Highlights of the Writers' Summer School in England

 If you have never been to the Writers' Summer School in England, you should try it. The event attracts writers and would be writers of all ages, shapes, sizes, colours, characters - and genres. Poets, playwrights, bloggers, best-sellers, romance writers and comedians.

Here are a few of my happy memories.

I started each day at 8 pm with Lift Up Your Pens where we were inspired to write a paragraph or two on a given subject. At the end of the half hour a few members of the audience volunteered to read out their work.

On one occasion we were asked to write about a dog, without mentioning the breed but implying it. I wrote about a retired dog walker, following a retired police dog finding a dead body in the bushes. The audience rightly guessed that my dog was an Alsatian.

Writers' Summer School at Swanwick, 2023. The Chairman is on the far right. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

Sunday Times best seller and multiple award winner Sue Morcroft and her literary agent. At Writers' Summer School in August 2023

Please share links to your favourite posts.

Who Should You Accept As Friend On Facebook And Elsewhere?

Who to accept as friends?

1 Smiling faces. I just changed my profile from one of my books to a smiling face. After all this is Facebook, not Bookface.

2 I welcome other writers who know writers I know.

3 I welcome other Toastmasters who know toastmasters I know.

4 Close family who live overseas and write in a foreign language which I translate by clicking on translate to get the caption on the photo.

5 Cute pictures of animals.

Who not to accept as Facebook friends?

1 People whose posts are entirely their children or babies or who have children in their profile picture. My profile is public and I don't think their children should be on Facebook and I don't want to inadvertently expose them to risk.

3 Posts entirely in Chinese, Korean or Arabic which take ages to translate, deal with events and people I don't know, especially with lots of violence and political messages and rants against everyone and everything, could get me into trouble and don't contribute to my positive thinking day.

4 Closeups of snakes and pimples and cancer and knives and masked characters, whether real life or book covers. Maybe the best crime novel ever but I am looking for sweetness and light.

5 Anything which tells me to share this dire warming with everyone. It is spam. If it is a genuine police or government message there will be a link to a government website which I can show to somebody living in the same house without burdening total strangers with fake news or spam.

Now, to end by sending a positive note, you know why some poeple are rejected but you are or will be my rational and genuine good friend.

Angela Lansbury, author and speaker. President of Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters club. (See Facebook pages.)

How To Prepare For Next Year's Writers' Summer School in England in 2019 Aug 10-16, Tips and Tricks

Writers enjoying summer weather at Swanwick in August. The Lakeside block is the far distance by the lake.

Problem
This year, 2018, Writers' Summer School was over-subscribed, with a waiting list. My friend D was only told the day before the event started that somebody had cancelled at the last moment because of illness. So how can you be sure of getting a place next year? Why would I want to go? For the food, if nothing else.

Desserts at Swanwick. Cheesecake was one of my favourites.

Answers
Number one action, note next year's date now.

Timing - AUGUST 10-16 2019
The conference starts just before tea-time on Saturday. It ends after breakfast the following Friday.

August, yes, August. Just around the time of the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. One year when the writers' conference ended, we drove on to the Edinburgh Festival.

When To Book
Priority bookings open on 1st January 2019.
General bookings 1st February 2019.

Who gets priority bookings? Presumably the committee themselves. Plus the Friends Of Swanwick who have donated money.

Food
You can let them know about special diets and allergies.
A gluten free cake is provided for tea time and among the desserts at dinner.
I was so impressed by the cakes that I wrote about them in the Swanwick Standard which we wrote during the conference.


Accommodation
The price you pay depends on the accommodation you choose - or what is left if you book late.
Included in the price: breakfast, biscuits and coffee or tea drinks at morning break, lunch, tea-time biscuits or cakes and tea, dinner. 24 hours machines dispensing water and coffee, tea, water.

How can you Economise?
Accommodation
1 Ttake a room in the main house with only a washbasin. Showers and toilets are along the corridor.
Other accommodation price varies.
You could just come up for one day and not pay for accommodation, just the day rate. That works if you live nearby or have a friends or relatives in the area.

1 If the conference is fully booked, find out if you can have a day rate and stay at a hotel nearby.

2 Enter the raffle at a conference and hope to win the big prize of a free conference the  following year, or the other prizes of money towards your return visit.

3 Enter the competitions by sending in a short story or poem on the theme which is announced later on.
4 If you are a famous writer, offer to be a speaker or to run a course, in which case they might pay some or all of your expenses.

Here's the man who wrote the play in which I acted. He was also the actor in somebody else's play. The actress who played the murderer in his play won the best actor awarded.

Sell Some Of Your Books In The Book Room
You will sell more books if
1 They are how to books on the theme of writing
2 You give and evening lecture or a day time course and quote or read a passage from your book.
3 You offer a discount off the usual price in bookshops.

Start Writing Your Novel or How To Book
If you have been selling just one book at writing conferences, many people will already have it. So write a new book.

If you need a deadline, write it during the November NANO event - at least 500 words a day.

Last year we had a stage on the side of the hall. However, this was said to block the exits and a Health and Safety officer made the organizers move it.

Plan A Poem
Plan a poem to read out at the open mic poetry evening. Print it off or keep it accessible on your phone.

Learn A Poem
Practise reading your poem aloud without reading it off the page, to leave your hands free so you can make gestures and act, and lift your eyes up from the page and make eye contact with the audience.

Plan A Piece of Prose
Write a memoir. Read out the opening. For the prose open mic night.

Singers and Songriters Unite
For the buskers night, practice singing. Learn to sing in tune. Join a choir or sing along with museic every day. Or write a new song for somebody else to sing. Make sure it has lots of rhythm and a chorus so the audience can join in.

Contest Submissions
Write a poem or short piece for the competition in the hope of winning a prize.

Play Planning
Write a five minute play for the Page To Stage Event. Write it with characters who can be male of remale. Make sure each character has lines which suggest gestures, to give the characters in your play a greater chance of winning the best actor/actress award.

Ideally have all the characters standing or walking around the stage. The stage at the front of the hall is low and if actors sit down they cannot be seen or heard at the back.

Transport
Share driving with a friend.
Book a rail ticket well in advance.
Use one of the rail discounts.

If you were at the 2018  event, look for the post-conference downloads:
www.swanwickwritersschool.org.uk/downloads
You will need the password which was given out during the AGM to those who attended the conference.

WANT TO RUN A COURSE
www.swanwickwritersschool.org.uk/pitch-a-course

Closed Facebook group.
LinkedIn
Twitter @swanwickwriters

Websites of the 2018 speakers:
Sue Moorcroft
www.suemoorcroft.com

Ahmit Dhand
www.aadhand.com

To hire a costume for the fancy dress dancing night:
Jolly Jesters
www.jollyjesters.co.uk 

Secretary ingrid
secretary@swanwickwritersschool.org.uk

Treasurer Lesley
treasurer@swanwickwritersschool.org.uk

The Hayes Conference Centre
Hayes Lane
SWANWICK
Alfreton
Derbyshire
DE55 1AU.
tel:01773 526 000.

Useful Websites
Hayes Administration office: 01773 526 000.
www.swanwickwritersschool.org.uk

http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2018/08/improvements-to-food-and-decoration-at.html
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
See next post:
http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-lake-flowers-and-food-and-faces-at.html

Where to Follow Jane Austen and Find Fan Clubs

House where Jane Austen lived for the last years of her life. Now  museum. Photo from Wikipedia.

Problem
I know there's a Jane Austen statue or person outside a museum in Bath, but where else can I go? Would I find a fan as far away as Singapore.

Answers
1 Bath Museum. most visually appealing from the outside and in the busy, bustling city of Bath.
2 House where she lived for last years.
3 Winchester Cathedral. Disappointed me. Not a lot to see or say.
4 If you fancy yourself as the next Jane Austen, Winchester has a writers' festival every summer, good for would be writers who can stay in university accommodation.

Gravestone. Photo from Wikipedia.

Fan Societies Worldwide
UK
USA
Singapore
Society of fans who dress up, using spree fabric to recreate clothes. Not as far fetched as it at first sounds. In Jan Austen's era imported sprees were used and appreciated for colourful ladies clothes.

Story
As a young teenager I had heard of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen but had trouble remembering which was which. Later I discovered :

The Brontes sisters were poor and had miserable lives and wrote stories of horror and passion. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre about a poor governess in a house with a terrifying mad woman. The governess nearly commits bigamy, but ends up marrying a man only when he is widowed in a fire after he goes blind. Sister Emily wrote the tragedy Wuthering Heights. Anne wrote a miserable story about drunkenness. The three girls all died young, in their thirties.

By contrast, Jane Austen's books are full of humour and irony.
I studied Jane Austen at school, a girl's Grammar School, in England, for A level. The book was Mansfield Park. It is not my favourite book. Most people most enjoy Pride and Prejudice.

Tips
List of 22 sites with visually appealing pictures:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/eleanorbate/lost-in-austen?utm_term=.ql9O9lOYo#.nbb3kD3Ke

Jane Austen's Worldwide Fan Club
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40093010

Winchester Writers' Festival
http://writersfestival.co.uk

Quotations from Jane Austen:
From Goodreads:
Pride and Prejudice: 'A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.'
(Post being researched. More later.)

Jane Austen books are on
Amazon
Ebay

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share your favourite posts. 

How to Get Readers, for Writers, bloggers and readers of travel articles and more

Problems
An internet source is subject to typos from the writer and changes made later by spell checker.

Readers have strong views on preferences for one company rather than another, one country rather than another, one website rather than another. I read on line that some people are boycotting certain sites because they believe not enough is being done to stop terrorism. Other would prefer the BBC to the Mail, or the Mail to the BBC, or an American source instead of a British one. Some people would visit or live in Greece rather than Turkey, turkey rather than Greece, and so on. Some want to know about bargains, others about luxury.

Story
When I first wrote about honeymoon destinations for the British magazine Brides, I was told that although the majority of readers wanted to read about luxury destinations, their budget was more modest. Therefore I had to feature places in 3 price ranges, 5 star, three star and one star. That way every reader would find practical information and every advertiser could be sure that the editorial would be supporting the readership at which they aimed.

Therefore, when I have time, I try to give three choices in the hopes of giving everybody something which suits them in every way. This means occasionally instead of starting a new blog, I add an extra website to an old one.

However, when it comes to the internet, I am told by SEO experts, that if you aim too widely, the reader does not identify you with any particular niche. If you want readers to come back, you must select either bargains, or luxury. This is the challenge for bloggers.

If you would like me to write articles on your blog, or to copy your articles, or to have permission to copy my articles on your blog with links back to mine, please get in touch.

Angela Lansbury travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages. 

Successful Writing Courses - Plan Next Year's Trips To The UK

We had two Americans and one person flew all the way from Australia and made her entire holiday allowance into a trip to the UK for Writers Summer School at Swanwick in England.

If you can't afford the course, you have two or three ways of getting a free or reduced place.
1 Enter an online competition on the Swanwick website for writers of short stories and poetry and hope to win the first prize of a free holiday.

2 A runner up prize or at least a certificate which might encourage you to save; a member of your family to loan or give you the money.

3 A raffle ticket bought at one Swanwick conference might win you a place at the next.

(more shortly. See previous posts on Swanwick.)

Angela Lansbury, author and speaker

A Poem About Fishguard Bay And Seagulls In Wales

I've revised my poems. Here they are with another verse.

The Invention of The Pop Up Toaster
by Angela Lansbury

For centuries the world would bake
Buns and teacakes loved by most
But when King Alfred burned the cakes
And many people burned the roast

Somebody thought a small machine
Could cook pieces of small toast

At last a toaster came along
Transforming every cup of tea
At first in Scotland after porridge
In eighteen hundred and ninety three

By nineteen eighteen toast popped up
The patent of the smart Charles Strite
His invention still pops up toast
For breakfast or your snack at night.

I wrote three poems, but I have only two, for reasons which will become clear from Poem 2:

Birds By the Bay of Fishguard
Song by Angela Lansbury

By the sunlit bay of Fishguard
Trains trundled in by cars so brave
Some crossed the rough seas to Ireland
Took daily ferries facing waves.

In the bar, we writers watched them
Writing poems full of sharp wit
Scribbling stories, plotting novels
In the bar, sipping wine we'd sit.

One seagull swooped down to the terrace
Seeking food, looked cute at me
But the damned bird grabbed my poem
Flew my wise words out to sea

And now it's perched on a lamp post
And I'm sure that you'll all agree
Don't anyone dare feed that greedy bird
That's cawing, laughing at me.

Qwar! Qwar! Qwar! Qwar! Qwar!

Copyright 2016
Angela Lansbury
Travel writer and photographer, author, poet, songwriter.

I wrote one two verse poem about writers sitting writing watching the bay, another one verse poem about a seagull. Poetry teacher Alison Chisholm suggested I should have something happening in the poem about the writers. I suddenly had a vision of the seagull stealing the writing, so I combined the two poems.

More about Fishguard Bay Hotel in previous posts. More about author Angela Lansbury in Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Lulu.com, amazon com, and other blogs.

The Roald Dahl Museum And Story Centre

The museum is in a pretty village with historic inns and colourful artsy little boutique shops selling books, toys, clothes, gifts, furniture, bric a brac and even colourful spectacle frames.

The shop has a big collection of toys and books. I found a kit for turning balloons into animal shapes (always wondered how they did that - my new party trick), as well as a great selection of books such as The Gruffalo.

Everybody around here seems very well-spoken and well-behaved. The schoolchildren visiting the museum are kept busy drawing and cutting out and schoolchildren are given a little ideas book in which each child can write their story ideas and stick a photo of the face of a character - both of which Roald Dahl did. The booklet even has yellow lined writing paper like Dahl's.

If you are a writer or interested in writers, whether or not you are a Roald Dahl fan, you will probably enjoy the videos of various writers describing how they work.

My Memory Aid For Spelling Roald Dahl

If you've had trouble remembering the spelling of either the first name or surname or both, remember that the names Ronald and Roald are Norse for ruler's wise adviser. Drop the N from Ronald and you have Ro-ald.

The second vowel, a, is in the second name or surname. D-A-HL.

What about the last two letters of the surname? Although the first name, roald, has the 'l' first, the 'l' is second in the second name or surname. Alternatively think of it as a shortened form of the words hall, hell and hill. Da H L.

Last tip: the first name ends with D. The second name starts with D. So the website name has a double D. Roal-D D-ahl. roalddahlmuseum.org

Your Roald Dahl trail:

Roald Dahl Museum. Roald Dalh grave in The parish Church of St Peter & St Paul. Flat on the ground gravestone (which you can see in the Wikipedia article on the author).

The Nag's Head Country Inn & Restaurant

Dahl's local pub was the 15th century Nag's Head where I enjoyed a tasty meal and was intrigued by drawings illustrating Dahl's books. The pub also features in the film about The Fantastic Mr Fox. The price range includes a lot of pricey items as you might expect from a restaurant with several accolades and being in an upmarket area, so if you are on a budget keep an eye on what you are ordering. The bedrooms are lovely. Check it out in Michelin, AA guides, trustedplaces/yell.com

Before going to the Dahl museum on your way to check into a hotel, check whether the Nag's Head or another hotel or another is including a free visit or two for one offer on a visit to the museum. You might find the offer on the hotel's website or a brochure. That could save you anything from £4/£5 to a lot more.

If you don't have time to see everything, and are likely to make more than two visits, or two visits plus some purchases from the shop or teashop, consider buying a friend's ticket, which gives you unlimited visits for a year plus 10% off your shop purchases and teashop purchases.

Writing Tips I Learned

1 Keep an ideas book.

2 Use a photo or face picture cut from a newspaper or magazine for your heroes, heroines - or villains.

3 Exaggerate the qualities of your heroes and villains.

4 Write about unusual animals, insects, people or monsters.

Diary Dates

September 13th is Roald Dahl Day, celbrating his bithday nationwide, with events and activities at the museum.

www.roalddahlday.info

Cream teas at the Church of St Peter & St Paul, Gt Missenden. Easter Sunday and every Sunday from May to September.

www.missendenchurch.org.uk

Museum Shop and Cafe Twit open to all

The Roald Dahl Museum & Story Centre

81-83 High Street, Great Missenden

HP16 OAL

Tel:01494 892192

www.roalddahlmuseum.org

www.roalddahlstore.com

****

What else to do in the area?

Amersham - was in Midsomer Murders and Four Wedding and a Funeral.

Amersham Museum has a Tudor house hall and medicinal herb garden. Amersham Museum, 49 High Street, Amersham, HP7 ODP, museum tel:01494 723700

www.amershammuseum.org curator@amershammuseum.org

What's FREE!

1.) Free parking outside Milton's Cottage when visiting it.

2.) Free entry to Wycombe Museum: Priory Avenue, High Wycombe, Bucks HP13 PX, tel 01494 421895.

website: wycombe.gov.uk/museum e-mail: museum@wycombe.gov.uk

3.) Bucks County Museum Church St, Aylesbury HP20 2QP, tel:01296 331441,wwwbuckscc.gov.uk/museum

free exhibitions on local history about the county. But a charge is made for the Dahl kids gallery which in midweek is only for schools. (Crawl along Fantastic Mr Fox's tunnel'). Gift shop and garden cafe

Spanley Spencer Museum: stanleyspencer.org.uk (about £5 each entry).

More Hotels

Hotels with pools and / or family rooms were:

Crowne Plaza, Marlow, was cheapest

Holiday Inn, High Wycombe M40 Junction 4, Crest Road, Handycross, High Wycombe, Bucks HP11 1TL, tel +44 (0) 871 942 9042 www.holidayinn.co.uk . central reservations +44 (0)800 40 50 60

Holiday Inn, Aylesbury

Bellhouse, Beaconsfield

Novotel Milton Keynes.

Roald Dahl Day Sept 13 - see later post.

Author of this blog and and other blogs:
Angela Lansbury, author of 20 books, travel writer and photographer, speaker. Please share posts.