Happy May, Thanks, and Top Tip (Cecil Beaton), as Promised

Pansies and my pigeon toes

May is dwindling and I'll be sorry to see it go.  We are coming off the coldest January - March temperatures in Vermont in more than 90 years.  I'm not making this up.  Go check with NOAA if you doubt me.  (So much for all those old timers who like to boast about how cold winters were when they were young).  Reprieve from our hard, cold winter arrived, at last, this month in a blaze of flowering glory.

Thanks to all who picked up the e-book this last week during the kindle countdown deal.  My enjoyment of May was boosted by sharing the Amazon best seller lists with the likes of Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman (two of my writer heroes), however briefly.  A UK deal e-book will be coming in June so stay tuned.

Of course, I understand that news of my e-book deals is of limited interest but to thank you for bearing with me I have a top tip...  Ready? "Cecil Beaton."

I've been an admirer for years.  He's most famous as a photographer, and for good reason, but he was also a writer, a painter, a high society flibbertigibbet and, perhaps most importantly for my purposes, a diarist.

I have been drifting through the last volume of his unexpurgated diaries for weeks now.  This volume contains entries written in the early 1970s in the twilight of his years.  Beaton was a social climber and prey to appearances all his life, but he was not a shallow person - or maybe he was a deep person with shallows. He's a terrible moaner every time he is inconvenienced or gets sick ("I've had the worst cold of my life these last days...") and can be very fey (a room requires un note de rouge) but he was also very perceptive, hardworking, and tough minded. 

I was touched that he was touched by a passage from The Pilgrim's Progress that was read out at a friend's funeral.   He rebukes himself for not having read it himself and (correctly) admires the beauty of the language.   He writes vividly and well (most of the time) and there's lots of fun gossip and the occasional brilliant insight.  He is genuine admirer of Queen Elizabeth II for good reason (she's good at her job and presents herself perfectly) but he doesn't hesitate to criticize her hair-do.  He is knighted in this volume and his details of the ceremony and the after-party are fascinating. He is sharp eyed and sharp tongued, but he doesn't spare himself, even describing the sad state of affairs of his genitalia following a prostate operation.  Here's a link to a New Yorker article about his diaries, FYI.

Thanks again for following along.  Thanks to all who downloaded the book. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have anything to tell me.

One Woman, 17 British Accents - Anglophenia Ep 5

Read This

Clare Flynn, a fellow writer, is doing a series on writer's spaces on her blog.  She just posted a little piece on the cabin in Vermont where I (mostly) wrote Up, Back, and Away.  You can read that here.  There's an entry on her blog about guy who writes from a VW bus.  You'll find that there too, so what are you waiting for?

A tantalizing glimpse of the aforementioned cabin..

Well, before you go and while I'm here, thanks again to all you UK Kindle readers.  The e-book has been hanging in the best seller spots in its various categories for weeks now on Amazon.UK. If you're one of those kind readers, don't be shy!  I am here to answer questions, read comments, what have you. Of course, if you have a complaint, that's for another department which is currently closed.

I hope your New Year's Resolutions are working out better than mine.

England Repays The Love

Happy New Year!  What are your resolutions for 2015?

Just Behind Harry and his Deathly Hallows, Just in Front of Monster Farts and Jeremy Clarkson.  A happy place.

Mine include getting back to work on my writing.  It has been fun working on repackaging, and pointing at, Up, Back, and Away but it's time to get back to the plow and break some new ground.  I did want to stop in here, however, and say thank you to all who picked up the e-book on Amazon.UK during the countdown deal this last week.  I hope you will enjoy reading the book and tell your friends if so.  If not, sorry for any let-down and for keeping that to yourself.  Kidding!  (Sort of).

"Most Wished For"  O, Thank YOU!

Anyway, during this last week I grabbed a few screenshots at Amazon.uk.  Hanging around in the company of Harry Potter is pretty thrilling, let me tell you.

I'm not leaving, BTW.  Book news and related info. will still be posted here, I'm just going to throw my shoulder to the wheel of some new things.  Thanks again.  Best wishes and all the best to you.

In Memory of Edwin Timms -Who Died near Ypres in 1916

I didn't know Edwin Timms, but I think about him often.

He was the favorite brother of Flora Thompson, who wrote the trilogy of books that were consolidated in the 1940s as Lark Rise to Candleford.  This has been rejiggered into a TV series and the books seem to have been put in the shade by this, which rankles because the book is really wonderful (much better than the show if you ask me, but you didn't, did you?)

Edwin appears in the book as "Edmund"  (Flora rewrote herself as "Laura").  Laura and Edmund were not children of privilege.  They grew up in a cottage in "Lark Rise," a fictionalized Oxfordshire farm hamlet, at the end of the 19th century.  There, the Timms family scraped by in a world that seems almost equal parts medieval and modern.  Their mother had aspirations for them: nanny for Laura, carpenter for Edmund.  Edmund thought he would like to be a farm worker: he loved the outdoors.  His mother was horrified.  Carpenter was about right.  Laboring could be left for those who could do no better.

Reading his sister's account of their childhood together, it's clear that Edmund was every bit as bright and talented as Laura - maybe moreso.  Laura was an autodidact.  She didn't become a nanny, but a postmistress. Before all was said and done, however, she was a famous and justifiably beloved author.      He died fighting in Belgium in 1916.

A central inspiration for me in writing Up, Back, and Away was Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.  It was assigned reading back when I was in high school (is it still?).  It asks powerful questions about what might have been if those who never got much of a chance had drawn a different lot in life.  Thinking about the poem while I was out walking in the Vermont woods one day about seven years ago I thought - well, what if there were the occasional intervention?  What if talent, which had been misplaced, was shifted to a place where it could root and grow? I started diagraming the story right there on that walk.

With Veteran's Day I'm thinking of Edwin Timms again.  He comes alive in his sister's account.  I can practically see him.  I feel as though I know him.

The loss of one such seems too much to bear.  My imagination fails when I try to multiply it by hundreds of thousands.  This backdrop of death, dismay, and diminishment for England in the 1920s was also much on my mind as I wrote Up, Back, and Away.  It's on my mind again for Veteran's Day 2014.  Tonight I'm grateful to Flora Thomspon for her wonderful book, for her endurance, and for making her lost brother live in her pages so that one such as I could remember him too - at least in this small way.

Back to England

The back of my daughter's head as we prepare
to enter that oaken cavern of wonders, Liberty
Department Store in London

That's where I have been.  On a whirlwind four-day trip that concluded last Sunday.  The big draw for this trip was the Kate Bush show in Hammersmith.  (If you click the link you'll be taken to the review in The Guardian - all the big news outlets have run reviews of the same character).

I've been a fan of KB for as long as she has been singing for the public so, crazy/self indulgent as it may seem, I had to cross the Atlantic to see her perform.  She hasn't given a proper concert in 35 years so I reasoned it might be now or never.

I'll spare you my review - for now.  I'll just say that it was worth the trip.  Of course, an additional benefit was that I had four days in London with my daughter (who is 16 - I decided she couldn't miss this and she was all mine for a few days).  Also, of course, I had the chance to be in LONDON, ENGLAND. It doesn't take that much persuading to get me to go to London.

Back to the Book: A Whole New Look

Though I have been quiet here it's not because Up, Back, and Away has been out of my thoughts.  The opposite is true.  I've been working for months on a revamp.  I can't expect that the Great World will be quite as excited about the relaunch as I am, but I hope that some old friends will be curious to see the book's new face and that new ones will be lured in, snared, and held fast.

I plan to have the redesigned version available in October.  Stay tuned.  I will be splashing it out when it is splash-able.

All this has knocked me off the real job of writing work that I have set for myself: the sequel.  Note to self.  Write the next book.  OK.  That ought to do it.

By the way.  While you are waiting, I should mention that I also have made available a little sampler of my shorter works this summer.  It's called The Tiny Confinements Miscellany.  You can download the ebook on Amazon for 99 cents or, even better, get it for free on iBooks.  Amazon, as usual, provides lovely links.  There's one in the sidebar.  (I couldn't figure out how to post a link to iBooks but if you search in their store you should be able to find it).  Just to hold you over, mind.

For those of you with first editions of Up, Back, and Away, as we may say, since they will someday be valuable rarities, I hope you won't be sorry you got in early.  More later.  Cheerio.

Fresh From the Literary Aficianado

All I can say is, if you don't want to read the book after reading this review (by Amazon Vine Top 50 reviewer Grady Harp) you also probably don't like ice cream or Audrey Hepburn.  Thanks for stopping by.  More book news coming soon (I hope).