas disguised as a man. Both pieces are also based on real life historical figures. Both move in fragments, making a lot of use of white space. 
  • What are you working on now?
    I’m hoping to write another thriller-type story about a real world spy, a master of disguise, another interloper, whose amazing life at the beginning of the twentieth century took him all around the world. Currently, I’m at the research stage, though I’ve written the first page and think I have the voice.
    Biographical details.
    David Rhymes lives in Navarra, Spain. He grew up in Nottingham and has a degree in English Literature from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He earns his living as a freelance translator, trainer, and instructional designer.

    His fiction has appeared in the Bath Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction and Fish Publishing anthologies, and has won prizes in the Bath Flash Fiction and Barren Magazine competitions. Other short listings include the Bridport, LISP, Desperate Literature and Smokelong Quarterly flash fiction competitions.

For more details, you might like to follow David on Twitter

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Interview with Doug Ramspeck, first prize winner, Oct, 2021

Doug Ramspeck won first prize in our 19th Award, with Snow Crow, a stunning and deeply moving story.You can read judge Sharon Telfer’s comments on it in her judges report. In this interview, Doug, a recently retired Professor of English from Ohio State University in Lima, USA who writes in several different genres, tells us, among other fascinating things, more about his winning piece and his new poetry collections. He talks about looking for the magic in flash and mentions third prize winner Tim Craig’s story That’s All There Is There Ain’t No More as a brilliant example of ‘rule breaking’ in writing. In an amazing co-incidence, we’ve also learned that Doug Ramspeck was the judge who selected Dara Yen Elerath’s debut collection of poetry, Dark Braid as the winner of the 20th John Ciardi Prize for Poetry through BkMk Press. Dara won first prize in our June, 2021 Award with another amazing story, The Button Wife. We’re delighted that Doug is reading his winning piece on November 27th at the next Flash Fiction Festival Day in the 2.30-2.45 pm GMT reading slot. We’re really looking forward to hearing it in his own voice. Hope you can come!

Interview

  • We agree with our 19th Award judge, Sharon Telfer, that your first prize winning story ‘Snow Crow’ is a stunning piece of writing,”brimming with tension and mystery”. Can you tell us what inspired this story and the process of writing it?

Read in Full

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Interview with Dara Yen Elerath, first prize winner in our 18th Award

This Sunday, 15th August is the last day to buy discounted entries for our 19th Award to be submitted by the deadline of 10th October. To get some inspiration for your own writing, read what poet, prose writer and artist, Dara Yen Elerath has to say about her first prize winning story The Button Wife, selected by K M Elkes in our June Award this year. You can read his comments about the story in his judge’s report. Dara Yen Elerath is also a visual artist, and one of her paintings reproduced here, is used as the cover image on her prize-winning debut poetry collection Dark Braid , which you can buy from Amazon and which she writes about in the interview. Dara also explains her different approaches to writing poetry and flash fiction and has a great writing tip at the end of this interview, part of which I have quoted below. And do look at the vimeo video she made which accompanies her amazing poem from her collection, How And When to Use an Eraser’

…always follow your language and allow the sonic qualities of the words to guide your imagination when you feel stuck or at a loss for how to proceed.

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Interview with Michelle Elvy about her hybrid collection, the other side of better

Ad Hoc Fiction, our short short fiction press, published the other side of better, by Michelle Elvy in June this year, exactly two years after publishing her innovative small novel in small forms, the everrumble, launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, held in Bristol in 2019. This new book is equally innovative, traversing the line between prose and poetry. In this interview Michelle tells us more about the book, the book launches which took place in New Zealand in June to co-incide with National Flash Fiction Day, NZ and what New Zealand poet laureate David Eggleton said about it. Michelle also talks about how she arrived at the title and the striking artwork for the cover by New Zealand artist, Jennifer Halli. the other side of better is also available from Nationwide and book shops in New Zealand as well as directly from Ad Hoc Fiction and in August and September Michelle is recording some online readings so we will all be able to hear stories from the collection. We are also delighted that Michelle Elvy, who judged our 2021 Novella-in-Flash Award, is judging the 2022 NIF Award which is open for entries now and closes on January 14th 2022. Read in Full

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Sara Hills talks about her new collection, The Evolution of Birds

    We’re delighted to share an interview below with hugely-talented writer Sara Hills, whose debut flash fiction collection The Evolution of Birds is now available to buy on pre-order at a 25% discount from Ad Hoc Fiction until publication day on 9th July. Jude Higgins is hosting a Zoom launch for Sara’s new book on Saturday July 17th from 7.30 pm – 9.00 pm. Sara will be reading stories from the book and talking more about it. And three of the writers who have given her quotes for the back cover, Christopher Allen, Amy Barnes and Diane Simmons will also be reading a short piece of their own work. Do come to give this wonderful new collection a good send off into the world. Email jude (at) adhocfiction (dot) com for a Zoom link to the event.

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Inside Fictional Minds: Q & A with Dr Stephanie Carty

Dr Stephanie Carty is a writer, NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and trainer with a qualification in teaching higher and professional education. Her fiction is widely published and has been shortlisted in competitions including the Bridport Prize, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bristol Short Story Prize and Caterpillar Story for Children Prize. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards. She is represented by Curtis Brown

We’re very excited that our small press Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing Stephanie Carty’s’s guide book Inside Fictional Minds, which is now available for pre-order from Ad Hoc Fiction at a 25% discount during the pre-order period and released on June 24th.

Below, Stephanie explains how the guide book came into being, what it contains and how to use it. Stephanie will also say more and answer questions in a mini ten minute spot at 2.30 pm BST on the next Great Festival Flash Off day, June 26th and Jude Higgins, representing Ad Hoc Fiction, is hosting a launch of the book on Zoom on Saturday, July 3rd from 8.15 pm – 9.15 pm BST.

At the launch, we will hear from Stephanie, Louise Ryder, psychotherapist and the artist who painted the beautiful cover. Also five writers of short and longer fiction: Rachael Dunlop; Neema Shah; Wiz Wharton; Sarah Moorhead and Melissa Fu who have all attended Stephanie’s Psychology of Character in Writing course and will read extracts from their works saying how they used her suggestions, also covered in her new guide, to deepen their characters.

Everyone is welcome to come to the launch – flash fiction writers, short story writers and novelists. And anyone else who is interested in learning more about this fascinating new book.
Email Jude {at} adhocfiction {dot} com asap for a link.

Q & A with Dr Stephanie Carty

  • You have been running your courses on the Psychology of Character in Writing for several years now and they have been very popular for writers of long and short fiction.
    Can you tell us more about what gave you the idea for devising these courses?
    It’s the perfect combination for me of applying what I’ve learnt as a clinical psychologist to my other love which is writing. What I’d noticed in some stories and novels was that lots of thought appeared to have gone into creating an interesting character with quirks, desires and emotional reactions but that sometimes their behaviours didn’t add up or a sudden change in them jarred as unrealistic. Once I started to run the Psychology of Character course, it was clear that many writers had not thought in depth about why their characters acted the way they did or what it would take to change their patterns. From the very first practice session, the feedback of how much of a difference it made to attendees to learn a little bit about some key components of how humans develop, act and grow encouraged me to continue.
  • The book is a complement to your face to face and online courses, but it is also something that writers can use separately from them. Can writers can dip in to, or is it something to work through from the beginning?
    What I love about the book is that it covers a wide range of ideas followed up by tasks to put ideas into practice so there should be something relevant for every writer and every story. I’m certain that people will use it according to their own style – some will want to read from cover to cover for an overview whereas others may already have in mind where their gap or uncertainty lies for a particular character. I’d actually recommend reading the whole book from start to finish without doing any of the tasks first. That will allow a writer to have a ready-made framework of how elements interact with one another. Then choices can be made about which sections to work on thoroughly using the questions posed to deepen understanding and bring the learning to life.
  • I think you have 48 exercises in all to try out in the book. What would expect writers to discover having completed them?
    There are actually 123 questions divided into 48 sets of tasks – far more than I’d expected there to be when I started to plan the book! To me, the active element of Inside Fictional Minds is crucial to its usefulness and sets it apart from some other resources that are more academic in format. The focus is on everyday behaviours,, emotions and unconscious mechanisms rather than extremes such as serial killers. So the tasks should lend themselves to any setting,, genre or length of story as people are people! I think one of the most interesting things for writers will be seeing how topics that may seem separate actually all impact on one another to create complex, interdependent factors that make their characters who they are..
    Several of the beta readers also stated that they learnt about themselves!

  • Can you say how thinking about character development is useful even for micro fiction?
    I think in very short fiction it can be a challenge to find room for character development. One method is to show your character’s defence mechanisms in action. In my upcoming short fiction collection The Peculiarities of Yearning, many pieces rely on a shift in an emotion or longing moving from unconscious to conscious awareness.. The character deals with this by a displaying a behaviour (defence mechanism) that aims to push this emotion or longing back down. If the defence works, you can have a tragic ending where the reader sees what’s missing even as the character denies it. If the defence doesn’t work and the hidden aspect breaks through, then the character has displayed some momentary insight or change. That’s ‘big enough’ for very short fiction and hints at greater development being possible outside of the story.
    My flash Cosmina Counts was awarded third prize in Bath Flash Fiction Award. As a standalone flash, I think it uses aspects covered in the book and gives glimpses into the internal world of a trafficked woman by demonstrating her defences, her longing that slips out, clues to her trauma and a return to her pushing the pain away with more defence mechanisms.
    Finally, very short fiction requires the writer to condense so much rather than spell things out. Each sentence is a chance to show the reader the world through the character’s ‘glasses’. Word choice and what is focused on versus what is omitted works really well in flash to demonstrate the character’s internal world, which I give some examples of in the book.
  • Can you tell us more about the the advantages for character relationships in novels and novellas?
    There is huge scope for character development in longer form writing. For example you can show the bumpy ride to change that is realistic rather than sudden revelations or change.. Realisations and beliefs are not equal to behaviour and personality change. There’s an ebb and flow to how we change. The book covers areas such as perfectionism, narcissim, social roles, being a people pleaser as well as a focus on the way that characters experience (and forbid) certain emotions and beliefs. Long form writing allows the character to dip their toe into alternatives, or ‘peel off the armour’ briefly as I explain in the book..
    My flash Cosmina Counts is actually a chapter from my second novel. I have the luxury over the course of an entire book to flip forward and back in time to account for Cosmina’s behaviours and then move her realistically from a mindset of revenge and isolation towards facing reality and accepting the help of others. Such a significant change could only work across multiple chapters because it’s human nature to resist our painful, hidden aspects coming to the surface. My longest chapter in Inside Fictional Minds focuses on change. Longer form provides the space to really delve and deliver without relying on so much interpretation of the reader. Working through the tasks in Inside Fictional Minds should provide a series of insights that although small on their own, can build into an overall picture of a deeply believable and developed character that resonates with readers.
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Pre-orders open for Echoes in a Hollow Space, by Ruth Skrine

    We’re delighted that Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing Echoes in a Hollow Space, a novella-in-flash from Ruth Skrine, Ruth turned to writing fiction in 1999 when she retired from her long career in the medical profession. She completed an MA in Bath Spa University and since then has published several novels and a memoir. In 2017, at the age of 87, she began writing flash fiction inspired by Ad Hoc Fiction’s weekly micro contest and a writing class on flash fiction run by Jude Higgins. Many of her micros were published in the weekly Ad Hoc Fiction ebook, and her flash fictions have been published in And We Pass Through, the 2019 NFFD anthology; Flashfrontier and Free Flash Fiction. In this Q & A with Jude, Ruth tells us more about the inspiration for her book and in advice for the older writer at the end says:

    All creative work is life-saving in old age. One is never too old

    Back and front cover. Picture of woodland with a hollow space, where title is placed Echoes in a Hollow Space is available at a discount of 25% for the preorder period and will be published on 31st May. It is also available for pre-order as an ebook on kindle and will also be available to buy as a large print format paperback from Amazon at the end of May. Read in Full

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