One of the benefits of writing a book, and better still, of getting published, is the way it opens doors to lots of other writerly activities, such as giving talks, running workshops, and attending Literary Festivals as a performer, as well as being a member of the audience. Another enjoyable aspect of being a writer (with or without being published) is making friends with other writers.

Last Thursday I was able to combine a visit to my writing friend, Crysse Morrison, with an opportunity to be one of eight castaways in an event listed in the Frome Festival Programme as Desert Island Reads. Crysse herself had to step in at the last minute to take the place of a performer who was unable to attend. You can read more about the event on her blog.
I’d left my own camera in her house so thanks are due to Crysse’s camera and to Wendy, one of the festival organisers, who took this picture, which features, from left to right:
Me, Kevan Manwaring,Keely Beresford,
Sue Boyle,
Crysse, David Johnson, Philip de Glanville and Adrian Tinniswood
Desert Island Reads was described as “eight local celebrities share a favourite literary extract and tell us why they chose it.” I felt a bit of a fraud as I was neither “local”, not a “celebrity” but no one seemed to notice. When Crysse had first invited me to take part, I’d thought about including some real-life letters, because of the role that real-life letters had played in my novel Paper Lanterns, but it was proving quite difficult to find something that not only had inspired me in the past, but still lived up to the memories of it.

After searching my bookshelves I found an edition of the letters and poems of John Keats and was relieved to find that the he could still work his magic on me. I’ll quote some of the extracts that I read in a future post. Take a look at the on-line programme for the ten-day Festival and you’ll be amazed by the wide variety of all the events.

Crysse was heavily involved in the organisation of several events, but she’d booked tickets for us both so that she could relax with me for the evening at ‘Cabaret Sans Frontiers’, a totally surreal and highly entertaining event –

and here I quote from her own blog: “the eccentric energy of Cabaret sans Frontieres, this year offering its macabre and madcap medley from a ship bound for ‘the edge of the edge of possibilities, and beyond.’ “

Here are a few more photos of the music

and strange exhibits that we were encouraged to inspect during the interval, such as this ’spider’ appearing to rest on the top of a cabinet, to whom I offered a sip of my white wine spritzer.

The next morning, before I set off for Sussex to visit my mother for the weekend, Crysse insisted on taking me to an amazing exhibition featuring the intricate, imaginative, and brilliantly bizarre constructions and sketches of Ralph Steadman.

If you’re anywhere near Frome, make sure you take a look.

There were no signs anywhere asking people not to take photos of the exhibits, so I’m hoping that no one will object to these.

On my return from Sussex
I was greeted by the sight of multiple copies of The Birmingham Sunday Mercury that Gardening Husband had bought for me to use as marketing material for my novel, Paper Lanterns.

I’d been told that it would be published today, and I was delighted with the double page spread, giving the story of the cache of real life letters that inspired the middle section of the book.

Here’s a photo of the man on the receiving end of the love letters from two different women,

and here’s the young Chinese girl, with a small selection of the letters behind her. It’s fascinating stuff, and anyone who’s read the book is likely to enjoy seeing the originals of the letters that I have adapted for the novel.

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!

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!

Is it ever acceptable to read other people’s personal letters? ( This isn’t Question Three in my Virtual Treasure Hunt, you’ll find that further down the page.) I’ll get back to those letters in a minute or two.

Meanwhile, I want to mention that more correct answers to my Virtual Treasure Hunt are still arriving in my in-box, and it’s not too late to join in. For those of you who haven’t yet entered the TREASURE HUNT, you’ll find Question Two here

You’ll find the THIRD QUESTION below, and I’ll be posting a few more over the next couple of weeks. The first five people to contact me with all the correct answers will receive a free copy of either Paper Lanterns or The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society.

It’s exactly a year since I posted this picture of a Greek Island – If you didn’t read that post, you’d probably wonder what possible connection there could be between a course on Novel Writing in that idyllic setting and the terrible Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001. (There’s more than one HINT in this paragraph that will lead you to the answer to this question – via a link to another post)

QUESTION THREE:
What was the last line of the poem which won me a cheque for £100?

As for other people’s letters, I wouldn’t dream of reading something personal that wasn’t meant for me. However, when the letters were written nearly one hundred years ago, it’s a different matter. Though, as I explained in an earlier post, it is still a very strange and moving experience.

Here is one that was written in 1916 by a young Chinese woman. You’ll need to read Paper Lanterns to see how I’ve woven this into the novel, which is set mainly in Hong Kong.

“Dear Sir

Shing Mui”

It’s a whole week since my book launch and I still smile with delight when I go over the events of that evening, so I’m about to indulge myself shamelessly by giving a few more details of my conversation with Clarissa about Paper Lanterns, and how my writing career has been linked to our friendship as you can also see in my profile, published last week in the Birmingham Post, and now available to read on-line

As I said last week, we’d been treated royally by the Ikon Cafe staff, and you can read here about Clarissa’s comments on the food.

Friendships forged in childhood, especially those based on shared incarceration at boarding school, can last for a lifetime, and Clarissa felt that the best way of explaining how we’d met was to read a short extract from her autobiography, Spilling The Beans.

Our lives have taken very different paths through adulthood. It’s no secret that Clarissa is a recovering alcoholic, and when her drinking was getting more and more out of hand, I was so worried about her that I wrote a short story based on this.

I entered it for a competition run by BRMB and the Birmingham Readers & Writers Festival in 1985(the forerunner of the Birmingham Book festival) and I still have the clipping from the (then) Sutton Coldfield Times with the account of my prize winning story.

That was my first ever success with my writing, and in 2005, Clarissa was there to introduce me at the Birmingham Book Festival’s launch of my first novel,The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society.

Neither of us could have predicted this wonderful event and the changes in both of our lives 20 years later – Clarissa was no longer drinking and had forged an amazing new career for herself in television, and I was a published novelist at last.

We talked about other events in my writing career, and the ups and downs of my attempts to get published, and then I explained the ideas, inspirations and themes that produced Paper Lanterns. This included the story of how I discovered the original letters from 1920

First I read a long letter from the married English woman, and then the one from the young Chinese woman written 4 years before that to the same man. (I’ll post that one soon, but meanwhile, here’s an extract from the English woman. As I explained during the launch last Tuesday, I brought the dates forward to 1930, and changed the setting from Canton to Hong Kong, as this is a place I know well. In my novel, I’ve kept as closely as I could to the original letters, and have invented a series of journal entries, involving a totally fictional story line for a key section of Paper Lanterns.

Thursday
Ah, Mr McFarlane, you are a disturber! What do you mean by upsetting the equilibrium of two highly respectable (!) ladies in their heretofore blissful states of married and single blessedness? And two at once, mind you! And you so young and all. The poor young idlers that we endeavour to teach to shoot must certainly not have got their money’s worth this morning and now at our first opportunity (recess) we two rush together to weep on each other’s shoulders for what we haven’t got and will never get. It’s a great bond, this being crazy about the same person. I only hope I’ll be able to preserve enough of a sense of decency from the wreck to give her the chance I wish I could take myself.

After these letters I read more extracts from the novel itself, and then went on to explain about the founding of Novel Press. I was delighted with the comments of Jonathan Davidson on the Writing West Midlands blog, where he suggests in his article “New Ways of Publishing” that:

“the means of production is moving away from being held in the hands of one conglomorate… Good writing will surface for us all to enjoy: 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.”

What a week this has been for me and for my latest ‘babies’: Paper Lanterns, and my publishing venture, Novel Press. On top of all this, I nearly jumped out of my skin this morning when I was leafing through today’s Birmingham Post. I was scanning for an article and a photo that I’d been informed would appear last week.

It didn’t.

Although I don’t tend to expect more than my share of luck to land on my doorstep, I have to admit that I was rather disappointed, especially as the photographer had come to take my photo the Tuesday before. ‘Oh well! Never mind,’ I thought. ‘It’s a shame, but they’ve obviously got better things to print.’

However, I never let myself be put off by low expectations , so before I went to work I stopped at the useful shop at the top of the hill. I slowly turned the pages, thinking, ‘Not likely to be in this week with all this election stuff jostling for space.’

It wasn’t in Books, Films, History, Outdoors, Motoring, or Travel. Business Briefing? Not likely! Then, over the page, under the heading, Business Profile there was my face occupying the entire page! And on the facing page, another photo and a whole long article about ME!! AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER CHRISTINE COLEMAN

But I’m running ahead of myself. This amazing double-page spread happened today, and I haven’t yet said anything about Tuesday evening at the Ikon Gallery. What a fabulous venue for my launch! This was all thanks to Sara Beadle and staff at the Birmingham Book Festival who organised the whole event, liaising with the staff at the Ikon Gallery.

They were all keen to help promote me as a local author and publisher, together with my childhood friend, Clarissa Dickson Wright who has loyally supported me in my writing endeavours (more of this in my next post)

When we arrived, Clarissa and I posed for photographs, in the Ikon Cafe and then we and my husband were treated to an excellent meal of tapas and other mouth-watering dishes. Clarissa is well known for her interest in good food, and was genuinely enthusiastic in her praise of our meal.

We were then taken up in a glass lift . Here’s the description from their website
“The dramatic second floor galleries offer 228.2m² of space and are light and airy, retaining the original arched gothic ceiling.”

The Ikon staff and volunteers had to wait till the gallery had been closed to the public before they could bring in the 90 chairs, erect the platform for me and Clarissa, arrange the copies of Paper Lanterns and my first novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society on a table at the far end, and lay out the drinks for the audience at the other end. It was all done with amazing speed and efficiency, ready to welcome the audience at the appointed time of 6.45.

All the seats were taken and everyone in the audience was wonderfully attentive and appreciative. They laughed in the right places and I was amazed and delighted at their reactions to my readings of two of the original letters that partly inspired the novel. I’ll be writing more about this event (including book sales and Novel Press in future posts,) and about the Birmingham Post article.

In the meantime, take a look at this excellent article by Jonathan Davidson, Chief Executive of Writing West Midlands, with his hard-hitting piece ‘New ways of Publishing’

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!

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.”

A writer’s lot can be a happy one, in spite of the frustrations they might experience when they realise that they have to take on a large part of the task of marketing their novel once it’s published. This probably applies to most novelists these days, even if they have a major publishing house behind them. When my first novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, was published by Transita, a small independent imprint (now sadly no longer working in the field of fiction) I was more than happy to do my share of getting my novel into the hands of readers.

Apart from the act of writing itself, one of the main joys for me of being a writer is the feedback from readers, whether in the form of a public review on Amazon, or other people’s online journals or blogs, or a personal note in the post, or an email from an individual.

Since I am co-founder of NOVEL PRESS, and almost all my spare time is focussed on marketing its first product, (my own Paper Lanterns) at the moment have very little time for creative writing.

Paper Lanterns hasn’t been out in the world for more than a few weeks so far, and there are lots of copies already out there, but this marketing business is a hard slog. Novel Press doesn’t have quite the same access to the book distribution services as more established publishers and there are moments when I begin to feel disheartened in spite of the progress I’ve already made.

It’s the feedback which lifts my spirits, reminding me why it is that I write. Not for money, that’s for sure! People sometimes ask me whether I write for myself or for an audience, and I guess the answer is ‘ I write for both’. Before I start, I do have an of idea of my potential readership, but while I’m engaged in the act of writing, all my thoughts are focussed on the process of creating the characters and their stories.

Readers only become a reality for me when I receive their comments, and in a kind of way, this helps to complete the creative circle – the positive feedback is both a wonderful reward for my efforts and a strong motivation to continue, first with marketing, and then, (soon, I hope) with more writing.

Apart from the lovely reviews from Crysse Morrison and Linda Gillard (both quoted on the front and back cover of Paper Lanterns, and on the introductory pages,) and those from Bookcrossers, LyzzyBee and Heaven-Ali, the first written comment I received was in an email from a work colleague. The high from that sustained me for hours!

“I have now finished Paper Lanterns. I am no literary critic, as evidenced here, but, for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed it. I loved the way it felt like you were going on the journey with Ann, both physical and emotional, and having to re-evaluate opinions of the various characters, especially Vivienne. I also liked the contrast between forsaking a true love for the family and, seemingly, abandoning family to be with a true love. There were lots of interesting characters and I felt their stories and the past/present & England/Hong Kong elements intertwined really well. By re-exploring venues with Ann and George, but also by meeting new characters such as Stuart, it all rolled along well and I found myself looking forward to my bedtime reading session to find out where it was all going.”

John Cairns, who wrote the review for Lamma-zine that I mentioned in my post of last week, has now given that review another airing by posting it on his own magazine, Cairns Media

A fascinating aspect of reviews is the way that different people focus on different aspects of the book. One of my favourite reader’s blogs is Rhapsody in Books, and I was delighted with the insightful review that Jill wrote a few days ago. I wholeheartedly recommend you to browse though her reviews, because if you’ve already read the book you’re quite likely to gain new insights from her comments, and be inspired to read other books.

The next post will feature one of my favourite blogs for writers.

PS - If you were wondering about the significance of the snowdrops, I’ve been meaning to post a nice spring picture, and this is a photo I took when I was down at my mother’s house two or three weeks ago. I emailed this to my mother, sister and brother, who are in Hong Kong at the moment, so that they could see them.

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.