Category: Writing Group

New Chichester Ghost Tour Launched

York and Edinburgh’s Ghost Walks are famous and an essential part of many people’s weekend visits to these cities. But where is Chichester’s? With its Roman history and beautiful old pubs that allegedly used to be part of a smugglers’ network, where are our ghost stories?

When Julia Macfarlane and her fellow authors looked into it, there just weren’t enough legends to make a truly entertaining walk. So, controversially, we made a few up to pad out the existing ones. Well, ghosts aren’t real anyway, are they?

The “Chichester Ghost Tour” is officially launched as part of Chichester Festival on 21^st June at 6:30 pm, and starts from Hennings Wine Shop. Tickets cost £8 but this includes a glass of wine or soft drink, and a copy of the book. Tickets can be bought from the Novium or via: https://chichesterboxoffice.ticketsolve.com/shows/873571359/events .

The book itself is a self-guided, tongue-in-cheek, optional pub crawl, version of the tour, with 10 ghost stories based in Chichester and written by local authors in the second half of the book, and already available on Amazon and Kindle. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0714B2ZBN

The book has been produced in collaboration with Bognor Regis Write Club and CHINDI (Celebrating and Helping Independent Authors), and compiled and edited by Julia .

As the back cover of the book says:

“Every city should have a ghost tour. No long weekend visit to a British city is complete without a visit to a traditional pub and a wander around the city centre. So Chichester deserves to have all three combined. And here you have it! A guide to follow on your own or with your friends which will take you on an (optional) pub crawl as well as pointing out the quirkier bits of our beloved town. To be honest, we expected more ghost stories associated with the place than we could actually find. But not to worry, using the full resources of CHINDI and Bognor Regis Write Club, we have managed to pull together enough tales to entertain you for a few hours, while you stroll around, gawping and pointing. Enjoy and remember to drink responsibly. Try not to have nightmares, unless you want to, in which case eat cheese for supper and read this book at bedtime.”

If you would like to know more, please email bognorwriters@gmail.com

Plans for 2017

We are writing our pieces for our next anthology. Deadline for entries by members is the end of June 2017 and we are hoping the new anthology will hit the bookshelves late October 2017. This will be the second publication the Bognor Regis Write Club will have produced this year. The Chichester Ghost Tour is released in May/June and contains 10 stories from local writers alongside a self-guided ghost tour.

January meeting

Ten of us attended. The theme for this month was to read out pieces we would like to offer for the anthology. A weird theme emerged with three pieces touching on peadophilia – uh-oh! Luckily we also had some Japanese fantasy and a Sherlock Holmes mystery as well as more poetry than usual.

We congratulated Jeremy on the success and completion of Chindi’s Writearound Sussex competition and discussed plans for our anthology. A sub-committee volunteered itself to act as editorial. Hoping to publish the anthology around May.

We’ve been ghosted – how rude!

I was reviewing our current members and realised two have stopped communicating, with no explanation. Both are surprising; the first dropped off the radar several months ago. At the time the group was looking for new premises and this person offered us her business premises. How nice! On the day, she contacted me to say she was too ill to let us in so we cancelled our meeting. And that was the last we heard from her – worryingly. Thank God for Facebook. She may not have been responding to my emails asking if she was OK and could we arrange the next month’s meeting date but at least with Facebook I could see she was still alive enough to post her business news. Not quite as much of a ghost as I feared.

And now it’s happened again! Another one ignoring emails and a Facebook message checking she was OK. A member who had fitted in straight away and had quickly made friends, we thought, sending supportive emails to members apart from the usual meeting stuff. And then suddenly nothing. It’s fine, we’ll survive, but being ghosted leaves you, me, us, wondering: what did we do wrong? Was it something we said, or did, or didn’t do?

I worry about these people, with good reason. One of our members, a young man of immense talent, tragically died in early 2015. Emails to him went unanswered for a week or so until a family member contacted us to inform us of his funeral. I’d like to think his ghost turns up at our meetings still.

But the other two, our living ghosts? Is it really too difficult just to drop a line saying thanks, but your group is not for me? But no, instead I waste my time worrying about them, contacting them to check they’re OK, wondering if and how we may have offended them and ultimately crossing them off our distribution list, while I feel guilty, when surely it should be them.

Maybe as writerswe’ll have our revenge in a writers way. Our theme one month can be: What happened to our ghosts? Maybe for our halloween meeting? Then we’ll publish our results to see if that gets a response. Mwahahaha!

Bognor Regis Write Club

We are a small friendly group of would-be professional writers of fiction, poetry and prose. We meet once a month in the local pub’s back room to read out our latest 1000 word selection, ranging from short stories, novels in progress, poetry and even a business manual.

Plans for 2016 include an anthology of our work and this website. One box ticked! You can find out more about us by checking us out on
http://www.meetup.com/Bognor-Regis-Writers-Group or by emailing bognorwriters@gmail.com.