RichardB

@alanr – just saw that I basically suggested the same as you!

I keep coming back to the words enmeshing/unmeshing. For me that feels really evocative of family tendrils, the way the brain works (especially in cases of forming, breaking and reforming connections). – it makes me think of a web and a net and a loosening of patterns. Don’t know how you might use it but I love that word!
Enmeshing Seven /…[Read more]

I like that way of putting it. Helpful.

I haven’t seen ‘Downsizing’ but it sounds like a film that is a bit overloaded with ideas and ends up getting lost among them.

Thanks Richard. I will.

Oh my goodness, guys, what great suggestions! I will check out those links too.

@Squidge, I’d love to take a look at your exercise if you can send it?

The focus for the book is about whether and how a family can truly reconcile after such a trauma, and what level of culpability a family must ultimately shoulder. Much time in the book is spent in…[Read more]

You talk about bonds and use the term ‘enmeshed’ so I’m going for The Untangling.

I like the ‘Here Ends…’, but what to say is ending.

…the Seven Years of Pain
…the Seven Years of Separation.
Why not something like Seven Years Apart or The seven years of separation. The End Begins Here…? Just playing now!

I also wonder if some of the other themes are more relevant to the title? There are an awful lot of themes going…[Read more]

Interesting one. Titles can be hard. Sometimes a really perfect one will just present itself. Other times…

I was looking, as I’m sure you have, at a thesaurus to see if it was possible to simply replace ‘abduction’. The best I could do was ‘Here Ends the Absence’, or possibly ‘Here Ends the Departure’ which I’m not sure really does it.

During the abduction, she believed her family had abandoned her. Now that she has returned, she doesn’t know whom to trust, or where her “real” home is. She clings to cousin Jess, she mistrusts the adults, in the end she turns on her cousin too (bit of an all-is-lost moment there, before the end).

Yes, abducted aged 8, now 15. She grew up enmeshed with her cousin – they were like twins in a fairy-tale. She is blonde, her cousin brunette. Otherwise, an unstable childhood; her biological dad is estranged. Brought up by her step-dad since aged 4, and has twin half-brothers (now aged 7).

Same moment. Same reaction, Sea!

Felt the pressure building up as I read and the dam burst at this line ‘Within twenty four hours enough people from Mousehole had volunteered to form a new crew…’Not a good look when you’re in the restaurant car park waiting for your sister.

Seriously, there are no other group of people who earn this much of my respect.

This is fascinating and poignant. All the more so as we have regular guests who stayed around a fortnight ago and took their friend over to Mousehole, as close as they could to the site of the Penlee disaster. The coastal pathway is overgrown now and their friend is unable to walk well, so they didn’t reach the site.

To cut a long story short -…[Read more]

Another possibility is that the waves were so big that in a trough the Solomon Brown literally hit the seabed. If I’m ever up Whitby way I’ll definitely see about a ride on their Watson lifeboat.

There’s a decent collection of historic lifeboats at the dockyard at Chatham. I’ve a feeling they have a couple of Watson-type boats there but it seems…[Read more]