Ospringe
A Visit with Grandad
A Visit with Grandad is available from Amazon
The Story
On a Saturday morning in May 1920, two of the Davies children – eight year-old Gertrude Violet Davies and her thirteen year-old brother, Claude Laverne Davies – leave their home at the Mill House, on Water Lane in Ospringe, Kent, and walk to 2 Middle Row, in the nearby market town of Faversham, where their grandad, Henry Kennett, lives. After polishing the firemen’s buttons, the three of them go for a walk, during which they share their cheerful chatter and think their private thoughts. The novel is available at www.amazon.com.
This journal records my reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.
During the writing of the novel, I kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.
The Project
Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the fourteenth installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which I am exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.
A Visit with Grandad is available from Amazon