Dutch Blitz + book adaptations+ Simone Biles

Aug 8, 2021

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May I recommend

Dutch Blitz.

Did you ever sit on a creaky cottage floor, your arms lightly sunburned, your left knee scabbed over from a tag-related fall, your hair still wet from the lake and your entire focus zeroed in on the array of cards in front of you, as your desperately… DESPERATELY tried to beat your older brother at the fast moving card game, Spit?

Yes?

Did you love that feeling of slight panic, as you rapidly laid the cards down on their piles, constantly scanning the deck in front of you so that you could gloriously put the last card down and triumphantly shout “SPIT!”

Well, you will love Dutch Blitz, because it’s pretty much Spit, but more complicated and up to four people can play.

It takes a while to figure it out, so don’t despair if the first couple of rounds are a bit muddled. As with most things, if you persist, you will crack it. One of the glories of Dutch Blitz is that one game only takes about 5 minutes to play, so it’s not a Risk/Catan level of time investment, but trust me, you can play multiple, multiple games.

Throughout the Pandemic Winter of 2020 we had a Sunday night ritual of Blitzing. Our cards are thin and frayed from the amount we’ve played. Andrew and Violet are better than me (infuriating). Andrew has a strategy that is actually pretty smart, but I get too panicked and confused by my own competitiveness to apply it regularly. Violet’s small hands and cunning tween brain make her a formidable foe.

Have I sometimes wondered aloud about the sexism of the Dutch Girl/Dutch Boy imagery on the cards or the subliminal reinforcement of colonial values present in the strict segregation of colours? Yes, I have. Is that why I lose all of the time? Probably. Does it make me irritating? Undoubtedly.

What cottage games do you love? Tell me in the comments below!

How TV adaptations are changing publishing

The Rise of Must Read TV

I clicked on this article lickedy split because my publisher, Keylight Imprints, was founded with the express purpose of finding and publishing content that had a shot at screen adaptation. This means that my book has a (very very very thin) chance of getting adapted to the screen, which is obviously beyond thrilling.

Television adaptations are influencing every stage of a book’s life, including how it’s acquired in the first place. Scouts from networks and streaming services are talking more and more with publishers about big- and small-screen options at earlier stages of negotiations, in many cases before the ink on a book deal is even dry. Production companies such as Anonymous Content are bringing publishing-industry veterans on staff, and agencies and scouting firms are hiring specialists in literary development.

Again, not a fan of the Olympics, but this was satisfying

Are you allowed to criticize Simone Biles?

I love a decision tree, and this has an excellent payoff.

English is weird, yo

Typos Tricks and misprints

I do like these deep dives into the quirkiness of English

English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ (bread, head, wealth, feather). Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ (break, steak, great). Oh wait, one more… there’s earth. No wait, there’s also heart.

Inspiring writing story

I’ve been poor for a long time: after many rejections Karen Jennings is up for the Booker.

Publishing is hard, and this woman seems to have defied the odds to get long-listed for the Booker. It’s a neat story.

“It was incredibly difficult to find a publisher,” she says, via video chat from Brazil, where she has spent the pandemic alongside her Brazilian husband, a scientist. Due to being essentially stranded there, she has yet to hold an actual physical copy of the book in her hands. “I finished the novel in 2017. And no one was interested. When I did finally get a small publisher in the UK and a small publisher in South Africa to co-publish, they couldn’t get anyone to review the book. We couldn’t get people to write endorsement quotes, or blurbs.”