How good is my sequel?
- Attfield Dutt
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
It’s a busy week – a funeral, a hospital appointment, Scottish dancing, a carol service in Llandaff Cathedral, a meal out to celebrate three family birthdays… But to speed me on my way, I’ve just had another five-star ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review for my short stories FRESH BEGINNINGS.
It has made me think seriously about what I’m working on at the moment, which is a sequel taking the characters from my earlier novel A DISTANT VOICE IN THE DARKNESS twenty years into the future, ending around now I think.
I’m encouraged of course by this new reviewer liking the sheer variety of the short stories – he sees a mixture of humour, poignancy and human warmth. He enjoyed the many different styles, but found an emotional depth in all of them.
It is indeed a crazy mix; you see, when the publisher invited me to submit a collection, I rooted around and sent her everything I’d had lying around on the computer for some while.
There’s two Time Travel stories (though that has sometimes been too subtle for reviewers to grasp). Some earlier reviewers complain that one story is meant for children because it involves Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. Two stories are just about as silly as I could make them, though they seem to have entertained a good many folk.
Two of the serious stories involve outsiders who are not always accepted in countries that have been at war. Two other stories are about grandmothers who lose touch with their grandchildren – and I was touched when this current reviewer wrote that one of my characters reminded him of his Nan who had died in 2021; you can’t ask for more than that in a review, can you?
What has made me think in this review is his comment that I construct a whole world for him by brief bits of back story about a character, so that he feels immersed in each short tale. But surely writing a novel is different and harder? As I write a sequel to my novel, it’s temptingly easy to tell the back stories because there are many significant events in the existing novel that I can easily recount – tabloid speculations which destroy a marriage, despair that drives someone to buy up old crockery just to chuck it at the wall, a roadblock during an armed coup in Lesotho where a driver is shot, all these I have already recalled: but do they fit?
Indeed do my different styles in short story telling fit in a novel, which is surely meant to be a whole?
But I can’t finish without quoting the end of this man’s review: ‘…I believe Dutt is an underrated author who deserves more recognition, and I will be recommending this book to friends.’ Underrated, eh?
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