Thursday, 16 January 2014

In my humble opinion

So how have you been? Is it still a happy new year for you? It’s been a very exciting week for me as Celebrations, but not as you know them has received two fabulous reviews which are here if you wish to read them


I find it really exciting to get new reviews of my work – that feedback is so valuable and it’s really interesting to see how people are enjoying the words I wrestled with. It’s also nice to be told how an element isn’t quite working or when I could have improved something. My youngest son, just fourteen and beginning his GCSE syllabi, said to me the other day ‘we don’t stop learning, do we?’ and, expecting him to go running for his bedroom at the thought that life might end up being like school forevermore, I had to agree with him.

It’s also surprising how subjective it all is – I recently had some feedback on a work-in-progress and it’s extraordinary that for one person the thing that made the book is the same thing that, for someone else, made them not love it so much. I’m busy reading a series of books that I had for Christmas which I’m really enjoying. I wouldn’t let the family watch the movie of the first one until I’d read it and could watch too but halfway through the movie, the story and character dynamics diverged so much from the written version, it could have been a different book altogether and not, in my opinion (again with the subjective!), for the better. The vision of the director seemed to be wholly removed from that of the author. A while ago I attended an author event given by a big name author and when asked what he thought of the movie version of his book (Hollywood killed off the serial killer that he had returning in another story), he said the important thing to remember is that Hollywood writes damn fine cheques!!

Perception, it’s a funny thing.





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