Blog | Alison Morton Author

In defence of round-robins

Oh, the sneering! Oh, the superiority! Even Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) is on BBC Radio4 broadcasting a series of witty ripostes to round-robins (RRs).

Now some RRs are painful: long-winded, which goes hand-in-hand with boring; poorly composed and/or typed; with scattered blurry photos; and produced with tight margins in tiny, coloured or weird fonts. But some gems are witty, near professional offerings, mostly photos with hilarious captions leaving you wanting more. The best ones make you grab the ‘phone or start bashing out an email to the sender immediately after reading.

In time-strapped, intense lives, the RR can reach many more people without the sender getting RSI, paying a fortune for individually printed photos or dying from exhaustion and insanity repeating the same stuff up to, and possibly beyond, a hundred times. How are RRs different from all the blog posts we chuck out indiscriminately into the digiverse?

But, like trying to avoid the slush-pile that many writers end up on, how do you write an RR that’s entertaining, informative and has that spark of something special? I’ve been sending them out for over twenty-five years, well before the time they became fashionable, so I’ve got some experience.

Keep these key points in front of you:

The recipient may only have a quick minute to scan your letter, so keep it snappy
Include lots of photos, but interesting, non-forced ones. Do not reduce them down to such a low resolution that they look like a blurry mess.
Do not witter on about Jemima’s first day at school. Most people have been to school, so have their children – we know. Just say J has started school and add a photo of her in her too large uniform.
Yes, a mention of holidays, but not a detailed description of the sangria night when you all got trollied. As above, we know this experience.
Achievements – careful does here. Of course, say that Jemima bagged a first in Icelandic or her sister passed her hairdressing apprenticeship and has secured a stylist job in a top London salon – these are great things. But don’t go on about it (Even I was reasonably restrained about the publication of my debut novel INCEPTIO on 1 March 2013. 😉 ).
What people in the family are doing now – as in the point above. A brief sentence or two is enough.
Try to inject some wit, but don’t force it.
And guess what? Edit it! An RR is like any other piece of writing and if you are sending it to recipients who are your friends and relations, they deserve the same courtesy as the rest of the reading public.
Lastly, make sure you leave a space at the end for a short, personal, handwritten message and signature.

Do you write or receive RRs? Go on, now, tell me your thoughts…

Updated 2025: Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. As a result, you’ll be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.

Grammar Nazi or dilettante?

I’m reading a book at the moment full of “prithee, varlet” language. It’s as irritating as Hades, but maybe that’s just me. The atmosphere of fear is building, the characters are forming and the plot slowly emerging.

But despite the over-elaborate language, the author’s grammar is spot on. And that’s what saves it.

Writing is a form of communication and when we structure writing correctly then our message is unambiguous, even in “prithee” language. The reader reads what we intended them to read. Even in a very minimalist-styled book such as any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, the accuracy and clarity of the writing enables the reader to see exactly what the author is saying.

If we don’t write clearly, then the poor reader has to re-read sentences and pause to work out what he or she thinks we meant. After a few jolts to continuity, it’s inevitable that the reader’s pleasure diminishes. And after too many, the reader chucks the book on the floor.

Editors can, and do, do a wonderful job, but even they get to the hair-tearing stage in the face of relentless sloppiness. If they have the choice of working on a well-written manuscript and one weighed down with mistakes, guess which one they’ll prioritise?

Poor grammar and spelling are the things that irritate readers of self-published books most, and most quickly, even in a free book. We have so much choice these days, why would we spend precious life-hours reading something that is written in a careless and sub-standard way?

However fabulous the plot, characters and narrative thrust of the story, good grammar and spelling matter.

Horrors to avoid (Any one of these makes me chuck the book on the floor.)
your/you’re
Can you say ‘you are’ instead? If so, then it’s ‘you’re’. ‘Your’ is to indicate something belonging to ‘you’, e.g. your book.
it’s/its
Can you say ‘it is’? Then it’s ‘it’s’. 😉 As with ‘your’, when used to show something that belongs to ‘it’, ‘its’ doesn’t have the abused apostrophe, e.g. “Gorgeous book. I love its cover.”
There/their
Can you say ‘here’ instead of ‘there’. e.g. ‘there are /here are’? There you are, then. Remember, ‘their’ is very possessive…
Affect/effect
‘Affect’ is an active verb. ‘Effect’ is the outcome, e.g. cause and effect. A quick way of remembering is that A comes before E, i.e. you have to affect something before you can see the effect.
‘Bored of’ or ‘bored with’?
Please don’t start me on this one. I hope you know the correct version. See me in the comments if you don’t.

Updated 2024:Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.

It's raining, it's pouring!

One of the first things we notice in the mornings is the weather. How many of those first tweets go something like this:
‘Brrr – cold as I crawl out of bed – not LOL’
‘The sun. At last. Damn, I have to go to work.’
‘DH now in garden shed building an ark. Blasted rain!’

We even report average weather:
‘Nice and sunny here, a bit overcast but OK. What are you up to today?’

Some primeval instinct drives us to orientate ourselves in the day the minute we’re awake. Cave man asked whether it was a good day for hunting, gathering or beating the crap out of the neighbouring tribe. Today, we look out of the window and wonder whether the car will start in the damp, if the heatwave will continue or the delivery person won’t appear because the snow’s too deep.

We need weather to frame our lives. And so do our characters, but not in a nice way. They need disruption.

Firstly, a writer can use weather to add weight, obstacles and trouble to a character’s dilemma. Weather can change the plot: snow falling might stop planes flying, bring down power lines, prevent a vital meeting or elopement. Prolonged, heavy rain may cause flooding, damage to vital papers, trapping a character in a cave or cellar or a beloved pet drowning.

Weather can affect a character’s mood: sun generally cheers people up and rain depresses them. Wind is well-known for, er, winding people up. Any teacher will confirm that kids become more jittery and argumentative if there’s a gale blowing outside.

And thirdly, using weather to reflect inner turmoil adds a layer to the story: character C is waiting for character D and the meeting is going to be difficult, C paces around, fidgets, keeps looking out of the window, his stomach is queasy. The wind outside is blowing rubbish down the street and the sky is getting blacker by the minute…

How to write weather
The key is to integrate weather into the story as it affects the character at that point. I write thrillers and the reason I might describe weak winter sunlight, or perish the thought, a sunset, is that the horizontal light gets into the hero’s eyes and blinds him when he’s taking a vital shot.

Some less extreme ways to introduce environmental conflict into a scene could be:

If teenagers are meeting anywhere outside on a first date, make it rain;
If a woman takes her young grandson sailing, a squall blows in;
If a man is afraid of the dark, make it a moonless night, preferably in the country, either windy or raining. Possibly both.

While weather is a vital ingredient, you only need to mention it once and the reader will set the scene themselves:

We ate quickly, ignoring the rising heat from the afternoon sun.
Next morning, it was still snowing and she’d left her boots in the car.
I wasn’t surprised to see him an hour later. He came in through the service entrance, shaking rain from his umbrella.

The reader can then take their experience of rain/snow/scorching heat and use it to ‘see’ the scene in the book. If it’s rain, some readers will imagine heavy rain, others a drizzle, but it doesn’t matter. The precise nature of the rain isn’t important – all you need to do is mention the wet stuff and the reader’s imagination will do the rest.

Drivers of the metal fish

Not steampunk, but creative imagination expanding our ideas of exploration…

Lagos, in the Algarve, was the harbour from which Prince Henry the Navigator’s maritime explorers set off in the early 1400s to discover the unknown world. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of this European Age of Discoveries during the 15th and 16th centuries, finding and mapping the coasts of Africa, Asia and Brazil.

Organised expeditions started in 1419 along West Africa’s coast, reaching the Cape of Good Hope and entering the Indian Ocean in 1488. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama led the first fleet around Africa to India, arriving in Calicut and starting a maritime route from Portugal to India. Soon, after reaching Brazil, explorations followed to southeast Asia and reached Japan in 1542.

The figures on the roof of 17th century Fort of Ponta da Bandeira which guarded the harbour entrance in Lagos seem bizarre to the modern visitor, out of keeping with the fort and certainly with the 1400s of Henry the Navigator.

But look again.

Their strange figures driving even stranger craft startle us. Perhaps they’re challenging us to look back at exploration in a different way and to think forward creatively, to explore with our minds into the future.

Have you experienced this type of creative link?

Latin, eh?

What connects a Wallsend metro station, an ATM in the Vatican City, Asterix and Wikipedia?

Latin, of course!

Originating in Italy, it was spoken in Ancient Rome and spread through the Mediterranean into much of the then known world. Although now considered a dead language, many students, scholars, and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and it is still taught in some primary, secondary and many post-secondary educational institutions around the world.

Latin is still used in the creation of new words including in English, and in biological names. Changing versions between vulgar Latin and Classical Latin, declining into a misspelled medieval form, revived and refined in the Renaissance period, it was used as the international language of communication until well into the eighteenth century.

Apart from the spells of Harry Potter et al, the mottoes of many American states and plant labels, Latin crops up today in some off-beat places.

Wallsend Metro station is the only public facility in Britain in which the signage is in Latin. This is a nod to its location near the Segedunum Roman fort at the end of Hadrian’s Wall. The station also includes a number of photographs of local shops and facilities which have been digitally altered so that their names appear in Latin.

The Vatican City is also home to the world’s only ATM that gives instructions in Latin.

Asterix is the famous cartoon character featured in the works of Uderzo and Goscinny. The comic but stouthearted Gaulish warrior is always getting one over the Romans. Not quite sure what he’d make of himself speaking Latin, especially as a legionary

Vicipaedia Latina is the Latin language edition of Wikipedia. As of November 2012, it has about 82,000 articles. Content is in Latin, but discussions are run in modern languages such as English, French, German or Spanish since many users find this easier.

Wikipedia reports, ‘Professional latinists have observed a gradual improvement in the encyclopedia: according to Robert Gurval, chairman of the UCLA classics department, “the articles that are good are in fact very good,” even though some articles by beginning students contain grammatical errors.
The Latin Wikipedia began dominated by topics from classical history, but beginning in 2006 a group of new contributors greatly expanded the coverage of 20th-century topics, such as pop culture and technology.’

Attributions:
Wallsend – Courtesy of Chris McKenna [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Vatican ATM – Courtesy of Seth Schoen [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO, and PERFIDITAS. Third in series, SUCCESSIO, is out now.