'Launching a book into the world'

Milly Johnson

Sometimes I think that the actual writing of books is the easiest part of the whole process.  Books are like small children – you have to celebrate their arrival into the world with a party (any excuse).  You have to ‘wet their head’ with champagne (more any excuse).  You have to support them, show off about them, insist the world sees them as your wonderful creation.  My books take 9 months from conception to birth – the parallels are too obvious to ignore. Every book is precious to me, I like them all for different reasons, but I feel that I shouldn’t have a favourite. I glow when I see their photographs in various places.  I beam when I hear good things about them.  I snarl when other people slag them off and my hackles rise.

But a new book coming out is a great excuse for a party.  And champagne.  And flowers.  Publishers send you a bouquet on publication day – and they are every bit as sweet to receive as the flowers you get in a maternity ward.  And it has become custom to open a bottle of fizz on the big day – although my little tipple is Pellers Ice Wine which is the best sort of bubbly I’ve ever drank.  Nothing else will do.

I’m sure that I go over the top when I release a book  (‘You?  Go over the top, Mill?  Never!’  say my friends with a smirk).  My launches get bigger with every passing year.  But it’s a great excuse to indulge myself all things stationery.  I am a totally stationery geek.  Hobbycraft is heaven as far as I am concerned.  And having a ‘theme’ for my book allows me to go and buy stickers, colour-coordinated ribbon, design bookmarks, even buy stamps and ink.  My house is currently full of umbrella stickers, umbrella confetti, ribbons with umbrellas on them, bags with umbrellas on them, chocolates in the shape of umbrellas, bookmarks with umbrellas on them… even napkins with umbrellas on them.  Doesn’t that cost?  I hear you ask.  Yes, and it’s a marvellous spend. I can’t stop myself. I know that when I have my launch evening, I’ll have a room full of people stuffed with cake, sandwiches, holding goody bags and hopefully when they get home, they’ll start reading the book with a jolly heart.

But I’ll let you into a secret.  I started the whole ‘goody bag’ thing with my first book because I was so terrified that no one would turn up to my launch party that I prepared to bribe them with presents.  Now, even though I know they’ll turn up because they’ve bought tickets, the custom has to continue.  Us writers are superstitious creatures and any break in custom could result in disaster.  It has to continue.  Shame.

Hence the fizz will be bought, Hobbycraft will be visited, cakes will be distributed and goody bags will be supplied at every launch I ever do.  It’s hard work.  I should have muscles like Arnie Schwarzenegger with all the boxes of goodies I have to carry into my launches.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Nor could I.  It’s my lucky ritual. And my child deserves only the best.

The Allure of Ruins by Santa Montefiore

Santa Montefiore

High up on the cliffs, overlooking the Irish Sea, is an old stone castle. Its empty eyes stare vacantly out at a horizon that is always the same yet forever changing in colour and cloud. One of the towers stands hollow but proud while the other has long since crumbled into the ocean. Sea gulls build nests where once the garrison stood. The wind sweeps in off the water, damp and cold, and slips through holes in the walls to touch the grassy spaces where long ago carpets were laid, fires were lit and banquets served. I’m sucked in by my curiosity and swallowed into the mystery of the past.  I wander enraptured by thoughts of what it must have been like centuries ago when those rooms reverberated with voices and the patter of feet, and those windows were full of faces, scanning the same unchanging horizon for ships. 
Ruins have always fascinated me. I want to be left alone to feast on the possibilities, to soak up the sense of history, to feel the vibrations of the past in those silent and chilly walls. But what is it about ruins that makes them so compelling? Do they perhaps resonate with the deepest part of us that knows that one day our bodies, too, will be empty shells, and our own lives relegated to history? Is our curiosity propelled by the mystery of our own mortality? Do they focus our minds on the transience of our lives and the inevitability of our deaths?
When I gaze up at those ancient walls I like to imagine the people who once dwelt there.  Their lives were perhaps long and vital and full of adventure.  They, like us, believed they were immortal. But where are they now? What is left of them? Those who kept them alive in their memories are also dead. Unless they were important historical figures, they will be lost forever like foam on the sea.  Ruins make me question my purpose here. If I am to leave the earth without a trace of ever having lived, what is it all for?
I wonder what those windows have witnessed. If only those walls could speak. But they’re not sharing their stories and neither is the wind that moans around the corners like ghosts of the dead, desperate not to be forgotten.  It fills me with a melancholy that is somehow pleasurable and I wallow in it as my imagination expands and I begin to weave a story of my own.
My new novel, Secrets of the Lighthouse, is a tale that unravels the mystery of a ruined lighthouse as well as a castle which has been boarded up and abandoned.  I chose Connemara as my setting because Ireland is intrinsically enigmatic and hauntingly beautiful. Every morning I hurried to my desk to indulge my love of ruins and nostalgia with greedy delight, and did what ruins always compel me to do – breathe life back into them again.

            

Truth and Fiction in Infinite Sky by C.J. Flood

C.J. Flood

A lot of people ask me how autobiographical Infinite Sky is, and the truth is, it's hard to say. The story begins a few weeks after thirteen-year-old Iris Dancy's mother leaves the family to go travelling around North Africa. Iris's home life quickly falls into a state of chaos, with her dad struggling to cope, and her older brother angry about being left behind. When a family of Irish Travellers set up camp in the Dancy's paddock overnight, these already high levels of tension increase. Iris finds the Travellers fascinating, especially their teenaged son, but her dad and brother want the Travellers gone, and fast. Over the course of a summer, events unfold that change these two families lives forever.

I started writing Infinite Sky four years ago, the summer before I started a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. It began as a sort of mystery story, with Iris uncovering clues about the whereabouts of her mother, and the type of person she was. For some reason, it didn't work. In workshop, my fellow students said it lacked dimension. I'm not sure why, but on arriving at my first creative writing course, I seemed to have forgotten how to write.

After a particularly harsh workshop, my tutor asked what I was trying to say with my novel. I came out with a strange jumble of things – still unsure what I wanted to say. One of them was that I wanted to write about the effects of a divorce on children. My tutor recommended I go back to writing what I knew, and I began mining my experience as an adolescent. I wrote scenes about my parents' separation and my relationships with my brother and parents. My classmates liked these scenes, and gradually, I began working the two ideas together. Using the truth of my experience of a separation, but jazzing it up with exaggeration and intrigue whenever I fancied. 

The resulting novel has a lot of truth in it. The setting is the house I grew up in, exactly, and the father character looks and sounds an awful lot like my dad, though he says and does things that my dad wouldn't dream of. There's so much of my dad in Thomas's characterisation that I was nervous of him reading it. My dad collected towers of five pees when I was a kid and had pockets full of sawdust. He still smells like wool and sweat and grass when he's finished work. Thomas, like my dad, is a landscape gardener. I stole so much! (Luckily my dad loved the book, and hasn't disowned me). The mum characterisation was a bit different. I had to use my imagination to create Anna and her reasons for leaving her kids. (My mum moved up the road during my parents' separation, whilst Iris's mum moves to Tunisia.) As such, Anna quite naturally evolved into someone apart from my mum, though she has the same strength and positivity, and a kind of glamour about her, too. Iris's brother, Sam, started out as based on my older brother, but he quickly became his own person. Being very close with his mum in the story, he takes her absence especially hard. He falls in with local troublemakers, and takes up fighting. All very unlike the peace-loving, long-haired skater brother of my teens.

The most fictional element of the novel is the family of Travellers. I did a lot of research to create them, though in the end, they are just people. Trick, Iris's friend/love interest takes a lot of traits from the boys I have loved thus far in my life. So you see, the question of how autobiographical Infinite Sky is, is a difficult one! Truth and fiction are so tightly woven together that it is an intense read for family and friends, and from what I hear from reviewers and readers, for strangers too.