Background research for Authors

 

While I understand that authors generally like to do their own background research, there must be times when doing a major writing project such as a novel, you feel that time does not allow you to cover every angle.  Sometimes other commitments, work related or even domestic, impede on your time schedules.  If this applies to you, then I wish to offer you my services as a research assistant, filling in those vital gaps of fact finding that you do not have enough time to complete.

The general overall aim is to provide researched background in the following specialities: Film history, photography history, fine arts, that includes collecting, antiques, ceramics, historic periods both in this country, literary fiction, biographies, folk lore, international studies, military and social history, Local history, anthropology, archaeology, background information for authors writing fiction on a certain topic[science excluded] but interested in considering history in general or cultural information, transport, railways, aircraft.  

The aim is to charge clients, £25-30 per day but I am prepared to negotiate if clients have a little more than their expenditure allows.  In the event of interest, I will send a CV and a questionnaire for authors to fill in where appropriate and a brief information sheet to read. The questionnaire is not too onerous but gives me some idea of interest


My contact details are as follows: - Email  lisafj50@gmail.co.uk or widget50@hotmail.com  Telephone 01449 740028   My home address is Church’s, Swingleton Green, Monks Eleigh, Suffolk. IP7 7AB

Thank you very much for your help in advance and look forward to hearing from you in the near future. 

A commercial for authors

Are you looking for someone to assist with some background research for your novels? Do you find that you do not have sufficient time to complete alll the necessary research and you would like someone to plug in the gaps? If so, I could be your answer.

However a small word of caution within reason, I do not have a scientific background and high maths leaves me cold although I can cope with perhaps layman style but I am more than happy to cover historical background facts in art, antiques, archaeology, contemporary history to name but a few on the arts side.

If any authors would like this kind of help, the cost is £25-30 per day, depending on the subject and if you would like a questionnaire and some further information, please email me at widget50@hotmail.com

Happy New Year - no mushrooms to stuff

Well hopefully those who are reading this, have recovered sufficiently from the seasonal indulgents and have tabled a list of fantastic resolutions to reform their bad habits, eating sensibly, by that I mean the right foods and not binging, booking into the local gym, doing those jobs you meant to do last year but could not face. I know we have some, jobs I mean.  How many of you by mid January have however broken those marvellous resolutions and thought 'hang it all, life is too short for all this, besides where are the mushrooms to stuff.

New Year always beckons brand new things and hopes although this morning, I felt like unplugging the radio and throwing it across the room with some doom monger fortelling the end of the world, worse still, the twat was from across the Atlantic. I threatened to write a long spiel to Chris Patten[mind you he has probably already registered my vitriol and venom with some of the programmes on off] with the moving of Countryfile from Sunday to Wednesday - why can't the powers that be within Aunty Beeb, leave things as they are. Is it to take us out of our comfort zone - the answer seems to be probably yes by all accounts. These kind of changes make me register my age perhaps but why muck around with things that people know is reliable and good viewing.  Also the repeats on repeats to say nothing of mucking about with Sherlock Holmes - which little bright spark thought that one up.  I also told him to get rid of some of the graduate dross who took courses in media[sorry 'meja' studies at university, got into the BBC, crowing what clever chaps or chappesses they are] Quite the contrary. All we seem to do, is cow tow to the masses with a load of rubbish. Has it ever crossed the BBC's minds that there is a reasonable minority of intelligent people who deserve something better?  Even if we do get something new, there is an overwhelming danger that we might faint with astonishment before we got to the epsom or smelling salts.  Yes, we are about to be treated to Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens's unfinished novel because he died before it was completed, not his fault poor chap, he did not have the advantages of today's medicine to give him another gasp of life to complete it The British population was threatened with a rise in the license fee to pay for new programmes but the great British public revolted more or less because they knew dammed well that the higher powers that be within the beeb, payed the likes of Jonathan Ross[or Woth] two million pounds that could have gone to make better programmes - good luck, ITV but watch the ratings plummet but then they have advertising to pay for their programmes thereby lies the rub to quote from the old bard's Hamlet.

So unless you are soothsayer, loaded with doom, please keep the forbodings to yourselves and let the year do as it always does and enjoy it the best we can.

Phew, CD, over for another year

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Christmas Day with my mother in our own happy quiet way but there is no getting away with it, barring one's age, that all the build up and the waiting seems to have gone on for far too long, in fact, it started to gear up in August until it reached fever pitch by the 24th December with everyone running around like headless chickens. It is small wonder that children become over excitable. Yes I was young once, really young. I am not aluding to my age deliberately although I am coming to the end of my fifties age decade so that should give some people a clue; I never wanted Christmas to really end, not just because of the excitement of the presents that one waits for with eager anticipation, but the awful knowledge too that I would be returning to boarding school after the New Year and Dad would be going back to work, sometimes even sent to sea in the New Year as he was in the Royal Navy. Now we treat Christmas Day almost on the par with Easter which oddly enough I prefer as the commericalism has not gone over the top.

Of course I enjoyed the Easter break like everyone else and if I was lucky, someone kind relative gave me an Easter egg when I was young. However, going back to the issue of Christmas, I feel now that by the time you get to Christmas Eve, one feels the desire to forget its impending approach.. I wrote my cards the week before my mother as I wanted to return to the WB course amongst other things. We had our aga cleaned out last Thursday so we could have our Christmas lunch which incidentally was a nice piece of roast pork - none of us go a bundle on turkey as we find it too dry. By the time we got through that even, none of us wanted a pudding really. In fact, it is small wonder that the manufacturers of indigestion cures, must make a mint over the Christmas period because people who are probably not used to eating vast quantities of food, find themselves feeling physically uncomfortable or have drunk too much, worse still, there is a tendency also perhaps amongst a few, to mix the grape and the grain with the alcohol. We like to enjoy the day without that feeling 'Oh heavens, I feel I have eaten too much'   Come the approach of New Year, everyone is making resolutions, one of them being silent vows to go on a diet, enrol in a local gymnasium to shed the Christmas bulk although by February with everyone back into the throes of work, the membership tails off. Also the thought of the dark evenings, to say nothing of bad weather is a major contributor. Ebay becomes the most favoured site to get rid of those unwanted gifts if it hasn't been done before on the return home from the Christmas break.  There are also the credit card bills plopping on the doormat that hails for many, that downward plummet of New Year morale because parents of offspring have spent a fortune on expensive presents for their offspring, generally trashed or broken by the second day or even proved to have been faulty, simply to assauge their guilt because they are too busy working to give them time.

Christmas in my opinion and I am sure, is a children's festival, borrowed by the Christian church from the midwinter pagan festival.  For adults, it is a pleasant break from work but a double edged sword as well.  For many relatives who have had their families, it can be one of the few opportunites to have relatives with their families but I can imagine that come the post New Year, there is a huge sigh of relief[although they would never dream of admitting as much] when they wave off their children and grandchildren for the journey home then sink back in their sitting room chairs by a log fire, if they are lucky and say to themselves,
"Phew, thank heavens that is over for another three hundred and sixty five days or so. I say 'or so' because this coming year, it will be three hundred and sixty six for it is a leap year.

To sum up, I think my real favourite times of the year are, February 2nd, Candlemas. No we do not buy fresh candles and for this period to ascertain whether it will be close to Spring, is that it must rain on the day so if you want to see the little harbingers apart from the snowdrops and the crocuses, keep your fingers tightly crossed for rain on the morning of that day. In America, it is groundhog day which is when the groundhog decides whether or not to come out of hibernation. If it remains in its burrow, then there is a bit of winter to come. Although we had the shortest day before Christmas and now it is well after four when it gets dark; according to one of our local vicars we had some years ago, he told me that after Candlemas, one really notices a difference in the extent of daylight hours so from the time we put our clocks back in October, I start counting the weeks then by the end of January, the days. It is then the progression towards Spring in March - need I say more?

So what do I think of Boxing day, well it should have another name apart from Boxing or St Stephen's Day, it should be 'Calming Down Day'

Hello, I am back in business

Well you might well be asking what I mean by this, back in business. The fact I was hacked and believe me, if you have not had this awful experience, it really knocks the stuffing out of you. I could not post emails on my old account, let alone receive them. They and I were going nowehere fast. Everything had to be overhauled, my computer had to be cleaned out and my software reinstalled.  The upside of this was my computer worked a treat. It worked faster than it had done for months.   Even better, I can print envelopes which I could not do before which makes me wonder how long this scam had been going on for and how they managed to upset everything.  The real indication of how serious it was, when the local health centre rang me, querying why I was asking for money from them from Spain, the dammed email they received, was signed with my name of all things.

Now I am looking for work I can do from home, what is more, a few days before this hell was let loose,I had a coming out session. No, don't  get the wrong idea. I am not homosexual or anything like that but I received a call from Writer's Burea. Mum took the call so when I came off and entered the kitchen, it was for want of a better word, confession time for I told her I was doing this course and to my astonishment, it transpired, she was delighted for I was using my money saved,constructively. Ten or twenty years ago, she would not have been quite so happy.  It was a huge relief so with her blessing, I am going ahead, squeezing in writing in any available gap.