It’s been a good week for yet more book-related activities after the excitement at Winchester Writers Conference last weekend:

1)SOMETHING NICE, but not unexpected: I received an email from the Lamma-zine reviewer of Paper Lanterns, John Cairns, with a link to his own e-zine, Cairns Media. He’d previously asked if he could quote an excerpt from my novel there, and here it is, complete with some of his own pictures to illustrate the scene from Paper Lanterns when Ann arrives at the ferry pier on Lamma island.

If you’ve read it already, you might like to see the photos, and if you haven’t, you’ll get a flavour of the book and the accuracy of my descriptions when writing the novel.

2) SOMETHING NICE AND TOTALLY UNEXPECTED: I solved the mystery of how Tammy from Tennessee had come across a brief description of my novel, Paper Lanterns. You might not find anything extraordinary about this until you think of the thousands of novels published each year, many with the weight of a huge marketing machine behind them, and then consider the fact that Novel Press is a frail new-born, with Paper Lanterns as its only product so far, and nothing behind it at all except my efforts, and the good wishes of my small group of fellow writers.

The only way I could think of that might have led Tammy to my book, would have been the lovely review from the excellent Rhaposdy in Books, with its large following of readers, most of whom are also Americans.But no,Tammy had arrived there through sheer happenstance (as I’ll explain in a later post). Until this week, I was too involved in discussing the most convenient way of getting the ten copies safely to her home in Tennessee, and it was only when I heard that the package had arrived,(two days after being picked up by the carriers, DHL) and the copies distributed to the other members of her group, that I thought of asking her how she’d come across it in the first place.

3) SOMETHING NICE that had been planned a couple of months ago: an ‘author’s talk’ that I gave on Thursday morning at Erdington library. Last month I was talking to a writing group there. This time, it was a reading group. One member who had read and enjoyed Paper Lanterns, commented on her perception of the way that novels these days are presented to the reading public. She felt that the we, the readers are being manipulated by the needs of the publishing world to produce sure best-sellers, and that many of the books that are promoted in bookshops have been written with an eye on an imaginary camera, as if they were packaging their stories in a way that would easily convert to film scripts.

I was glad to hear her views, as they seem to accord to those of Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands in his article ‘New Ways of Publishing’ in which he expresses the hope that “poor writing won’t be quite so often foisted upon us in an attempt to get a return on investment or to distort our reading tastes for purely commercial gain.”

And now for the fifth and final question in my Virtual Treasure Hunt. Congratulations to everyone who’s already emailed me the correct answers to the first four questions (It’s still not too late to find the answers – you can start here, and then find the links back to the earlier questions)

QUESTION 5
(a)What is the fourth statement about Writing a Book that I won’t immediately want to contradict?
AND,(HINT) if you’ve found the right page, you’ll also be able to tell me the answer to this, linked, question
(b)Which author re-wrote one of his novels 30 years after its publication?

The first five people to ‘contact me’ with the correct five answers will win a copy of either The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, or my latest novel, Paper Lanterns:

GOOD LUCK!

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.