Early author | Caltrop Press

Journal blank books, writing prompts, etc. are not in our usual repertoire but sometimes fate hands you a good thing you don’t expect. Sheila Allee’s “All are Free to Write” is one of those. It is a vast improvement over the typical products in the “low-content” genre, and might even be considered a collection of very short stories. Its 52 stories are set up as a prompt for writing something once a week for a year, but unlike most such products, the prompts are not one-line quotes from famous people or motivational meme sentences. Instead, each section is carefully crafted to provide a vignette from the author’s experience and by the end of the year you will know her as well as you anyone but your real lifelong friends (and probably better than many of those, because we don’t share all our secrets, do we?) The book is still useful even if you are not into journaling, because you can certainly use the thought for the week to prompt you on something you are involved with. For instance, the first piece of giving yourself permission to do something other than the daily routine spurred a business blog post on the need for companies to make investments in “sharpening the saw” if they wanted to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.

OK, maybe David and his delightful family and staff laid a promising framework with the great accommodations and fabulous food at their Charleston Inn in Hendersonville NC. But books are a serious thing and he doesn’t know I bought a copy (until now). I was planning to take it home and give it a try but I soon found myself sneaking in a chapter here and there as our companions’ rest schedule permitted, and a satisfying finish was reached before the trip ended. The author strives somewhat for the John Grisham style, although he comes at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, and there is a bit of the first-novel tendency to use the dialog to preach instead of letting the action reveal the intended message (which in this case it would have done anyway – I knew where the story was going long before the speeches came in). This applies also to the key relationship which simply happens, so fast as to be jarringly improbable. Those minor carps aside, as I said from the start, once you get into it you will have a hard time putting it down, and that is criterion number one for a thriller-type book.

Payne, David R., “Just Punishment“, Page Publishing, 2016.