Ann Burnett

Missing Photos

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Those of you who have bought A Last Journey on Amazon are missing the photos which are in the printed book available from Lumphanan Press. So I thought I’d put up a selection of them for you to see. Here are some from visits to the USA in the 70s.

Bill outside the White House main entrance

Me watching Teddy Kennedy giving an interview on the Capitol Steps.

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Inuit Children in Kotzebue, Alaska, situated above the Arctic Circle

The slides are now so old that they are not as bright or as clear as they were when they were taken in the early 70’s.

Ann Burnett’s Memoir ‘A Last Journey’ Unveiled

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Award winning writer Ann Burnett is releasing her memoir A Last Journey, at the Festival Theatre on October 15th 2024.

Age Scotland have given Ann an award towards its publication.

This is a touching, funny and moving story of Ann and her husband Bill’s life together before Lewy Body dementia took him over, and her struggles to look after him until his death.

Dementia. It wasn’t what the couple expected at all. They had ‘imagined themselves doddering along till their eighties’ but dementia had other ideas.

Inveterate travellers, living abroad and experiencing life in different countries, they suddenly became confined to their home because of dementia and lockdown  

It’s Coming Soon…..

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I’ve written a book. A memoir all about the last few years when instead of writing I became a carer for my husband Bill. He was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia in March 2019 and died in March 2022. Only three years it took for that terrible disease to kill him.

I stopped writing during those years. I had neither the time or the energy to do it. My life was subsumed into caring for Bill. I tried to get as much help for us as I could so I joined Dementia Research. A student contacted me looking for people she could talk to about having carers in the home so for six months I had sessions over Zoom when she asked me about how things were going. I talked. And talked. She recorded our sessions, transcribed them and sent them to me after she had completed her research.

I also wanted the professionals who were dealing with Bill to be aware of the person he’d been, and not to regard him as just a poor old soul so I wrote a brief summary of all the things he’d done, his sporting achievements, the countries we’d lived in and the sights and experiences we’d had as a family and made sure there were copies of it in all his medical files.

After Bill died, I read the student’s transcripts over and realised how much I had forgotten about those terrible days. I wanted to recall other aspects so I started jotting down brief paragraphs about trying to find food that he could eat, about the sheer exhaustion of it all and what it did to me, about the carers who came to help, about the guilt and the sadness and the laughs. Yes, we even managed to laugh at times.

Then there were the diaries of our travels that I found when I was clearing out, the letters I’d sent home, the articles I’d written for an online site dealing with countries to see and visit. A tremendous amount of material and the only thing to do with it was to shape it into a book.

It took me over a year and many tears and much frustration but it’s now finished. Hopefully it will be published in the autumn.

Can’t wait to share it with you!

Books to Buy for the Holidays

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This is shameless advertising but how else can I tell you about what’s on offer? Big publishers have budgets for promotion and advertising and events and giveaways but us lowly authors (and that’s most of us in the writing game) have to do it all ourselves.

So, to paraphrase that old rhyme,

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat

Please put a penny in the poor writer’s hat

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do

Please buy a book by me and  God bless you!

 

So what have I to tempt you to buy?

Contemporary ebook romances

Love Begins at 40

LoveBeginsAt40byAnnBurnett200

Set in Largs, a small Scottish seaside resort, it tells the story of Maisie, a successful businesswoman approaching her 40th birthday and wondering what’s missing from her life. Will she find it in the quiet town of Largs or is Glasgow a better bet? Is James the answer or is Lenny?

Festival Fireworks  FestivalFireworksbyAnnBurnett200

Young Aussie lass Jill arrives in Edinburgh in Festival time, keen to explore the city and the country. But her next door neighbour, Andrew, seems set on spoiling her plans, especially when she discovers he’s also her boss. Can she still achieve her goals despite Mr Bossy, as she calls him, apparently out to thwart them?

Memoir

A Scottish Childhood; Growing up a Baby Boomer book cover2

My father, a keen amateur photographer, took loads of photos of us as children. I’ve collected the articles I wrote for the late, lamented magazine, Scottish Memories, on growing up after the Second World War and put them together as a snapshot of life in the West of Scotland in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Writing for Children

A Drop of Rainbow Magic 9780955854057

This is a collection of stimulating and vivid stories and poems originally written for the BBC children’s programmes, but with a difference. The children, themselves, are the illustrators. There are pages for them to do their own drawings of what happens in the stories. It’s so important nowadays to give children the opportunity to develop their own imaginations rather than have it fed by computer games, TV and animations.

Short Stories

Take  Leaf Out of My Book leaf-cover-09-16

A selection of prize-winning short stories which illustrate my tagline ‘writer of many things’. From a war-torn country to a city in the near future trying to survive economic disaster, to an inept Glasgow private eye, and a fantasy concerning Scotland’s Robert Burns and a determined fan in a pleated skirt, there’s something for everybody in this eclectic mix.

So buy a book and make everybody happy this Christmas!

 

 

 

Publication Day

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It’s exciting when Publication Day arrives. After weeks, months, even years of hard work the great day comes at last and The Book is finally out there! Will it sell? Will the reviewers like it? Where will it be on Amazon rankings?

The important thing for an author to remember is that people’s tastes differ – fortunately – as what one person loves in a book, another hates. And I’m the same. Some books I devour with a great deal of pleasure, others I give up on after only a few pages. So some reviewers will give it a resounding 5 stars while others, more circumspect, award 3 or 4 and there’s always some idiot that you’ll vow to hate for life who hands out a measly singleton.

So what of Love Begins at 40? It’s about Maisie, approaching her fortieth birthday with some trepidation. She’s a successful businesswoman in Glasgow, who, in order to have better life-work balance, buys a holiday flat in Largs, a seaside resort on the west coast of Scotland. There she meets James dealing with his own difficulties in life. But they are attracted to each other. Can they overcome their problems, make some hard decisions and end up happily ever after?

Read it and see!

LoveBeginsAt40byAnnBurnett200

Tirgearr Half-Price Sale

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July is the month when Tirgearr Publishing has its summer/winter sale – summer in the northern hemisphere, winter down under.

All their books are available at half-price by using the code given here:Summer-Winter sale with Tirgearr Publishing 2018

Festival Fireworks is available so don’t miss out on your chance to buy it!

FestivalFireworksbyAnnBurnett500

Something to Tempt You into Reading…

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A little bit from my latest novel, Festival Fireworks…..

‘And you are interested in the ballet?’ His blue eyes were large and staring right into hers.

‘I don’t know very much about it.’ She wasn’t going to admit that the only ballet she’d ever seen was on TV, and that as a child, she’d eschewed ballet lessons in favour of tennis coaching. ‘Are you one of the dancers?’

‘Yes, I am Grigor Lutsenko. I am principal male dancer.’

Crikes! That blew her cover. Now Jill realised that he would know she knew nothing about ballet, and worse, hadn’t even seen one of the troupe’s performances. ‘I’ve only just arrived over here. I haven’t had a chance to see much of the Festival.’

‘I am sorry that you not see me dance. I think that you would like me.’

‘I like you very much already,’ Jill said, raising her glass of whisky to him. ‘What a pity you’re leaving tomorrow.’

They shared a smile. ‘A great pity,’ he purred. ‘What is it that you do? For work, I mean?’

‘I work for Andrew MacCallum-Blair, you know, the guy who’s organised this bash.’

‘This what you say?’ 

‘Bash. Get-together. Reception.’

‘Ah yes.’ The puzzled look on Grigor’s face was replaced by that enchanting grin. ‘This Andrew, he is your boss?’

‘Yes, there he is over there.’ She raised her hand to point to him through the crowd just in time to see Andrew glare back at her. Oh dear, what was she doing that he didn’t like?

Grigor caught the look, too. ‘He is not pleased that you talk to me,’ he said. ‘He is your lover?’

‘Certainly not!’ The words exploded from Jill. She would have said more but bit her tongue just in time.

‘That is good,’ said Grigor. ‘Then perhaps you like to be my lover? We have tonight, you know. I don’t leave till eleven hundred hours tomorrow. We have good evening together, and I show you the Ukrainian way of make love.’

‘Thank you, Grigor,’ Jill answered, trying not to blush or giggle. He certainly didn’t believe in wasting time. ‘Another time perhaps. When I come to the Ukraine.’ Not that she had any intention of so doing, but she was trying to let him down as gracefully as she could.

 ‘Everything going ok?’ Suddenly, Andrew was standing beside her. She hadn’t noticed his approach. A shiver tingled its way down her spine and settled in her stomach, where it transformed itself into butterflies playing leapfrog.

‘Yes, fine.’ She gripped her whisky glass more tightly to stop her hand from trembling. At that moment, one of Edinburgh’s finest dowager ladies hooked her hand through Grigor’s arm and led him off to another group. Grigor turned as she dragged him away and shrugged his shoulders at Jill. Another time, another place was the message she took from the gesture. 

To read what happens next, why not buy Festival Fireworks here?

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