Thanks - The Books are in the Mail

Thanks to all who entered the recent Goodreads Giveaway,  The books have been despatched, as some people used to say.  I still have a few of the first editions up for grabs (see previous post) if you're looking for a group-read.

Just for stopping in today I have a little thank you gift for you - a book recommendation.  If you liked Up, Back, and Away I think you will love the trilogy of books written by Adrian Bell about how he became a farmer in Suffolk back in the 1920s.

I read that Bell's books went to war with English soldiers during World War II.  They carried his books in their packs and he carried them home to their countryside.  He's a wonderful writer and you won't be sorry if you give him some of your time.

Somewhere There's A Book Club Where We Belong... Win Some Paperbacks!

Under my desk, there is a box.  It is about half full of early printings of Up, Back, and Away - Version 1.0, before I made a few corrections and commissioned a genius to illustrate the cover.  These early paperbacks look like this:

The way we were...

Despite being put in the shade by Juan's brilliant cover illustration,  these books still have a little piece of my heart.  I hate to think of them languishing like Jessie in Toy Story in a dark box. So, in this holiday season, what I would like to do is send them to you and your bookclub.

I will send up to ten copies to the club/club(s) representatives making a request.  If more than one group writes in (leave a comment here with some form of contact information or email me at holdforkim@gmail.com), I will put names in a hat and draw them out.  I will sign all the books so you'll want to hold onto your copy for that day when Sotheby's comes calling.  I think there are about fifteen in the box...  Say how many you would like, give me an address in the U.S. (sorry, too expensive to ship over borders - but see note below re: ebook), and hey presto.  First come, first served.

If your group gets around to actually reading the book and you want me to come via Skype to the meeting when you chat about it - just come back here and say so.  Or send me an email at the aforementioned holdforkim@gmail.com. I'd be honored.

For those of you who have moved on from paper or who are in England, starting Dec. 16, 2016, you can get the e-version (with lovely cover and corrections) for 99 cents in the US and 99p across the pond on Amazon for one week.

But don't let that stop you asking for these copies.  I live to serve and to send paperbacks.

Leave a comment.  Email me. Tell your friends.  Thanks for stopping by.  Merry Christmas.

Ready, Steady, WRAP!

"Tandembaum" by Juan Wijngaard, brilliant artist and cover illustrator of Up, Back, and Away

You-Know-What is coming.  I'm no where near ready - but, friends, I am making plans.  I'll have a little something for everybody - and that means YOU too - later this month.

In the meantime, just to say Happy Hols and thanks for stopping by, here's a link to one of my new favorite BBC Radio programmes: Choral Evensong on Radio 3.  This is, "A Service for Advent with Carols" recently recorded live at the Chapel of St. John's Cathedral in Cambridge.

If you have been around here before you know that since I discovered the iPlayer app (q.v.- the app works brilliantly to dial up the whole universe of BBC radio - and it is a vast universe).  British public radio puts ours in the shade. Choral Evensong is one of many long-running programmes (I always mentally pronounce the "e" there, being American) that I have come to love.  The only down-side is that all that fabulous radio has cut down on my reading.  If you have a tip for a book I should check out, leave it here or over on Goodreads.

More later. Best wishes for a bright season.

Origin Story

When the cover was a work in progress,,, by Juan Wijngaard

I was asked not long ago by a bookseller to contribute an essay about what inspired me to write Up, Back, and Away. Here's the answer, if you're also curious.

How'd You Get the Idea In the First Place?

As it happens, I can tell you!

I was listening to my iPod, Adele’s first album,one spring morning in 2007 as I was walking along the Stowe, Vermont Recreation Path. 

It’s a beautiful path that follows a rocky stream through woods and fields with the Green Mountains in the long view.  I had recently left full time work for a half-time job (I’m a government lawyer by day) and I had two kids in school.  This meant I had a little mental space and time with which to work for the first time in years.  I had been a writer before law school, for local newspapers and in a college PR office, and I had continued writing (for fun) on a blog that I have kept since 2006.  I mention this because I was in the writing habit, which helped, I think, to keep ideas coming.  The walking part is important too.  I walk every day if I can.  I got to thinking that day as I listened to Adele sing about how important it was for gifted people to arrive at the right place and time if their gifts are to be realized.

When this thought flitted across my mind, I immediately thought of Thomas Gray’s famous, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’  It contemplates, among other things, those whose talents never stood a chance: circumstances were arrayed against them from birth. For most in that churchyard, it was the time and place in which they were deposited that was fatal.  I wondered what if some exceptional people weren't constrained by the circumstances of their birth?  What if the Universe had a way of, very occasionally, correcting these mistakes?  Of shifting people born in the wrong time and place to the place in time where they and their talents could flourish?

What about, a time travel story? One with a cosseted but basically good American rich kid at its center?

What's on the other side? I didn't know. I went through.

Sending  my young hero to England in the 1920s would give me a chance to write about many of my favorite things: : English language and literature, social history, the differences between English and American culture, as well as their similarities, and about how we all must meet the challenges that life throws at us.   I could also write about fun stuff (for me) Staffordshire pottery, London in the twenties, the English countryside and English country living at its last gasp between the wars. I could include three-speed bicycles and manual typewriters and dogs and old buildings and old songs and new music and stranger-in-a-strange land and all of that! The revolution in the place in the world of the western woman is the great story of the last 100 years.  With time travel I could explore this, as well as the timeless story of the struggle to find courage and to come of age. How about a rescue mission – where our hero has to find a girl born out of her time and a secret not meant to be and then get home with them both so that she has a chance to fulfill her artistic destiny?

It was my own small “J.K. Rowling moment” –  the one we’ve all heard about, when Ms. Rowling was riding on a train and suddenly had an idea for a story about a school for young wizards?  I know I’m no J.K. Rowling, but I think I experienced something of the same thrill.

The book unfolded itself right there.

Well, sort of.  I then had to spend the next five years working it all out.

It wasn’t all joy, working on the book.  But it did a great deal for me personally.  I enjoyed the research, writing the characters into being, and working out the plot lines.  Mostly I was trying to write the book I wished was out there for me to read when I was growing up.

My Not So Illicit Affair with Staffordshire Wares

Transferware in the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont

Certain near relations give me a hard time about the number of plates I have hanging on my walls. (You know who you are).   My collection of Staffordshire transferware is modest compared to those  serious collectors and scholars whom I encounter in the Internet - but my love for it is real and enduring.  

I love to think of the people who worked so hard to make these things out of the earth around Staffordshire (which is a county in the English midlands): the skill, the effort, the quest to make things as pretty  as possible.  The wares were designed to appeal to the sweet tooth of the common man: they were shown off on dressers and cherished as family treasures in modest homes around England, the empire, and the USA.  (Those of you who have read Laura Ingalls Wilder must recall the China Shepherdess that accompanied the Ingalls family on their travels).  The actual creation of these pretty things was, however, a gritty, industrial business.  The towns of the potteries are not and never have been elegant vacation spots, which endears them to me - a native of the similarly-regarded Schenectady, New York.

The output of the potteries in the 19th century was colossal, and much of it destined for the American market.  I often wonder that the whole county of Staffordshire wasn't swallowed by an enormous pot hole. (That phrase, BTW, comes from the practice of digging good clay out of any old place in Staffordshire).

No China Shepherdess in this collection but you get the idea - Shelburne Museum

In Up, Back, and Away I cast Lady Fisher in the role of a Potteries Heiress.  Her industrial-based fortune made her and her brother, who redoubled the family fortune, into earthenware aristocrats - not so good as the old-time gentry but whose money bought grudging entry to the upper class.  There were many self-made men with a genius for pottery production - Josiah Wedgwood being the most famous example.

Whenever I'm out in an antique store, or even a modern kitchen goods store (they are still making pottery in Staffordshire, thank goodness) my eye always goes to the transfer-printed wares.  If you have any interest in the history of the English Potteries, here is a can't miss web site.  I'll venture a suggestion: next time you find yourself presented with a pretty old plate or cup, flip it over and have a look at the mark.  You might then enter that information at that website, or just plain old Google, and find there is story to that pattern and to the history of the manufacturer waiting for you. 

Enourmous Staffordshire jugs - also at Shelburne Museum.  

Brilliant Animation Brings 1931 Back to Life

I'm hoping to convince this genius, who's doing WONDERFUL things with his computer in Russia, to do a book trailer for me.  (I think he's actually famous and in demand so don't hold your breath).  In the meantime, you can marvel with me at what he has already accomplished.

Click and enjoy. Be sure to switch to full screen.

Alexey Zakharov animation - YouTube

Remembering the Somme - 100 Years Since...

The precipitating event, or one of them in Up, Back, and Away was the Battle of the Somme. I studied it for quite awhile before writing the Somme scenes. Just reading about WW 1, especially the personal stories of the soldiers (I recommend Robert Graves' memoir Good-bye to All That and Siegfied Sasoon's fictionalized life story, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man ) was very moving, but this commemoration is the most brilliant memorial I've seen - making the loss tangible and for reminding the rest of us of what their sacrifice (among so many others) made possible.  

Something to keep in mind over here during our Independence Day celebrations this weekend.