Made your New Year’s resolutions yet? Do they resemble the ones shown here, by any chance?
If so, you’re not alone. The Libertà Hive is with you!
Writers make that one every year, without fail. It’s a goody.
The Libertà hive had a little holiday last week which included viewing the Severn Bore. Not, I hasten to add, as these guys do it,
but from the relative safety of the bank. Hive members and cold water don’t mix.
You have to be impressed, not only by the spectacle and roar of the Bore, but also by the guys — and they were all guys, we noticed, some young, some not so young, but not a female in sight — who turn up in wetsuits with surfboards in order to try their luck with the wave.
Before the Bore arrives, the River Severn looks remarkably peaceful, as you can see, with a largish sandbank across about half its width. We were surprised at how shallow the water is here.
Look at those intrepid surfers. They turned up, in ones and twos, slid down the muddy bank where we stood and trotted out to join their mates in the middle of the river. Continue reading
How many of us owe a lifelong love of a particular author to serendipity?
The kind of happy accident — in a bookshop, or a book sale, or perhaps even a hotel bedroom — when we pick up an author we haven’t heard of and start to read.
And ten minutes, or ten pages, later, we have the key to a whole new world and we are well and truly hooked.
Wonderful!
Today’s new Love Letter is from a male reader (small fanfare of trumpet here for sex equality in reading!). David describes the effect of just such an unexpected discovery — a hitherto unknown writer who has since become a must-buy for him and an essential part of his reading landscape.
Just the thing to warm the cockles of every writer’s heart.
The writer in question is Raymond E Feist and David’s happy discovery was Magician, an engrossing fantasy first published back in 1982. You can read David’s Love Letter here. Continue reading
Our Love Letter to a Favourite Novel feature is still a work in progress. We’ve now refined it in the light of comments we’ve received from (we hope) intending contributors. We’re really grateful for all the supportive and encouraging suggestions and we hope you will keep them coming.
At this stage, we’ve got a couple of watchwords for ourselves and our contributors as they write their Love Letters: sharing and authenticity.
Sharing — we want everyone who reads these posts to feel at home here, whether they’re a fellow author or not.You can read more about the latest news on the Love Letter to a Favourite Novel feature on the main page.
Today with a fanfare of trumpet — we could only manage one, sadly — we’re publishing our first reader contribution. Beth Elliott shares her love for R D Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. Continue reading
If the Libertà hive ever needs a household god, we may well plump for the Roman Janus, god of beginnings and transitions. Janus usually appears with two heads. That means he not only tells you where you are, he can tell you where you’ve been, too.
Janus is also the god of gates, doorways, passages and endings, the sort of god who is useful for showing you, and us, the way.
So here we have a god of beginnings, middles, endings. Readers like all of those, and they’re pretty useful for writers as well. At Libertà, we’ve come to think that Janus is probably our guy. Continue reading
We like to think of Libertà as a hive of worker bees, buzzing away industriously, creating good and sweet produce for readers to enjoy. But 200-odd years ago, the bee was a French Imperial symbol. Napoleon’s Bees were — to coin a phrase — the bees’ knees.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Feel free to groan!)
Where did Napoleon’s bees come from? Why did the bee become a French symbol rather than the fleur-de-lys?
