I’m pleased to say that there are several Treasure Hunters out there who are on the way to winning one of the free five books on offer. You’ll find the fourth question below. The fifth and final one will be posted next week.

Each of the posts with a Treasure Hunt question will take you back to the previous one, so for number 3, click here (or just scroll down). This will make it easier for newcomers to join in, and have the same chance of winning, as answers can be sent in one by one, or all at once with the correct answer to question 5

QUESTION 4
What were the words that Dave Reeves used to introduce me on his radio show?

(HINT) This group give great PERFORMANCES. Once you’ve found them, you’re just one click away from the post that holds the answer.

And now for a few totally irrelevant photos –Well, they are relevant to my life at the moment, but not to my writing activities.

I’ve mentioned Gardening Husband in some previous posts, and one of those links him with poetry though he’s as much of a poet as I am a gardener – in other words, not at all!

However, he has made a significant contribution to the content of Paper Lanterns, my latest novel, as you can see here and here.

These pictures show where he spends a great deal of his time.

In the last few weeks
we’ve been devouring:
baby broad beans,
spinach,
peas,
strawberries
and, just recently
some of the new crop
POTATOES.

Eaten within a couple of hours from being wrenched from the earth, they are the best you could possibly ask for.

The taste of them is as near to the irradiated, several-months-old spuds from supermarkets
as our Earth is from the moon!These are the first digging of Jersey Royals.

The sight of these is a poem in itself!

If you can’t get a ticket for my book launch next week, you do have a chance to hear me talking about Paper Lanterns, thanks to Radio Wildfire. “The Loop” is always worth listening to in its own right, and not just because it’ll let you hear me talking about the real-life letters that partly inspired Paper Lanterns. It’s a nonstop transmission between their live monthly broadcasts - two hours of lively interviews with writers , musicians and generally creative types from around the West Midlands region.

The whole ‘menu’ is there for you to read, so you can see what’ll be coming up next. You can’t predict which part you’ll land on, but you’ll be able to see whether or not I’m next on the list. If you’ve worked out that you’ve just missed me, and my turn won’t come round again for ages , you can decide to go out for a walk or dig the garden and then come back to listen to me. (There are lots of other interesting things though, so you might prefer to listen to everything else (instead, or as well!)
All you need to do is click on this link then click ‘Listen’

So what about those letters? Briefly, the story behind the novel relates to some original love letters that were written in China in 1920 by a married English woman to a young colleague of her husband. There were five letters that related to her, and the final of these had been written by a female friend of this woman, informing the young man why he had not heard from her friend. It turned out that the husband had discovered that ‘something’ was going on, so the errant wife had given up her would-be lover for the sake of her children.

Reading these letters, I felt like an intruder even though the writer herself must have been dead by the time I came across this material. I was intensely moved by this glimpse into the private life of a woman from a different era, but then, when I then found that there were the two short letters in broken English, written in 1916, I was almost in tears for the young Chinese girl as she struggled to express her grief at his absence.

There were a few other accompanying documents in the same package, and when I turned to these I realised that both sets of letters had been addressed to the same young man. In spite of my feelings of sympathy towards both these women, the writer in me was already dreaming up ways in which the stories of those two women could be woven into fiction.

I’ll be writing more about these letters soon, but meanwhile, in case you were wondering why I’ve included pictures of a peacock and pink magnolia, it’s because these were taken on a gloriously sunny day in Kew Gardens, while we were visiting our daughter and her fiance in Chiswick for the weekend.

Getting back to recommending other websites to visit, you might like to follow this link I’ve already mentioned Nicola Morgan (aka ‘crabbit old bat’) in a previous post, and the new link is to her new novel, with lord knows how many exciting competitions etc. What a wildfire of energy the woman is!

Do I speak Romanian? No. Can I read Romanian? No. Am I a fraud? I hope not.
Then why has EgoPHobia, a Romanian cultural e-journal posted my name under the name of a Romanian writer of a short story called Hell and Blood?
Here it is – see?
“by Cristina Nemerovschi (Morgothya) (Romania)
Translation from Romanian by Christine Coleman and Mircea Filimon, MTTLC student
edited by Robert Fenhagen”

And here is the lively opening of a story that I appear to have translated into English from a language I know nothing about (apart from its links to Latin and Italian)

“Today I started spitting blood.

The first thing that I thought was that I might have tuberculosis, which, actually, made me feel alright, because after all, it’s a disease which sounds good; it kind of gives out a romantic aura: tuberculosis; mononucleosis, well, at least, I think so, and I don’t die too quickly— the worst case scenario, I have a few months to live, which is plenty of time for me to write a novel, or a really good short story, or, at least, some poetry, or, at the very least, an essay–something that will be found after I croak, of which people will say, “He was a prolific writer; we’ll miss him. He died of tuberculosis, you know.” And the other person will say, “Oh my, I had no idea.”

So how did I get involved in the first place?

It was thanks to Anne Stewart, the talented and energetic founder of poetrypf, ”a growing showcase of poets writing in English, some fully accomplished with several published collections, others at the start of their poetic careers.” Anne agreed to collaborate in the translation project set up by Lidia Vianu, Professor of contemporary British literature at the English Department of Bucharest University.

This project began in February 08 with translations of poetry into Romanian and publication online at the Translation Café, along with a programme of broadcasts by the Romanian National Broadcasting Corporation. Anne asked for poets to volunteer some of their own poems for this project, and in early December 08 I had the surreal experience of hearing my own brief biography, and then my poems, read in Romanian.

When you’re on the site, click on: ‘The Poets’ on the top right of the page. Then scroll down the alphabetical list till you reach my name and that of the translator, and click on ‘Listen’, to hear my poems being read first in Romanian, and then in English

Follow the poetrypf link again and scroll down to find out more about this project, including the CD, the anthology and the international tour. I didn’t take part in the tour, but one of my poems, Something Like a Stone, is on the CD in both languages. Read more about my first ever prize-winning poem, here

But that wasn’t the end of the Romanian connection for me. Towards the end of February, I received an email from Anne, “am I right in thinking that you were interested in ‘polishing’ translation from Romanian? We have a short story translated by one of Lidia’s students that needs polishing to publishable standard.”

I tend to try anything once, when an opportunity arises for a new experience, so I agreed. Almost by return, the organiser of this project, Silvia Bratu, sent me the story.

And now for the tricky part: when you can’t understand the original language, how can you be sure of the author’s intentions? Was that slightly clumsy phrasing a deliberate representation of the narrator’s own lively speech patterns? Or was it just ‘bad English’? How far should I go in imposing my own personal views on another writer’s work?

I’d enjoyed reading this story as it had a fresh and quirky style with some highly original images – I particularly liked the narrator’s musing about the moment of death:

“ If…you keep your soul after death, then you need to mark it very clearly so you don’t mistake it for someone else’s. Because there should be some sort of little border to cross, a tiny rupture, during which you and your soul are separated for a short time. It’s like putting it on a plate while you go through the metal detector.”

When I followed this link and read the final version, I was glad to see that the editor had tightened a few of the passages that I didn’t feel a ‘translator’ had the right to do.

I was lucky enough to stumble across this wonderful blog soon after I’d made my first tentative step into the maze of Blogdom last May, Beginning my blog about creative writing.

My son had made me a website in 2005, when my first novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society was published, but I had to rely on him for any updates I wanted to make. Consequently, it gradually became as static as a framed picture. ‘You need to have a blog, Mum,’ he insisted, and changed my site into a Wordpress blog, something that I can actually manage for myself.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time at my computer, creating poems, stories and articles, but I know that unless they are printed, or sent elsewhere as an attachment, they’ll remain unseen in a little yellow folder, seemingly filed away somewhere behind the monitor screen where the words first arranged themselves into sentences and paragraphs.

Clicking the ‘Publish’ tab, knowing that what I’ve written will be on view for anyone across the world who happens to land on my site, is a very strange sensation.

At first, I felt every post had to be a mini-masterpiece, otherwise hundreds of critical strangers would be posting scathing comments about the standard of my writing skills. At the same time, my logical brain was telling me that the only virtual travellers to land on my site would’ve arrived there by accident, and would immediately click themselves away to somewhere more exciting.

It gradually dawned on me, prompted by Techie Son, that I was the one who needed to do the travelling. And how instructive, and what fun that has turned out to be! I’ve mentioned several other websites relating to readers and writers in some of my other posts, but as a writer, I think it would be hard to beat Essential Writers for its huge variety of topics, the standard of its articles; its welcoming attitude and support for ‘newbies’ and its ease of navigation.

Personally I have reason to be grateful to Judy Darley of Essential Writers:
for my first ‘author chat’

for my opportunity to talk about the publication of my first novel

for publishing my article about choosing a cover for my new book

and now, a wonderful review of Paper Lanterns.

And just in case you miss her ‘welcome’ page, here are Judy’s own words about Essential Writers

“If you love words, you’re in the right place. This is a website for anyone who makes their living by writing, or who wants to. This includes journalists, authors, poets, short story writers, scriptwriters, graphic novelists, and anyone else for whom the written word is essential.

Although I will be overseeing the site, adding content and ensuring you get all the information you need, the majority of the features, interviews, blogs and tips will be written by the people in the know, as well as anyone who fancies sending their words out into the world.

On the How To pages, you will find valuable explanations of complex issues such as tax, while the Essential Words section is packed with interviews with authors, editors and other inspiring people. The blogs will give you an insight into the lives of other writers, while news will let you know about writing opportunities and what’s going on where right now.”

Last Saturday was dedicated to STATES OF INDEPENDENCE, a regional event held at De Montfort University in Leicester, with its main focus on independent publishers and their books. It was organised by Five Leaves Publications in Nottingham and the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University

I’d first heard about the event via Soundswrite, the wonderful poetry group that I try to attend every fortnight, and I volunteered to help out on their stall.
Although I take great pleasure in promoting other writers, I’m an incorrigible self-promoter too, so my next step was to contact the organiser, Ross Bradshaw, Director of Five Leaves Publications, and see if he could squeeze in a table for my Novel Press.

My experiences in marketing my previous novel had made me fully aware of the difficulties, but my policy has always been ‘try, regardless, and see what happens,’ so as I was driving through the pouring rain yesterday morning, I had no expectations for myself at all in terms of selling books.

What I had planned to do, in between helping with the display of poetry books published by Soundswrite Press, was to browse some of the other forty stalls attend some of the talks and readings. Top of my list was this enticing preview:
Literary forgery with David Belbin
David Belbin’s novel The Pretender is about literary forgery (and small press magazines) covering the forging of stories by Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Roald Dahl. For the cover his publisher forged an edition of a non-existent magazine. David will read from the novel, but also touch on that long history of literary forgery, plagiarism and theft.

Unfortunately I didn’t make it, but every cloud.. silver lining etc. In this case, it was because I was too busy talking to interested writers and readers, and by the time I was free, it was too late to barge in. Apart from the enticing nature of the write-up on his talk, I also wanted to meet David in person because he now runs the Creative Writing M.A. at Nottingham Trent University – an organisation to which I owe a lot. (see some of my earlier posts for more details of why I might never have been published without it.)

It’s a shame I can’t be in two (or even more than two) places at one time, as there were lots of other interesting talks on the menu, but I thoroughly enjoyed talking to people who stopped by my table. I sold several copies of both Paper Lanterns,
and
The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, but it was the conversations that reminded me yet again of how much I enjoy discussing writing with those start of their writing journeys, and others, well on the way to publication, and now, my added interest, all the processes of publishing and marketing. (I didn’t realise I hadn’t reduced the size of this pic enough! Might alter it later)

It was also refreshing to chat to some of the young students who are finishing off the 3rd year of their degrees. When I heard that some of them were giving readings of their own work, I went to hear them (this happened at a moment when there was no one at my stall!). There was an interesting range of short stories and poems, but the highlight for me was from a young man named Nathan (I think?), whose ability to recite a long and very entertaining rhyming monologue perched crossed legged on a table and looking and sounding perfectly at ease, reminded me of the poet and stand-up comic, Luke Wright (see my previous post about that performance)

All in all, it was a great day! Thank you Ross and the team from De Montford University.

If it hadn’t been for Google alerts, Hermann (aka Lamma-Gung - Managing Editor of Lamma-zine, Webmaster & Moderator of Lamma.com.hk) would never have known that his beloved home, Lamma Island, was the setting for my latest novel, Paper Lanterns.

You can imagine my excitement when, on my return from my recent visit to Hong Kong, this email appeared in my inbox: “I’m editing, photographing and publishing the daily online newspaper for Lamma Island, Lamma.com.hk. I found your blog and would be most interested in getting your book reviewed for the Lamma-zine by one of my regular reviewers or myself. We frequently feature Artists and writers living on Lamma or anything written about our home island.”

That excitement now seems almost mundane compared to what I felt on receiving this glowing review from John Cairns, a writer himself.

It’s always encouraging to get a positive review (I was lucky enough to get lots of these for my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society) but I have to admit that I was a little apprehensive when it came to having Paper Lanterns read by people who know Lamma Island and other parts of Hong Kong far better than I do. What if I’d made some major factual errors, or totally failed to capture what the residents consider to be the essence of the place?

Fortunately, this has not been the case, as you can tell from the extracts that he has chosen to include in his review.

As he writes in a separate email, “I enjoyed it a lot and from cover to cover. Admittedly, a big part of the reason to enjoy it so much is the extremely familiar setting. But if Christine had done a bad job with the Lamma setting, it might have been horrendous to read. And in fact, it was very good indeed.”

“Place” has always played an important role in my novels – and I like to read books with vivid descriptions of unfamiliar places that make me feel I’ve been there myself. This was one of the delights in reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, for instance. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, set in the Congo, was another.

One thing that interested me when I was reading John Cairns’s review was the way he had picked up on what for most people might have been an insignificant detail:
“Coleman shows a nice touch with details, often inserting meaningful objects at suitable moments. For example, Ann recalls being an angry teenager who retreats to her bedroom and flips through Anne of Green Gables, a classic novel about childhood angst. “

It turns out that John grew up on a farm in Canada’s smallest province, just a few miles from the setting of “Anne of Green Gables, the classic Canadian novel published more than 100 years ago.”

It’s things like this which bring home to me most forcibly how small this world really is!

The review was published on Lamma-zine this Tuesday, 16th March, so there will soon be other articles that push it out of view, so you might need to scroll down a bit before you find it.

How can it be March already? Maybe there’s a mathematical formula that can explain the correlation between my own advancing years and the increasing speed with which each brand new year hurtles towards its middle age.

March is a significant month for Paper Lanterns – its formal publication date falls on 15th of March, but the copies themselves have now been delivered to Novel Press and are ready to find themselves new homes on other people’s bookshelves. Look to your right, scroll down a little bit, and you’ll see how easy it is to get your copy! I’m also hoping that some of these might land in temporary accommodation in Hong Kong bookshops, as well as some Independent booksellers in the UK.

As I’ve said below, there have been hopeful signs of interest, and a couple of days ago I was delighted to open an email from the editor of the online Lamma-zine, wanting to know where he could buy a copy of my new novel so that he or one of his team could write a review. At first I’d assumed that he must have heard about my book from my sister or one of her friends, but no, it was Google Alerts which had led him to this site. Hurray for Google!

Other March events include the latest copy of Writing Magazine, inside which, on pages 30 and 31, is an article entitled “Make your book unputdownable’” by Crysse Morrison in her regular ‘Good Practice’ slot. This series of articles is well worth reading, but that’s not all – the sub title is, “Hook your reader with a glimpse of the action and conflict to come”, and its main focus for the examples it gives is the novel, Telling Liddy, by Anne Fine, the award winning author of numerous books for children and eight for adults, and my second novel, Paper Lanterns. How’s that for company for unknown author!

I was delighted when Crysse told me that she wanted to use some quotations from Paper Lanterns for this article. There they are, under the subheading, ‘Enticing trailers’. There are three intertwined story lines in my novel, and three key dates. The main action of the book is set in the present, but both 1971 and 1930 are highly significant as well. I’d changed the opening chapters several times before I settled on a short prologue set in 1971, giving hints of what will unfold later in the book.

I gradually realised that I needed another, earlier, clue to the events of 1930, and Crysse goes on to say: “But the initial hook of this novel is an atmospheric fragment of oriental mystery from a later chapter when Ann (the main character) begins to uncover family secrets that will slowly burn away all the previous certainties of her life:

Friday 8th April, 1930, Hong Kong
“…and I had the oddest sensation – as though my soul – my very self – was a bright flame that now was shrinking, leaning away from him as from a gust of wind. And into my mind came the image of how the Chinese protect a small flame of light from being extinguished and at the same time, beautify it, with a delicate construction of coloured paper.”

A March event that I’m particularly looking forward to, and involves my new baby (Paper Lanterns, of course!) will take place in a coffee shop in the middle of Birmingham on the last Tuesday of the month. But more of that later.

Character, Plot and Place – three essential ingredients for a novel. I think I’d usually say that ‘Character’ is my priority, but today, ‘Place’ is on my mind. When I come to think of it, I tend to associate people with places where I see them most often.

Right now I’m in Hong Kong (as I mentioned in my post below) – more precisely, I’m on Lamma island, where the Ann, the main character in my book, Paper Lanterns, spends a week that changes her life. So it’s not surprising that I thought about Ann’s reaction to the island when I arrived there on Thursday afternoon:

“Now she’s close enough to see the long ferry pier jutting out into the still water of the bay, and the small flat-roofed houses nestling on the slope of the hill among tall trees. And there, on the near side of the pier, a tiny collection of wooden shacks on stilts, perched above the rocks on the shoreline, and behind these, a small inlet with a cluster of little boats.”

As I emerged onto the pier myself, I thought of Ann again, “ The first thing that strikes her is the row of bicycles that straddles the top bar of the railings on each side of the long, concrete pier.”

It’s the Chinese new year this weekend, and I was delighted to see the long line of bright red , tasselled paper lanterns swaying above the bikes in the breeze. There’s an air of excitement in the narrow main street of Yung Shue Wan, but it it looks as though the weather will be cooler than expected, and is likely to rain.

Still, at least I managed to get here – there was an hour or more when I thought we’d all have to go home again, while the plane full of passengers was waiting on the tarmac at Birmingham airport for our turn with the de-icer machine to clear the wings of the inch or so of snow that had just fallen. I’d not realized how disruptive even a centimeter of snow can be, when combined with zero temperatures. At least we won’t have snow and ice here.

In case you haven’t yet seen the cover of my book, I have to tell you that the lanterns on the cover are green, not red! The book will be on sale on this site next month, but meanwhile you can find out more about it here.

It’s still January, the double-faced month, so it’s not too late to mention books I’ve read in 2009 - especially a December book, and especially this one, which is so difficult to slot neatly into any category; neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there, and just when you think you’ve grasped its nature, it slips away, laughing: “A highly original and visual novel, brimming with delicious wit, The Milliner and the Phrenologist is a remarkable debut from Kay Syrad”

It’s written in a voice like no other that I’ve encountered in this or the last half of the previous century. Not that it’s archaic or old fashioned, though it is set in Victorian London. Quaint, perhaps, might be a better word, though that won’t do justice to its groundedness and other-worldliness, its frivolity and wisdom, ruthless honesty and tenderness. I was gripped from the first page to the last.

The characters are drawn with fine brush strokes, a few at a time, so that the reader can visualise their faces , gestures and clothing in minute detail, as they are gradually led to a fuller understanding of the inner workings of their minds.

Here is just one example, taken at random:

“As she was passing the tea rooms …she noticed John Motton sitting at one of the tables…He hadn’t seen her and she moved back slightly, so that she could watch him without being noticed. He was chewing what was probably some kind of meat sandwich, and it amused Alice to see his jaw bones moving in large regular circles. She could see his smooth temples becoming red and crinkly-veined, how his whiskery cheek hollowed and puffed…and Alice couldn’t take her eyes off him, for it seemed that he was never going to take a fresh bite.”

Here’s an extract of what’s said on the back cover:
“When Alice Heapy, an unusual and artistic young milliner, daringly sets up her own business, the mother of John Motton, eminent phrenologist, is amongst the first of her bourgeois and eccentric clients. Alice is intrigued by the phrenologist’s belief that he can determine his clients’ character and moral capacity by measuring their heads, whilst Motton is astonished at the power Alice’s poetic hats exert on the lives of his mother and her peculiar friends. But under each other’s exacting and increasingly hostile gaze, Alice and Motton begin to reveal—and, in desperation, attempt to conceal—their own characters.”

A few years ago, I’d been privileged to be in the same group as Kay for a series of monthly poetry seminars led by Mimi Khalvati, and although the other group members all produced good work, it was clear to me that Kay’s was an exceptional talent.

When I heard through the Cinnamon Press website that they were publishing Kay’s first novel, I was delighted for her, and impressed by the publishers for recognising and supporting this talent.

If you’re looking for a light, predictable holiday read, this book might not be for you. But if you want to wallow in delicious prose and enter a strange world whose characters will remain in your head and niggle away at you until you pick up the book and read it again, then I urge you to click on the link from Kay’s website, and buy it from Cinnamon Press.

Once you’ve read and enjoyed the book, that’s the time to use the link to Amazon and leave a review.

I’d love to hear your views if you do get hold of this book. And also if you have an unusual book to recommend.

A whole week since my last post! What have I been doing all this time? Apart from braving the ice and blizzards to get to work, (not too arduous really as it’s only three miles away and mostly on gritted roads), and enjoying snowy walks in Sutton Park and roaming freely around the golf-course down the road, I’ve been partying with a wonderfully eclectic bunch of bloggers to celebrate the first anniversary of Nicola Morgan’s (aka The Crabbit Old Bat’s) brilliant blog: Help I Need a Publisher.

No, I’m not being offensive – this is her own boast: ‘I am proud to be the first google result for “crabbit old bat”. My aim to help good writers means I’m glad to annoy hopeless ones with my acerbity. I’m with Thomas Mann: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ‘

I love that quote – it’s a great comfort when the going gets tough! Before I tell you more about Nicola’s party – I’m posting a picture that reminds me that the sky hasn’t been a continuous murky grey over the last couple of weeks, and because it reminds me of spring blossom.
Also, I want to show you the back cover of Paper Lanterns before you get so enthralled by reading all the interesting comments (186 at last count) and then get absorbed into the maze of amazing links. I was swallowed up for the whole of Sunday and any spare time I’ve had since then.

So take a look at this picture before you scroll down to the link that’ll deflect you from my site (I’m not trying to get rid of you! It’s just that if you’re anything like me, you’ll forget to drop back here again to post a comment too.)

If you haven’t been following my previous posts about the design of my book cover, and how readers have helped me select my final choice, you might need to take a quick look at the recent posts below. It’ll help you to see why I’m so delighted to have this particular scene on the back cover.

And now for the Crabbit Old Bat – I’m going to let her speak for herself, which she’s always ready to do: (a shrinking violet she’s not) –
But before you gatecrash the party, start with the pathetic fallacy: “IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT” (13th January) then soak up the HUGE NUMBER of helpful hints in WHERE DOES A STORY BEGIN, (12th Jan)
and THEN you’ll have earned your right to pick your way through the clusters of streamers and deflating balloons as you open new links to the blogs of the guests at Nicola’s Party

Have fun!!