Ice Dancing

My novel Ice Dancing is FREE from today, 11th July, until Saturday 13th. You'll find it on Amazon Kindle, here in the UK and here in the US.  

I love the two main characters I created in this novel almost as much, I think, as they love each other!  Of everything I've written, I find myself going back to it from time to time, just because I can't quite bear to let Joe or Helen go. I already have a sequel planned, but it will probably be next year before I can write it. But I do want to spend just a little more time in their company. And like all writers, I want to know 'what happens next'  for them. Sometimes a story is complete. Sometimes there's more to be told and I think, for Joe and Helen in Ice Dancing, there is a bit more to be told. I keep 'seeing' them here and there. I could swear I saw Helen at a village dance last year, an attractive but unobtrusive woman of around forty with a very sweet smile. I followed Joe around Morrison's supermarket one day, intrigued to to find that when somebody is mildly scruffy but tall and athletic and that good looking they do indeed stand out from everyone around them, even in a crowded store! And 'what happens next' keeps nipping at me, even while I'm working on other things. Because I know what happens next and it probably isn't what you might think. 

All the same,  I'd be the first to admit that Ice Dancing is a book full of slightly unusual themes and settings. I'm not surprised it was a book that my agent told me she liked very much (she likened it to The Bridges of Madison County and I was flattered but I can understand why) but thought she would find it very hard to sell to a big traditional publisher. I think she thought it was a niche novel and maybe it is. But so far, all kinds of people have told me that they have enjoyed it and been very moved by it.

It's a novel about village life: supportive, strong and loving, but also stifling and small minded because people are connected and interlinked in ways incomers don't usually grasp for some years. It's a novel about the way in which small communities are so finely balanced that even a small change can create a major upheaval. 

It's also - of course - a sexy, unconventional and very grown up story about the lightning strike of love at first sight: ‘He came gliding into my life,' says Helen, 'And changed everything. He didn't intend for it to happen any more than I did. I think it took us both by surprise. Like a bolt of lightning. Like a puck to the head, as Joe would say.’ 

It's a novel about ice hockey. But you don't have to know anything about hockey to enjoy it. Helen knows nothing about it when she first meets Joe! She's a Scottish farmer’s wife, approaching forty, living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. She has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing will ever be the same for either of them again.

Hilary Ely, reviewing this novel for Vulpes Libris, writes, 'The narrative brilliantly describes the physical imperative they have to be together – not just the snatched times alone, but the magnetic pull they have towards one another when other people are around, their almost uncontrollable urge to touch one another and the risks that brings.'

Finally, this is also a novel about a shockingly dark side of an upbeat sporting world, for although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and much more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine. 

If you're reading this on 11th, 12th or 13th July - why not give it a try?

One More Reason To Love Amazon

Old Los Cristianos.

I'm in the middle of a new project which involves extensive rewrites and revisions of an old back-list title, which will be my next eBook publication. Actually, it will be two books, possibly even three, loosely based on a novel which was written and published many years ago. I don't often like to go back to old projects, but for all kinds of reasons which had more to do with changes in the publishing world, the publication didn't turn out quite the way I wanted. It was written (and acquired) as one kind of book and published as another. The novel I intended it to be - a book about cross cultural marriage and the adjustments that have to be made - disappeared somewhere down the corporate hole in the middle of the deal. It was reasonably popular at the time but when I read it now I can see all kinds of problems which should have been addressed at the editing stage. And it's rather dated. But at the heart of it, I think there's a good strong story in an intriguing setting. And I still like the central characters very much.

So I'm rewriting it. Drastically. Adding a lot, subtracting a lot, changing a lot and all of it in the light of experience. I seem to be a sadder and wiser person these days and it's showing in the story. By the time I've finished the first book in the series, it will - I feel - be quite different, although with enough of the old skeleton in there to satisfy the people who liked it the first time round.

So what has all this to do with loving Amazon, other than the fact that the new novels will be published on Kindle?

Well, this first novel in the series is set largely in the Canaries, on the islands of Tenerife and La Gomera. I wrote the first draft of this story back in the 1980s when I was living aboard a giant catamaran (called Simba - big cat - get it?) mostly at anchor in Los Cristianos Bay,  although with occasional sorties elsewhere, particularly to our favourite place in the whole archipelago: La Gomera. I'll be blogging a bit more about that time over the next few weeks. Needless to say, it wasn't OUR yacht. My husband was working as skipper for a charter company, and we would sometimes be joined by paying guests. Which wasn't all that happened. I came back expecting a baby!

But over the past few weeks, I've realized that I both need and want to know more about the history of these islands. Not because these are historical novels, but because one of my main characters is born and bred on La Gomera. I already knew something of his family heritage and was intrigued by it but - you know how it is with research - I had a hankering to know more, even if I didn't make detailed use of it in the new novels. Searching for the history of the Canaries, even online, doesn't elicit very much information. I had read as much as I could, back in the eighties, and still had some of the books and pictures from that time. I still had my notes from various sightseeing trips, and conversations with local historians. But there seemed to be a dearth of detailed histories in English and my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. (Living on a boat, you learn the words for fibreglass polish and folding table but not much of an academic nature.)

I did a bit of googling which only pointed me to books, papers and sites I already knew about. So I turned to Amazon. Which, I now realize, was where I should have started. When you're looking for a book, but you haven't a scooby what it is, what it's called, who wrote it or even if it exists, Amazon is the place to go. I swear, within three clicks, Amazon had presented me with a couple of extraordinary accounts of the Canaries from the late 1800s, facsimile editions, complete with gorgeous pen illustrations. Not only that, but when I hesitated, wondering if I should buy these fat doorstops of volumes, I clicked on a review to read a charming, funny and detailed exposition by another reader who made the books sound irresistible. Another click and they were on their way to me. They arrived the following afternoon. (OK. I've succumbed to Amazon Prime. They even give you a two hour window for delivery)

And here they are. Beside me as I type this. Lengthy accounts of travels in the Canaries first published in 1887, written by an enterprising and engaging 'lady traveller' called Olivia M Stone.

So that's another reason why I love Amazon. There must be some seriously good and intuitive programming at work here. Within moments, they had suggested two books I didn't even know existed, books they delivered to my doorstep twenty four hours later, books which turned out to be exactly what I needed. Spooky. Like Lois Lane said of Superman: Can you read my mind?

Bird of Passage, Free on Kindle to Mark the Start of Spring.

Cover art by Matt Zanetti

My novel Bird of Passage will be free to download on Kindle from 4th - 6th April. It's another 'island-set' novel. I seemed to go through a period of setting my novels and plays on islands, until I exhausted that particular piece of inspiration, but it still nips away at me from time to time. So the rewritten version of an old novel, The Golden Apple, due for publication next month, is set on a completely different kind of island: a much warmer place altogether, La Gomera in the Canaries. And even The Physic Garden, set fair and square in early nineteenth century Glasgow, has a trip to the Isle of Arran as a central and very important scene.

Bird of Passage, though, is set on a fictional and unnamed Scottish Hebridean island, which could be just about anywhere, from Gigha, which I know well, to the Isle of Skye, or Mull or Islay, or some amalgam of all of them. Oddly enough, the perception of where it is seems to depend on the reader's own experience and that's fine by me. I love that process which seems to go on, whereby the reader recreates the world of the novel within his or her own mind.

Susan Price, reviewing the novel for An Awfully Big Blog Adventure describes how she realized that there was a connection with a much more famous classic novel:
'I was three-quarters of the way through this book – or even more – before it dawned on me that it was Wuthering Heights in modern dress. I was tipped off by a couple of sly and amusing references to twigs tapping on windows and ghosts, and by the hero disappearing for twenty years and then returning a rich man.
It’s not a re-telling, though – it’s a re-imagining. A dialogue with the older book, if you like. It asks, would the same story, the same deathless love, be possible in the modern age, and if so, how?'
Link to the rest of the review here.

A very young me, in Wuthering Heights mode!

Susan is right. I wasn't attempting a retelling. I wouldn't dare. But Wuthering Heights has always been my all time favourite novel. I was born in Yorkshire and was trundled over the moors to Top Withins when I was still in my pushchair, or so I'm told. Bird of Passage is a book I was desperate to write, partly because of my own obsession with Wuthering Heights, but I spent years hunting for the right story, the right setting, the right set of characters.

Reviewing the novel for the Indie eBook review, Gilly Fraser writes:
There are no pat answers in this story and no neatly contrived solutions. Endings are jagged, situations remain unresolved. Yet at the end of the book there is a feeling of satisfaction that things did work out as they should – at least to some extent. I think that makes the story and its characters all the more realistic and credible. It’s hard to pigeonhole this book to a specific genre. It’s a love story, yet sometimes defies the label. It’s contemporary, yet dwells quite a bit in the past. As to its audience – I think this would appeal to readers who don’t need to be led by the hand and who enjoy
challenging relationships. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Read the rest of her review here

One of the nice things about reviews - especially when they are positive but quite analytical - is that they give you as a writer a new perspective on a novel. It's odd how often you're not entirely sure what you've written, or what you might have achieved, even though you've been in the thick of it, even though you may have had all kinds of intentions for the book. 

I'm often asked to describe the kind of books I write. It's a question I find genuinely difficult to answer, and reviews like Susan's and Gilly's help me to find some answers. My books aren't really romances in the conventional sense because they don't always have the traditional happy ending or even the traditional structure. They have a resolution of sorts, and I hope they give the reader a sense of satisfaction, but the characters don't generally walk off into the sunset. Or not often. One reviewer who loved this novel still found it heartbreaking, and people who have read The Physic Garden, even while they tell me they couldn't put it down, still tell me that they simply couldn't bear what happens in the end. I know what they mean because I couldn't bear it either, and I wrote it! 

Whenever I finish a novel, I try to work out what kind of book I've written. I know that may sound a bit daft. But when you're in the middle of a piece of work, you're so buried in the time and place, so deep into the minds of your characters, that you really can't see the wood for the trees. So it can be very helpful to stand back and try to analyse exactly what kind of novel you've produced. At first, I despaired of finding any common denominators within my fiction. Everything I write seems to be quite different: some are historical, some contemporary, some are more literary than others, some quiet, some complex.

Quite a while ago, an agent told me (and I'm paraphrasing here) that my work was too well written to be popular but too accessible to be really literary. She saw it as a fault. The more I speak to my readers though, the more I see that a lot of people out there are looking for stories which are well written and grown up, but accessible too. And I think that's what I write. Mainly because that's the kind of book I like to read. Lots of them are love stories. But I suppose they are 'grown up' love stories. I wish Amazon had a category like that, but they don't yet - and 'adult' has quite a different connotation! Even the Physic Garden, which isn't really a love story at all, but a story about male friendship and betrayal, is a grown up tale.

Bird of Passage is a very grown up love story -  about past damage and the obsessive attachment that is the result. And of course it is, unashamedly, a homage to my much loved Wuthering Heights. If this sounds like something you might enjoy reading, it's free to download for the next three days, here in the UK and here in the USA.

Support Your Local Writer

Cover art by Michael Doig

An arts magazine to which I subscribe dropped through my letterbox yesterday morning and sent my blood pressure sky high. This is a little publication which focuses mainly on art and artists. But the current issue devoted a large chunk of its available space to an anti Amazon, pro bookstore rant with the now wearily familiar exhortation to us all to support our local small businesses and shun those giant corporations like Amazon, Starbucks and Google. I'm assuming the editor doesn't use a PC or a Mac to construct his copy, but I wonder what he uses instead? Pencil and paper? One of those old printing sets you used to get in your Christmas stocking?

There was, however, a significant omission from his rant in favour of small businesses: the thousands of small business people without whom there would be no books whatsoever. 

You've got it. Writers.

It amazes me how often certain commentators speak and write lovingly about books (their smell, their feel, their physical form)  independent bookstores (struggling local businesses worthy of our support) and publishers (under threat, under pressure, under the cosh)  but relegate the one small business person without whom NONE of these would exist, to the sidelines.

A nice little hobby?

Part of the problem is that only a certain percentage of writers think of themselves as professionals, as people running a small business. But isn't that the same with any 'creative' pursuit? Back when my husband was wearing himself out (quite literally as it turned out - he now has serious arthritis) on huge woodcarving projects, people would watch him at work and remark on what a 'nice little hobby' it was for him. So for every writer who sees him or herself as a professional there will be a dozen happy dabblers - and why not? It's a good thing to do. But the knock-on effect of this is that assumptions are made, assumptions which we sometimes have to challenge.

I've had a long and interesting career but like all writing careers it has been a bit of a switchback. And I've learned that it is never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. But right now, somebody is actually facilitating my business, distributing my books and paying me on a regular basis and that somebody is Amazon. Those by no means large but wonderfully regular payments are what allow my own small business to support many other small businesses, like the variety of young, self employed digital artists who have worked on my eBook 'covers' with me and the local company  Paligap, which built my Wordarts website for me. Not forgetting our village cafe  and pub to which I escape to from time to time. 

Encouraging customers to support one particular local business is all very well - especially if that business is well loved and is serving its community in all kinds of interesting ways. And I love indie bookstores. Especially the ones with cafes, the ones where local writers and book groups hang out, the ones which encourage readings, the ones where the owners are welcoming - unlike the indie bookshop which had better remain nameless, to which I delivered a small box of my very much local interest books on the explicit instructions of my publisher who claimed to have arranged the visit in advance, only to be met with something verging on hostility!

Sailing to a bookshop?

There are a few excellent independent bookshops which might loosely be described as local. Those in Wigtown - a beautiful place - involve an hour's drive along winding, hilly, country roads, pitted with potholes that might better be defined as craters and made horrible by log lorries, bouncing along the middle of the road at high speed. I shop there from time to time, but not often. The other involves an hour's drive in the opposite direction and 45 minutes on a car ferry. Forgive me if clicking on the great Amazon in the clouds so often seems like a much better option when I want a book right now, especially if I can get it for my Kindle and be reading it instantly. Good for the writer. Good for the reader. 

Asking people to boycott a system which demonstrably benefits producers and customers alike seems illogical and unfair. And as Hugh Howey wrote in a recent blog post, the real story is NOT him. (Although his is a wonderfully inspirational story for all of us!) No. It's the thousands and thousands of writers like me, writers who were told by their blinkered industry time and again that no matter how excellent their product, nobody wanted it. The midlist was dead. Well, turns out it was only taking a nap. Now that it has woken up, it's alive and kicking. And here we are, small business people, managing to connect directly with our real customers - our readers - and finding out that there is an appreciative market for our products after all. 

Love Stories: Why Feel Guilty?

Way back when The Curiosity Cabinet (still free on Kindle for one more day) was short-listed for the Dundee Book Prize, I got to have dinner aboard the Discovery in Dundee with the lovely Ian Rankin and the equally lovely Malcolm Archibald, (destined to be the eventual winner)  among other people. The three shortlisted novels were read by a number of Scottish book groups whose members reported on them. The comments on The Curiosity Cabinet were very favourable. But most of all, I remember one reader who, although praising it, remarked that it had been a 'guilty pleasure'. That phrase has stayed with me for years. I was very glad the reader had enjoyed the book, delighted that they had found it to be a pleasure - but at the same time, the idea that they felt guilty about enjoying it made me kind of sad.

Responses to novels are subjective and as a writer, you can't argue with them. You just accept them and move on. But I felt sad that at some point, somebody had given my reader a very definite idea about what he or she should enjoy. I found myself wondering who it had been. A teacher? A literary critic? Another reader?

Now, anyone who has read the Curiosity Cabinet will know that it is - unashamedly - a love story. Actually, it's two love stories, one past and one present and they are very carefully entwined. There are similarities, a fragile web of connections across time, but many differences too. It isn't a novel about solutions, although I like to think it's a novel about ways in which time resolves some things, at least. It isn't a time slip novel so much as a novel about layers of time. It's a 'quiet' story, as somebody else said. That was where it fell at the Big Publishing hurdle, even though it was eventually published by a medium sized publisher. The big editors told my agent they liked it - in some cases they told her they loved it - but they didn't think it was a stonking great story, so they didn't think it would ever be a stonking great bestseller.
They were probably right.

Some readers think it's simple, and some readers don't. That's interesting too. I don't think it's all that simple or only simple in the way that a poem is simple. It's probably no accident that I was a poet in another writing life, and still find myself relentlessly paring things down to their bare bones when sometimes that isn't what a novelist should be doing at all.

But I find myself saddened that a significant percentage of readers seem to have forgotten - or feel that they shouldn't admit - their desire to seek out and enjoy the magic of a well written, thought provoking love story, whether it ends happily ever after or not.

Doom laden?

I've been thinking a lot about the kind of novels I write. Figuring that if I can't describe the kind of books I write then readers will have a hard time finding them.
I'm a mid-list writer, for sure. I write historical fiction and contemporary fiction. I hope it's thoughtful and accessible.
But you know what else?
I write love stories.
Even my recent novel, the Physic Garden, a fairly sombre exploration of friendship and extreme betrayal, ('doom laden' a friend described it)  is also a love story, although it is up to the reader to decide exactly where that love lies, by and for whom.

Two other novels, the Amber Heart and Bird of Passage, one historical and one spanning a whole lifetime, turn out to be love stories too. In Bird of Passage, it's a strange, twisted kind of love, but love it most definitely is.

Ice Dancing - of everything I've written - is probably  the most straightforward love story, although even this one isn't very straightforward, since it's about the disruption of irresistible love at first sight for two honourable people. It's also the least popular of my novels as far as sales go - which is faintly irritating, because I love these two characters almost more than any others I've created and am desperate to write a sequel.  I know what happens next, and that's such a temptation for any novelist. (I'm tempted to beg a little here. Go on. Give it a try. Then I can write some more about Joe and Helen!)

But really, this is a plea for honesty. I know I love films, plays, dramas and novels about relationships, affection, love, passion, friendship, obsession, the feelings we have for each other, feelings that can shape (or wreck) our whole lives. I can't be alone in this. Let's face it, I'm not alone in this.  So surely these things are worth exploring in our fiction. Who on earth decided otherwise? Some of the finest stories ever written have been love stories. Should we feel guilty for enjoying these too?

My most favourite least popular novel! 

Insomnia

I used to sleep like a baby. These days, I sleep like the baby I actually had, about twenty six years ago. Charlie didn't like to sleep at all, really. That was the problem. He was a lovely baby, but he could stay awake and then some. Hardly ever napped in the daytime and didn't even seem to want to sleep for too long at night. I got used to sleeplessness back then, so when he started being able to amuse himself with books until he fell asleep - that was after we'd read countless stories to him - I went back to restful nights again.
Not now. Now I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm wired. It's as though my brain has been working away - on novels, stories, articles - while I've been sleeping and dreaming, and after a while, it gives me a nudge, saying 'Wake up, wake up. I've got something to tell you.  DON'T YOU WANT TO WRITE IT DOWN?'
Sometimes it's because I'm in the middle of working on a novel or a play. Sometimes it's when I've been reviewing something. Or got so involved in reading a book that I wake up and want to get on with it. (See review of The City and The City, below!)
I don't think it's doing me a lot of good. I'm tired pretty much all the time these days, and keep making resolutions to get more sleep or better sleep or - let's face it - any kind of deep sleep at all.
I have this fantasy of going away for a week or so, to stay in some nice hotel with meals and drinks on tap and with absolutely nothing to do. No laptop, and not even very much sightseeing. (Our holidays usually involve complicated itineraries, visits, doing things, PLANS)
I'll take my Kindle and catch up on my reading. Or watch a bit of television. Or just look out of the window.
I'll read for pleasure, read for fun, read the things I want to read rather than the things I feel I ought to be reading.
I won't do anything I think I ought to be doing.
Not a single thing.
Meanwhile, here's something I woke up thinking only the other morning. Very early morning. Just beginning to get a little bit light, here in Scotland. And with the birds in the garden just starting to sing again after a long hard winter.
I didn't wake up thinking about the birds though. I woke up thinking this:
It isn't so much a problem of the numbers of not very good eBooks out there. I can avoid those easily enough. I have a sample facility on my Kindle.
No. It's the vast numbers of really, really good eBooks out there. My Kindle is currently stuffed with them. (Which is why I want that holiday.)
These are good reads by any standards: entertaining, original, engaging.
And you know what? Most of them were turned down by traditional publishing. Many of them were turned down many times over by industry 'experts'. Many of them were written by people who had once been traditionally published but were given what is commonly called the elbow, by those same  experts. These were industry insiders who claimed to know what they were doing. They said it often enough. They are still saying it.
Which is a scary thought.
It's enough to give you insomnia, isn't it?

New Novel For A New Year - The Physic Garden

I'm deep into final revisions of a new historical novel called The Physic Garden. So far, only two other people have read it - well, three, if you count the young intern who read it for my last-but-one agent and dismissed it as 'just an old man, telling his story.' It was about that time that the agent in question gave me the push, having decided that she had bigger and more lucrative fish to fry. This was clearly true and I can't really complain about her decision. I was never going to come up with the instant blockbuster hit. But it's still a shock when somebody whom you have thought of as a supporter decides that they don't want you any more. Especially when, for reasons too complicated to go into here, I had actually been given the chance to leave her for other representation, but had elected to follow her to her new company just a year previously. Silly me.
The daft thing is the intern was right. It is an old man telling his story. His name is William Lang, he's a bookseller who used to be a gardener in the Old College of Glasgow University and he is looking back over a long life, well lived, telling a tale of youthful friendship and appalling betrayal from the perspective of old age. In the course of the story he reaches some surprising and moving conclusions. That first reader clearly didn't get it at all. And for a little while I set it to one side, disillusioned. Although why the crass opinion of a single person who I suspect only read a chapter or two should have meant anything at all to me, I don't know. But we are easily knocked off our perches, especially when a book is very dear to us. After a while, I saw that this novel was and remains very dear to me. And that it isn't 'just' anything. But it certainly is an old man telling his story and none the worse for that.
Of the two other people who have read it so far, one tells me she loves it and one finds it so harrowing, so desperately sad, that she can't 'like' it in the conventional sense, but that's OK. Because she 'gets' it too. She understands it.
It is a sad and challenging book, for sure. Even now, when I read through it, the sense of an inevitable tragedy runs through and through it, bring a lump to my throat. The narrator seems very real to me, a strong character who insisted on telling his story in his own voice.  It felt a little as though I were channelling somebody. An odd and uncanny sensation. The novel rushes headlong towards some unbearable denouement which I could do nothing at all to avert. No more could he. And yet, and yet, there is some kind of resolution and we are well aware that this is a fine man who has lived a good and fulfilling life.
My only reservation may be that some of my lovely, supportive readers who appreciate my other, contemporary novels may find this one ... quite different. I hope they bear with me - and William - enough to give it a try. We'll see. I have a feeling it might be a bit like Marmite. You'll either love it or loathe it. It's scheduled for publication some time in mid February. But in the run up to publication day, I'll try to tell you a little more about everything that inspired it, and the historical background to the story.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

I haven't forgotten about my 'How I Got Where I Am' series, but other things have intervened over the past couple of weeks! I'll pick up where I left off next week. Meanwhile, I feel the need to write a bit about 'cover images' for eBooks. And here's why.

In traditional publishing, you may be consulted about the cover of your book, but you won't have the final say - or, more often than not, any say at all. Marketing, branding, current fashions all take priority. (I used to loathe those headless women covers so much but it's a fad that seems to have faded thank goodness.) As a writer, you will hardly ever be able to communicate with the artist involved.  I liked the original paperback edition of the Curiosity Cabinet a lot  although it was very different from the eBook edition - of which more in due course. As far as I remember, the image of the embroidered casket which the artist used came from the Burrell in Glasgow, where there's a splendid collection of them. (Go and see for yourself!)

There are whole websites devoted to praising or slating eBook covers. There are competitions and awards. I sometimes wonder why we human beings are so darned competitive. Free us up to be what we want to be, do what we want to do, and people will instantly suggest that somebody (preferably themselves) needs to exert some sort of control, judge, make distinctions, create hierarchies. People become so alarmed by the random nature of the emerging eBook market that they suggest a string of controls involving submission and judgement followed by the acceptance and curation of the favoured few, seemingly unaware that they have just reinvented traditional publishing.

Over a long career in writing of all kinds, I've come to loathe that word 'submission' and to consider other models, other ways of doing things. Submission means the 'action or fact of accepting or yielding to a superior force or to the will or authority of another person.' Which only works when that other person really is genuinely superior, a wise teacher, an experienced and respected expert. Writers begin their careers by submitting - we're routinely advised that we need to contemplate scores, nay hundreds, of submissions. We get into the mindset at a time when we really do need a modicum of expert advice, but the trouble is that even when we become seasoned professionals, we too often continue to yield our power, our ideas and significant equity in our product to other people. The fact that quite often those people don't really know their literary bahookies from their elbows somehow escapes us. They tell us how superior they are and we believe them. Relationships which should be creative partnerships become lopsided. Until Amazon came along, there was little alternative.

So where do covers come in? Well, eBook covers aren't really covers at all. They are images, images which you see at thumbnail size on Amazon and other listings pages, images which are enlarged on e-readers, but which can be works of art in their own right. To some extent, this was always the case. Years ago, one of my short stories, The Butterfly Bowl, was published in a glossy women's magazine and the accompanying image was such a small work of art that I bought the original from the artist. But images for eBooks may be an opportunity for creative collaboration of a new and exciting kind.  Let's free our minds from the usual design/marketing/judgmental constraints for a bit. Let's decide that if we want to, we can explore new ways of doing this, too. If we're eBook publishing because we're writing across genres or because what we write doesn't fit comfortably into any single marketing paradigm, then why shouldn't we consider new ways of approaching the images which interpret and reflect our books?

When I decided to publish The Curiosity Cabinet as an eBook, I knew that I needed a new cover image to go with it. A friend, distinguished textile artist Alison Bell - who had read and loved the book - offered to design an image for me. It is her own response to the novel, and a very beautiful one at that. I would no more have looked at it as a piece of utilitarian design than I would look at any other genuine work of art only for what it could bring to the 'pack shot'.

It's an approach which I have largely followed with my other novels, either asking the artist to read the book, or at least talking about the themes in some detail and asking for a creative response, much, I suppose, as one asks a designer to approach a play - discussing the thinking behind the project but then giving them the freedom to interpret, using their own individual  creativity.

The image above for Bird of Passage, by a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti, was a revelation to me. I had discussed the themes, the setting of the novel, passed on some of my own photographs, even  had something in mind. What Matt came up with, though, was utterly unexpected.  But the sheer brilliance of it as an interpretation of the novel, the loneliness of the central character, the sense of his imprisonment in his own past, all of them are there in Matt's superb image. I remember the first time I saw it, it brought a lump to my throat!

Two more novels have covers designed by another young Scottish artist, Claire Maclean. The Amber Heart is a big book, a sweeping love story, set in nineteenth century Poland. I wanted romance on an epic scale. It's a story of a lifelong and passionate love affair. Claire, with a deeply romantic imagination seemed the ideal choice and she produced a cover of such warmth and beauty that I had no hesitation in asking her to work on my next novel, Ice Dancing, as well.
But this was a different proposition.  Ice Dancing is grown up, sexy, quirky. An intelligent love story with a dark side.  The hero plays ice hockey, for sure. (The title is a metaphor for relationships that extends through the whole book!) But it's really  a story about an exotic and charismatic interloper in a small Scottish village - and love at first sight.. The idea of  hockey as 'fire dancing on ice' - the sheer, intensely physical sexiness of it, certainly permeates the whole novel, and that's what Claire seized on. Once again, the image practically took my breath away.

Now, Alison has read, and is meditating on the ideas in The Physic Garden, my next book, a historical novel set in Scotland in the early 1800s. She has remarked that it is a deeply melancholy tale (it is, I'm afraid) and - unerringly - she has honed in on a passage which is absolutely central to the novel. I await her interpretation with interest.

When it works well, we need to acknowledge that the symbiosis between artist and writer can create a piece of art which illuminates and comments on the writer's work. All of this is such a creative pleasure: a new and unanticipated benefit of inde publishing. The odd thing is that, although the covers have been created by three different artists, there is a 'look' about them which seems somehow to reflect my own voice as a writer. That voice is the common denominator and it shows.

Branding a New Novel and Illuminating Reviews - Ice Dancing

Every now and then, as a writer, you come across a review of one of your own pieces of work which illuminates your novel, play or story for you.  I've had reviews of my plays (in production) which seemed to indicate only that the critic had missed the point. On the other hand, I've had reviews of my plays which have taught me plenty as a playwright, the kind of helpful reviews which identified what I was trying to say and fed something back to me in the form of analysis, not precluding criticism, but doing me the courtesy of taking the work seriously, on its own terms.

It's the same with new novels. You wait with some trepidation for the early responses. And while it's nice to get good reviews and miserable to get bad reviews, the very best reviews tend to be those which in some way illuminate your own work for you (and others), with the reader doing you the courtesy of taking the work seriously and then taking the time and trouble to analyse their own response to it.

A recent review of my new novel, Ice Dancing, here , by Hilary Ely, on the excellent Vulpes Libris, was one such example. Not only is it, of course, very good to know that somebody has enjoyed the novel enough to want to write about it, but a review like this, which explains why, in some detail, is uniquely helpful to me as a writer.

As an independent 'writer as publisher' and at a time when traditional publishers also expect writers to do a great deal of their own publicity, you have to make some decisions about what kind of book you have written. And I don't just mean thinking about whether or not your novel slots neatly into any one genre. If you've embarked on eBook publishing, it probably doesn't. That may well have been part of your problem. It certainly was for me. I'm a natural mid-list writer, writing across many genres: love stories which are by no means conventional romances, historical novels with a contemporary dimension, family sagas which don't follow the usual pattern, reasonably literary novels which are nevertheless deemed to be 'too accessible to be really literary.'

And now Ice Dancing, a passionate, contemporary love story with a charismatic and handsome ice hockey hero - but mostly set in a small Scottish village. Of course it's the hockey that leaps out at you, from the rather beautiful cover, designed by a young Scottish digital artist called Claire Maclean. And when I started to think about marketing this book, I did think first and foremost of all those women, young, old and middle aged, who love hockey quite as much as I do, and go to as many games as they can. (Hockey is never just a male preserve, not in Canada and the US, certainly not here in the UK either)

But of course the novel is about so much more than that. I knew it, but it was Hilary's lovely, thoughtful and thought provoking review which clarified it for me. For this is a novel about a coup de foudre as it's known: the lightning strike of love at first sight, the irresistible thunderbolt of intense attraction which changes everything at a stroke, however inadvisable, however unlikely, however disastrous the results may be.
It's also a novel about a relationship between an older woman and a younger man - the kind of ten year age gap which, were it to be reversed, wouldn't raise so much as an eyebrow, but which still seems to be a cause for comment in these supposedly enlightened times. And which makes the thunderbolt even more difficult to deal with for all concerned.

It is, as Hilary points out, also a novel about adultery and guilt. Which may seem to be an old fashioned concept, but which can still wreck lives pretty comprehensively. And besides all that, there is a very dark back-story about the kind of damage, betrayal and maltreatment which can also wreck lives in all kinds of ways. So this is a novel about the after-effects of such things, and whether it's possible to come to terms with them and how. Besides all that, of course, it's a novel about rural life, a warm and loving account of what it's like to live in a small village: all the cosy, comfortable security of it, as well as all the stifling goldfish bowl downside when everybody knows everyone else's business and doesn't necessarily feel the need to mind their own!

I have the distinct impression that, when it comes to publicising Ice Dancing, (which my agent compared, with some justification, I think, to The Bridges of Madison County) I'm going to have to promote it to different and possibly distinct groups of people. The hockey fans will love the hockey. But even readers who don't care for sports but enjoy a good, passionate love story will find something to enjoy. The metaphor of 'dancing on ice' - precarious, slippery, needing a partner to steady you in an alien environment  - runs through the whole book, as opposed to the line dancing which is the heroine's hobby, line dancing where you don't need a partner, where you don't need to touch anybody at all. This is, I think, quite a sensuous story. And when I reread it now, I can see that it is, perhaps first and foremost, a novel about the extraordinary imperative of intense physical attraction. Which is, let's face it, endlessly fascinating for most of us, whatever our age and stage in life.

Oven Bottom Cakes. Family Secrets, My Irish Nana and Me

The Irish Famine by George Frederick Watts

I recently spent some time rewriting the blurb for Bird of Passage before a forthcoming free promotion (16th, 17th and 18th August). It's one of the big advantages of Kindle publishing that you can go back and refine something in the light of reviews, reader feedback, or just general intuition. The novel is set in Scotland, but it's probably the most Irish thing I've ever written, with the exception of a sad little story called Civil Rights, first published in the Edinburgh Review some years ago, and scheduled for another airing during the Edinburgh eBook Festival. 

I was born in Leeds, and my nana was Irish. Her name was Honora Flynn. Anne Honora, to be precise, although everyone called her Nora. Her father, James Flynn, was registered in Liverpool although later records mention Ireland as the place of his birth - maybe he was just off the ferry! - in 1856 or thereabouts which means that the migration of the family was probably related to the after effects of the Irish famine. 

Family tradition puts their place of origin as Ballyhaunis in Mayo and Flynn is certainly a Mayo name. By 1887, though, James was living in Leeds. He was a 'paviour' as the records state - which means he built roads. At the age of thirty, he married one Mary Terran or Terens who was a widow with children. His father Timothy was dead by then, but the marriage was witnessed by Charles and Mary Flynn, (his brother and sister?) who couldn't write, so marked their names with an 'X'. My nana, Anne Honora was born the year before their marriage, but it's a fairly safe assumption that she was Mary Terran and James Flynn's child. They went on to have more children, Timothy, Michael and Thomas. 

Later, my nana met my auburn haired grandad, Joe Sunter, in Holbeck, in Leeds, but at some point, she went to Canada looking for work and a new life. She didn't find it and sailed back again, to find that Joe was home from a trip to Singapore with the Merchant Navy. They were married not long after and had five children of whom my mother, Kathleen Irene, was the youngest. 

My grandad's family had been dalesmen - of Norse descent in all probability - from the upper reaches of Swaledale, lead miners turned coal dealers and farriers, and they were staunch Methodists. My nana's family were Irish Catholics and there was always a certain Irish element to my upbringing. I think the Catholic Church is a bit like Hotel California in the song - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I went to a small Catholic school, although we weren't what you might call 'red hot' in our religious observance. But when, at the age of 16, I first went to Ireland, working for a family in West Cork, looking after their children for the summer, it felt strangely familiar. 

The extended family, two sisters, with their husbands and assorted children, were renting an apartment in a big, beautiful, tumbledown house. It was a farmhouse but it must once have belonged to some minor Anglo Irish gentry before the 'troubles' changed everything. There was a dusty ballroom, an overgrown fountain in the garden, and a fearsome sow who would come galloping through the undergrowth in pursuit of strangers. The big holiday apartment had once been the servants quarters and the mice partied in the attics all night long. I was one of two nannies, temporary nursemaids, mother's helps, whatever we were. I looked after eighteen month old triplets and three older children by day,but at night, when they were mercifully in bed, the other nanny and myself went dancing in the nearby villages escorted by various local boys. I fell in love, just a little bit, and walked back down the long drive in the moonlight with a good looking boy called Paddy (what else?) who kissed me beneath the damp buddleias. I can never smell that honey scent now without remembering it. 

Later, I worked in Dublin too and everything about that time and place fed into the fiction which would come after. But much as I loved Ireland - much as I still love the place and its people - I didn't realise until years later that the scandal of the Magdalene Laundries and the cruelty of the Industrial Schools was still going on, even while I had been innocently holding hands with Paddy on that moonlit lane. Which is a chilling thought, even now.

Tattie Howkers

Tied up with all that is the story of what happened to my beloved nana, and how we - my elderly aunt and I, because my own mother was dead by that time - came to find out something about Nora which she had kept secret her whole life - which she had taken with her to her grave. Nobody knew, until much later when somebody, ferreting through official records, found it out. Later still, I wondered if that had been why Anne Honora had decided to leave for Canada. Maybe she felt that she had no more to lose. But she had come back and married my grandfather anyway. 

I wrote about it when those most closely concerned with it were dead even my dear aunt, who had been deeply upset by it. I wrote the poem below, Oven Bottom Cakes, before ever I wrote Bird of Passage. But although it's quite different, and Anne Honora's story is nothing like Finn and Kirsty's story - I still feel those little connections and inspirations, nipping away at me like midges on a summer night. For Bird of Passage is a story about secrets and lies, about concealment and shame as well. 

And I think the inspiration for these two quite different pieces of work must come from the same beloved place. 

 OVEN BOTTOM CAKES

My Irish nana made oven bottom cakes

with the last of the dough,

furiously working the elastic on

cold marble, her hair thrust back

like a schoolgirl’s with a clip.

I see her print pinafore and her body

flex as she presses her thumb into

the middle of each cake then

leans across the rag rug to throw

deft flour into the oven to judge

if the temperature is right.

On a February morning in smoky Leeds

in 1910 my nana, a shirt maker,

gave birth to twin girls Gladys and Ethel.

She named no father and they died within days.

Later, she told nobody.

They were erased from our story

as surely as if they had never lived

until years after her death when

some  remote cousin gleefully

excavating the family tree,

sniffed them out and spilt the beans.

Toddling, I would nap with her

in the afternoons and she would

push me out of her bed for

fidgetting, my soft breasted nan.

Did she see in me those

babies she had buried?

My nana baked bread for me.

How she loved to feed me good things,

made oven bottom cakes and we’d

eat them with the best butter

and blackberry jam that

nipped your teeth with seeds.

Catherine Czerkawska.

Magdalenes

. 

The Curiosity Cabinet: Where Did I Get My Ideas From?

Cover image by Alison Bell

A few days ago, just as I was thinking of writing this piece about The Curiosity Cabinet, I had an email  from friend and fellow writer Shirley Mitchell, who wondered if the 'cabinet' of the novel just might have been inspired by one of her children's stories, published some years ago, in which there was a 'curiosity cabinet'. As it happens, it wasn't, or not to my knowledge - but it very easily might have been and it would have been very nice if it was.

It's one of the most commonly asked questions when writers are giving talks and readings: 'where do you get your ideas from?'

You're always tempted to say things like  'Ideas R Us' or 'That big Scandinavian shop called Idea - they come in flat packs with free tea lights.'  But actually, it's a good question. The fact is that inspiration comes from a million different sources and it can be very hard in retrospect to figure out how the ideas all came together to make a novel.

With the Curiosity Cabinet, there were three very definite strands of inspiration, all of which collided in my head - and in the resulting novel. Four if you count the fact that I wrote it first as a trilogy of plays which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Rachel Chiesley, the unfortunate Lady Grange

The idea began when I was in Edinburgh - probably when I was working on yet another radio play. The drama studios were in Edinburgh at that time. I went to an exhibition and learned about poor Rachel Chiesley, Lady Grange, who was 'kidnapped' from her home in the city in the early 18th century, and carried away to St Kilda, where she spent many desperate years in horrible isolation. There has since been an excellent book written about these events, The Prisoner of St Kilda by Margaret Macauley but at the time, I found myself piecing the sad story of Lady Grange together from various sources. What fascinated me about the story was the way in which the two cultures of Scotland, Highland and Lowland, were so very different, a difference which I had already found myself exploring in some detail when I dramatised Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona for Radio 4. I found myself thinking 'what if' - which is perhaps how all novels start. What if the person kidnapped was a young woman. What if she (and the readers) had absolutely no idea why she had been spirited away from everything she held dear? What if she had left a child behind? (I had a young son myself at the time.) Could she ever begin to adjust to her changed circumstances, to her changed surroundings? Could she ever change her perceptions of what seemed to her to be a savage place?

At the same time, though, another idea was fermenting away in my mind. I found myself visiting Glasgow's Burrell Collection on various occasions and it was invariably the needlework that drew me. I've loved antique and vintage textiles for as long as I can remember. My mum used to go to the saleroom and I used to go with her, but although she was mad about pottery and porcelain, I was fascinated by the textiles: the embroideries, the linens and lace. Still am.

When I visited the Burrell, therefore, I particularly loved the embroidered 'raised work' cabinets with their wonderful little scenes of all kinds: the figures and flowers, the birds and beasts and houses. I always found myself daydreaming about what it might be like to possess something like this, but also about the women who might have made them - and the objects they might have kept in them. The needlework pictures so often seemed to tell stories, to symbolise things which were important to the women who had so lovingly embroidered them. Not only that, but the very act of stitching seemed to me to imbue the resulting work with the emotion of the maker, quite as much as a painting or sculpture. Of course, these were not really 'curiosity cabinets'. Cabinets of Curiosities were usually masculine affairs, collections of rare and wonderful specimens of all kinds, shells, fossils, bones and the like. But the embroidered casket of my imagination was a very different kind of Cabinet of Curiosities. I saw it vividly in my mind's eye, full of a collection of fascinating objects: shells and feathers for sure, but also a number of personal possessions, stored away there for three hundred years. And in my imagination, I saw too that they were all women's things. In order to write the novel, I had to find out who those women were, and what was the story of the casket, The Curiosity Cabinet of the title. 

My third strand of inspiration was the Isle of Gigha. My husband first introduced me to this magical place. Many years previously, long before we met and married, Alan had been diving for clams off Gigha and the boat's engine had broken down. He and his brother-in-law, working together, had been 'rescued' by the islanders, who had offered them hospitality and engineering expertise in about equal measure. After we were married, and especially after our son was born, we went there often. It's still one of my favourite places in all the world. I even wrote a big history of the place called God's Islanders, very much a labour of love, published a few years ago by Birlinn.

So when I was thinking about a setting for The Curiosity Cabinet, and although the island in the novel is fictional, and could be any one of a number of small Hebridean islands, it was the Isle of Gigha with its white sands, its honeysuckle and foxgloves, its dazzling coconut scented whins that was always in my mind's eye.

Although the historical story in the trilogy of radio plays - the tale of Henrietta Dalrymple and Manus McNeill - is more or less the same, the present day tale is very different. I was never satisfied with that aspect of the radio trilogy and when I came to write the novel, it took off in quite different directions. I decided that I wanted to write two parallel love stories - one set in the past and one in the present. This was never going to be a conventional 'time slip' novel and although there are suggestions of the supernatural in it they are very subtle indeed and never overt. I suppose what I was aiming for was a suggestion that sometimes the past might just possibly influence, or might be worked out in the present. Or then again not! Without imbuing the whole thing with some kind of spurious Celtic twilight - I still wanted to illustrate the feeling you occasionally get on these Hebridean Islands, the vague sense that you are in a 'thin' place where the boundaries between this world and another are so fine that sometimes you can see through them. But all the same, I wanted it to be real. And in order to make it and keep it real, I had to pare it down as far as I possibly could, but still keep it involving and sensuous. 


When an American reviewer, Lorissa K Evans, wrote of the US Kindle edition, that 'the writing ,,, is so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it' I was delighted.

I submitted the final draft of the novel for the Dundee Book Prize. It turned out to be one of three books shortlisted that year, and was published by Polygon in Edinburgh. Feedback and reviews were excellent. A lot of people seemed to enjoy it and the edition sold out. Eventually, the rights reverted to me and since I was seriously considering indie-publishing by that stage in my career, it was one of my first ventures on Amazon Kindle where it seems to have had a whole new lease of publishing life. My friend, Scottish textile artist Alison Bell, gave me the new eBook cover image as a very beautiful gift.

You can download it here in the UK and here in the USA. One of the nicest and most perceptive reviews so far has been by Hilary Ely, on Vulpes Libris It's so lovely when a reader completely understands what you were trying to say in a novel and why you were telling the story in the way you did. There's no feeling quite like it!

Catherine Czerkawska
www.wordarts.co.uk

If you're curious about the story, interested in Scotland, especially small Hebridean islands and fancy some holiday reading with a difference, The Curiosity Cabinet will be free to download on Amazon Kindle for three days,17th, 18th and 19th of July. 

The original Manus McNeill?

The Amber Heart and Bird of Passage - the Novels I Feared No-One Would Ever Read

If you just happen to be reading this post on Wednesday 13th or Thursday 14th June 2012, you'll find that you can go to Amazon's Kindle Store and download my two newest novels for nothing. If you've missed the giveaway then you can still download them for the price of a couple of lattes - or a latte and a half, depending upon your cafe of choice. (I'm a Cafe Nero addict, here in the UK - an Italian style chain with cool, stylish interiors, friendly staff, good coffee and good music - and no, they aren't paying me to say as much!)

If you fancy an epic love story in the Dr Zhivago mode (I'm thinking of the movie, rather than the book)  - or a sort of Polish Gone With The Wind - you'll find it here if you're in the UK and here if you're in the USA.

One thing I've learned from the various reviews of this book over the past few weeks, as well as direct messages from readers, is that they have sometimes been uncertain as to whether they'll like the Polish historical background.

One enthusiastic reader remarked honestly that she thought it might be out of her comfort zone, but then got thoroughly swept up in the story and setting, found that she loved it and wanted to tell other people about it. Another calls it a 'rollercoaster of events and emotions' and I hope it's all of that. It's certainly what I intended it to be when I was writing it. And it's certainly what I myself felt about it as a story.

However, I can completely understand why readers might be a bit reluctant. For many of us here in the west, we have a vision of the Poland of the cold war years firmly lodged in our brains - part of that great unknown empire beyond the 'iron curtain.' When I was a little girl, growing up in post-war Leeds with my lovely Polish father and Irish mother, I used to hear them talking about the iron curtain and imagine it as a real barrier, a huge hanging made of shining metal, sweeping across the countryside.

But for me, there was another Poland and that was the one my father told me about, as magical and unattainable as a place in a fairytale.

I was quite a sickly child, with severe asthma, and dad would sit beside my bed and patiently weave his own lost past into fabulous stories for me, describing his family, most of whom had died in the war or in the various skirmishes that preceded it, especially in the east.

But he also told me tales of a time long before that: the superstitions and beliefs, the songs and poems, the eighteenth and nineteenth century history which he had absorbed when he was just a little boy himself.

His tales were full of that long-lost world of the Austro Hungarian Empire, where privileged people drank tea out of silver samovars, ate preserves from porcelain dishes with tiny silver spoons, and sometimes visited Vienna where they would eat cake ... and dance.

Of course it wasn't all like that. This was in so many ways a savagely dangerous world. Human life was cheap  and as well as the cake and the dancing, there was abject poverty and prejudice, bloodshed, misery and disease. All of these things have found their way into The Amber Heart, as well as an equivocal but attractive hero in Piotro, a heroine whose faults match her virtues in Maryanna, and a setting which I still find myself revisiting in my mind's eye from time to time - the big, beautiful, pancake yellow house of Lisko.

Give it a try. You might find yourself swept along too!

The only thing I ask is that if you do download this and enjoy it, you'll snatch a few moments from your busy day to tell other people what you liked about the book - and maybe tell me too. (Even if it's only the Viennese chocolate cakes and pastries, which I certainly had a lot of fun writing about...)

At the same time, you can download my contemporary novel, Bird of Passage. Here in the UK and here in the USA. Although the settings for these two novels are quite different, there are some similarities between them. Both owe something to my passion for Wuthering Heights, although of the two, Bird of Passage is by far the more intentional homage to that book. Even there, the references are quite subtle.

There are other similarities between The Amber Heart and Bird of Passage which I only noticed after I had finished writing and revising both novels. Both are love stories, both are big books in the sense that they are reasonably long and span a great many years.

I realised quite quickly  that I needed the elbow room to tell the whole story in each case.

Bird of Passage, which begins and ends in the present, has something of the 'family saga' about it. Mainly though, it's a haunting tale of obsessive love, betrayal, loss and institutionalised cruelty, set in Ireland and Scotland. I found some parts of this very distressing to write. It took me a long time to realise what had made Finn, my central character, into the person he was. I resisted exploring it. The book felt stuck and stupid for a while. But once I found out what had happened to Finn - and that's exactly what it felt like - finding it out - everything came together for me, even though exploring it was still a painful process. By then, I cared for Finn quite as much as Kirsty in the novel.

Both of these books have something else in common and I'll own up to it here. It was almost impossible for me to find a conventional publisher for these two novels  although I and my agent(s) spent long and frustrating years searching. I'll let you into a secret. One of the many editors who said of Bird of Passage that she 'loved it but didn't think she could sell it' told me that it was 'too well written to be popular but not experimental enough to be literary'. Even back then, when eBooks were just beginning to loom on the horizon, I despaired at the judgement and thought it was a serious indictment of the way in which conventional publishing views its potential readers. The books I loved to read myself were accessible, well written stories that drew me into a world created by the writer. That was what I wanted to write. I couldn't imagine (and I can imagine a lot of things - it's what I do after all!) that I was alone in this.

I don't think I was.
I don't think I am.

The Scottish island setting of Bird of Passage

But really, this is not a complaint. I used to have a few chips on my shoulder, I'll admit. I had too many years of agents and editors raving about work which they could neither sell nor publish. Even the sympathy of friends was unbearable. But now, thanks to Amazon, and Kindle, I'm as happy in my work as I have ever been in my life. And I have more stories to tell, more novels to finish and new books to start. So watch this space.

For those who are still not quite sure about eBooks, or just don't like the medium, I'll definitely be getting both of these out as Print On Demand paperbacks, early next year. Sooner, if I can manage my time just a little more efficiently.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about me, visit my website at www.wordarts.co.uk and if you want to know a bit more about the Polish background to the Amber Heart, visit my other blog at http://theamberheart.blogspot.com