Kathleen Jones's Blog, page 49

Leaving Again

Having a few very stressful days trying to sort out the house, the books that arrived from the printer last week, and pack the car with everything I need to take back to Italy.  The sun is shining on the river this morning and the trees are glorious with autumn colour.  Hard to leave.  I'm not looking forward to the long drive south, this time via London.  But, like the swallows, we will be glad to arrive - hopefully the sun will be shining on the Mediterranean and the Italian chestnut trees will be golden too.

Didn't sleep last night - packing and making lists in my head - it's not easy to sleep just before a long trip. I will be offline for a few days now until we arrive on Wednesday, or Thursday.  Fingers crossed for an uneventful journey.

Frosty November Morning

This is what I woke up to this morning......   Spot the heron!

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: My Life as a Man by Kathleen Jones

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: My Life as a Man by Kathleen Jones: When I was asked to write the biography of the English poet Norman Nicholson , I realised that it was the first time anyone had ever wanted me to write about a man. All my earlier commissioned biographies had been about the lives of women.  How easy was it going to be, I wondered, to get inside a man’s skin, inside his head, understand how he thought, why he did what he did, wrote what he wrote?  Are men so very different to women? ......

Planning a Book Launch

It's crunch time for the new biography, which hopefully is rolling off the printer's machines and into boxes in the next couple of days.   The E-book is also ready to roll at the end of the week.  But how are we going to sell it?

Getting visibility is one of the big problems for a small press and for indie authors generally.  The Norman Nicholson biography is being produced for the centenary of his birth in January and we hope that the publicity for that event will help to sell the book.  We've decided that we're going to pay someone to do the promotion for us. Not only will this give The Book Mill a more professional profile, but it will take a big weight off my back - publicity isn't my strong point. I hate selling myself!

First, find your publicist - someone used to writing press releases and tackling newspapers and other periodicals - someone who isn't afraid to pick up the phone and promote the book.  Then you have to make lists of possible review sources - perhaps people who've reviewed your work before?  Then there are the lists of literature festivals and book shops who may be willing to host events. I'm lucky to have a friend, Jean, who is happy to take on the job of promoting the book.  We're planning a couple of bookshop and library events and already have bookings for two literature festivals who've done events for my previous books.  Jean is going to send off fliers and press releases and see what else what she can get.  This is the first time we've done both print and e-book publication together and it's all an experiment.

I've had one very lucky break - Norman Nicholson did quite a lot of work for the BBC who have decided to do a Radio 4 documentary on his life to be broadcast for his birthday in January.  The producer requested a copy of my biography and I've just been to London to record some interviews for the programme.  Fingers crossed they use some of it!

It's all a big learning curve, but I will pass on any useful information that comes my way.  Publishing without the resources of a big international organisation behind you isn't easy.

Tuesday Poem: For Fathers of Girls by Stephen Dunn

Having just been present at the birth of my grand-daughter, feeling aggrieved that her father was denied the right by British immigration, birth has been on my mind.  There aren't many poems about birth from the father's point of view.  And then I stumbled on this poem by Stephen Dunn at Garrison Keiller's Writers' Almanac. 

For Fathers of Girls by Stephen Dunn

for Susanne

When sperm leaves us
and we cockadoodledo
and our wives rise like morning

the children we start
are insignificant as bullets
that get lodged, say,

in a field somewhere
in the midwest.
If we are thinking then

it is probably of sleep
or the potency of rest, or
the one—hand catch we made

long ago at the peak of our lives.
Later, though, in a dream
we may imagine something in the womb

of our heads, neither boy nor girl,
nothing quite so simple . . . . .

To read more please click on this link  
Writers' Almanac - For Fathers of Girls  Copyright Stephen Dunn

And of course, there's the ultimate birth poem by Sharon Olds - The Language of the Brag..... Fabulous!!

Autumn on the River

I've been very quiet here recently - at first a week of baby-worshipping in London, and then laid low by a bug I picked up there.  I've watched a lot of very bad day-time TV from the sofa!  But the view from the window has been  better than the screen.  It's autumn here in Cumbria and the trees are beginning to turn on the river bank.


We missed the St Jude storm, luckily, but have had lots of rain and the river is running brown and high.
This taken minutes after the previous pic - but the sky had darkened and the sun vanished!
Can anyone tell me why this heron is behaving strangely on the river bank?


Despite the weather and the short days things are still managing to flourish outside in my wildly overgrown garden.  The Stanwell Perpetual rose is living up to its name -

And these winter aconites are a brilliant blue against the wall of the mill.

And how's this for a crop of mushrooms on an old tree stump next to the road?

I love autumn - the colours and the scents of woodsmoke and damp earth.  As a child I remember being taken to the chapel harvest festivals where the pulpit steps were piled high with mounds of apples and pears, tomatoes, leeks, pumpkins, beetroot, potatoes, and buckets of  flowers - mainly dahlias, chrysanthemums and sweet william. All of it home-grown and auctioned off for charity. We went home with bulging bags. The smell of the Bramley apples! It's not just my memory - home-grown really does smell different to the supermarket stuff.  Just thinking about it makes me feel hungry, so I'm obviously getting better!

Tuesday Poem: If You Are Lucky, by Michelle McGrane

Tuesday Poem: If You Are Lucky, by Michelle McGrane: If you are lucky you will carry one night with you for the rest of your life, a night like no other. You won't see it coming. For...


Michelle McGrane's collection 'A Suitable Girl', published by Pindrop, is one of my favourite collections from the last year or so.  'If you are lucky' is one of the big moments in the collection - sensual, and giving that tingle in the spine that honest poems do when they hit the spot!

Worrying times for digital authors

There's been a bit of upheaval on the internet over the past week.  Amazon had their Seller accounts hacked and all sellers had a notification from a 'fake' Amazon telling them that their money had not been paid and they should update their bank details.  Fortunately, being a suspicious character I didn't click any links and signed into my Amazon Seller Account in the normal way, to be told that, yes, someone had infiltrated their accounts and all our bank details and payments had been frozen.  Several frantic emails from Amazon to me followed, saying that fake emails had been sent, to be ignored and that 'we are fixing the problem, be patient'.  Then emails saying I'd been paid by mistake and that they were taking money back, then emails telling me the problem was fixed. What was fake and what was genuine?  No idea - they all looked the same.  I changed my passwords and hope now that it's all sorted.

At the same time, Kobo Writing Life suspended all 'indie' published books ostensibly  because of the fear of abusive content.  I've no problem with books being  vetted for abusive material, but it seems that they have taken this much, much further.  Small 'micro' publishers are also affected.  My partner Neil publishes four authors, including myself and all our titles are suspended.  It could be said that mine are 'self-published', but the other three are definitely not and this is very harmful.  Also, all four of us are published by the Big 6 (whose books are not suspended) and several of the books concerned are E-editions of books published in paperback by Penguin, Robert Hale and Constable. Most of mine are literary biography - a genre not renowned for its erotic content!   It could be said that Kobo are deliberately targeting Independent publishing of any kind, not just 'self' publishing, and this is a very worrying tactic for a company owned by WH Smith.


The internet is a dangerous place and Indie authors seem to be more vulnerable than most on its dark streets.  We need to make sure we keep up to date with the technology.  Cyber Censorship is an even more difficult issue.  I believe passionately in freedom of expression, but I don't want extreme violence and porn of any kind to be freely available to people innocently browsing the pages of the Kobo catalogue.  But what about all the other outlets? Are they going to follow suit?  Will we have to declare explicit content when we publish?  Will the rules be more stringent for independent authors than the Big 6?  What is clear is that there's more need than ever for Indie Authors to belong to groups that will help them out and give them more clout when it comes to challenging people like Kobo and Amazon.  I belong to the Alliance of Independent Authors, Awesome Indies and Authors Electric and it's quite comforting to be part of a tribe.

The long drive home

Finally back in England after a very long and tiring drive across Europe.  In Switzerland there were police road-blocks, apparently directed at lorries, which created queues of more than 2 hours at each location.  We lost almost 5 hours in stationary traffic.  And then there was snow - freshly fallen at low levels.  Winter has come early to Europe this year.

Southern France was cold and damp but very welcome.  We didn't get as far as we'd intended, but stopped at a pretty little town in Alsace called Colmar.
It's a chocolate box town in the old centre, but it's not a museum - very much a working place.  There are some wonderful crooked buildings - photographed early in the morning before we set off again.  We needed to cover a lot of miles to make the ferry in time.  There were torrential rain storms and gales in northern France, which made for some tense moments.


But we're finally home, tired but triumphant.  I'm here for a month, but Neil left this morning to go back to Italy - not wanting to waste the studio space he's rented to work on a new piece of marble.  But he was back this afternoon because they wouldn't let him out of the country on my passport!  Moral:  never pack when you're tired!!

Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Alice Munro

Congratulations to Alice Munro for being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  It's another shot in the arm for the short story, since Alice Munro doesn't write anything else - she's sometimes been called the Chekhov of  Canada.  I love her stories and have often tried to analyse them - and failed!  They have a mysterious magic you can't explain by plot diagrams or character analysis.  But they make a gut-wrenching connection with the reader, tapping into some kind of universal knowledge of the human condition.



Congratulations, too, to my fellow Cumbrian Sarah Hall who has won the BBC National Short Story Prize with 'Mrs Fox' - described as 'a darkly erotic tale'.

Tomorrow we will be packing the car to leave Italy, driving all the way to the north of England, via the Zeebrugge-Hull ferry. We're aiming to arrive on Monday morning.  Just hoping for good weather and calm seas!