Spring Update!
I have begun writing fiction dear friends! I have joined the community at Wattpad & am writing as Bella-Talk. My first story is a spooky tale aimed at young teenagers, in the vein of the Goosebumps series if you remember that? Please take a look and, if you like it, follow me so that you can get an up-date whenever I post another installment.
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| Don't Let Him In |
My other exciting venture is also on Wattpad, I have decided to up-load a novel which my mother wrote but was never published. She began writing this story when I was still at primary school, but had several re-writes and revisions before the version I'm sharing now, which was completed in 1995. Her profile is Pamela_Cleaver and the novel is entitled Enchanted Valley - its genre is a romantic novel with a time-slip / enchanted theme, so some of it is set in the 13th century. I'll be delighted if I can expose her writing to interested readers (she died almost 10 years ago and forums such as Wattpad didn't exist back then!)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
This massive, romantic, thrilling book starts in 1946, Claire has been a nurse in WWII and now she’s reconnecting with her husband Frank after, they’re staying in Scotland tracing his family roots. Claire is used to the world of academia, having been brought up by her uncle, living and working on archaeological digs. The couple witness a druid ceremony, but when Claire returns to the standing stones to get a closer look, she is unexpectedly transported back in time to 1743.
Claire adjusts pretty quickly to this change of time and outlook and she journeys through Scotland with a fierce band of highland Scots, who are on the run from the British soldiers. At first they are wary of Claire, believing her to be a spy but slowly she proves her worth, firstly with her knowledge of first aid and primitive medicine and soon it’s fairly obvious that her loyalties lie better with these wild outlaws, one of whom she’s fallen in love with, than with the occupying British.
Claire constantly arouses suspicion, being so different from the women of this time, not only in her speech and attitudes, which gets her into several scrapes, but almost invariably Jamie Fraser comes to her rescue, and soon she owes him her life.
Her time spent with him in the eighteenth century is a rollercoaster of travelling, building family ties, danger of discovery, punishment and death. She daren’t share the secret of where she’s from and each time Claire cures people she worries about changing history irreparably, will she ever be able to return to her previous life in the twentieth century? what will she find there? and is the cost of leaving too great?
The story is interwoven with historical facts, myths and superstitions the people lived by, they jump off the page rather than preaching at you, and no less believable are the concepts of time travel and druid magic. The battles and hardships are well described and gritty in their detail, the scottish dialect is gently interwoven but the strongest element is the love and passion between Claire and Jamie! It is powerful and magnetic and for me that was what had me powering through the saga, and now it’s making me want to read the second book in the series, Dragonfly in Amber.
Outlander Series: Which Entertainment weekly terms “A time-hopping, continent-spanning salmagundi of genres.”
- Outlander
- Dragonfly in Amber
- Voyager
- The Scottish Prisoner
- Drums of Autumn
- The Fiery Cross
- A Breath of Snow and Ashes
- An Echo in the Bone
Diana has also written novellas which add to the story (The Lord John series for instance) and she has spin offs which follow characters which you’ll meet reading the main novels, so there’s plenty of reading material to get your teeth into! Diana is currently working on a ninth novel, but is not sure if that will be the final book.
The Outlander books are being televised, Series 1 and 2 have already aired (by Sony Pictures Television) following books 1 & 2 and an announcement was made this February that Series 3 is being filmed and will be shown in September 2017.
