K. Velk's Blog, page 6

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.

Oh Tandenbaum Oh Tandenbaum! GO, Get The Book!

Image copyright 2008 Juan Wijngaard, used by permission
Hey UK!  I know I'm a few days late for Christmas but I wanted to remind you over there across the pond that you can get the ebook of Up, Back, and Away til New Year's Day for no more than 99 p on an Amazon UK kindle countdown deal so... get clicking!

If you are subscriber to kindle unlimited the download is free.  Happy holidays, jingle bells all that.

Merry Christmas Blighty!

Bring on the half timbered beauties!You know I love you, right?

Why else would I have spent six years writing a book about life on your island during the 1920s?  And a lifetime reading about you all, and half a year's salary visiting you when I could?

Sooo.  For Christmas I'm running a 99 p promotion on Amazon UK of said book.

Don't buy it now - unless you feel like adding a little extra to my Vermont coffers, which would be really sweet of you but not very giving of me.  You can keep those precious pence in your own coffers, or on the Amazon gift cards that you're definitely getting for Christmas, if you click through, anytime between Christmas Day, starting at 8 AM GMT and continuing to New Year's Day 12 AM GMT (2015 already!)  

So load up that new kindle (the one you are also getting for Christmas) or load the kindle app onto your iPad and drop it down.  The ebook will be less than a single Krispy Kreme donut at Victoria Station (I speak from recent experience) so no excuses!  You can come back here and click the link or just search Up, Back, and Away in the kindle store at Amazon.uk

Now, it's time for my annual English Christmas internet celebration, which consists of posting this, my favorite English Christmas Carol.

I'm mentally standing under some mistletoe and blowing you kisses.  (A helpful hint: turn up your computer's volume, the song starts quietly).

See you during Christmas week over at Amazon.com.uk!

Hi Ms. L'Engle.

In celebration of that whole new cover thing, the e-version of the book is 99 cents on Amazon (all you need is the free kindle app if you don't have a kindle) until Nov 26.

I checked Amazon Sunday am and found this.


I reverence Madeleine L'Engle so I burst into tears.  I have read A Wrinkle in Time every ten years or so since I was about ten

I couldn't really hope to hang around in such close company for long (I just checked and Up, Back, and Away has slipped to number 8 in this category) but it was a heady moment.  I'm hanging on to that screen shot, believe me.

In other book news, I got a request last week from a writer named Tony Riches (he's also a Welshman, which instantly put him in my good books) to do a guest post for his writing blog.  It was a fun assignment.  You can see that here.

As noted, that 99 cent promotion continues through the end of today, Wednesday November 26.  Thanks to any and all who got a copy or told a friend.

And the Prizes Rain Down.

Well. One prize, for the new cover. No money, but nice bragging rights for a month.  (Really, I was excited).

Have a look.  Thank you Mr. Friedlander.

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.

The New Phone Books Are Here!

The new look.  Oo la la!
I hope I'm not the only one still living who remembers that line from the Steve Martin semi-classic film, The Jerk .   I was a huge fan of Steve in middle school.  I listened to his famous comedy album over and over and laughed even at the jokes I didn't get.

In the movie, of course, our hero, The Jerk, is excited to be validated by seeing his name in the phone book.  I feel a bit of the same thrill about the redesign of the book, about which I have already gone on at length in the previous blog post.  And, please note, blog redesign here. Ahem.

Anyway, the ebook, with Juan Wijngaard's beautiful cover art, is now up on Amazon. The paperback redesign is in the works.  (The first proofs came back with some color matching issues that I'm trying to resolve)e.

I'll be running some promotions on Amazon and Goodreads in November so stay tuned.

If you like Juan's work (and if you don't, check your pulse or go breathe on a mirror or something), you might be interested in this little TV spot they did about him on a New Mexico PBS station.

Thanks for stopping by and your kind interest, or forbearance, as the case may be.

Here's Juan:

Back to England

The back of my daughter's head as we prepare
to enter that oaken cavern of wonders, Liberty
Department Store in LondonThat'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 LookThough 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 was persuaded this summer by a gentleman who auditioned to read for an audio version that the cover was just too Blah to attract readers.  This narrator had read for the part shortly after I posted the book on ACX, a website that brings together producers, writers, and narrators.  I liked his audition, but had no budget to meet his rate.  He came back around a year later and said he was sorry to see the book hadn't been recorded. He thought it had promise.  This gentleman has become very successful in a short time, taking full advantage of the burgeoning world of audio books and he's a hard-headed businessman into the bargain.  He told me plainly that it would languish without a better cover.

I'd had a few cover detractors (see reference to 16-year-old daughter) but I couldn't see their point -at first.  Now I could see it from the International Space Station.   I decided he was right.  Even if commercial success never comes, I want the book to be the best it can be.  I went hunting on the internet and soon discovered the work of Juan Wijngaard.  He had several works for sale in a well-known London gallery called the Illustration Cupboard.  His style reminded me a little of that of Maxfield Parrish, the great commercial artist and illustrator of the 1920s.  Given the book's themes and 1920s setting, and my own sweet tooth fondness for color and romance, I worked up the nerve to send Juan an email in a suitably groveling key.

If you have clicked through that link you'll see that Juan won a Kate Greenaway medal for one of his early book illustration commissions.  He's Dutch (really, when you're looking for a painter, start in Holland).  He was, however, born in Argentina, trained in London and now lives in New Mexico, where he works primarily as a fine artist these days.  He is, in short, a unicorn of a person (also he plays an obscure stringed instrument).  He responded kindly to my sheepish email and asked to read the book. This was a key moment for me.

The first book designer I approached had lots of nice covers displayed on his website.  I asked if he would read the book.  I considered this essential.  I said I would pay extra if that's what he needed.  To his credit, he simply said he would not do it.  He did not have time.  He only wanted to know what it was about.  When Juan said he would have to read the book before he would commit, I knew I had found someone with whom I could work.  The rest is now, almost, history.  Juan is a lovely person and I have been thrilled with his work.  I hope you will be too.  Of course there are other components, especially these days, to book (and ebook) layout and design and these are being handled by a talented young designer in Australia called Scarlett Rugers.  She's got all the bits now and we're nearing the finish line - I hope.

I plan to have the redesigned and corrected version (there were, alas, some very few errors in the text)  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.

Read This

Because it's fantastic.

It's an excerpt from a short Talk of the Town essay called "Howard's Apartment." It was written by Maeve Brennan, who wrote for The New Yorker as the "Long-Winded Lady" from 1951 to 1984.

This piece was published on November 11, 1967.

The setup: The Long-Winded Lady is house-sitting for a friend in a two-room Greenwich Village apartment on the third floor of a brownstone. Her friend's apartment is in the rear of the building. There is a party going on in the front apartment. She hears the party in bursts, as the door opens and closes with each guest's arrival. She is alone, listening to the party, and thinking of herself as a Goldilocks-style intruder in her friend's apartment when a rain storm sweeps in:

As the rose leaves fluttered, welcoming the downpour, the ailanthus trembled all over, and the flat red-and-black side of a large apartment building half a block away shone with color. Wherever the rain fell there was color, and the rain fell everywhere. At the first moment of the storm, when the lightning flashed and the rain came thundering down, I stood up from the green velvet sofa where I am sitting and walked across to close the door to the terrace, and when I turned back, the room had become dim - nothing left of the brightness that had filled it all day. Now the room is vague and insubstantial and shows itself for what it really is - the accidental setting of an enigmatic but disquieting dream that I have dreamed before, in past rooms, and will dream again in rooms I have not yet seen. It is a dream without people. The rain has gathered the room and me into the invisible world where there is no night and no day, and where walls and mirrors and trees and buildings are formed of advancing and retreating sound. At this moment it is easy to see how mountains and oceans are created and erased by a shift in the light, and to understand that the solid earth may shrink without warning to the vanishing point underneath our feet. The rain falls steeply, making cliffs as it falls, and its force has turned the room into a cave that is real only because it is hollow - a sounding place in which here is only one sound. In the profound silence that rises here now, even echo and memory fade away.

A good friend of mine hunted down the 1997 reprint of the 1969 original collection of Brennan's Talk of the Town essays. My copy, as per the publisher's note, includes a few essays that were not collected back in 1969. I have kept the book next to my bed, along with Brennan's short story collection, The Springs of Affection (same friend). The 1997 book is again out of print and there is no e-book version. This is proof that there is something really wrong with human beings.

I have read both of my Brennan books in spurts, like you might eat some particularly expensive, complex cheese. Each story or essay gives me so much to think about I can only manage a few pages before I have to stop and sleep. In case you're wondering, this is high praise.

I'm not good enough at writing to put into words what makes these essays so good. They are personal to Maeve Brennan, but also universal. The incidents about which she writes are small New York incidents that are also common to us all. E.g., a man on the subway offers her his seat and she, startled, says no thanks, I'm getting off at the next stop. She starts thinking about what a nice, polite man he is, and how lucky his wife is, and then realizes she has two stops to go, and feels terrible because he will have misunderstood why she declined his offer.

I find myself stopping at about every third sentence to wonder about Brennan's biography. She came to New York with her Irish diplomat father when she was 17. She became a New Yorker - to her toes - but not a fancy one. (Although the Irish claim her, quite reasonably, as one of her own).

From the essays you get the impression that she spent most of her New York time alone, on subways and sidewalks, in low-rent hotels, coffee shops, and bars. She was very beautiful, as the photo on the cover of my paperback shows, and she wrote about fashion at Harper's Bazaar before the New Yorker took her up. Her romantic life was, however, a disaster. She died alone, mentally ill, and camped out a lot of the time in one of the women's bathrooms at the New Yorker's old offices. I visited those offices once, in about 1992. I wish I had known she might have been lurking there. I wouldn't have known who she was, of course, and she might have whacked me with a shopping bag or otherwise terrified me, but I would treasure such an encounter now. Reading her essays tonight it occurs to me she was talented to the point of doom, like van Gogh. If I was running the world, she would be as famous as he is.

I like to do you who stop by here favors sometime, and I am counting this post as one such. If the excerpt I chose didn't blow you away, I hope you'll still look for the book. It's full of other marvels, not quite so opaque, or that at least that you will come back here and look again some other time, maybe when things are strangely quiet.

Thanks to my friend who thought I would like Maeve Brennan. Right again.