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News Oh Dear… This Doesn’t Look Good…

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Hannah Faoileán said:
They're particularly into wild grasses and nettles - great for insect life.
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Well worth doing and extremely easy! We've chucked a few of these around and they're fabulous!

Butterfly and Bee

Buy wildflower seed mixes for bees and butterflies from Landlife Wildflowers, the wildflower experts. Our UK native wildflower seed mixtures are packed full of UK native species described by the RHS as 'Perfect For Pollinators.
www.wildflower.co.uk www.wildflower.co.uk
 
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So I haven’t read a single word written by Ms. Winn / Walker, but… here are some conjectures...

* I assume she’s got some real, natural writing talent. What a shame, then, that things have gone off the rails like this. As Matt says above, they really didn’t have to.

* Bev said, early on, that her spidey-sense started to tingle a lot while reading… it didn’t feel right, not sincere, genuine. Why didn’t anyone else (agent! editor!) pick this up, too?

* The disaster-scenario would be that Ms. Winn really can’t write very well/or at all, and this was a project largely engineered by the agent (or less likely, the editor). In this case, Winn could argue were there a court case that – Hey… it wasn’t me! You guys did all the “constructive editing”…. I simply took your advice! That would be nasty, because Winn may not have very deep pockets (now!) but the publisher does, and they might become a target for any US litigation. Hope this wasn’t the case.
 
I don't know how much impact this could have in the US. I think we're quite accepting of the fact that everything is made up, from the White House to Hollywood and back. Prime example, the movie Fargo, says "based on true events" at the start of the film and none of it is even kind of based on a true event (okay, a guy tried to hire a hit man to kill his wife, but he tried to hire an undercover cop so it didn't go far). I did love that the TV series of the same name carried on with that tag, and again; whole cloth
 
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AgentPete said:
Why didn’t anyone else (agent! editor!) pick this up, too?
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I think someone may have done, had to have done, but day-to-day junior staff would keep quiet once the production process was rolling. It was at the acquisition point where the hard questions – does this really sound right? – should have been asked, by more senior people. Agent included. (Whose website raves about Winn. Even now, today.)

But commercial thinking obviously won out. And, authenticity and ethics aside, her book has sold well, so from that point of view alone, they were right.
 
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