Have now entered Cyberspace...

Not much time to blog a long post.  Suffice it to say this:  Hope has now entered the realms of ebook.  Can be bought with pounds sterling, dollars--of the US and Canadian varieties, euros, yen, and rupees.  Yes, that's right--The Book is now as far a field as Japan and India.

Here, for example, is the .co.uk link  You should also be able to browse inside the book here.

Currently (20 May) listing as #1 bestseller in 'Mormons' on Amazon!

The Shaping of Hope

I sat down this evening, excited to make a mention of my fascination for poetic structure in creative writing [it genuinely is a fascination] and promptly got side-tracked by a 'discovery' that may impact my time and capacity--it left me feeling deflated, demoralised, and just a bit angry.  And robbed of the enthusiasm for writing about something I really wanted to share. 

 

But then I realised this is Life.  So I have climbed back into my seat, allowed myself this little preamble as a way of acknowledging the turbulence [in the hopes that it will help to defuse it a little] and now recommit to sharing something about my experience of shaping of Hope. 

 

In 2005-2006 I attended Lancaster University (to study for an MA in Creative Writing) and there was taught about the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci Sequence (a strange mathematical counting pattern that conforms to the Golden Ratio: i.e. 0, ,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc.)  and the Hero's Journey.

 

I became fascinated by the artistic patterns, the symmetry, and the possibilities for combining all three.  I am intrigued that that these 'things' are something seen frequently, yet unconsciously enjoyed and infrequently perceived, in spite of manifesting in multiple and diverse ways and places (examples can be seen here for example.)  For me, they become fascinating because they seem to exist just beneath the surface, all the while shaping and moulding us into our most natural and beautiful form.          

 

For me, these principles became almost an obsession in the later stages of redrafting Hope.  Okay, strike the 'almost'.  But to be fair to myself, I believed I could see a chance to deepen the poetic structure of the story.  I wanted to experiment to see whether it could strengthen the reading experience in a way that wouldn't draw attention to itself in a bad way, but instead be something that if and when discovered might provide an enriching revisiting of the story later.

 

Now.  I am mindful that analysis can kill a good read, but if you are interested in exploring the book's poetic structure, here are a few clues to get you started:

 

• Act 1 = the first 5 chapters [which includes the Prologue]

 

• Act 2 = 13 chapters [subdivided in two blocks: the first made up of 8 and then second an additional 5; chapter 13 is important in terms of the Golden ratio in the story as a whole].

 

• Act 3 = 3 chapters. 

 

I'm sensing it's best to leave it at that. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With many many thanks...

Imagine being in a room with a window low enough to see something of the outside, but just too high to really see the lay of the land properly (though something of the outside is visible, it's only really the sky you can see; occasional better sight of the ground can be established by jumping with all your might but you can snatch only split second views before you fall back down).  This is what it feels like from the point of view of an overexcited and perhaps overzealous debutant novelist based in the UK who is trying hard via Google to keep a cyber eye on the main action taking place in the USA and whose book has been officially available for purchase for less than three weeks.

So here we are.  Two and a bit weeks into April, and the fact that I am beginning to forget how little time has actually passed, and just how obsessed I may sound is marginally concerning. 

Mindful that my long suffering Facebook friends are continuing to patiently bear with my somewhat one track posts, and mindful of the speed at which forgetfulness can kick in, I wish to create a gratitude list: 

• Grateful to every generous soul who has celebrated this success with me.  (I was especially touched to receive a congratulations card out of the blue from an aunt.)

• Grateful to the people who have given their time to read and review the novel (and those still engaged in such an endeavour).  Your gift has been a real boost for the book's launch.  So thank you. 

• Grateful to the dozens of friends who have sportingly (if you listen to yourself say that slowly it will uncannily sound like supportingly) like the Hope Facebook  fan page, and, so, willingly submit themselves to the possibility of double updates from me. 

• Grateful that Hope is now on the shelves at Deseret Book--and selling. 

• Grateful that copies are being sent out by post--including my complimentary copies--really looking forward to handling the physical product.  Don't tell my kids, but I plan to give each of them a copy with a personal message.  (Just what they wanted, you say?  I know!) 

• Grateful to be finding the book has been picked up by Independent LDS retailers: in addition to the main market in the USA, this includes Canada and the UK.

• Grateful to be able to say, finally, to my wife and children the waiting is over: the novel is now on sale. 

A Hope links page...

It's early days, but here are a number of links to places to learn more about (and in some cases buy) Hope:

Review by a retired English Literature Professor (which I am understandably VERY proud of!) 

Link to a Goodreads page for Salt Lake County Library Service, where, if you live close to, you can borrow the book.

Another positive review (from Shauna Wheelwright at ilovetoreadandreview)

A plug for my novel at Diony George's blog

Good news on Goodreads--happily, a developing page...

A link to the store I used to work for; love the social media plugins at the bottom of the page! Wish I knew the people who have clicked Facebook 'like'.  I'd love to thank them.

Link to Deseret Book (where there are currently 3 easy to access reviews).

List of some couple of dozen retailers who should all be able to source the book

The BYU Bookstore

A second distributor (who will specialise in supplying Amazon and Barnes and Noble orders--watch this space).


Further to the link above (Update 13th May 2014) 


Amazon.COM (i.e. USA)

Amazon.CO.UK (i.e. UK)

Amazon.CA (i.e. Canada)

Amazon.DE (i.e. Germany)

Amazon.FR (i.e. France)

Amazon.ES (i.e. Spain)

Amazon.IT (i.e. Italy)

Amazon.CO.JP (i.e. Japan)

Amazon.IN (i.e. India)

Also, (in no particular order)

Wordery

Book Depository

Asking Questions, Maintaining Perspective

I've been chugging along at this creative adventure for quite a while now, chugging along through various experiences, including a couple of films (here) and a number of creative writing programmes.

In 2006, some two and a bit years after graduating with a BA in Independent Studies,  I just about scraped a Pass on my MA in Creative Writing: the pass mark was 50, I received a 53.

My confidence took a huge hit, I felt incredibly humiliated.  For a time, the desire to keep writing was eclipsed by anxiety that I was merely deluding myself.  Embarrassment about my 'failure' prevented me from really believing I could succeed.  In short, I was focused on the wrong catalysts.  Embarrassment, however human, showed immaturity: my focus was me, when it needed to become more deeply concerned with serving the reader.  And in more truly patient with the time that takes.  

My wife (who is a very talented fine artist) once said, in essence, all art is valuable because it reveals where the artist has come to at any given point; in other words, the question of "how good it is" is in many ways an irrelevance and an unhelpful distraction.  Which is not the same as saying all art is equal (i.e. ready for publicly sharing) but an invitation to be patient with myself in producing the work, patient with the process of making it ready for others.  

How long to write a book?  How long before I get published?  Will my work secure positive reviews?  Will the novel sell?  How well will it sell?

For me, these are big questions.  And questions I have asked.  But whenever they become urgent, they are clues that I am walking onto the ice, thin ice.    

The distracted question of how long it takes to become published (a question I have asked if different ways many times) is potentially a revelation of troubled subtexts.  The unspoken doubts are 'how long should it take, may it take, will it take'?

What I am really asking is: 'do I have what it takes to see a project through to the "end"?'  Whatever "end" means.  Maybe what it means is another subtext of self doubt: 'how will I know when I am done?'  Which is to say 'how will I know when I have done enough for someone else to like it?'  Ah... Will my work be popular, or will I get overlooked?  Will all my effort come to nothing? Will I be more liked, or less liked? 

There is the ice: these most dangerous of questions, dangerous because they take my eye off the proverbial ball. 

Stanislavski might have asked me: 'Do you love the art in yourself, or yourself in the art?'

As E.M. Forster said: 'Only connect.'



   

The First Review!

Hope has now gone to press! And the journey to publication has entered the review stage.  I received the following this evening (8 March) and wanted to share... 

 

The story of the earliest Mormon missionaries in Great Britain, arriving as they did just at the tipping point when a nation of independent craftsmen and weavers and creators of hand-made lace was already becoming the first modern industrialized state, inventing in the process both smog and mass production and the middle class,  is an oft-told tale of spiritual power and sacrifice and miracles and of an immigration to their promised Zion of the faithful on such a grand scale that it literally saved the new Church from its enemies in the United States and in the process changed the history of nations on both sides of the Atlantic.  A tale oft told but probably still not as familiar as it deserves to be among Latter-day Saints today.  But Seth Wilkins's novel Hope, with that history as its background, is quite a different tale, the story of those who stayed behind, who did not join the Church and the exodus to America in those earliest years because they were unaware of what was being welcomed by others around them, or perhaps because of their fear of sacrifice or of persecution, or sometimes because they became victims to that persecution before final choices were even possible.  What became of them, and their descendants?  How was the foundation laid for the United Kingdom to become the first nation in the modern Church to be organized entirely into stakes?

 

But to dwell on the background history here is to miss too much, for Hope is a very human story of faith and love; of betrayal and fury; of kidnapping and murder, fraud and vengeance and, sometimes, forgiveness; families divided and ruined, or united and made eternal; families built by individual struggle and decisions of lasting consequences.  Wilkins's novel is set in the Lancastrian moorland, stark, and chilling, and beautiful to those with eyes to behold, where great darkness can seem sometimes to cover the land by day as well as by night.  It is also a setting in which "a fragile shaft of sunlight" can reach down "through the cloud and spread over the village" and indeed over all the landscape beyond the villages, woods and tarns and rocky outcrops, and into the hearts of some of the characters, those alert to receive light.  For human hearts, we see here, are as variable and as variously receptive as this landscape.  It is a story, in some ways an extended parable, in every way beautifully crafted and powerfully told, set firmly in its historical present but also reaching back into "another time when there was only order and peace" and also forward with its "sense of future things and a gradually rising sense of elation."  And if its cast of characters includes, as all our lives do, "a sea of beings--the presence of angels," it is nevertheless at every moment a very human story of human relationships and human choices, corrupt or enlightened, stumbling or everlasting, as bad as can be or as good as human capacity is able to extend itself.

 

It is a novel no one should miss!

 

 

Gordon K. Thomas, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Brigham Young University

Order it here...

Announcing Hope...

Englishman Isaac Shaw is dead. For sixteen years, his family has struggled on in shame, believing he died a criminal—responsible, in 1837, for several deaths when he set fire to the village mill. When Isaac’s youngest son Manny runs away, straight into the path of a traveling Mormon elder, the meeting threatens the family’s future. Charged with care of a letter that challenges the village’s history, Manny must find a way to reveal the identity of a young woman called Hope. The quest is destined to change everything. This plot-driven mystery is a tale of humankind’s eternal search for peace.

Here it is.  My book.  After the best part of thirteen years--struggling, doubting, and, against the facts hoping--publication is finally at the doors.  By the end of March I should be able to call myself a published novelist.

I'm not sure I can fully believe it.  I'm not even quite sure what comes next.  I know I am enjoying the process; the novel is to be published by the Utah based Walnut Springs Press, via its Currawong Press imprint.  I am over the moon that Deseret Book Distributing are an official distributor and delighted Hope will feature in the Deseret Book summer catalogue (that goes out a huge mailing list.)  I almost feel like my writerly life is complete. 

There's a moment in a favourite film (Chariots of Fire) in which Harold Abrams finally takes gold in his event, the 100 yard dash, and soon afterwards is invited by his friend Aubrey to celebrate; instead, Harold leaves the changing area in a daze, without so much as a goodbye.  Lord Lindsay advises Aubrey to leave Harold be, explaining how hard it can be to comprehend and accept one's own success.  Ah.  Yes.  I have a little inkling about that now.    

There's a danger here, of course, that in getting so carried away with the fact that a bona fide publisher actually wants and enjoys my work, I begin to sound like a Megalomaniac.  Or worse, that I begin to think like one.  I hope I don't come across this way.  I apologise if I have or ever do.  That would be awful.  

But in a way, I do feel like I have just been given parole. 

For years I have felt imprisoned by falling short, occasionally and (more recently) increasingly in despair, wondering if I would ever achieve my goal, and I suppose a little afraid that it might just have been delusion.  It has been a choice to pursue creative ventures, but it has rarely if ever been easy on our family.  My wife has been unbelievably loyal, constantly.  So this achievement is sweet because I have wanted so much to be published for her sake, for her faith in me.  That's why after some thirteen years--and arguably longer, since I began a sustained approach to creative writing the year we married, 1997--this feels like parole.

I hope you won't misunderstand me: my feet are very much on the ground about the book's prospects.  I want it to do well.  And I'll be trying to make sure it does.  But, for nearly six years, I sold books for a living... I know what the realities are.  So this is not about getting rich quick (I've got thirteen years to remunerate!)  It's about honouring a feeling that creative talents are important.  It's about trying to stay true to a belief that the arts can make a difference.

Hang on to the idea that perseverance wins out. 

Hopefully you'll forgive this little bit of self-congratulation, and, if you are also doggedly slaving away at a secret--or not so secret--creative project, scratching your head at your defiance of the 'facts'... permit me to encourage you to keep going.  Just keep going.  It turns out 'they' were right all along: perseverance does pay off in the end.   

Hope is due for release April 2014, and will be available in both paperback and electronic forms.  Paperback: ISBN 978-1-59992-904-0; E-book: ISBN 978-1-59992-905-7. 

The paperback can now be ordered here...