Will

Editorial services

July 18, 2020July 18, 2020 by willwain Comment Closed

Freelance substantive editor, copy editor, proofreader and researcher with over twenty years’ experience. Currently writing and researching a sea story, the Ghost Ship of Trinity Bay, about the Welsh Marie Celeste What can I do for you? Do you have a finished or an unfinished book, story, essay or other work? Does it need some polishing, or would you like a considered opinion (based on a thorough reading) of your work? I can evaluate it, suggest rewrites or changes, do detailed copy editing, or simply check it for errors and anything that is unclear (proofreading). All manuscripts considered, in electronic (digital) or typescript form. I’ve a lot of experience in assessing novels and poetry, making suggestions and selections, and working closely and sympathetically with writers to give them serious feedback about their work. I’ve helped bring books to print in both print and digital form. And I can guarantee personal attention, good communication, and a tailor made approach to each individual writer. Email me...

From the UK to Random Island. Has a 130-year old mystery been solved?

July 30, 2019February 17, 2021 by willwain Comment Closed

From a press story in Newfoundland, 2018 Three families, one from the UK, one from the United States, and one from the former community of Deer Harbour, Random Island, will come together this month in Newfoundland to commemorate a seafaring tragedy from the 19th century. 130 years ago, a British warship patrolling off Catalina discovered a merchant sailing ship from Wales, abandoned in fair weather, seaworthy but with no sign of captain or crew. No trace of them was ever found, and the story became known as the Welsh 'Marie Celeste' like the famous ghost ship. UK-based writer Will Wain is the great-grandson of the captain of the ship, Resolven, who has been trying to solve the mystery for many years. He was recently contacted by a lady in Alberta who told him of an amazing discovery. Will says. 'This lady told me that her grandfather and his brother were from Deer Harbour, Random Island, and they had found a body in a merchant...

Primrose Hill before it was posh: Will Wain meets Eugene Manzi

July 29, 2019July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

I met Eugene Manzi at one of Primrose Hill’s many patisserie/coffee shops, this one (or was it the place next door?) stocked with a minimalist display of startlingly coloured cupcakes. Eugene and I opted for tea and croissants – not a classic pairing, but preferable to any of the whirly child’s-paintbox confections on offer. Eugene as a small boy lived above his father’s shop at 105 Regent’s Park Road from 1944 to about 1955, and recalls a mixed ‘Bohemian’ and working-class neighbourhood of artists and students, immigrants, small factories and workshops that seems a world away from the swish ‘village’ of today. His earliest memories are of... Read the rest of this article on the Primrose Hill history site here...

Screechin’ in St John’s

July 28, 2019July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

You don’t come to Newfoundland for the weather. I’d flown in the previous evening in a misty rainstorm that would have seemed just right for Craggy Island, but my single day in St John’s before hiring a car and heading up country dawned sunny and clear, a summer day with none of the country’s notorious fogs. I was in the country to research the story of my great-grandfather, a sea captain in the nineteenth century who had vanished from his abandoned ship, along with all the crew. Before setting out on my quest for ‘the Welsh Marie Celeste’, I had one day as a tourist in Newfoundland’s capital and I’d had some good tips on how to get a taste of the state’s largest and most cosmopolitan town... Read more on travel blog site www.thetrundlers.com...

The Welsh Marie Celeste: a true story

July 28, 2019February 17, 2021 by willwain Comment Closed

THE WELSH GHOST SHIP RESOLVEN In August 1884 the Royal Navy vessel HMS Mallard was patrolling the fishing waters off Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, when she sighted the merchant ship Resolven, apparently adrift. She gave no answer to the Mallard’s signals, and on boarding her, the Navy sailors found that the ship was completely deserted, though there was no sign of damage or disturbance. A fire was lit in the galley and there was food on the tables, but not a soul aboard. The lifeboat, too, was gone; for some unknown reason, the crew had simply abandoned their ship. She was salvaged, but the crew were never seen again. The Resolven was a brig out of Aberystwyth in West Wales, sailing between Welsh ports and Canada with cargoes of timber and cod. Her Captain was John James, Master Mariner, of Newquay. Also missing from the ship was a large sum in gold coins, the Captain’s entire fortune. His widow died in poverty after making her small son...

The Rained-Off Rocket Battle

July 1, 2019July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

The film is the low res movie I took of the Chios rocket battle, Easter 2012 - please watch it with the sound on otherwise you won't hear the fizzin' of the rockets and the pealin' of the bells... ... The fireworks ‘war’ between the two parish churches of Vrontados, on the Greek Island of Chios, is said to have started in the 19th Century, with children firing stones at each other from slingshots. Now it's the young men who fight, with thousands of homemade rockets that they spend all winter stockpiling. The target on St Mark’s church, separated from the other church by a deep ravine, is the cupola, while the supporters of St Mark's try to score a direct hit on the clock tower of St. Erythianis the Virgin. Despite bans during the Nazi occupation of Greece, and then again when the Colonels were in power in the 1970s, the rocket war has flourished and is now a major spectacle, and...

A Company Of Rivers: New York and Shepard Rifkin

November 17, 2013July 31, 2019 by willwain Comment Closed

It’s easy for the visitor to forget that New York City and all its sunless canyons between skyscrapers are built on an island which is bounded by a multitude of rivers. Climbing any of those Babelous towers to the sky, you can see the Big Apple sitting in a great big bowl of noodles: its waterways, which border and define the narrowness of Manhattan, and helped to shape the city’s history. Until the day before yesterday it depended upon them. The sea brought New York its huddled migrant masses, but the waterways helped to give them life. There is a writer, one who has never really had the recognition he deserves, called Shepard Rifkin, who in the course of penning a pacy thriller called McQuaid in August in effect made New York City the main character, and in particular the rivers and waters which he knew so well. I want to digress a bit about Shepard Rifkin before getting back to...

My Mum Wrote Shakespeare

January 29, 2013May 7, 2017 by willwain Comment Closed

The strange idea that Shakespeare was written by someone else, a notion which only seriously began in Victorian times (and an aptly-named Mr Looney played a pivotal role in some of that early speculation) has not only not faded, it has been given a big boost by an entertaining film, Anonymous, which plugs the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author. All the renewed debate has reminded me that one person who actually added anything to Shakespeare’s own lines, though in a very modest way, was my own mother. Eirian James, who became Eirian Wain later, was working in the 1950s for the Arts section of the British Council in London. In collaboration with George Rylands of King’s College Cambridge and the Marlowe Society, the Council, and Mum, helped to produce LP records of the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays, and the Sonnets too. While working as the organiser and administrator of this labour of love, she got to...

Hitler’s Cheerleaders

January 29, 2013September 26, 2014 by willwain Comment Closed

Philip Larkin once wrote, about his childhood home, that ‘nothing, like something, happens everywhere’. Why is it so fascinating, then, to find places where you might think nothing happened, but where (in fact) a whole collection of somethings did? You have to get off that well-beaten track, to look for the odd corners of England – let’s just stick to England, for the moment, if nobody minds – and I’ve found that you can’t look for those places, you can only find them; stumbling around, but with your eyes open. (As the screenwriter and author Ben Hecht put it, writing about himself : I was... ' just walking down the road when [I] bumped into history.') My favourite of these rare discoveries is a village called Swinbrook, in the countryside where the Cotswold hills begin to rise, about fifteen or twenty miles to the west of Oxford, and a more likely place to find nothing happening it would be hard to...