Bella Osborne
Bella’s first novel, It Started at Sunset Cottage was released by Harper Impulse. She was a runner-up for the New Talent Award at the 2013 Festival of Romance and a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
When is Swearing in Books Acceptable?
Bella Osborne
When it comes to swearing in books I think it’s fair to say that most of us who write will have found ourselves swearing at our books but is it right to use swearing IN the book?
I think this is an interesting dilemma when we live in a society where swear words are frequently used by pretty much all members of society. It is no longer a shock to hear someone swear. There is no longer a Mary Whitehouse or equivalent to protest bitterly about such things (for anyone that ticks the first two age boxes on surveys you may need to Google Mary Whitehouse). Swear words are scattered liberally in films and television which normalises them further. However, I still agonise over it in my writing.
I am not a very sweary person but when a particular set of circumstances convene I too will utter something my grandmother would not have approved of.
I know of an author who received a letter from a reader complaining about the swearing in one of her books and how it was unnecessary and unacceptable. It made the author look at their writing differently and they responded by cutting out swearing considerably in future books.
I used the ‘find’ function for swear words in my first novel and found initially twelve instances of strong swearing and was quite shocked. However, this isn’t me swearing this is the characters and right there is the nub of the discussion (sorry did it take a while to get there?) You see it’s not about how I am as a person or the people that hopefully will one day read my books, it’s about the characters depicted within the pages.
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Finding The Time To Write
Bella Osborne
“I would like to write a book but I haven’t got the time.” How many times have you heard that? How many times have you thought that you don’t have the time to write. My bet is that it’s more than once.
This is where I can help. Firstly, you can find time, if you really want to. It is so very easy in today’s busy world to think that you don’t have time to write. But I guarantee that if a friend called you now and you needed to drop everything to help them, you would do it. Because you’re a good person and you would find a way to accommodate their request. So why can’t you find a way to accommodate your writing? Don’t you deserve the same level of dedication as your friend?
The issue is time stealers. Time stealers are everywhere (they may have even been in an episode of Dr Who) they are the little things that eat away at your precious allocation of time almost unnoticed. If you could just grab back a fraction of those minutes even just the odd twenty minutes here and there it will make a big difference. Here are some suggestions of where to look for those elusive nuggets of time:
You could look at the ends of the day – could you get up a little earlier and write then? Or stay up a little longer and write then? Can you grab time in lunch and coffee breaks or boring meetings?
If you watch television regularly, start adding up the hours – you will be shocked. Continue reading
by Is there such a thing as a chocolate hangover?
Bella Osborne
So here we are at a key point in the year and one that involves copious amounts of chocolate – what is not to love about that? I have to say that I may well have overindulged as I am having nightmares about drowning in a sea of mini eggs and I believe I may have suffered from the first ever chocolate hangover – it wasn’t pretty.
Thanks to Mr Fry producing the first chocolate Easter Egg in the UK in 1873 we see them on the shelves from 1st January and then the week before Easter we remember that we need to buy them for friends and family at which point all the good ones have gone and there are just Toffee Crisp and Power Rangers ones left. (There is definitely a comparable analogy about men in there somewhere but I’m going to let it go).
So given the chocolate hangover situation I felt duty bound to do a bit of research – so please bear with me.
People claim that chocolate has a variety of effects on them; that it’s addictive, it perks them up or in some cases it gives them headaches. To understand that we need to know how it works. Well, it’s all to do with brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters, which charge around the brain telling the body what to do (like Dr Who and whoever his latest sidekick is). They have an impact on our emotions, mood, thought patterns, energy and concentration. (The neurotransmitters, not Dr Who). Continue reading
by I don’t do Marmite or a Short Story by any other Name
Bella Osborne
I don’t do Marmite (it is the work of the devil) and I also don’t do short stories. Short stories are incredibly difficult to get right, whether you are writing them for magazines, for competitions or just for fun. They will almost always come with a word limitation (hence the short) and despite this huge restriction there is an expectation that there is a whole story wrapped up in the prose (hence the story).
My track record with stories has seen me fill a whole exercise book at school with one story much to the mixed reaction of my English teacher who was wonderfully encouraging but with a pile of other marking to do, my lengthy witterings were not always timely. My next attempt at a finished story was my novel ‘Acting on Impulse’, the first draft of which came in at one hundred and twenty-eight thousand words. So you can see my ability to be succinct has not improved over the years.
So when my writing tutor asks the class to write a Short Story I break out in a cold sweat (and curse the fact that I sit next to both the radiator and the draughty window), my mind goes a complete blank and I decide categorically that I can’t do it. I will then spend the whole week trying to think about a plot based on whatever criteria has been set and will almost always conclude that it’s impossible to fit any of my ideas into anything shorter than ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Ivanhoe’ at a push (approx. 587k and 192k word counts respectively, in case you were wondering).
by Mummy Lit – What?
Bella Osborne
So I was looking at the calendar and I got a little excited as it was nearly Mother’s Day and I love Mother’s Day. It’s a day that I thought I would never get to celebrate after a rocky road to becoming a Mummy but thankfully we made it via the scenic route and each year it is an utter pleasure to receive a homemade card and cold toast for breakfast from my daughter.
I was slightly wrong footed when I was discussing my writing with another writerly type person (we like to seek each other out, there’s safety in numbers) and we started discussing genres. I will call my writerly type person Bonita, for that is not her name. I explained to Bonita that I thought my writing was Romantic Comedy with a slightly darker side and went on to regurgitate my short blurbs on novel number one and my current work in progress. She agreed whole heartedly for novel number one which could be described as Notting Hill meets Eastenders and is about a womanising Hollywood actor, Tim, who falls in love with an ordinary woman called Kate. However, when I started to talk about my second novel which has the working title Virtual Family, there was lots of head shaking from Bonita (it’s a good name isn’t it?).
by Book Club
