charles barrow's writing

I've talked about 'Victober 'on here before, though to my surprise I find it was back in 2022. It's a BookTube event that takes place during the month of October, when readers are encouraged to read a book published by a UK author in the Victorian era - during the reign of Queen Victoria 1837-1901. The last time I took part in this challenge, or at least the last time I wrote about it on my blog was in October 2022. That year I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This year I will be choosing one of the books from the stack pictured below. Sorry the photo is a little murky and the book titles a little hard to read, but the books pictured (from bottom to top) are: Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle. Last time I took part in this challenge I didn't follow the letter of the rules and I may not ...

As mentioned in early September, October is all about Victorian literature. In a theme tagged #VicTober on Youtube, where I first learned of it, readers are encouraged to read books written during the Victorian period - 1819-1901 if you wanna get pedantic. Furthermore it has to be by an English writer. BookTubers are reading Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge as a group read, but I decided to skip over that as I read a Hardy recently (Under The Greenwood Tree), and had my heart set on reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte instead. I thought I must have read this book before, at school maybe, but no. I didn't recognise large swathes of the story. I definitely knew that I'd seen a film or TV adaptation because I remembered a crucial, very cinematic, plot point that comes right near the end. Anyways, I enjoyed it. It was slow going at times, as classic novels can be. Some of the language is overly flowery - why use one word when you can use ten. Some of the religious and...

Traditionally, a  drabble  is a piece of fiction that is exactly 100  words long . Thank you Google. I was completely unaware that a drabble was a thing, especially a fiction writing thing. I'd heard of flash-fiction, and micro-fiction to describe short pieces, but not a drabble. Until, that is, I happened upon a Blogger blog, 101fiction, entirely dedicated to the drabble. They run a monthly drabble writing competition - t he prize is publication in their download magazine. They ask for stories of 100 words, and t hey allow only a one word title, hence the 101 of 101fiction, and they set a different theme each month, this month it's Invention . The whole idea intrigued me. I've never tried writing such a short piece of fiction before, and there was something about that title of Invention that was a great writing prompt for me. So, for that past week I've been writing a drabble. I've really enjoyed the process, the constraints that such a small word limit impose...