• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to footer

Dawn Brookes

Author

  • Home
  • About
  • Books
    • Rachel Prince Mysteries
    • The Rachel Prince Mysteries Box Sets
    • Carlos Jacobi
      • Body in the Woods
      • The Bradgate Park Murders
    • Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe Mysteries
    • Nursing Memoirs
      • Hurry up Nurse! Book 1
      • Hurry up Nurse 2: London calling | Book 2
      • Hurry up Nurse 3: More adventures in the life of a student nurse|Book 3
    • Audiobooks
  • Books Show
  • Contact
  • Free Book
  • Events/Courses
  • Philanthropy
  • Press
  • Rachel Prince Mysteries
    • A Cruise to Murder
    • Deadly Cruise
    • Killer Cruise
    • Dying to Cruise
    • A Christmas Cruise Murder
    • Murderous Cruise Habit
    • Honeymoon Cruise Murder
    • A Murder Mystery Cruise
    • Hazardous Cruise
    • Captain’s Dinner Cruise Murder
  • Carlos Jacobi
    • Body in the Woods
    • The Bradgate Park Murders
  • Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe Mysteries
    • Death of a Blogger
    • Murder at the Opera House
    • Murder in the Highlands
  • Nursing Memoirs
    • Hurry up Nurse! Book 1
    • Hurry up Nurse 2: London calling | Book 2
    • Hurry up Nurse 3: More adventures in the life of a student nurse|Book 3
  • The Rachel Prince Mysteries Box Sets
  • Children’s Books
    • Suki Seal & the Plastic Ring
    • Gerry the One-Eared Cat
    • Danny the Caterpillar
    • Ava & Oliver Series
      • Ava & Oliver’s Bonfire Night Adventure
      • Ava & Oliver’s Christmas Nativity Adventure
    • Miracles of Jesus Series
      • Jesus Feeds a Big Crowd!
      • Jesus heals a man on a stretcher
  • My Readers Top 20 Books Read in 2021

writing

Travel Journal 1982 Day 5

June 20, 2022

Sunday June 20th 1982

Awake at 8:30am, got up and went for a swim. We were going to sunbathe but the rains came pouring down. When it stopped we went out for a game of tennis, but it started to rain again! Temperature was still 30˚C.

Suzie’s father came around this afternoon and we spent the afternoon chatting with him and Suzie’s friends. We’ve changed our itinerary, missing out KL and going straight to Penang and on to Haadai in southern Thailand. From there we’ll go on to Bangkok and Chiang Mai then back to Bangkok and over to Sri Lanka. We can’t go to Burma as it would take too long by boat and it’s expensive to fly.

We did end up flying in and out of Burma as part of the trip.

I met Wai Yin at 5pm. We went to the Wesley Methodist Church; great service. He’s a really nice guy. I didn’t know when I met him in London that he’s a doctor!

We walked alongside the river after church and Wai Yin showed me the poorer side of Singapore. Here, people live in small huts and it’s filthy. There is a mix of religious symbols and artefacts in the bushes with traditions from Muslim and Chinese faiths. Numerous altars lined the way. Wai Yin told me people used to come to die here, though not so much nowadays.

Half-sunk barges lined the river, mostly empty, but some with sacks of rice on board. Singapore was once a small fishing village until Sir Stamford Raffles landed in 1819. He brought the British over, who colonised it. It was taken over by what was then Malaya in 1963 and gained independence in 1965.

Skyscrapers are being erected throughout the city and the cost of living is rising. There’s no law against prostitution in Singapore and STDs are kept under control through regular checkups. Sadly, most of the girls in the sex trade are aged between 16-25 with many coming from across the border as the pay is better.

After the walk we met up with J, Linda finally and her friend Bu at the Satay Club. We ate from a steamboat where you cook raw food from scratch. Over the past few days I’ve eaten octopus, cuttlefish and pigeon’s egg. I feel sick at the thought of the last one. Tonight, I drank juice from a baby coconut which tasted different from what I expected. Wai Yin insisted on paying for the meal. We’ve hardly spent any money since arriving in Singapore and I’m beginning to feel guilty about it. Everyone we’ve met has been so hospitable.

It seems I didn’t write anything down for Monday 21st June so the next entry will be on 22nd.

Travel Journal 1982 Day 4

June 19, 2022

Saturday June 19th 1982

Woke feeling shattered. Jet lag has caught up with me, awake half the night and wanting to sleep all day.

J drove Suzie’s car while the Singaporean acted as guide. We visited Tiger Balm Gardens, elaborate gardens with Chinese sculptures of wise men and buddhas. The torture chamber was a trifle gruesome with models of torture etc. A group of American’s were singing Christian choruses which was a pleasant interlude.

Posing with a Buddha
Tiger Balm Gardens

After our Tiger Balm visit we went to the Chinese Gardens in Jurong where we had lunch. There was a gorgeous lily pond and botanical plants. On the way back we picked up two of Suzie’s friends and they played Gin Rummy for a while.

I phoned a chap I had met at All Souls Church in London, Wai Yin who’s going to take me to church tomorrow and then J will join us for dinner. J and I went for another swim.

Suzie and her friends took us to Chinatown for dinner. The markets are vibrant and busy throughout the evening. We also saw fortune tellers with crystal balls, tarot cards and the like trying to attract tourists. We ate at one of the street markets. One of Suzie’s friends paid, she wouldn’t let us open our purses at all. These people are so generous. The poorer side of Chinatown was laced with shanty houses, beggars on the street and poverty.

My purchases were a set of chopsticks to take home and a t-shirt.

Linda Ho called Suzie’s at the end of the evening and has invited us to spend the afternoon and evening with her. I need to call Wai Yin early tomorrow to see if we can go to church tomorrow evening.

Travel Journal 1982 Day 2

June 17, 2022

June 17th 1982

Landed in Dubai at 04:30 local time (01:30 BST), temperature 27˚C, dawn is almost breaking, so is Dawn with swollen feet and ankles! The air stewards have been lovely to us although food comes round almost every hour as we pick up new passengers.

05:30 we’ve just been for a walk outside, now daylight and very, very hot. We’re exhausted as we haven’t had any sleep yet.

09:45 local time landed in Karachi. We’ve disembarked to change flights. There’s no such thing as queuing here, people just shove their way to the front. Stepping off the aeroplane was like stepping into an oven – 29˚C – hot with wet humidity. My skin has never felt so clammy. Flies are everywhere, no sooner do you swat them away than they’re back. Huge, dopey things, I guess I’ll have to get used to them.

We had a thorough frisking by a large, angry woman before being allowed to enter the transit lounge. We have no idea when the flight to Singapore is. All I know is we’re both extremely tired and it’s baking hot.

7pm local time we landed in Kuala Lumpar. We’re on a Boeing 707. The temperature is 30˚C: boil, boil, roast, roast. The flight from Karachi took 6 hours. I met a chap called Hamar, a student at Glasgow Polytech studying engineering. He’s come home to Malaysia for a 3 month holiday and has invited us to stay with his family when we come back. It will be interesting staying with a Muslim family.

We changed plans in Malaysia and didn’t visit Kuala Lumpar

10:30pm (3pm BST) we landed in Singapore at last – 22 hours travelling. We’ve been worrying about where we will be staying in Singapore as I’m not sure the NZ chap (friend of a friend) knows we’re coming. Once through customs, I called the number – the guy, Chris hadn’t been expecting us but told us to get a taxi and come on over!

Younes, one of the stewards chased after us and told us we could share his room at the Royal Hotel for 4 nights! We told him we’d meet him in the lobby at 12MD the next day (just in case things didn’t work out with Chris).

We got to Chris’s fully air-conditioned apartment at 11:30pm. The apartment’s in a high-rise block and is enormous. He shares with his girlfriend, Suzi. Seems we were just in time as Chris is leaving for Jakarta first thing. He works on oil rigs. He was extremely hospitable once I told him John had suggested we contact him on arrival. He handed us keys and told us to stay as long as we liked. I fell into bed at 1am.

Needless to say, we didn’t take Younes up on his kind offer

Monday 7th March 2022

March 7, 2022

I finalised events for the literature festival I chair and managed to get them all up on the website. The day pass tickets are now up for sale, so if you live near to Derby, feel free to take a look here.

I’m continuing edits on my two-thirds finished draft of Murder in the Highlands and made steady progress with it today. It’s starting to come together and I’m getting a handle on the characters and suspects, developing them at the same time.

I’ve spent a few months exploring the social media platform Tiktok and will be creating more videos for my author presence there. If you would like to follow me you can find me here.

Sunday 6th March

March 6, 2022

Work in Progress

I’m going through the editing process of Murder in the Highlands before taking the work forward. This helps me to refocus my attention and sets the stage for the final third. I’m almost two-thirds of the way through so it makes sense to do this now, making sure that what I’ve written so far is making sense. At this stage in almost every book I’ve written, I hit a brick wall and get a little bit bogged down by my internal critic. Once I come out of editing mode, I’ll be able to silence the critic and switch back into creative mode! Looking forward to that.

To be honest, I’ve been distracted by world events of late… who wouldn’t be?

Other Stuff

As it was Sunday, I tried to take some rest and get other more mundane things done around the house. I went to virtual church as I have been doing since the pandemic started. Funnily enough, I’ve been able to go to a church in London which I went to when I lived in the capital forty years ago. All Souls Church in Langham Place has been putting on virtual services throughout lockdown and is continuing to do so. I’ve enjoyed returning to somewhere that seems familiar in spite of the number of years that have elapsed since I last went there physically.

Literature Festival

In 2018, I founded a literature festival which I now chair. I spent the morning creating and adding the final few graphics for events to the website and put the day pass tickets on sale. Tomorrow, I’ll need to read through some guest blog posts for the site.

I love doing the festival but while it was cancelled for two years during the pandemic, I’d forgotten just how time consuming it can be.

Cozy Mystery Writing Conventions

October 16, 2020

Genre Fiction

I’m a mystery writer with my fiction falling into the cozy/cosy crime niche. I’ve now published seven books in one series with an eighth on the way. Cosy mysteries and the majority of detective novels fall into the category of writing known as genre fiction and on the whole, follow a defined set of conventions.

Agatha Christie Monument

These conventions/rules developed out of the Golden Age of Crime novels. Authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie created the widely recognised genre. The cosy mystery has evolved over the past few decades as new writers attempt to stretch boundaries, although many still adhere to the Decalogue or ten commandments described by Knox in 1929. 

Escapist Literature

I admit to being challenged by proponents of literary fiction and literary debate such as Albert Camus, but I prefer to write books to enable people to escape from the reality of life. This is one of the reasons I write books where the criminal is always found and justice is served. The popularity of genre fiction could highlight the need for people to feel safe while – at least in terms of crime fiction – being given the opportunity to experience vicarious excitement. The excitement comes through readers exercising their brains to solve the puzzle, working alongside the sleuth. 

As a former nurse, I studied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs in great detail. He described the need to feel safe in the hierarchy. He postulated human beings needed to satisfy certain needs in order to grow, mentally and physically. Maslow’s definition of safety was more about protection from external elements. Such safety requires a person to have shelter and security of body and mind; order in the world outside; laws that reinforced safety; stability in work and finance and freedom from fear.

Escapist literature does help people to remove themselves from the harsh realities of the world for a time. 

Writing within Genre Conventions

A major challenge with formula writing is that of staying within genre constraints while adding enough variation to make the work unique and interesting. Lethem, (2007) argues that no work is completely original and Eliot (1920) stated that ‘mature poets steal’. King Solomon complains even in Biblical times that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9). 

Genre Conventions

When a reader sits down to read a book based on a formula they are familiar with such as a crime novel. They and the writer will have been influenced by previous books. Julia Kristeva called such a relationship within the academic world, intertextuality but the same applies to reading and writing formula fiction. The reader expects to find new layers within each novel, without which, they will feel dissatisfied. 

Genre, or formula writing doesn’t claim complete originality but there still needs to be something different about each work to keep it interesting. Bloom (1997) suggests that authors can be original although his text spends a lot of space arguing why it might not be.

Opponents of Formula Fiction

Stories falling within formulaic modes are commonly defined by those who oppose such literature as ‘sub-literate (as opposed to literature), entertainment (as opposed to serious literature), popular art (as opposed to fine art), lowbrow culture (as opposed to highbrow)…’ (Cawelti).

Describing formula writing in this way denigrates its artistic ability to fulfil a need within the human being to find pleasure through reading such works, and denies its own purpose and justification. 

Pacing

One of the main issues authors have with writing genre fiction – or any fiction for that matter – is pacing. 

Cosy mysteries tend to be written at a meandering pace where the plot unfolds gradually in an enclosed space, for example an English country village or, in my case, on board a cruise ship. 

Some crime fiction is written in this style but suspense thrillers generally require more tension. Writing the first Carlos Jacobi mystery has involved a change of pacing for me as a writer. I’ve had to think about phrasing and creating hooks at the beginning of the work. On reflection, this applies to all fiction and all writers improve over time.

New Series: Carlos Jacobi PI

For me, opting to remain true to crime fiction, but attempting to write a grittier series has been a new experience. Many people believe that the original detective fiction novel formula began with Edgar Allen Poe.

Carlos Jacobi PI

In Body in the Woods, there is one character (brother-in-law of protagonist) who is deliberately long-winded as he is the sort of person who goes into the minutiae of detail even in normal conversation. He is a scientist and a bit of an anorak. My challenge was, how to incorporate these characteristics into the story so that the reader understands his long-windedness is deliberate. I wanted the reader to be able to relate to this person as someone they might know in real-life. 

Valuing Genre Fiction

With my new series – although more gritty than the Rachel Prince Mysteries – I’ve remained true to my ethical stance as a writer that not all crime fiction needs to be gory. Neither does it have to include bad language nor explicit sex. I believe the challenge for me as an author is to create page-turning work without the use of sensationalist shock value. There is as much room in the market for clean crime today as there was when the forerunners of cozy crime penned their works.

Cawelti’s work has had the most profound influence on me as a writer in that it has reinforced my belief that writing genre fiction is just as valuable as writing literary fiction. He argues that formula literature (which crime fiction fits into) has a cultural value and I believe such literature fulfils an important function in human psychology. 

What about you?

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

GET IN TOUCH

Contact

 

Connect With Me

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Follow Me on Bookbub

Dawn Brookes

Affiliate Links

Dawn Brookes is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to generate an income stream by including affiliate links to Amazon. If anyone orders a product after visiting Amazon via one of these links, the affiliate receives a small referral fee from Amazon. Links to the Alliance of Independent Authors membership website also include an affiliate code.

My Book Progress

Treacherous Cruise Flirtation
Phase:Writing
83.3%

Follow/Like me on Facebook

Privacy

Privacy Policy

Join Alliance of Independent Authors

Alliance of Independent Authors /

Copyright © 2023 · Dawn Brookes All rights reserved

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
SAVE & ACCEPT