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I was going to talk dialogue this week, only then I noticed the date. The last Friday of August, a tipping point for the year. The last golden breath of summer. The last week of vacation, before:

• Return to school
• Blackberry collecting
• Apple scrumping
• Hello again to socks
• Hedges gather little jewels of purple and red (haws, sloes, damsons, crabapples, all of which are abundant near me)
• Tints of yellow in the leaves
• The long poles of cow parsley have dried out

I live rurally in the fine county of Oxford and – if you have the misfortune to live anywhere else at all – my experience of late summer and early autumn will be different from yours. So, I don’t know, if you live in Australia, you probably associate this season with even more massive spiders than usual, yellow dust storms that last a month, the croc vs kangaroo Olympics, and the chatter of wallabies high up in the eucalyptuses. (Disclosure: I have never been to Australia, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the country nailed.)

Now we’re talking about time this week, but first a little announcement:

Dialogue

We’ll talk about dialogue next week, and we’ll do that via your own submissions.

Give me some chunks of dialogue to examine next week. Here are the rules:

1. Drop your offerings into the comments below this post.
2. Max 300 words per submission, please.
3. One submission per person.
4. Make sure you give us a line or two of explanation first off, so we can understand the context of your scene.
5. Don’t email me anything. If it ain’t on Townhouse, I ain’t looking at it. 
6. If you pop anything in the comments below, I'm gonna assume you're OK me RIPPING YOUR WORK APART MERCILESSLY IN PUBLIC. If you're not, then keep your tin hat on and your head below that sandbag parapet.
7. Specifically, your work and my comments on it may appear in an email to a lot of people, here on Townhouse and potentially one day in a book. If you don't want that happen, then please see above in relation to tin hats and parapets.

I only pick work that I basically like, though, so if I pick your work, you're doing OK.

Okiedoke ...

Now back to time:

Movies struggle with Big Time. They can do day to day stuff easily. We see a character going to bed. We see them eating a croissant and drinking coffee. The audience easily conjectures that this is the morning after. Boof.

But Big Time? For movies, that’s hard. The old Hitchcock era movies used to handle those things by pages flipping off a wall calendar, shots of the changing seasons. (Wind! The universal signal of autumn. Snow! The universal signal of winter. And so on.)

Now all that’s a bit crass, a bit heavy. These days, movie makers attempt something slicker, even if it’s just a caption at the bottom of the screen or a speeded-up, CGI of the wind-snow-crocuses model of passing time.

You, a novelist, don’t have the same problem. If you want to tell the reader it was two years later, you can just say “Two years passed.” That’s simple, clean narration. It doesn’t have that CGI, calendar flying clunkiness. No one will resent your simple captioning.

But time offers so much more. It’s not a problem to be dealt with, but a dimension to be embraced. Think of it like place, a silent character, a huge extra richness in your broth.

Here are some examples of how you can use it – but there are a million more. Think of these examples as mere appetite prompters.

Cold Time

Changes in weather is a technique so obvious, it could come close to a flipping calendar in terms of crassness. But it really doesn’t have to be like that. The novel of mine that made most use of the weather was Love Story, with Murders. There, I carefully seeded the earlier chunks of the book with hints of chill and forecasts of something much colder on the way.

Then, before the cold had actually arrived, my character was fussing around with giant red snow shovels and the like, but in a context where those things felt odd and out of place.

Then – the snow arrived. Canadian levels of snow and cold in a country that doesn’t normally get much of either. The snow wrought huge changes in the landscape, but also in Fiona’s life.

Alone in a remote cottage with inadequate provisions, she is forced to adapt her diet:

Make tea. There’s nothing herbal here, so I make do with a regular tea-bag. No milk either, so just brew a pint of hot, black tea in a huge pottery mug. Contrary to my usual habit, I add sugar, to take away the taste of the metallic mountain water, the strongly tannined tea. It tastes like sweetened bog-water, but is nevertheless somehow welcome. A comfort against the cold.

That’s not strictly about either weather or time, and yet it is both. By compelling us to register change, we notice both the cold and the time. And those changes register not just in feelings-of-being-chilly and making-of-log-fires, but also in unexpected ways – earthenware cups and sweet, tannined tea. Time and the cold become multidimensional: they disrupt habits, force giant earthenware cups into our hands, change the taste of tea.

And then, of course, time and the story proceed.

Fiona almost dies in the cold. And then the snow melts, and she encounters her normal landscape, post-snow with its dirty urban water and gritted streets.

Because the changes of weather were viscerally felt by the character herself, the timescape in the book also registered acutely. And the felt passage of time is so close to the actual experience of story, the reader ends up having a deeper experience than they otherwise would. It’s kind of magical, but it definitely happens.

Big Time

My Lieutenant’s Lover began a love story in St Petersburg in 1917 – separated the characters for a quarter of a century – then brought them together again in post-War Berlin.

Any love story needs to achieve the ache of longing, and there are probably more subtle techniques than the one I used. But dropping two world wars, one revolution, plenty of gulag, and a thousand miles of separation between the two characters certainly did the trick. A character only had to glance back over that past – a sentence, two sentences – for the reader to feel the scale of the loss and the longing.

And all those little markers of age – an attractive seventeen-year-old girl turning into a middle-aged Red Army sergeant – made that weight of time present on every page

Also, my choice of time and place meant that the physical world always reflected the passage of time. The Berlin of my love story was a place of rubble. The factory that had once belonged to my male protagonist was so completely bombed out that virtually nothing remained. A youth using its slim remaining shelter christened it the Nichtsfabrik, the Nothing Factory.

That book with its huge, tragic timescape, just felt big to a reader. It wasn’t (by my standards) massively long, but the love story took on an epic quality simply by virtue of the passing years – and the weight with which the readers felt those years.

Precise Time

One of my books, some time back, was struggling in its near-to-final draft. Everything that needed to be there was there. The story had no fundamental problems, but it didn’t yet have the iron hardness of something ready to print.

A couple of things fixed that book. One was just hard editing. Literally, an edit that looked for and deleted spare words, eliminated unwanted sentences. My character’s voice is always taut, even if my writing’s only at 95%. But that extra 5% brought that tautness to a line of constant tension. A glittering brightness.

But the other thing was: nailing the timeline. Figuring out if the gap between Event A and Event B was four days or five days and being explicit about it. The surprising thing about correcting that timeline was that I’d unconsciously been avoiding proper description, because I knew I was blurry about time. So if my character was out and about in central Cardiff, and I didn’t know what day of the week it was, I’d pull back from really describing the streets. A Wednesday quietness? Or a Saturday bustle? The hubbub of a rugby match at the Millennium Stadium? Or pensioners enjoying a discounted Thursday morning haircut?

The precision of timing didn’t just help my readers sort timings through in their heads. More important, it helped me. That last twist of the lens helped achieve that final, defining focus.

That book turned out a good ’un in the end.

***

That’s it from me. The blackberries are early this year, but not sweet. I think we need a day or two of sunshine. Which, oh my merry non-British friends, is something you can completely and utterly rely on in the fine county of Oxford.

Don't forget I want to see your dialogue snippets. Chuck em below. Follow them thar rules above.

I’m a crime writer, a genre famous for its gritty realism. Raymond Chandler and his important predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, took the crime novel away from Agatha Christie’s country houses – with their butlers and colonels and candlesticks – and thrust it down the mean streets of 30s and 40s America.

That transformation was wholly good for the crime novel and in the Christie vs Chandler wars, I’m Team Chandler all the way.

And yet, though the crime novel was irrevocably changed by Chandler, I’ve been a poor student of his lessons.

None of my crime novels is massively realistic and the most recent, The Deepest Grave, is a modern police procedural that concerns itself with the hunt for Arthurian relics. The book ends – massive spoiler alert – with an actual swordfight.

Chandler would have choked on his lime juice and gin cocktail at that, and at much else. But you know what? I don’t care.

I do believe in methodical research, but I also believe in imagination. In a contest between the two, imagination should always win. Or rather – to phrase the same thing more accurately – the story should always win. The story is the only thing that matters.

So take one obvious problem with the modern crime novel. Here are two simple truths:

1. Modern police services uses a wide range of specialists and a major investigation may well involve dozens of officers across a huge range of job roles.
2. Readers want stories that involve a relatively tight group of investigators. If you started to have a dozen or more significant investigators, readers would lose track, stop caring and stop reading.

How do I solve that problem? In a word: merrily.

I just toss my policing manual out of the window and have my character do what I want her to do

 A well-known crime novelist, who is also a former police officer, once started reading one of my books. Two days after she started, she contacted me. She told me that she loved my writing (and thank you for that, ma’am), but she was unable to read the book because of the gazillion procedural errors I had committed in my first fifty pages.

And – I don’t care. My readers don’t care. Indeed, even most police officers don’t care. I’ve also been told, by police officers, that my books capture the exact flavour of the police service – the rules, the hierarchy, the banter, the awkward shift of a macho culture towards something more twenty-first century in its habits.

And, whether that’s true or not, I STILL DON’T CARE.

I care about just four things: the story, the characters, the characters and the story.

Plausibility

Now, it’s also true that, in caring about my story, I need to care about my readers’ reactions. Suppose I committed some obvious howler in my opening fifty pages – let’s say I arrested a character and held them for seven days without charge. That might be plausible in some parts of the world. In modern Britain, it’s inconceivable. Any crime reader would know that. They’d bridle at the story I was trying to tell.

At the same time, my character operates best and most interestingly alone. Police forces often require officers to work in twos, because then if evidence is acquired, there are two eye-witness reports not one. So one of my constant juggling acts is to find ways to spring Fiona Griffiths away from the rules. Sometimes that’s her own rule-breaking. Sometimes it’s because a superior officer, short of resources, winks at a short-cut he or she expects not to matter too much. Sometimes, it’s simply the force of circumstance.

I need to dance along the line of reader-acceptability and story-intrigue. Both of those things matter, always.

There’s another thing too.

Detail

Detail matters. It’s often the little specks of quartz in a story that give it its dazzle. Some examples:

The custody cell / Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

Fiona, undercover, is put into a custody cell with a woman who has secrets to spill. I clicked around online to find out what those custody cells looked like and found two intriguing facts.

One, they’ve built horrible little stainless-steel units that have a sink built into the top of the toilet. That means there’s just one appliance to install and one that’s pretty much destruction-proof.

Two, UK rules require custody cells to enjoy natural sunlight, which you might think involves an actual window, except that the Cardiff custody suite has solar tubes bringing sunlight down from the roof into the depths below.

Those weird little facts that gave a feeling of utter realism to those moment in the cells. And not just realism. They brought a kind of dislocated strangeness that was utterly right for the scene.

Oil strikes / The Sons of Adam

Back when I was writing historical fiction, I wrote a story about two brothers who were involved in the oil business. One struck oil in the Middle East, in Persia as it was then known. The other struck oil on Signal Hill in California and then, later, in West Texas.

Those oil strikes weren’t really fictitious. I dug out accounts of the original strikes and kept very close to the actual facts of what happened. Oil strikes aren’t all the same and the real-life details I used – a hollow booming sound, a leak of gas, a dead goat, the violent upthrust of a genuine gusher – gave utter life and plausibility to my story.

I also told readers in my author’s note that I’d kept close to the truth, so readers had a real sense of, yes, this is how it was, this is what an oil strike felt like, back in that golden age of oil-discovery.

Detail, plausibility and the freedom to jump

I’ve talked so far about two big benefits of research – even if, like me, you are not exactly famous for the exactitude of your research.

Keeping within the bounds of plausibility – that matters. The details research can give you – those matter even more.

But I want to add a third ingredient too. The freedom to jump. Quite often, I think writers feel constrained from letting their imaginations rip, because they worry, “What if it’s just not like that? I can’t write about the Battle of the Whatever, because I don’t know if they used spears / slingshots / muskets / spiny molluscs / laser guns. Better just to skirt the issue.”

So – find out about the Battle of the Whatever. Go read a book. You’ll be able to settle the spear / slingshot / musket issue. Better still, you’ll find out that, say, a rainstorm early in the battle caused a lot of problems with wet gunpowder and you might find yourself writing interesting details about how Musketeer Jones was grappling with the problem of how to open a paper-wrapped cartridge without ruining the powder inside. Your research is giving you a springboard into the story. Actively making an entrance, not passively permitting access.

Weirdly, all this remains true if you’re writing SFF.

Andy Weir’s The Martian was a work of pure imagination – but one that depended on intense, brilliant research.

And, OK, he was limited by the chains of near-future science and technology, but suppose you were writing steampunk fiction involving the Battle of the Whatever.

Brilliant! So on the ground you have Musketeer Jones grappling with her paper-wrapped cartridges. And up above, you have two warlocks in a zeppelin, hurling spiny molluscs down from the sky. The minute, detailed realism of the former somehow rubs off on the latter. Your actual historical research is lending a baffling kind of authenticity to your warlock / zeppelin / mollusc combo. Throw in some quick Wikipedia research on spiny molluscs, and bingo! You have a scene set to sizzle, my friend.

(And hey. I just opened up a Wikipedia page on spiny mollusks and whaddaya know. Some species are cannibalistic and can eat through each other’s shells. Your scene just got better again.)

That’s it from me. Summertime calls. I am off to barbecue a mollusc.

What about you? Are you Trappist? Do you love a barbecued mollusc? Why would anyone want to bite a bullet? How can an oil strike kill a goat? Oh my, we have a lot of problems to solve, my friends. Let's get started.

This week, I had a plan. I had an actual plan for what to write to you about – a plan inspired by a publishing contract that happened to fly across my desk. (Or, OK, not fly, because those things are always overweight. It waddled. And panted. Then flopped.)

Ah well. It was a good enough plan and that email will come to you some other time. But then, into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron:

Hi Harry

Inspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey. 

It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I've truly come as a writer.

But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you've learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first?

The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.

Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth.

So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing.

Only –

Actually –

It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this:

You are many writers.
You aren’t just one.

I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write.

My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds.

And then –

Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again.

I wrote popular non-fiction.

I wrote niche non-fiction.

I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on.

And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved.

I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write.

I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.

Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual.

Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers.

And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories.

All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset.

So my answer to Cameron is simply:

Be multiple.

Find other stories, other genres, other wings.

You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. It’s not even a question of your ability to read the market. When my Fiona Griffiths series launched in the States, I had brilliant reviews from a ton of major outlets. Yay! My work was being published by the same editor who looked after Lee Child and Karin Slaughter. Yay! But my work bombed completely, because something to do with the cover or the marketing or the unknown something was wrong.

As it happened, in that instance, I just bought back the rights, and relaunched the books, very successfully, as an indie author. But that had never been the game plan.

Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans.

And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication.

And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated.

Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle.

So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night.

You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly.

My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too.

What's your experience? Have you switched genres abruptly and what did it feel like when you did? Tell us more ....

A friend of mine is a painter. He was in a grump the other day because he’d been working all morning on a new canvas, then decided the picture wasn’t going anywhere. His plan was to scrape the canvas down – scrap it, in effect – and start on something else the following day. He moaned about a morning’s wasted effort.

Well, he didn’t get much sympathy from me.

(I’ll tell you why in half a second, but the last of my triumvirate of writing books is out at the end of this month. It’s called HOW TO WRITE and – in its previous, Bloomsbury, incarnation – it got lots of nice comments from readers. We’re looking for people who would like an Advance Review Copy. The e-book will be yours totally free. Your only commitment is that you’ll leave an honest review on Amazon when we publish. More info in the PS. And here endeth the public service announcement.)

Right. Back to painting and all that.

Now, for one thing, a painter’s decision whether to commit to a project is just a much smaller deal. My buddy thought he had a good subject for a painting. He tried it out. He didn’t like it. He decided to do something different.

For a painter, that’s a day. For a novelist, that’s a year. And – especially if you rely on your writing income for a living – that’s a year you literally can’t afford.

That’s one reason why I make a big deal about elevator pitches. You just can’t afford to go bombing off on a project where the basic idea is flawed.

But also – editing.

My painter buddy can just step back from his canvas and see, at a glance, if he’s happy with it. He literally has to take one backwards step. That’s all.

A screenwriter has more of a challenge, but even so, she has only 20,000 words to deal with – an easy hour’s read.

You lot – you brutes – have work that often runs to 100,000 words or more. My first novel weighed in at 180,000 words. The final book was like a blue and gold brick. And don’t get me wrong. I love long work; I’m almost incapable of writing briefly.

But the editorial challenge is huge, even at the basic level of evaluating your own project. Instead of the painter’s simple backwards step and visual assessment, we might have to spend six hours reading the damn manuscript. And having done that, we’ve got a ton of intersecting thoughts and issues. We’ve half-forgotten our opening thoughts by the time we get to our closing ones. And the implementation phase is even more arduous than the evaluation one.

So: what to do?

The obvious answer is: you just plunge in.

Gotta problem with Character A? Dive into your 100,000 word swimming pool, find references to Character A, tweak what you need to tweak, then get out dripping and wet.

Got a plot problem with that bit after the escape from the castle? Then dive in again, tweak again, do what you have to do.

And so on. Given that you may have a whole string of editing issues to fix, that’s a lot of dives into your swimming pool – or, worse, you decide you’re going to deal with everything at once, which means you soon start drowning in word-porridge. You fix one thing but accidentally break two others, and because you can never just step back and see your manuscript at a glance, you don’t even see the breakages.

Now, any pro author ends up evolving their own methods for handling these issues. (Common elements include: washing less, drinking a lot of coffee, sleeping at weird times, forgetting about your family and developing a tic.)

But watching the magnificent Rachael Herron at the Summer Festival brought a new clarity for me.

Assuming you’ve written your first draft, here’s what she suggests you should do:

You go through your entire manuscript. You note down every scene and summarise it in a sentence. Like this:

• Jed and Tania argue
• Tania drives to her mother’s
• Arrives with mother – encounters sobbing Elinor
• Jed smashes up holiday cottage

And so on.

That exercise, for the whole book.

To make this work, it’s critical that your scene summaries are as brief as possible. A maximum of one line of text. That way, you can print off your summary of the book on two or three sheets of paper – and you can just see it. The whole damn book. The entire skeleton laid out before you.

That brevity is illuminating. Take those little bullet points above. Do you need the “Tania drives to her mother’s” scene, yes or no?

Well, OK, that depends on the story. If Tania, while driving, has thoughts / reflections / memories that shift her world a bit, so the Tania who gets out of the car is different from the one who got it, then the scene probably stays.

But not all scenes are like that. Maybe, you just wrote the scene because you thought “gotta get Tania to her mother’s” and forgot you could just write, So Tania drove over to her mother’s house, where she …

In that case, you certainly don’t need the scene – but that extraneous material only becomes obvious once you don’t have the texture of a fully-written scene to seduce you.

Rachael Herron encourages us to take things a step further. She likes you to define your theme in a phrase: ‘Family is chosen’, ‘Love wins’, ‘Heroes can be unsung.’

Now, I’m not sure my books would be happy to get reduced in that way. For me, theme is best understood more loosely. For me, it’s more like a collection of words and ideas, rich in opposites. (So underclass is a theme of my Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, for example. But that also means power is a theme, because you understand the powerless via the powerful and vice versa.)

So you can define your themes narrowly or loosely, but Rachael says you should take your skeleton outline and ask of every scene whether it somehow embodies or reflects on that theme.

If it does, then great. The scene probably belongs in the book and your editorial task is simply to make that theme as strong as it can be. So that Tania-in-a-car scene might have her grappling with her “heroes can be unsung” thoughts and memories, in which case it certainly belongs. But if the scene has no thematic resonance, you ditch it.

Or you change it.

You might, for example, need a particular character to die to advance your plot. But then how to do they die? Is their manner of death one that harmonises with the moods and melodies of the book, or not? And if not, then what might work better?

Personally, I don’t get quite as systematic as Rachael does, but I’m generally quite a messy worker, anyway. I also like my books to have some rough edges. Some elements that don’t quite fit into a system.

What I do love, though, is the absolute clarity of her approach. Your book in three pages.

I’m knee deep in my detective story at the moment. I’m at about 60,000 words and (because I never write short) I’m still a good 50,000 words from the end.

But I already know that some of my earlier text needs redoing. There’s a character, Anders, who needs to enter the story way earlier than he does.

In my pre-Rachael Herron life, I’d have just gone back and created the scene. My forward motion through my text would have been put on hold while I dealt that little episode. In Herron-world, I don’t need to do that. I just keep a skeleton log of my book as I go and enter a note or a post-it which says, “Introduce Anders here”. By the time I get to the end of my book, I’ll have a whole flapping horde of those notes, which I can just deal with one by one.

And yes, those notes will breed more notes, but that three-page skeleton will remain the iron spine running through all the editorial work I do – the organising principle.

I think that, thanks to these disciplines, I’ve just figured a midpoint sequence in my book that may yet make the whole damn thing hang together. (Think highly trained & physically capable psychos spilling out en masse across the Welsh countryside. Yum.)

That’s it from me. The children think they’ve found a coronavirus in the garden and want me to come and look at it. It’s green, apparently, and the size of a walnut.

_______

As mentioned above, we have some free e-copies of HOW TO WRITE to give away. It’s a really big writer’s guide to writing a novel, from first conception to final editing, with everything else included along the way. If you would like an advance review copy, then:

1. Please email publishing@jerichowriters.com with “HOW TO WRITE” in the subject line please
2. Please let us know if you usually shop from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or some other Amazon store. If you never shop at Amazon, then they won’t let you leave a review, I’m afraid.
3. We will send you a free e-book, which will be yours to keep.
4. Your commitment is that you will leave a review on Amazon promptly on the book’s publication at the end of this month (or, maybe, the start of Sept; we haven’t yet finalised details.) We’ll be in touch at the time to nudge you and we’ll tell you exactly how to leave a review.

We’re are especially keen to get plenty of US reviewers for this book, so if you’re based in the States, do please get in touch.