Book Reviews and Publication/Broadcast News

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Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes. Hope you have had a good weekend.
Had a lovely carols event at our church over the weekend. Good support too and all were in fine voice. Gets Christmas off to a cracking start for me. Writing wise, will be winding down now over the next few days. Am not planning to post on 25th and 26th December. I will post up until Christmas Eve and then from 27th December onwards. Well, that’s the plan at the moment anyhow. Is Lady looking forward to Christmas? Oh yes. She’s a great believer in Santa Paws and an even bigger believer in Christmas dinner!

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Lady and I did great impressions of drowned rats this morning. She dries off far quicker than I do.
I’ll be sharing a festive round up of recent writing events I’ve been involved with and flash stories for Chandler’s Ford Today this week. Looking forward to sharing that. It’s a good way to cover a few things in one post.

Am preparing a post for 29th December taking a look at the year to come writing wise. I do get as much writing done as I can in the few days leading up to Christmas. Afterwards, times of appearance will vary but I am looking forward to the Christmas break and getting more reading time in as well.

Author newsletter will go out on 1st January – to sign up do head over to my landing page at https://allisonsymescollectedworks.com

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Wow, where has the year gone? My final post for the year for Authors Electric is on the theme of Book Reviews. I look at this from the point of view of whether you review how many books you’ve read over the last twelve months, as well as the difficulty of getting reviews for your own books. I discuss my own policy for reviewing anything too. Hope you enjoy the post.

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Hope you have had a good day and Christmas preparations are going well. It was odd not going to church this morning. We went this afternoon instead for a lovely Carols by Candlelight service instead. A good time had by all. We were in good voice. Tea and coffee and festive refreshments went down very well afterwards too.

Am delighted to be back on CafeLit once more with I Do, I Don’t. This story started life as one of my Flash NANO 2023 prompts and I am glad it has found a home. Hope you enjoy the story.

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Many thanks to Hannah Kate for her Three Minute Santas show on North Manchester FM as it is a great chance to celebrate festive flash fiction. Enjoyed listening in. Lovely variety of stories.

My broadcast story was This Is The Partnership. Find out how Santa deals with a dodgy salesman and where the contract comes in during all of that. Oh and how the Tooth Fairy fits in too! Good fun to write. I hope you enjoy listening to it. My tale comes in at about the 34 minutes mark in Part 1 of the show (link here) but do check out both parts (link to Part 2 here). You don’t want to miss out on the cracking stories.

You really can’t go wrong with a show full of stories and Christmas music, can you?

Will be talking about my festive related writing activities, including this show, in my Chandler’s Ford Today post next week too.

Screenshot 2023-12-16 at 20-14-24 North Manchester FM 106.6 Listen Again - Listen whilst connected - downloading our shows is not possible

Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

Hope your Christmas preparations are going well and you have a lovely time with friends and family. I also hope you receive plenty of book related presents too (and they’re easy for Santa to wrap so win-win).

I have written the odd flash fiction story in poetic form. One of these is The Working Man (Tripping the Flash Fantastic) which looks at a current carpenter, an old boy, and his approach to the Nativity. Let’s say he likes the fact that working shepherds were the first to get to the stable. It was a pleasure to write it.

Festive flash can cover aspects of the Nativity as well as things like the stories associated with Santa. I like to write both. I like the thoughtful or cheery mood so often associated with festive flash fiction. We need cheer every now and then in stories I think.

412384359_792733716199825_5419709909276471137_nIt’s not quite the night before Christmas. It is the Monday before Christmas though! And Monday means story time (though I am giving myself next Monday off for some reason!). Hope you enjoy my latest YouTube video – Timings. You know how we all moan about late deliveries of parcels, post etc. Just occasionally someone else does too – find out who here.

 

Well, I got to hear Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade for the first time this festive season as I listed to Three Minute Santas presented by Hannah Kate on North Manchester FM yesterday. Countdown to Christmas started then (and this song must be known as the Slade pension fund!). Good to hear it again. I’ve always loved this one.

Will be slowly winding down towards Christmas but am pleased I did get my entry off to what will be my last competition entry for 2023. Glad to have got that off this side of the holidays though.

I enjoyed singing some stories myself in the forms of carols in my church’s Carols by Candlelight service. I’ve always had a soft spot for stories in songs and a classic one here for me is Squeeze’s Up the Junction. Do check it out if you don’t know it. It is classic ballad territory. Proves also you can tell a story in not many words indeed but then that would be music to my ears, wouldn’t it?!

My flash collections are available in Kindle and paperback

Hope you have had a good day. Lovely to have my This is The Partnership broadcast by Hannah Kate on her Three Minute Santas show on North Manchester FM. Good to hear the variety of stories on here. One reason I love writing festive flash fiction is because there is so much you can do with it. You can write takes on the Nativity. You can write takes on the tales connected with Santa and his elves and so on. And there is always room for a ghost story – see Charles Dickens’ catalogue for more on that! Am I surprised A Christmas Carol has never been out of print? No. Suspect it never will be. Rightly too.

Will have a story, I Do, I Don’t, will be on CafeLit tomorrow so hopefully will share the link there. So it is a good weekend for sharing story links! See above for CafeLit link.

Am looking forward to singing some stories (via carols) in my church’s carols event tomorrow. Always fun and it will be interesting to see what Christmas cracker jokes we are treated to this year! (I love a good groan at a cracker joke).

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Goodreads Author Blog – A Christmas Carol – An Acrostic

A = A classic story which will never date or be irrelevant.

C = Charles Dickens’ tale will always have resonance.

H = His character of Ebenezer Scrooge has gone into the language – we talk about someone being a Scrooge.

R = Realising what the true meaning of Christmas is forms the heart of this story.

I = Imagining what it could take to make Scrooge the way he was at the start of the story shows empathy for a lost soul.

S = Scrooge changes – he has to, else there’s no story – what is fascinating here is finding out how it is done.

T = Time rules are suspended thanks to the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

M = Muppet Christmas Carol is, to my mind, the best adaptation of the story.

A = And I love the Marley and Marley sketch in this film – think it is brilliant.

S = Stories can show their classic status by seeing how many adaptations of them have been carried out – loads for this one.

C = Caring for others is a huge theme in this story and Scrooge comes to see how others see his miserliness.

A = Anguish in Scrooge’s past is shown to him – he has to face his mistakes, especially with Belle.

R = Reality is part of this story, funnily enough, as there are scary moments in the tale and Scrooge is made to face what he has become, perhaps the scariest thing of all.

O = Original and gripping – wow, what a story!

L = Love triumphs – Scrooge changes – he is no longer a lost soul.

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WRITERS NARRATIVE SUBSCRIBER LINK

AMAZON AUTHOR CENTRAL – ALLISON SYMES

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