Vibrant Imaginative People

October 2023, Issue No.21

Your VIP Newsletter from Soulla's Writing Room

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Hello my VIP and welcome to your October newsletter!

These past few weeks and the start of this new month have just been full, full, full of many highs and some wonderfully inspiring and serendipitous moments. (More to follow, so please read on)

Wow! Honestly, it feels so good to be able to share some of my good news with you especially after how unwell I was when I sent out my last newsletter.

How are you? What’s October been like for you so far?

This selfie (not the greatest) was taken at the Frameless Exhibition in London last weekend. If you get a chance to go, I'm sure you will enjoy the magic of the interactive art as much as I did. Some of the world's most famous artwork coming alive around you with some beautiful music too really is an experience you won't want to miss.

Doreen S., the winner of my competition to guess the colour of my new book cover has been in touch to tell me how happy she is to have won. She told me that on the day she guessed the colour she had woken up early and had watched the sun rise from her balcony in Portugal. ‘The yellow glow was beautiful,’ she wrote, and I just love how the dawn of a new day inspired her guess. And this brings me to my next piece of news…

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Counting Down… 9 Days to Go

A Palette of Magpies has nine days to go before it is out in the world being read by beautiful people like you, your friends, your relations, your colleagues, and neighbours. Your support has been hugely encouraging and I want to say a BIG thank you to each and every one of you who has already pre-downloaded or pre-ordered the book.

And for those of you still thinking about it there’s a 0.99p /0.99c offer up until the day before its release and here’s a little excerpt for those of you who still need another little nudge of persuasion…

"... ‘No post mark or stamp,’ she said to herself. She tightened her gaping bathrobe around her and swiping the pale blue card from the horsehair mat had disappeared into the warmth of the kitchen at Chrysanthemum Cottage.

“One for Sorrow” it simply said. And a tiny hand-painted magpie adorned the bottom left-hand corner of the note. A grey cloud poured down onto the magpie as he perched all alone, on a tree stump, its head bowed in sadness as if disappointment tugged at his jawline. Nothing else. No signature. No message. No hint as to who it might be from, yet despite her initial irritability a warm, calming tingle shot through her. Nothing sinister, nothing to be alarmed about.

She wondered whether her best friend, Louise, across the lane, always twitching behind the frilly curtains of Wisteria Cottage, may have seen anyone, seen anything. She would drop the question into the conversation, casually, as they took their customary morning walk around the village after breakfast, though Louise was prone to getting excited.

The brass kettle, old and tarnished, whistled on the stove; one of the few items she had kept when she inherited the cottage after her parents died. The whistle brought back a faint memory of her father drinking his daily cup of tea, after work, while Judith fussed around him with her schoolbooks open on the floor, pens and pencils rolling under his seat as she chatted about her school day. Her mother was rarely interested in hearing about her lessons, but her father was always ready with a keen ear.

‘Forgot the kettle,’ she said and, with her hand to her chest, ran to lift it off the burner. ‘One for me and one for the pot,’ she said out loud, throwing two teabags into the teapot.                    

Her morning ritual had not changed much over the past few years despite having lived in many different places; it was the one constant she held onto, her anchor to normality, to staying sane, to remaining buoyant. She took the saucepan off the range, her one egg bobbing furiously in the boiling water. She spooned it into her chicken-shaped egg cup ̶ another childhood item she had rescued ̶ and with her one slice of toast on a floral-edged plate she sat at the table.

She scraped butter onto the toasted bread and cut it into five soldiers. ‘You can’t beat a good hearty breakfast,’ she said to Jasper, her elderly cat, who, following the trajectory of the sun, had moved from his favourite warm spot in the kitchen to another outside the open back door. So fat was he now he rarely wandered much further than the first couple of yards into the garden, often lying in the suntrap of the south-facing plot for hours at a time. Jasper didn’t even jump up at the birds anymore: blackbirds, finches, robins, and tits tentatively edged towards him, and he would lie like a bronze statue, unmoved. It was as if he had taken Judith’s lead and, much like his owner, had resigned himself to a slower pace of life. At least that had been Judith’s unimaginably boring retirement until the cards began to arrive. And though at first discombobulating, thank goodness they had..."

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Autumn Quotes

Do you like quotes? What is your favourite quote?

If you’re anything like me, you might have little quotes scattered around or hidden in the most unlikely places ready to surprise you and your family. I have quotes pinned to my fridge, the mirror at the top of the stairs, the corner of a picture which hangs in the main bathroom, the kitchen door (which is always open because the door is so old and warped it won’t close) as well as in my diary, my notebooks and a dozen other places. I use quotes to encourage and inspire, to cheer myself up, to share love and happiness and to tell people I miss them and I am thinking of them.

So I want to share my love of quotes with you and have created a free printable download of four quotes which you can print at home and put up somewhere as a little reminder of how beautiful autumn is or cut up and pass onto friends and family as little mementoes with your own personal note written on the back. I hope you enjoy them.

Please pictures of how you use these with me! I'd love to see them in your home and place of work.

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Beautiful words, inspired curiosity, active learning

Autumn is a time of transformation, of endings and beginnings and I love how the evenings are closing in earlier and earlier giving me more time to spend at home and take some time to learn from another author.

I signed up for a wonderful writing course - it popped up quite by chance on one of my social media feeds -- and it is absolutely one of the most beautiful courses I have ever taken. It is soft and gentle, and Cristina Lopez Barrio shares her own inspiration and processes with such meandering clarity.

I feel really connected to her and her writing and I am learning a lot about my own process and how I can further improve my own writing and make sure I write in a way that I really want to; no holding back, no worrying what others will think, digging deeper so that I am writing from my soul and a place of truth which I have always tried to do… in fact writing first and foremost for myself and as if no on eels is going to read my words. I am facing my fears, rejoicing in my desires, and learning to incorporate those aspects of me into my writing. This serendipitous crossing with her work has made me SO happy!

Are you learning anything new this autumn? I'd love to hear about your interests.

If you would like to start writing or have an idea for a story you would like to tell, then why not book a fifteen-minute call with me to see how I can help you bring your dream into the real world as a solid, finished story you can share with readers. There is always someone out there who is waiting to read your story. 

And there's another serendipitous moment I would like to share with you too! So please read on...

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VIP Member Spotlight

With the sad news of fighting closer to home between Israel and Palestine, I feel particularly blessed to have taken part in a wonderful festival which celebrated the bicommunity of Cyprus and which introduced me to many new readers, new fellow authors and many new people who love Cyprus just as much as I do.

I arrived at the festival, in the Cypriot Community Centre in North London, to find a big smile and warm hug waiting for me from a man I had never met before, a Cypriot author, Akin Yilmaz who had already set up his table with his books.

Akin was born in London to parents who emigrated from Cyprus in the 1960s. He trained as an accountant after leaving school and has an MA in Psychology. Akin is currently Director of Finance and hiss voluntary roles include being Company Secretary of Enfield Town Football Club and a Governor at Enfield Grammar School. He is married to Binnur, and they have three children.

Not surprising, his book, Under the Orange Trees, is an account of how the troubled history of 1950s Cyprus impacted his family; not too dissimilar to that of my own family’s story of leaving Cyprus to start again in London. I instantly felt a bond with this man and her even signed and gifted one of his books to me. (I would have done the same but I sold out!) So it is with great joy he agreed to be in this month’s VIP Member Spotlight.

Here's a short excerpt from Akin's book which I hope you will enjoy!

"Village weddings were usually a three-day affair. It was Thursday and in Arodes Ferdi’s bride to be, Zehra, was preparing to have her hands covered in henna. The powdered form of henna comes from the plant known as Lawsonia inermis and is made into paste before being applied on the skin. Zehra first put on her white dress, before she laid the palms of her hands down on the table. Zehra’s aunt firstly cleaned Zehra’s hands and arms with warm water that had been heated over the fire stove. The henna was then applied to the palms of Zehra’s hands, before an old lady uttered blessings in Arabic. Zehra’s mother came into the bedroom and kissed her daughter, and a few seconds later a blast of sound came from outside. Zehra opened the window to see two men playing the duval and zurna."

I have started reading Under the Orange Trees and the echoes of a Cyprus and its people in turmoil is evident on the pages... I hope you'll have a read too.

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It's been lovely having you here, sharing my news and I hope to hear from you too. Let me know what you've been up to and what you enjoyed about this issue.

As always, huge thanks for reading and hope to see you soon.

With lots of love

Soulla x

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