Talismans

I am superstitious, about the usual, stupid things. I don't like the number thirteen.  Tails-up coin on the floor? DON'T PICK IT UP! Black cat crossing path? Change course! If I spill some salt, I make it better by throwing more salt on the floor, over my left shoulder. I make my kids do the same thing, which I am sure will be a big help to them down the road.

The post before this one (re: "Giveaway Weekend!"), was post number thirteen on this blog.  

Irksome.  Possibly dangerous.  

True, the weekend went quite well and thanks to all of you who downloaded the Kindle book.

Now, to make sure that those of you who procured it will like it, I am back here with post number fourteen.  (The flip side of this particular symptom of a weak mindedness is that I also have a belief in lucky charms. If some things are unlucky, others are lucky, right?)  

Here though, I am a little more original.  No rabbits feet or four leaf clovers for me.  As I was writing Up, Back, and Away, I surrounded myself with bits of English things that I felt would beam genius at me, or at least a little inspiration.  I wrote it in a few different places.  Mostly in this cabin behind our farmhouse.

I kept certain things near me in there like this:

This plate and one of its mates hang on the wall in the cabin, right over my writing desk.  (English pottery, particularly English transferware, has a role to play in the story and I have LOTS of it - don't start me).

I also had the works of Shakespeare, in a gimcrack 19th century multi-volume set, on the book case behind me.  I had an old Union Jack, the sort people might wave at a parade, stuck into a salt-glazed jug made by T.J. Mayer, Longport and dated 1851 on my writing table.

I had this stamp (and its penny and a half companion) in a little frame on the window sill:

I had these guys.  They MUST be lucky:

I had this 1917 pound note on my desk in a protective plastic sleeve.  It's just like the ones Miles brings with him on his journey.

And I had this: the original "Banded Stone."

You'll have to read the story, maybe on that free Kindle download, to find out what this is all about.  

These rocks are common in some places in Vermont.  I encountered them at one of my favorite places in the world, Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont.  If any place has magic, Shelburne Farms has magic.  I dragged my kids there one day while I was deep into writing the story and made them round up some choice examples to inspire me.  This is the one I actually wound up describing in the book. 

Lucky?  

I can't help feeling so.

Thanks again for your interest.  I hope you will enjoy the book as much as I liked writing it. Fingers crossed.

Freeeeeeeeee!

I heard that little pig in the Geico commercial when I typed that headline.

Anyway dear people, the BOOK is free to download on your Kindle or Kindle App today and tomorrow (June 14 and 15),  So please get yours and tell your friends.  If you like it, feel freeeeeeeeee to write a review on Amazon.  If you don't, well, you can tell me or maybe just keep that to yourself.  (I'm smiling as I write this but inside I am all steel).

Happy Father's Day.

Here's a link to the freebie for my countrymen.

And here's a link for all my friends in Blighty (Amazon.uk).

Thank you all.

A Gift For The Queen's Birthday

HRH Elizabeth II in 1968 - the famous "Admiral's Boat Cloak Portrait" by Cecil Beaton

Did you know Elizabeth II R has a birthday coming up next weekend?  It isn't her actual birthday, which is on April 21.  The weather is a little too dodgy then for a parade or trooping the "colour" etc. so they move the party to late May or June.

This year, it is on June 16.  Have you thought what you might get for HRH?  I am happy to say that, for once, I have planned ahead.

Are you sitting down?

I am offering her Majesty, and everyone else with a Kindle and working knowledge of English, a free download of my book, Up, Back, and Away.

The giveaway commences at midnight on June 14, 2013 Pacific TIme, and ends midnight June 15.  (With the time delay that covers her big day).

The book is a time travel adventure story wherein our hero, a fifteen-year-old boy from suburban Dallas, is sent back to England in 1928 (on a vintage English three-speed bicycle) to "find a girl with a gift, a girl born out of her time," and a "secret that was not meant to be" and then return home with them both.

So, if you have a Kindle and the slightest bit of interest wait til next weekend and pounce, or click,  really.  Remember Queen's Birthday = free book.  Queen's Birthday = free book.  Queen's Birthday = free book.  (This is supposed to be like a Manchurian Candidate style trigger for you).

Incidentally, the paperback is on sale now at one third off the cover price so, there ya go.  Also, if you have Amazon Prime you can borrow the book (and other Kindle books) for free anytime.

"The Past Is Never Dead..."

It isn't even really past.
- William Faulkner

In one of the more delusional maneuverings of a literary executor, as you may have heard, the Faulkner  Estate sued Woody Allen and Sony Pictures last year for misquoting that line in the fabulous film, Midnight in Paris.  (Allen's script rendered it: "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past.")

Anyway, let's put that aside.  I came here tonight to praise and commend the thought and its expression by both Faulkner and Allen.  It recurred to me again tonight when this lovely bit of film, which I watched part of during my research for U,B, and A, was posted on Twitter.

The past doesn't seem so very far in the past, when you can see it in color.  Here's London in 1927, amazingly, in color (or "colour" if you prefer).  (The code to embed the video just wouldn't work so you'll have to click through.  Sorry).

Giddy London

I have been spooking around British Pathe again...  While I was writing Up, Back, and Away, I was always dipping into bits and pieces of the 1920s for inspiration.  There was a popular musical at the London Hippodrome in 1925 called Mercenary Mary.  The story was forgettable, but a couple of the songs are favorites of mine and, (getting back to British Pathe) here's a little film clip that speaks to the glories (and the oddness) of London in the 1920s:

MOVIE MOMENTS FROM MERCENARY MARY

The film is silent, but maybe you can watch it after you listen a bit of to the music. (Sorry, I can't seem to get the movie and the music to open separately):

Speaking of Illegitimacy...

Does anybody anymore?

One of the the great contrasts for Miles in Up, Back, and Away, between life in 1928 and his life back home in contemporary America is the difference in moral attitudes toward sex.  Of course, whenever this topic comes up these days, it is the evolving (now in some corners fully evolved), attitude toward homosexuality.  But Miles finds himself grappling with the (now) dull, old-fashioned issue of what is still technically known as fornication - that is, sex out of wedlock.  I think it is next to impossible for young people today, at least those who live in mainstream America, to grasp the risk that unmarried women took when they "gave in."  The great terror was of pregnancy.  At least for middle class people, illegitimacy was a shame of Biblical proportions and one that contorted many women's lives into terrible shapes.

 I am a great admirer of the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers' - although (oddly) I haven't really found the mystery story that moves me.  My admiration is chiefly for her book The Mind of the Maker which is (in its quiet, reflective way) a thrilling bit of philosophy. (And believe me when I tell you I am not one who normally reads for anything but fun).

Sayers' personal story, along with the ideas she articulates in M of M,  was very much on my mind as I was writing my own book.  I don't think people today have any sense at all of the absolute crushing scandal that illegitimacy caused in those days, at least for middle-class people.  Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of clergyman and her family was nothing if not respectful.   When she was a young woman in the early 1920s, she became pregnant by her married lover.  She went into seclusion until after the baby was born, with all the secrecy that could be managed.  The baby, John Anthony, was was sent to live with a cousin of Sayers's who ran a foster home.  While Sayers remained part of his life for all of the rest of her life, the truth of his birth was never publicly discussed.  (For a nice blogpost detailing Dorothy Sayers life and career, click here).  In my own family, we found out only after my mother's older sister died a few years ago that she'd had a child out-of-wedlock in the 1950s.  It had never been spoken of, even among family.  My mother had no idea about it it at all, though she was in her 60s when her sister passed, and her parents (my grandparents) had never gotten over it, and really, had never forgiven my aunt.

My poor aunt's hard experience, and Sayers' herculean efforts to hide her relationship to her child, provide just a couple examples of how drastic the change in social mores have been in the last 100 or so years (and which account for attitudes and codes of conduct that baffle Miles).

The E-Book Has Launched!

It costs less, as it should since there's no paper involved or anything, and it has a snappy, slightly different cover, and a hyperlinked table of contents and EVERYTHING.

Follow this yellow brick link.

If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for FREE and what kind of a great deal is that?