M.J. Johnson's Blog, page 17

Double - Oh - Fifty!

There was a bit of a kerfuffle earlier on in the week: on Monday someone cheekily put Adele's new Bond single out on the internet. I didn't hear it, although I did catch a tiny snippet later that afternoon on the PM programme. The song is being officially launched on Friday to mark Bond's fiftieth anniversary.

The Bond series is fifty years old, imagine!

If JB was a real person and hadn't always managed to stay roughly the same age throughout his various incarnations, I expect he 'd be a nonagenarian by now. I can just picture him in a Home Counties nursing-home dedicated to the care and welfare of retired operatives of the British Secret Service. It would have to be a place especially comfortable, for those exceptional agents who carried a double-o prefix - who knows, perhaps his old sparring partner 'Q' is there too! And maybe he's busy dictating his memoirs to a certain elderly lady called Moneypenny - a 'Miss' rather than a 'Ms' - who spent her life swooning and waiting for the adoration of one man to be reciprocated.

My first encounter with Bond was at the age of nine when my grandad, Dycu (Duck-Key) to me in my family's Valleys' dialect but officially Dadcu (Dad-Key), took me to see Goldfinger. The year in question would have been 1964. Dycu was an avid reader and it was probably from him that I picked up the habit myself. The man almost always had a book in his hand; Nevil Shute, Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming were amongst some of his favourites I recall. He must have liked them a lot, because he had whole shelves dedicated to these writers, and there were countless others too whose names I can't remember.

Plaza Cinema, Kingsway, Swansea I think it was possibly the only time Dycu took me to the pictures, certainly the only occasion I ever recall. I remember we went to see it in the Plaza Cinema, Swansea, which made a huge impression on my young mind. Because of all the ornate ceilings and chandeliers I believe I may have thought I was entering the court at Versailles. It was without a shadow of a doubt the most opulent building I had ever encountered - a true picture palace. It had been built in 1931, seated 3000 people and was at that moment the largest cinema in Wales. It  took a hit when Swansea was badly bombed during WWII but had been restored in time for me and my Dycu to see the Bond film. It was pulled down to make way for a dance hall, supermarket and smaller cinema (though still massive compared to cinemas today which tend to go for fairly small multi-screened complexes) the following year.

And what about the film? It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen! My mother came to meet me and Dycu as we came out and I reckon our eyes must have been popping out of our heads, because I recall Mam saying,"Well, I can see you both enjoyed that!"

After Bond I required my pearly-handled six guns with the low-slung holsters that I sported about our garden in Wales considerably less. I started to wear a trilby hat, had a card in my pocket that bore my secret service number (licensed to kill of course), when taking refreshments in our kitchen I sipped small glasses of Tizer pop (shaken not stirred) and always carried a gun discreetly in a shoulder holster. Cowboys were out - secret agents were in!

For the next twenty years I went to see every new Bond movie. Roger Moore made the series fun, but Connery, with a little touch of sadism about him, was always best in my eyes. I loved Thunderball as a boy with all its underwater action but as a man I think I like From Russia with Love most of all. And Goldfinger , the template for every Bond film that came after it had the best villain, best villain's henchman and best theme song, sung of course by 'Our Shirl from Tiger Bay'.

I really like Adele, think Daniel Craig's great as JB, but honestly let's face it, they don't really stand a chance against the wide-eyed-awe of that boy I've been travelling with since 1964!

Happy Fiftieth Birthday Mr Bond!

Nobody Said It Would Be Easy!

Someone direct-messaged me on Twitter this week offering me an opportunity, that if I bought their book for 99 cents, in return they'd re-tweet my Twitter messages for a whole month! Presumably the person in question couldn't care less whether I read their book or what I thought of it, the only point is presumably to get enough sales to climb up the Kindle chart? Not only does this approach reek of desperation, but surely it's the sort of practice that can only bring indie authors into disrepute? We've all heard of authors (not just the independent ones!) who've composed their own glowing 5 star reviews, which to my mind is an even worse crime because it completely undermines the integrity of the review process. There was a report in the Telegraph recently about a fairly prominent history professor (now being sued apparently) who was using his wife to write admiring reviews for his work whilst at the same time she was cobbling together dimissive ones for his rivals. I read that this process of writing fake reviews even has a name and it is called "sockpuppeting". Personally I don't care what the practice is called, and the only word I can think of to describe it is reprehensible!

Anyone who's published a book knows how hard it is and how vitally important reader reviews are - especially for indies! It can be frustrating when someone kindly takes the time to contact you and mention how much they enjoyed reading your book, but doesn't actually get round to posting a review about it. It's also quite disconcerting sometimes how widely different people's tastes and expectations are concerning the stuff they read. I know that not everyone who chooses to read Niedermayer & Hart will absolutely love it without any reservations. I am a grown-up and I can accept this (sometimes)! Some of the people who have posted reviews on behalf of Niedermayer & Hart are known personally to me, but the majority are not; whatever they wrote about the book (known or not!) was done at their own discretion, except in two cases where I contacted the reviewer and asked them to alter a certain line which would have 'spoiled' the plot. My wife, son, friend and editor Peter Bolwell have not posted any reviews on behalf of the book either as themselves or under pseudonyms. Because of their close involvement in the project I'd consider it quite wrong if they did so.

Nobody is after bad reviews of course and we all want to sell our books. Book buyers don't always buy when they're supposed to and when they do read the flippin' book they don't always see it the way they're meant to! Seems like the only ideal solution would be a world in which I am both the author and the book's perfect reader! A kind of narcissistic love-fest!

Book-reading strikes me as one of the most subjective of all pleasures. And, as I've said, I have to accept that people have widely different expectations when it comes to the stuff they read. I don't personally understand how anyone could give Catch 22 or To Kill a Mockingbird anything less than five stars, or how anyone could fail to love Dickens! Yes, I know, shocking but true!
Niedermayer & Hart isn't a slim novella with characters named Tristram and Arabella who have fallen on hard times and are forced to rent out rooms at their chateau (a very small chateau you understand!) in Provence. N & H is a 162,000 word story that is meant to be enjoyed as a ripping yarn, grip you by the whatsits (apologies if you don't have any whatsits!) and keep you turning its pages right to the bitter end. If you buy it and read it, I sincerely hope you'll like it because I'd like you to buy and read my next book too and the one I'm currently working on after that! If you could spare the time to write a short review on Amazon or Goodreads I'd be very grateful - believe me it is so important! I'll be like a puppy with two tails if you not only leave a review but also press the 'Like' button on Amazon and my Facebook author page. Unlike the publishing houses who can introduce their new authors through newspapers and advertising campaigns etc, for us indie guys it's all down to the honest response of our readers' reviews. It strikes me as a very bad thing indeed to renege on that trust by using any of the techniques described in the first paragraph.

After all, nobody held a gun to my head and insisted that I write a book. Nobody said it would be easy! And what's more I'm doing something I totally love!

Do Not Go Gentle ...

At the moment I'm flat-out writing by day and when I get the time to read (usually in bed at the day's end) it's generally a piece of research. I'm not complaining, it's interesting and I know it will make the new book I'm writing far better for having done it. However, recently my wife has taken to reading the much loved stories in the collection A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas, and sometimes as I catch her smiling happily at my side I must admit to feeling the occasional if teensiest pang of envy. When the prose is just too good to keep to herself, she shares a passage with me. We whoop and chuckle with delight, marvel at the colour of saying and Thomas's brilliance with words.

Dylan Thomas was probably one of the biggest influences on me as a boy growing-up. When I was five my parents moved from Aberdare in the Cynon Valley to a village called Gowerton five miles west of Swansea. The "ugly lovely town" he speaks of in a great deal of his work was also the place where I knocked around and spent my formative years. When I return to Swansea now on visits home to see my mother, the seagulls squawk the same, yet I barely recognise the place, it has changed so much. The majority of the grimy, teeming streets of two-up two-downs that stretched for miles from St Mary's Church to the Brangwyn Hall are mostly gone now. As has, as it seems to me (easy for me to say as someone who now lives quite far away!), much of the character I loved about the old town: the old bus station and the endless queues for buses and toilets; the scalding hot, weak, sweet teas always on tap in the bus station cafe, and served by the woman with the cross-eyes; the smell of fish and chips from Bellis' Chipshop, caked and drowning in lots of salt and vinegar in greasy newspaper that always left your fingers inky black; pikelets and Welsh-cakes baking at Coakley's Cafe on Oxford Street. There were plenty of unappetising smells too, coming from the dingy alleyways strewn with litter.

I had teachers at my school who'd been to school at the same time as Dylan Thomas. My RE teacher, affectionately known as Zeke, described young Dylan as a thug. I believe my English teacher was himself taught English by Dylan's father. Thomas the fallible man had of course passed away by then - but we didn't care about any of that, we had the legend! As boys with a burning passion for the arts, my friends and I ate and drank his words. He has always struck me as a writer who can speak directly and with immediacy to the youthful mind. He was undoubtedly one of the biggest culural influences upon me in my early life. On Saturday afternoons my pals and I took coffee in the Kardomah cafe because Dylan had, and after opening time, under-age we sipped our beer slyly in The Three lamps public-house, because that's where Dylan drank (the fact the original had been destroyed courtesy of A Hitler and his Luftwaffe was we felt of little or no importance!).

I've been fortunate enough to be involved in three productions of Under Milk Wood during my life as an actor, and each time, and with each production being some years apart, I've always been amazed yet again at how fresh and wonderful his language is.

I think I know what I'll be reading next.

Sporting Failures

I once played an inept Welsh games teacher in four episodes of a series for London Weekend Television called Drummonds. They were the last four episodes of the second series and there was talk of going for a third, but sadly this wasn't to be. On reflection I hope it had nothing to do with my lifelong shortcomings when it comes to sport? I don't think so, the character was meant to be accident prone! In my first episode he fell off the wall-bars and broke his collar-bone and spent the next three episodes with his arm in a sling.

This was quite possibly the nearest I ever came to being typecast as an actor. My late father was an excellent sportsman and had he been born into another era might easily have become a professional footballer; my brother too was very skilled at sport; however, when it came to me, oh dear! At secondary school on the end of term report my games teacher Robert Evans once wrote, "Impossible to comment on this boy!" I think this suggests that whenever there was a games or PE lesson, I'd generally absented myself with a (often forged) sick note! Today, in the most enlightened schools I think I would have been diagnosed as dyspraxic rather than labelled 'hopeless' or 'useless'. When I trained to become an actor at RADA the dance and movement teachers clearly thought I was either messing about or plain not trying. Surely, nobody could be that badly coordinated?

So perhaps you can understand how I don't naturally enjoy a warm glow when I think about sport. In fact, when I think of my schooldays, it's quite the opposite. Those humiliating team-picking moments in the changing rooms, when you pray you'll be picked before it gets down to the very last boy (usually not the case!).

This summer Britain has been the world's focus for sporting activity. First the Olympics, then the Paralympics, and I must say I really enjoyed every single bit I watched. It really is wonderful to see great athletes perform and an unusual experience for us Brits to see our team winning so many medals. A great boost I think to our national pride - quite welcome in light of the gloomy economic forecasts that predict some austere times may be lurking just ahead. The Olympics and Paralympics seem, too, to have helped us embrace our racial diversity and to applaud excellence in human achievement, even when it does not live up to the ideal embodiment of physical perfection. Thanks to all the athletes from all nations who took part in both the Olympics and Paralympics. Your contribution was truly awesome! I think Lord Coe and his team did a fantastic job organising it all! Incidentally, what honour can you confer on someone who's already a Lord, is there anything higher? Perhaps the Queen will consider adopting him?

And not content with a gold medal, good old Andy Murray bagged the US Open yesterday! After 76 years since the last time anyone from these islands won it, our national pride must be in serious danger of spontaneously combusting! Very, very well done that man!

Catching Some Summer Rays!

The Roman Amphitheatre Verona It is widely acknowledged that 'a change is as good as a rest'. Which about sums up the kind of holiday we go for here in the Johnson house. Judith and I are incapable of sitting on a beach in brilliant sunshine for more time than it takes to dry-off after a swim, get the shorts and t-shirts back on and toddle off to do something else. We tend to choose places for our holidays within easy reach of at least one cultural centre. Last year in Lake Garda we explored Verona thoroughly, as well as many of the interesting places along the lakeside like Riva Del Garda, which have either a museum or an historic site to visit.

They say travel broadens the mind - pretty often the holiday food is so good it can broaden the waistband too! But you do learn some useful things - I now know where to find the best take-away pizza in Verona! In fact I plan to write a short story some time about this particular pizza business: the honest diligent husband who was always hot, busy cooking and serving; while his wife, immaculately turned-out and looking like she'd just had a massage and manicure only appeared when the shop was full. This woman had developed a highly efficient way of accounting, because she never rounded a price down but always up to the next 50 cents. Although we came away from her shop after a week of pizzas a couple of pounds heavier and a few Euros lighter she did give me a lovely idea for a story - so, fair exchange I reckon! Us in Austria (how do they always know we're British?) This Summer we went back to the Tyrol, Austria, to a little village called Soll. We'd had a really lovely time there a couple of years back. The hotel we stayed at last time has since changed hands so this visit we took accommodation at the Tyrol (Tyrol Am Wilder Kaiser if you want its full name). Josef and the rest of the family team who run the hotel really looked after us well. Our room was spacious and comfortable and like everywhere in Austria it was kept extremely clean. If you like walking in beautiful mountains, swimming in mountain lakes and riding on cable-cars to your heart's delight (like we do) then I'd highly recommend both Soll and the Hotel Tyrol. The Heldenorgel, Kufstein We meant to go to Innsbruck (we've been before but had always felt we had unfinished business with the city having visited last time on a Monday when the art gallery was shut! And we hoped to see lots of other stuff too!) but this year we were enjoying the wonderful mountain walks and sunshine too much and ran out of time to get there. However, we did go to Kufstein on our one rainy day to see the Heldenorgel being played. The organ is set at the base of an old fortress and has been played twice daily (midday and 6pm) in memory of Ausrtria's war dead since 1931. It is an incredible piece of machinery with the organ pipes at the top of the tower (most easily reached via the funicular railway!). The four main villages of the Wilder Kaiser region, Soll, Schefau, Elmau and Going go out of their way to make their Summer visitors welcome. Many visitors return time and time again and all the Gondola/ cable-car half-stations have great playgrounds for entertaining children. They allow the children to create their own world without imposing too much that's been thought up by adults. Our son would have loved it there I know had we discovered it when he was a child. Incidentally, I didn't see one screaming child or irrate parent during the whole two weeks.

Yes, they always know. But how? So a change, a rest, lots of fresh air, lots of walking up and down mountains (phew!), great food, great hotel, great village and lots of nice Austrians, Germans and British people.

Now I'm back at home again and it's down to some serious writing. Lovely jubbly!

Artist/Animator Interview

Tom Johnson directing a member of the cast Very shortly I plan to release the third and final part of the animated cat and mouse trilogy of short promotional films that began with A Gripping Tail and continued with The Purr-fect Crime. I thought it was time to praise the excellent hard work of my son Tom Johnson who has been responsible for almost all the artistic presentation of Niedermayer & Hart. This is the first blog interview I've ever done! Here goes! Martin: Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
 
Tom: I studied Fine Art (Painting) at Wimbledon School of Art and spent three or four years afterwards doing various jobs to pay the bills as well as putting on a few shows in and around
London. I've been working full-time as an art teacher and running an art department over the last four years but have continued to produce art work as well as doing some open studio
exhibitions. My work has mainly been commissioned portraiture. I still paint people but have stopped taking on commissions for the time being because of the limited time I have.
 
Martin: Where did the idea of making an animation to promote the book come from?
 
Tom: I'd been running a local community art project the previous year and the theme had been stop-motion animation, so it was a medium I'd been experimenting with already. I've always loved the animations of Ray Harryhausen - in particular the famous fighting skeletons scene from Jason and the Argonauts.  So animation was something that I'd always wanted to try, and I think it was my mother who suggested it might be fun to do an animation to promote
Niedermayer & Hart.  Martin: Why did you choose two cute characters to promote a fairly dark and disturbing horror/thriller?
 
Tom: The cat and mouse theme immediately conjured-up a sort of Tom and Jerry rivalry - the idea is that the book (because there's only one copy) is compulsive reading and unputdownable - they both want to get their hands on it.

Martin: Art imitating life then!

Tom: You hope!

Martin: Alright, carry on! Tom: There's no tie-in to the actual plot of Niedermayer & Hart at all. Their characters developed as I made them out of plasticine, although I did have an idea about how I wanted them to look.  I often doodle cartoon cats and mice.  Their personalities really began to emerge once I'd started shooting. You feel that although there's some animosity between them they reluctantly accept each other too.
 
Martin: How long does it take to make each animation, start to finish?

Tom: After making the figures and the initial set-building and painting, and making the tiny props for the characters to use, I suppose the first two (A Gripping Tail and The Purr-fect Crime) took about two whole days, to shoot the scenes and then to edit everything together before adding sound effects, music and all the titles and credits. The third instalment took longer - more like four days - because of a few more complicated and fiddly bits that were involved.
 
Martin: What kind of software did you use to make the films? 

Tom: A Gripping Tail was made with a piece of software called ZU-3D on a PC, but the second and third were made with i-Stop Motion on the Mac. There's not much difference between the picture quality of the animations but I found i-Stop Motion easier to use and there were more options when it came to the post-production. 

Martin: How did you do the sound effects, voices etc? 

Tom: I recorded all of the sound effects myself, straight into the computer, with the exception of the music tracks (although you can hear my ukulele and some singing in the animations). I spent quite a bit of time recording and re-recording sounds whilst sitting on the sofa, watching clips over and over again. Sometimes I had to overlap several sound effects in order to get it right. It's the kind of thing you need to have a bit of privacy for - anyone except for my girlfriend that heard me making snoring-cat sounds and little mouse noises would think I'd gone barmy.

Martin: Most people don't know you like I do!

Tom: Thanks, Dad.

Martin: Would you like to do more animations in the future, or have you had enough of  messing around with plasticine?
 
Tom: I'd like to do some more in the
future but my main priority right now is my painting. Martin: You also designed the book cover for Niedermayer & Hart. What did that entail?
 
Tom: I made a large watercolour painting of Valle Crucis in North Wales for the main image and for this I had to work from a composite image which I made using photos of the abbey taken in summer along with winter photos taken a few years ago in Kent when we had a heavy snowfall. When I was happy with the finished piece I scanned the painting into the computer.  I used Photoshop to set up the dimensions for the front and back covers as well as the spine allowing extra space for what the printers call "bleed" and for crop marks. I added in the text and after a lot of adjustments the file was sent off to the printer. We had to do one extra tweak after seeing the first proof, but in the end I was really happy with the result.
 
Martin: So, what are you working on at the moment?
 
Tom: I've just completed a portrait which I've been working on for some time. The actual time that I've spent on it probably only amounts to a few weeks work, but over the same period I've worked on various commissions and generally been very busy with my day job, so it's a great feeling to finally get it finished. I've also got a few more paintings in the pipeline which I'm looking forward to working on.
 
Martin: Thanks very much, Tom - both for taking part in this interview and for all the help you've given me with the book. Without your help the finished product most certainly wouldn't have had such a professional look. I know I'm probably biased but I think it's a lovely book to look at and hold - a real thing of beauty. 

Please take a look at Tom's website at www.tomjohnsonart.com

Curry

If you order a curry in South Wales, you will generally be asked if you want it "Half and half?" This is shorthand for half rice, half chips. The Welsh love chips. My late father used to quip that because the Welsh ate so many chips they had developed square backsides. When I moved to London in my late teens and ordered my first curry, I was rather surprised by the bemused response I received from the waiter when I asked for a "Medium chicken and mushroom half and half." I wondered if he was from some remote part of the sub-continent with unique dietary habits. Nope, he'd just never been to Wales!
 
My older brother led me to my first curry house when I was about thirteen or fourteen. He ordered me a mild one and I managed about three mouthfuls before my head felt like it was about to spontaneously combust. Ian, who has always had a good appetite, ate two curries that lunchtime. Sitting opposite, I watched him put away the food with immense respect whilst pouring the contents of the water jug down my burning throat. However, hot food is something you definitely get acclimatised to.
 
I think I can safely say that over the next fifteen years I probably had at least one or two curries a week. No real surprise that Chicken Tikka Masala has ousted Fish and Chips from its number one spot as the UK's favourite takeaway. However, I never went really hot! I only ever attempted a Madras once and I'd never mess around with a vindaloo or above. I can still remember the particular flavour of the vegetable curry they used to serve at Mother India on Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, where I lived for a number of years. I've tried many times to re-create that taste, got close a few times, but never quite got there.
 
When we moved out of London to a village in East Sussex in 1987 - just before the hurricane struck - we were horrified to discover that the nearest Indian restaurant was six miles away! And what's more, it turned out to be a pretty mediocre one too!
 
Flippin' 'eck, this was serious!
 
Then our friend Anne came to the rescue. She kindly lent us her copy of Indian Cookery by Madhur Jaffrey. Anne (like us) didn't have one of those kitchens where the cookery books are kept in fine pristine condition, and I recall the book was already well-used with a lot of curry stains on its pages. A humorous person by nature, in reference to this she joked that it was a "Scratch and sniff edition!"
 
Believe me, that book saved our lives!
 
Eventually, after many months, Anne asked for it back. The book had become such a part of our culinary life that confronted with separation we took the only possible alternative there was to running away from home with it - yes, we bought a copy! Ours wasn't the scratch and sniff edition, however over time it has gradually been converted into one. I've bought other Indian Cookery books over the years but to be honest I've never come across better recipes. The book came out to accompany Madhur Jaffrey's classic series on Indian Cookery for the BBC in 1982. It is a jewel!
 
Know what? After writing this, I could murder a curry.

Dandelion

I've heard it said that if the humble dandelion could be found only on the remotest, most inaccessible slopes of the Himalayas, it would be the most highly prized flower in the world. Ever taken a good look at one and how superbly formed it is? Like so many of the truly wonderful 'ordinary' things that surround us, I often have to remind myself to look more closely - because so much of what we consider to be familiar is barely 'seen' in our daily rush. This gift of sight is indeed a strange phenomenon! We human beings so often fail to see that which is right beneath our noses. 

I lay in bed just after waking, just before 7am this morning beside my wife. We've been together for over thirty years. We met when she was nineteen and I was twenty. Both of us were a bit bleary-eyed after several busy days, and with less sleep than we operate at our best on. I'm not quite sure how it came about but we started discussing some of our favourite lines of poetry, and perhaps because I've not long returned from Swansea, Dylan Thomas came to mind. I
  recited some of the first lines from Under Milk Wood, "It is Spring, moon-less night in the small town, starless and bible-black ...". Jude quoted, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ". She remarked, "Imagine how pleased we'd be with ourselves if we ever wrote a line that good?"
 
She's absolutely right of course.
 
But you know what? I think the thing I'm most pleased about is having a partner I wake up next to every morning who doesn't think I'm barking mad if I feel like discussing poetry at 6.50am.

Lore's Tale

Lore's Tale by Lore Bolwell and Peter F Bolwell

Lore Weil was born in Prague in 1925 of Austrian Jewish parents. Her father Franz served during the First World War in an elite regiment of the Hapsburg army, was promoted to the rank of Oberleutnant and decorated by Emperor Karl. Lore's mother Angela was multi-lingual and had attended a 'finishing school' in England. Ironically, her father, something of an Austrian nationalist, was greatly disappointed when he returned home after WW1 to discover himself in the new state of 'Czechoslovakia'. Lore had one brother Herbert who was born in 1930, the year the family moved to Dessau in Germany. She was seven when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and it was around this time that she began to be aware of the anti-semitism surrounding her. Within a few years the comfortable, middle-class life they had previously known became a thing of the past for the Weil family. The children and their mother were in Austria at the time of the Anschluss in 1938. There then followed several hurried changes of location to try and evade the Nazis who were busy gobbling-up Europe. They briefly returned to Prague and realising it was unsafe, eventually found themselves stranded in Holland at the outbreak of World War Two. They were awaiting word from Franz to follow him to England where he had gone on ahead in the hope of setting-up a new home for his family. He would never see his wife again.

At this point Lore's ordeal truly begins as she attempts to survive in a Europe that is increasingly hostile and dangerous to her personally simply because of her ethnicity. The story, as told without any hint of sensationalism by Lore to her son Peter and which he has recorded in the first person is, like every Holocaust testimony, horrifically shocking, not just for its brutality and inhumanity but because of its close proximity to us. The people in her story don't always behave in the way we expect them to, the bad guys aren't always bad and the good guys sometimes act in the most despicable ways. The enemy wasn't some barbaric horde back at the dawn of recorded history but the civilisation that gave us Mozart and Beethoven, Erich Maria Remarque, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor Niemoller, Meister Eckhart, Albert Schweitzer, Freud and Einstein (to name but a very few). These events happened only a short distance away from the country that I myself call home, and it's sobering to think that I was born only a decade after the end of the War in Europe.

I have known Peter Bolwell, Lore's son, for a number of years. He is a committed Quaker, an Esperantist and someone whose views I am personally always prepared to listen to. He has a terrific sense of humour, plays several instruments, and has a strange and inexplicable appreciation for some really quite bad Spaghetti Westerns. Although he is invariably busy, I have always found him to be extremely generous with his time. He kindly helped edit and proof-read both of my novels, so it was my great pleasure (utilising recently developed formatting skills) to help him set up the ebook version of Lore's Tale.

This short, well written book, a personal memoir, is an important snapshot of one of the most dreadful and degrading periods in human history. We must never forget the stories of those like Lore who suffered in ways that are almost unimaginable for us now to comprehend. Indeed, should we ever forget, then we who have been forrtunate enough to have enjoyed mostly peace and harmony in our lifetimes are in grave danger of once again repeating the mistakes of the past. Some years ago I taught Engish as a foreign language at a summer school to a nice bunch of Belgian teenagers. I read them Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori - they were noticeably moved by the words. Yet in the discussion we had afterwards, the consensus of opinion was that such cataclysmic events as WW1 and WW2 could never happen again in Europe. I felt quite shaken by their confidence and told them that I sincerely hoped they were right about this - that idea of 'never again' still troubles me!

Lore's Tale by Peter F Bowell

Peter Bolwell's email address: piffkin@gmail.com

Paper version - price £3.00. Available to purchase from the author via his email address, or by ordering from any good bookshop quoting the reference ISBN: 978-0-9571588-0-1

Lore's Tale Amazon Kindle - price 77p ($0.99)

Summer Chill

I'm doing a a bit of a promotion throughout the month of August and reducing the price of Niedermayer & Hart on Amazon and Smashwords by 40%. I think the book makes a good summer read (I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I?). Summertime, with its longer hours,  is especially handy for those with over-fertile imaginations where extra daylight can help to lessen the tension caused by the dark and dastardly goings on in the book.

I've been giving pricing quite a bit of thought. I could make the book free of course and hopefully get lots of downloads that might artificially massage its rankings, which in turn might produce lots of positive reviews that would then generate paid sales - but you know what? I'm not going to! The reason being this: I don't personally believe that anyone should receive no recompense at all for their hard work (unless they themselves choose that path, of course!). To my mind, giving stuff away for free can't ultimately be good for anyone, least of all independent authors. And anyway, do the people who download all these free books actually bother to read them? Some do, I don't doubt it. However, in the fairly short time I've been twittering and involved with indie authors, I could have furnished my Kindle for PC with enough reading material for the next two or three years easily. Yes, I've people-pleased and taken their books when Twitter pals have been doing Free Day Promos - but I have to ask myself, is this really helping them, and perhaps more importantly is it helping independent publishing, or is it helping to wreck it from the inside? I'm not at all sure!

I 'm certain that the big publishing houses aren't concerned that indie authors give their stuff away for free. They know full well that the reading public will always want whatever is currently flavour of the month, and if you want 'flavour of the month' I guarantee you'll have to pay for it.

Like I said, I don't believe it's right to give work away for nothing. Perhaps I feel this way after many years in the theatre where experienced actors are constantly being asked to work for all kinds of reasons for either no money or less money than they truly deserve, "It's an ensemble piece ... There's not much money in the budget ... Stephen would love you to do it, and knows you'll be brilliant in the part ... I'm afraid the entire budget has gone to pay for the star and everyone else is getting paid Equity minimum ..."

Niedermayer & Hart is 162,000 words long, was seriously considered over several months by two major publishing houses and in the process received considerable praise from quite a number of people in the publishing world (I have the letters to prove it!). When it didn't happen, I felt utterly crestfallen and didn't write again for ages afterwards. Some time later, after I'd completed another book, it was my wife who suggested I might reconsider N & H - I read it, realised it was still a decent read but re-drafted it because I felt my style had improved after the exercise of writing book number two. I then had it proof-read by three people that I trust implicitly.

The trade paperback is (IMHO) a beautiful looking book and I've organised a few compos and promotional giveaways. However, this has, and will always be, limited to a certain number of copies at a time. The paperback sells for £12.99; unfortunately some people have contacted us to say they've been having trouble ordering it from Amazon, and if you find this is the case for you it is easily available through most other sources including via PayPal through this website.

The ebook is easily available from Amazon and Smashwords and is now at the special August-only price of £1.96 UK (price including VAT) $2.99 US. I hope as many of you as possible will take advantage of this offer and enjoy reading the book.