Tuesday 22 November 2016

Awesome Authors! Great Books! Discounted Prices

I've teamed up with some great authors and we're having a bit of a Book Bargain event over on Facebook on Cyber Monday - that's the 28th November. I'll be manning the event from 8pm GMT for an hour so pop along and join in. The event will run from 10am GMT from 28 November to 9am 29 November to make it a global event for our authors. Here's the link to join in the fun! See you there!

Tuesday 15 November 2016

Since You've Been Gone

Since You've Been Gone

By Lisa Dyer

About the Book

Together Forever...

until the day Abigail dumped Hal, after he left for university, back in 1983. Hal was so devastated that he went home less and less until, in the end, he didn't go home at all. And he never got over her, even after he married the wealthy Julienne. Their marriage was doomed from the start; it was just a case of who caved in first.

Abigail had a secret; one she had kept from Hal, and it had defined her life for fifteen years. She was glad he never came back to learn it. That was all about to change.

Hal was on his way home. Nothing would ever be the same again...

Excerpt

​In the beginning...

…there was Hal and Abigail and they should have lived happily ever after… everything in their story shouted that to the world. Hal’s mother knew it. Their friends had no doubt about it. Hal and Abigail were the perfect pair. Having grown up together from infancy, there were no secrets, no hidden agendas; just love. All that was missing were the church bells and the first flat with the second-hand furniture and the gas fire that didn’t work, and even that would be okay because they’d cuddle up in bed to keep warm until summer.

Then Hal blew it all wide open by getting a conditional offer to study at Cambridge – in the Department of Veterinarian Medicine. To be honest, it was a total shock to everyone, but most of all to Abigail. She had supported his idea to apply, but had secretly thought that he would be out of his depth and have second thoughts. He didn’t. It was all he thought about and planned for. He locked himself away in his bedroom to study, and suddenly two people, who had been inseparable from the first moment they had met, were wrenched apart. Hal’s mother, Diana clucked about nothing else; anybody would think he was marrying into royalty. Anyone foolish enough to ask, ‘How’s the family, Di?’ soon found themselves wishing they’d kept their mouths shut.

Hal and Abigail limped through the spring, and dragged themselves into the summer. His hard work paid off and he attained the required grades then received positive confirmation that, come the autumn, he would be going up to Cambridge. There was one last night, camped down at the Bay, Hal on his guitar and the old crowd avoiding talking about what was happening, as if by doing so it may go away. And that was it. The beginning of the end of Hal Bartlett and Abigail Markham. Except, for Abigail it was the start of something new, something so big, so life changing – and its outcome would resonate down the years…

Amazon

Sunday 13 November 2016

Meet Michael Bayliss

What should we know about him? Michael Bayliss, vet, Yorkshire man, legend. On the surface, he seems a pretty uncomplicated person. He gets on with life, living in a flat above the practice and doesn't really have a long-term plan. This easy-going nature can put him at odds with people because they think he's easy to read, likes a bit of banter and therefore unable to be hurt but he is a vulnerable as the rest of us. Michael is the product of a broken home, his mum having run off with the local bingo caller. It has given him a wary perspective on relationships but that doesn't stop him having them or having opinions on Hal's. It's the commitment he has the problem with. What is the main conflict? For Michael it is keeping Hal grounded in reality. He knows that his friend has an emotional block but all the while it is kept on a low level, he's not bothered what it is. When Hal's life is thrown into confusion, Michael must be the anchor but also, he must have one eye on what the impact of going home might have on his life and the practice his shares with Hal. What is the personal goal of the character? For Michael it is getting through life as peacefully as possible. He's a grafter but with a slacker mentality. Not for him the mortgage and the kids. He doesn't want convention and, although he is wary of relationships because they seem to go to fast for him, he is really looking for someone just like him; someone a little unconventional. Since You've Been Gone was published by Crooked Cat Publishing in December 2013 and is available exclusively through Amazon across all markets and Kindle Unlimited.

Meet Abigail Markham

What should we know about her?

Abigail Markham is a Dover girl through and through. Born and raised in the Tower Hamlets, she still lives in a tiny terraced house within a stone’s throw of her childhood home. Abigail is a fighter. She is also complex. She didn’t have the best start to her life and her prospects were patchy to say the least but she has a good heart and is a strong woman. She married young and bore her first child in her late teens. The marriage produced one more child before it fell apart. She works in the local hairdressers and life is tough but she has her friends and her sister and they keep her going even though money is short.

What is the main conflict?

The main conflict for Abigail is reconciling herself with her past decisions. She has a secret and she has had to live with the consequences of the path she chose. Some would say she did it for the best of reasons and others might think that maybe she was crying out for attention but, the deed was done and she got on with it. There is a part of her that is angry, even though the decision was hers and hers alone, she feels let down. Only Abigail can reconcile herself to her decision and, although she doesn’t tacitly blame Hal, she feels anger towards him. Once she looks at herself and her own part in how her life turned out, she will be much more at peace.

What is the personal goal of the character?

Finding peace with her past. She is happy that Hal never came home because she doesn’t have to expose herself to having to tell the truth but she also suffers from an acute, unspoken sense of abandonment by him. It’s kind of given her a bit of a martyr complex – ‘look at me, look what I did without your help’. Once it all comes out, then she can move forward but she has to be prepared for it all to come out.

Since You've Been Gone was published by Crooked Cat Publishing in December 2013 and is available exclusively through Amazon across all markets and Kindle Unlimited.

Dude-Lit

We all know what Chick-Lit is, right? Chick-lit is usually light, romantic, boy meets girl; the written words equivalent of a rom-com. The cover tells you exactly what you are going to get when you open the page – girls who shop, have a great circle of friends but always has that one true best friend, can sink wine like water and have a crush on the boy next door.

Invariably, like the three act structure, there is Act 1 when the plot is set up, little bombs are primed to go off and foreshadowing is announced and the love interest is introduced. Act 2 is the fun and games, the nights out with the girls, the shoe shopping, the witty banter that is exchanged between the two would-be lovers until the mid-act turning point when it may all go south; a misunderstanding, a rival for affections, a row. Then the downward slope to the break into Act 3 when it all gets a little darker, maybe it’s all going terribly wrong but then, the eureka moment and ta-da, the protag knows what to do and the two would be lovers are reconciled and go off on a haze of pink fluff into a bright new future.

They are fun to read and the main character is always likeable in the same way as the object of her affection is always the best of men, even if she doesn’t know it at the time. So, what about those who, maybe, you know, what a little less chick and a bit more dude or have just got over Chick-Lit as a genre.

More to the point, what about men who want to read light fiction

Well, they can have a dose of Lad-Lit.

To be honest, Lad-Lit sounds a little bit too blokey for me; am I likely to find much talk of cheeky Nandos and some bant with the Archbishop of Banterbury?

Turning to Wiki for a bit of help I find this description:

Lad lit typically concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of urban twenty and thirty something men, faced with changing heterosexual mores and the pursuit of a desired lifestyle. The stories revolve around issues like male identity crisis and masculine insecurity in relationships as a result of the social pressures and the expectations of how they should behave in work, love and life, men’s fear and final embrace of marriage. In other words, the final maturation into manhood.

And it’s history:

"Lad lit" is a term of the 1990s that was originated in Britain, where it was developed for marketing purposes. Several publishers, encouraged by the increasing sales of glossy magazines (Maxim, Esquire, GQ, FHM), believed that such fiction would open up a new readership. Thus, lad lit is not its own phenomenon, but rather part of a larger cultural and socioeconomic movement. This new publishing category ostensibly sought to redefine masculinity. The protagonist of these books is the young man on the make, mindlessly pursuing booze, babes and football. His ineptitude, drunken-ness and compulsive materialism were part of his charm. The figure was created in contrast with the New Man of the feminist era and, beneath the crass surface, the lads are attractive, funny, bright, observant, inventive, charming and excruciatingly honest. They are characters who seem to deserve more from life and romance than they are getting.

Nick Hornsby, apparently, is the man for this type of genre, which is seen as a backlash against the phenomenon of chick-lit. Interestingly though, the Oxford Reference website states that in answer to the question, which came first, the chick or the lad, the answer is, the lad.

Hmm…so much for the 1990s, what about today. Is Lad-Lit still relevant or have we moved on? I think so. Welcome to the world of Dude-Lit. So, dude lit then, what is it? Who writes it? Do I want to read it?

A simple but effective description by blogger Brie Clemintine:

“Lately I’ve read books who main character is a man who goes through a self-discovering journey that make(s) me feel like I’m reading a “Chickless” Chick-Lit story, or, as I’ve come to think of it: Dude Lit”

The blogger on Giant Squid Books goes onto say:

“In many ways, dude lit seems to me to have many elements of chick lit, but told from the POV of a male narrator. It is said that if chick lit were a movie genre, it would surely be romantic comedy, and I think a lot of the same thing can be said about dude lit.”

If Lad-Lit was on the back of some kind of rebellion against Bridget Jones and her diary, or the dawn of New Main, then perhaps DL has rolled in on the crest of button down check shirts, nice leather brogues, beards and craft beers.

I don’t know, when did hipster arrive on the scene because Brie was writing about dudes in 2012 and I've found references to it from 2010.

Well, having had a fish around on the web I’ve found some links to book recommendations in the Dude-Lit range so I’m going in.

One thing that has definitely struck me is this; I always floundered when trying to describe Since You’ve Been Gone. To me, a male protagonist wasn’t symbolic of traditional chick lit yet, I didn’t feel it feel into the Lad-Lit realm either. However, now, I think I’m very happy to describe it as Dude-Lit, which doesn’t mean that it is the sole preserve of men (as Chick-Lit wasn’t and never should be considered the sole preserve of women). Getting Amazon to rethink my browse categories however, is another matter!

RIDIN’ THE BUS

The bus plays a big part in my life because I never learned how to drive. Some days it's a complete drag; getting stuck in traffic (okay, so every one gets stuck in traffic but, c'mon, I'm on a bus!), babies screaming, people talking loudly on their phones so you know exactly every minutiae of their lives. I have to catch two buses and the second one has to go over the railway lines, so invariably we're stuck at the gates for a while. Yeah, it can be a drag.

Then again, I'm a writer so going on the bus is like a field trip. Seriously. People like to know where you get ideas from, or inspiration, or language and I say: take a trip on the bus. Get a day ticket, ride as many as possible - if you're not a regular bus user - and just...listen.

Dialogue can be really hard. We all have our own unique voice and sometimes that is the voice we use in our writing but that's not how all people talk. Some repeat themselves, some use 'like' and 'you know' too much, and some listen and nod and say 'yeah, yeah, yeah'. Actually, if you listen to people talking, you can see that we don't all stop and wait for the other person(s) to finish; we inject, interrupt, zone out. That's really hard to convey in a narrative sense but pretty easy if you're writing a script - there's a button to show that everyone is talking at once - but, honestly, would your reader want all the extraneous words we spout in everyday conversation? Probably not. Take this conversation I overheard on the bus a few weeks back:

Woman 1: I saw Ruth yesterday. I never had her down as a snob Woman 2: Oh? Woman 1: She was with her boy and he's off up to secondary school in September so I asked where he was going and she jumped in and said, the high school and I thought, you know, she meant one of them out at Lexdon, so I said to him, oh, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, yes, Stanway High School. Well, I've never heard it called that before, you know, because it's not a high school....secondary modern probably...but I thought, you know, she meant the high school. Woman 2: Well, yes, you would. Woman 1: We've got several of those haven't we...the girls high and the boys grammar and that private one. Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one. Woman 1. That's what I thought she meant when she said it, that's why I said, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, he is Stanway High School.

There was a short pause before Woman 2 started the conversation up again with a repeat of: Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one.

So, everyday conversation can be boring, repetitive and not for you but....but, it's not what they are saying per se that you should be interested in but the cadence, the variances in pauses, the words like 'yes' or 'yeah' that are used as a shorthand for not saying a lot; the tone of delivery of a 'yes' can be quite loaded., is it conveying anger, agreement, sarcasm, sadness?

lso, there's the variety. Slang is very transient and probably best avoided if it's really of the now as it will date quite rapidly however, it is interesting to listen to young people using slang.

I sat in front of two teenagers who were discussing gang culture on the two large estates in Colchester. Two phrases stood out in the conversation: getting switched up and on your onesies. The former, a quick check in the urban dictionary informs me is when your mood changes from calm to mad in an instant and the latter is when your on your own. In this case, the boy told his friend that it 'wasn't on for seven to do that when you're on your onesies.'

Of course, you can differentiate between characters by using regional accents. I did this in Since You've Been Gone by having Michael, Hal's best friend come from up north but even then, regional accents are not homogeneous. I based Michael's rhythm on Guy Martin - it was a tough gig watching hours of Mr Martin but he's interesting because he has a very unique and identifiable way of talking. However, a note of caution, be sparing in your use of dialect, readers don't necessarily want to have to fight through obscure words and saying just because you've found them during research (I loathed reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell for this very reason - her repeated use of the word 'hoo' which means 'she' bugged the life out of me). So, less is more, I think. Use it to convey but don't let it swamp the reader with idioms.

Ride the bus and happy writing

MY WRITING PROCESS

Here is my version of The Writing Process

What am I currently working on?

Actually...I've kind of got three things on the go. I know, spreading myself a little thin. One is a Young Adult novel provisionally called What Are Ghosts Afraid Of? This one is quite a bit of the way through but I've reached a halt and am still working out my demons on that one. Secondly, an untitled chick-lit piece that started off with great panache and good intentions but then stalled. Not because I don't know where it's going but because my third project took over. The Winter Rose is proving to be a genre mash up - a romance/historical/supernatural murder-mystery (I'm not even sure you can have that much of a genre mash up to be honest). We shall see.

What makes my writing distinctive?

I don't know...I use third person omniscient although I do generally have a distinctive protagonist. I guess it's up to the reader to decide if I have a distinctive writing voice.

Why do I write what I write?

I like ideas that amuse and intrigue me. I also enjoy looking at the weirdness of relationships. I don't really want to write straight chick-lit with the boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back dynamic. Relationships are messy and they suck sometimes. They're also amazing and make you feel alive so I want to go down that route rather than the soppy will they/won't they road. With Since You've Been Gone I had the need to express something about how I felt going back home to Dover (also the home town of my protag Hal Bartlett) but also I was quite determined to subvert expectation. I think, in the most part, I succeeded with that.

How does the writing process work?

I'm a pantser - I write by the seat of my pants. I can't plan for toffee. I get an idea, a starting point. I get the measure of my characters and I get an ending. I just then work to join up that initial opening 'scene' with the final closing one. I started off writing scripts and putting them into contests. I think I probably write my novels in the same way. I 'see' a scene and I write that 'scene' (maybe that will translate to one side of an A4 piece of paper - I do it all long hand and type it up later). Then I will use that to progress to the next 'scene' and so on. So, when other writers/authors talk about word counts they like to achieve every day - 1,000/2,000/3,000 words, I talk about maybe 800 words. I do short, sharp blocks of writing.

Since You've Been Gone was relatively easy to write because it started out as a 90 page script that had been through tough feedback from a professional script reader. It had also been in competition - Prequel to Cannes (2nd place) and was only one of 25 scripts picked annually in the BAFTA/Rocliffe New Writers Forum Prize. It had its structure in place. So, writing from scratch is taking me some time.

What next?

I'll keep going. At them moment I've resumed work on the untitled chick-lit and managed to work out some of the bugs.

Meet my main character - Hal Bartlett

What is the name of your character?

Meet Hal Bartlett, sometime resident of Dover, Kent, now living in rural Oxfordshire with a veterinarian practice, a very opinionated business partner and a lot of marital problems.

When and where is the story set?

Hal Bartlett is the main character in Since You've Been Gone which is set fifteen years in the past. The story begins in Oxfordshire as Hal wrestles with the increasing deterioration in his relationship with his wife, Julienne. It's the eve of Julienne's spoilt younger sister's high-end wedding and Hal knows he's out of his depth. After a bitter row, Hal takes the only option open to him...he returns to the home town and friends he abandoned years before and begins his journey to revisit his past and lay some old demons to rest.

What should we know about him?

Hal is a good man, a bit of a wimp but essentially a good bloke. His life is a bit messy, no neat edges. He left his home town of Dover in the September of 1983 without ever realising how life expanding university would be. Slowly, so slowly even he didn’t notice it happening, Hal shed his old life, old friends who never left the town into which they were born and, sadly, he shed his parents. He didn't do any of this because he was denying his past...he did it because Hal is a man on the run, from his emotional past and in particular one person, Abigail Markham. She was 'the one'. The one that he loved first and last. The one that broke his heart. The one that cut him loose. His withdrawal from his old life and absorption into his new allowed him distance and an excuse never to go back and find out exactly what happened between them.

What is the main conflict?

Hal married out of his league and he knew it. His wife’s family have money, have never been on the type of rough council estate Hal grew up on let alone been in a council house and they glossed over Hal’s working class roots and remade him in their image and Hal, for a quiet life, goes along with it. He’s an adaptor but never comfortable in his new role and always guilty of what he’s done to his parents in order to keep the charmed life he now has. Hal needs to man up and get out but he’s loyal and steady and really he’s looking for an excuse. Hal is also wrestling with his past and is too scared to confront it, to move on and wipe his emotional slate clean. Forces outside of his control, however, end up making the choice for him and he goes back...back to the home town he left as a teenager and back to the family and friends he's distanced himself from in order to heal his own heart. He's about to get a big wake up call and his life will never be the same again.

What is the personal goal of the character? In the beginning Hal is drifting. He knows in his heart of heart he's in the wrong place and with the wrong person but he's also trying to be a 'good bloke'Like most people, circumstances drive him not the other way around and so he finds himself constantly fighting the tide to get upstream. What he really needs is a good old dose of 'closure'. To lay his past to rest so that he can move on with a new heart. He sort of understands this but is at a loss on how to act upon it without causing the hurt he some much desires to avoid. Hal wants to be at peace with himself.

Since You've Been Gone is available exclusively on Amazon across all markets to download onto your Kindle or Kindle apps and Kindle Unlimited for £2.99.Paperback is available through Amazon for £6.99

FLORENCE WHITE AND WHY I AM A FEMINIST

Let me state upfront that I am a feminist. I make no bones about that, I don’t hide the fact. Being a feminist does NOT make me anti-men.

Everybody should be a feminist because feminism, fundamentally, is about equality. Equality between sexes – equal pay for equal work. Equal opportunities regardless of sex (I won’t say gender because gender and sex are too wildly different things).

I could bang on about it for an eternity. I won’t.

This post is about another kind of inequality. It is a little known, little-researched piece about one woman who didn’t even believe in feminism. Despite that, she is someone that I admire enormously; someone who I look up to.

Let’s do a bit of background history here.

In 2005 the outgoing Secretary of State for Work and Pension noted just 13% of women compared to 92% of men were entitled to the basic state pension.[1]

Read that again – 13% against 92%.

This was less than ten years ago. [a]

Adair Turner, chair of the Pensions Commission pointed out: "Current female pensioners receive much lower levels of occupational pension because during working life they had much lower levels of employment, a greater tendency to be in part-time work, lower average earnings, and a greater tendency to work in service sectors where pension provision was less prevalent."[2]

Wind this back to just over a hundred years ago and not much has changed.

In that time women faced the same challenges in old age as women are facing today due to the same reasons.

Then, as now, women tended to outlive men.

Then, as now, women in old age are poorer than men due to the reasons that were given by Adair Turner.

Then, older women in poverty were probably widowed whereas today it is more likely to be caused by the ending of a partnership.

Britain introduced the state pension in 1908. Yes, you read that correctly, 1908. We think of the welfare system as being a product of the post-war years but state pensions have been around longer than we think. In fact, our government was considering it way back in the 1870s. The idea of having a state-guaranteed compulsory saving scheme was scrapped because…women didn’t earn enough to fund it.

Instead, a non-contributory pension was introduced in 1908. Single men and women were paid 5s a week, married couples got 7s 6d (on a sliding scale). But here was the rub. In order to toddle off to your local post office and claim your pension, you had to live to the ripe old age of 70 and it was means tested. In order to qualify, the worker had to be earning less than £31.50 annually. Encapsulated within this was also remnants of the Poor Law – so those applying had to pass strict rules such as proving they were not drunkards or showing that they had worked to their full potential. In essence what it meant was, there was plenty of scope for the government to deny people this basic pension (which in itself didn’t satisfy the Rowntree poverty line).

The age of 70 was no coincidence. The chances of staying in work under the conditions the poor lived in were slight. Most people were employed in heavy, manual labour, and were unfit for work by their 60’s. Women, especially, fell foul of the ‘worked to their full potential’ caveat as they were more likely to take on the care of family members thus placing themselves out of the workforce for prolonged periods of time.

By 1925 the pension landscape had been altered with the inclusion of the National Health Insurance Scheme (introduced in 1911) to supplement the state pension.

This new amendment not only created even greater inequality between the sexes but created a whole new area of inequality between women.

The introduction of a widows’ and orphans’ pension generated hostility due to the fact that it would only pay out to the widows of insured men who, at the time of their death, had children under the age of 14. “What about the older widows?” was the cry. This was ‘solved’ in 1929 by giving the widows of all insured men a pension at 55.

Sadly, this created a new divide between women.

What about those that didn’t get married.

Now, it’s easy for us, modern women and men to think that marriage isn't the be all and end all of life. Back then, it kind of was. Marriage was a state to aspire to. Marriage is what ‘you did’. Women had an expectation of getting married, of having children. It may be imagined that with a non-contributory pension to look forward to and the ability to work unhindered by having to stop to raise children, unmarried women would fare better. Not so.

Single women had to pay lower contributions to the National Health Insurance Scheme and they received lower benefits from it (through some idea that they had fewer responsibilities –i.e. they weren't a man and the main breadwinner of a family!!).

Unmarried women faced restricted opportunities in the job market, were paid lower and the chance of saving for ‘old age’ was out of their reach. Even if they were lucky enough to have parity in education, opportunities due to the patriarchal structure of society were beyond them. If they gave up work to care for parents. If they were sick. If anything happened to disrupt their contributions, their entitlement to state-assisted aid was forfeited and they had to work until 70 to obtain their means-tested state pension.

So getting married, as it had always been, was almost a necessity for women. It sounds mercenary and maybe it was but mostly it was about survival.

After World War One, almost two million women found themselves single. A lost generation of men, killed in battle, maimed in war, meant that husbands were in short supply.

The desire, the need, the want to get married went unfulfilled.

So…and I'm so glad that if you've got this far, you have borne with me…I get to the source of my post.

Florence White was born into abject poverty in the back streets of Bradford in 1886. She was wildly intelligent, formidable, strong-willed and stroppy. At 13 she followed the usual route of her class and went to work at the local wool mill.

She was politically active within the local Liberal movement in Bradford. She met and became engaged to Albert Whitehead. Sadly, Albert died during the First World War and it was her bitterness and her rage against married women that drove her on.

I think the thing that comes out very strongly about Florence was the fact that she isn’t an altogether likeable character. She was irascible, sharp of tongue and she could be shockingly manipulative (witness the fact that she practically forced her sister to give up her own boyfriend – out of jealous? Spite? Both?). But equally, she displayed extraordinary kindness – making dresses for the poor girls down the street. Caring for her sister Annie – a shocking hypochondriac – and sending her mother to stay a boarding house belonging to a friend when her health deteriorated.

She was neither a saint nor a sinner but one thing she was, she was driven. So driven.

She persuaded the MP for Bradford South Herbert Holdsworth to assist her in her quest for pension parity.

She was calling for all women, married or spinster, gain their pension at 55.

Her argument was thus:

Women, for numerous reasons, were forced into involuntary retirement earlier than men.

Women suffered from poor health.

Discrimination against post-menopausal women.

Women giving up work mid-life to care for ageing relatives.

Okay, so number two looks contrary to what was said in earlier arguments about women living longer than men but, you know, there are, undoubtedly a number of factors, that are non-life threatening, that affects women due to physiology, that just don’t affect men.

With the backing of Herbert Holdsworth and the influence he could exert, a meeting was ordered inviting interested parties to gather. Not expecting more than a few to turn up, Florence was astounded when over 600 people gathered to her speak. She went down a storm. A natural and persuasive orator, she had the backing of those who heard her and thus was born the National Spinsters’ Pension Association. It went on to become the single largest women’s reform movement of the early twentieth century.

Florence White, with her incisive mind, and mercurial temper, was an unlikely leader but it was this drive, tenacity and sheer bloody-mindedness that made her the voice of hundreds of thousands of women who had previously fallen by the wayside when it came to benefits in old age. The penury they faced in later life due to what she perceived to be unfair pension rights and the bias shown towards married women and widows by successive governments.

Soon, branches were springing up all over the country and they employed, not the type of violence seen by the suffragette movement, but logic, positive argument and peaceful demonstration. Envelope stuffing in the small, cramped office over the confectionery shop run by Annie, was the norm. Continuous streams of letters to MPs asking them to back the cause. In '37 she organised a mass mail out of an NSPA Christmas card to Kingsley Wood, Conservative Minister of Health and vocal and fierce opponent to Florence’s cause. They were delivered to his office by the sackload.

And she took it all the way to the steps of Parliament. In 1937 she headed a march on Parliament of thousands of women from all over Britain. Here she handed over a petition to James Guy, a 'friendly' (as Florence dubbed those MPs who backed her cause), containing over a million signatures, demanding equal rights for spinsters. It was the turning point of her campaign.

By 1938 she had the respect and backing of a number of MPs. She also had an equal number who opposed her. William Leach, a Labour MP for Bradford Central had, in 1929, voted against the cause. But turned by Florence's persuasive words, he now found himself on the side of pensions for all women at 55.

On 16 February 1938, William Leach put forward a motion for a committee to be set up to look into the claims of the NSPA. In a vote, the motion was carried but then the MPs forced a division and MPs were forced to vote on the issue.

The vote was carried:

The Speaker at the time is recorded in Hansard as declaring:

The ayes to the left one hundred and fifty. The noes to the right, ninety-eight. So the Ayes have it. The Motion is resolved. That, in view of the widespread feeling that unmarried women have legitimate grounds for complaint against their treatment under the National Health Insurance and Contributory Pensions Acts, this House is of opinion that a committee should be appointed to inquire into the justice and practicability of acceding to the claims made by organised spinsters for a pension of ten shillings per week at fifty-five years of age and the inclusion in a contributory pensions scheme of all those who do not come under the Acts in question.

The committee was headed by Charles Thomas Le Quesne, a Liberal MP and barrister. His Report of the Committee on Pensions for Unmarried Women found great substance in the arguments put to them by Florence White and other members of the NSPA and was greatly concerned by the sheer number of women left in poverty (especially due to caregiving). It was proven that unemployment rose amongst spinster over the age of 45 and the chances of these women re-gaining employment after forced absence was much harder than men.

Florence didn’t achieve her dream of parity. The committee found against a universal pensionable age for women of 55. However, they did bring in a state pensionable age for all women. It was 60. So, if you were ever left wondering why men retired at 65 but women at 60, now you know. It was down to the work of Florence White.

Still, the amount of pension was still low and it still affected women more than men. A second means test was introduced in 1940, known as Supplementary Assistance. One-third of all pensioners who qualified for this were women.

I found Florence after picking up a copy of a book called Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson and I was hooked on her story. For several months she consumed me. I would sit for hours reading up on her and it wasn’t easy.

Go on – go and Google (or whatever you do) Florence White….I’m here, I’ll wait for you.

Yeah…did you put in Florence White NSPA? Because, if you didn’t you don’t get far. And if you do, she commands one single page of links….one page.

This amazing, strong, stroppy, driven, bitter, incisive, determined woman gets one page of links to her work.

So, I wrote 55. I found an unpublished biography, which sits in the Wakefield archives, and used that as my basis. I then immersed myself in the tales of factory workers in the 1800s, wool mills, the pamphleteering of Florence’s father James White (who died in Newcastle prison), Hansard, back-to-back housing in Bradford, I looked on Google street view so I could see where she lived and the route she had to walk to the factory. I breathed spinsters for months.

I had this dream of seeing my output – three episodes of 55 minutes each, that tackled her life from when she started at the factory through to just before the Le Quense Committee – on BBC1 in the 9 o’clock Sunday night slot with Imelda Staunton as Florence, Julie Waters as Annie and Richard Armitage as William Leach. Yeah, I know, what are us newbie scriptwriters like?

I converted it to a radio play and contacted the bods at Radio 4. You know what the man said: 'We like contemporary stories and, besides, women’s issues have been done to death’

No, they haven’t and they never will be ‘done to death’ all the while we live in a world where feminism is a dirty word to some, and women still have inequality to deal with.

That is why I’m a feminist.

Further information on the Scandal of Womens Pensions can be found here:

[1]http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-scandal-of-womens-pensions-in-britain-how-did-it-come-about

[2] As above

[a] From original post date

Planner or a panster?

ARE YOU A PLANNER OR A PANSTER Re-blog from 2014

So, here's the thing - are you a 'plotter' or a 'pantser'? In your writing I mean.

Do you spend hours plotting the A story, the B story, the sub-plot, the bombs, the pay offs...marking them on coloured cards that denote this character or that character. Maybe you use a spreadsheet like J.K.Rowling. If you do then you're a planner.

Or, maybe, like me, you have a very good idea of your story and characters and can even see the last page but the bit in the middle is a whole adventure waiting to happen. I'm a pantser.

It's just the way I write. To a degree I have notes - usually scribbled on bits of paper that find themselves tucked away in a pocket, written down as the thought occurs. But I tend to start off with the idea, incorporate the thoughts and let the story carry me along.

I've never really enjoyed the process of writing a treatment. Invariably I find that after I have spent an age doing that, once I start writing, the story goes so wildly off track as to be totally organic and seemingly with a life of its own.

I know some writers swear by the planning and plotting stage and love the feel of a fresh block of coloured index cards in their hands but me, never got my head around it.

Well..I say that...but then today I've given it a whirl. I found a fairly simple template to use (believe me, some of them were so complex as to fry my brain). I've modified it to suit my own needs and I've printed off the format. I've started to add ideas to it but I don't know...

So, what brought about this change of heart...I'm trying to write a story set both in the present and the past and it's going to get out of control if I don't round it up and bring some order to the proceedings! Maybe this will help.