BOOK LAUNCH

Well, This Is Exciting — The End Of A Long Journey Is In Sight

Three Decades Looking For Jam Sponge Then Finding Marmite!

Penny Grubb
ILLUMINATION
Published in
4 min readJul 4, 2023

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Cover reproduced with permission of Fantastic Books Publishing

Thirty years ago, a story thread came to me. It caught my imagination but I couldn’t work out how to write it. I wasn’t very good at structuring a story back then, but an idea came to me about how to do it.

Problem: I hadn’t learned to distinguish the good from the bad in the area of writing ideas, and it was a bad one that had swooped in from the left field.

I wanted to write a book entirely composed of documents — letters, reports, official transcripts, that sort of thing. Why I wanted to do that is lost in the fog, but I wonder if I had recently read something written that way that had particularly taken my fancy. If so, I’ve forgotten what it was, but I’ve enjoyed epistolary novels for as long as I’ve been able to read. Who remembers Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs?

Ok, my wish to write an epistolary novel wasn’t an intrinsically bad idea in itself, but it was wholly at odds with the story thread I had in mind. At the time, I didn’t see that. It was as though I’d decided to make a jam sponge cake, then remembered the steak-and-kidney pudding that needed using up, and had combined the two.

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Penny Grubb
ILLUMINATION

An award-winning crime novelist & long-time amateur poultry keeper, who specialised in teaching methods, healthcare & software engineering as an academic.