It’s alive! The Hedgeway is launched

Just a reminder that today The Hedgeway is being launched, officially, with a party over on Facebook  here

The book itself is available as paperback or as e-book. You don’t need a Kindle to buy e-books; there are apps for phones, pcs, tablets and Macs.

Here are the links for UK and US for the ebook version.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hedgeway-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B00OW3TUY8/ref=la_B00766135C_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414739747&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Hedgeway-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B00OW3TUY8/ref=la_B00766135C_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414739747&sr=1-2

For the paperback, go to my Amazon page and scroll down

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vivienne-Tuffnell/e/B00766135C/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

 

For other Amazon shops, either type my name into the search bar, or (neat trick) click the UK  or US link, then go to the address bar where the URL is displayed, click on it and alter the dot com or .co.uk to whichever suffix you desire, such as dot.de or dot.au.

The book is a short novella or longer short story and is only 77p or local equivalent for a limited time only. Reviews VERY welcome, but remember NO SPOILERS!

The party will be filled with a lot of fun activities, including a n attempt at live, interactive storytelling. Do join us, or drop by and enjoy the evening wherever you are. I am told I throw a great virtual party. Bring yourself, your music suggestions, stories (and even links to your own spooky tales) and have some fun.

 

Samhain, the thinning of the veils and why darkness is important

Samhain, the thinning of the veils and why darkness is important.

Samhain, the Summer’s End of the Celtic peoples, is almost upon us. You might know it better as Hallow E’en or All Hallow’s Eve. The plethora of parties and pumpkins these days masks the traditional view of the day as both the gateway to winter and the time when the veils between the worlds became thin and the dead can visit with the living. There is a mountain of folklore and tales of this time and the church too marks it as a time of remembrance, for marking the passing of those we have loved and remembering them with rituals designed to bring peace and ease to both sides of the veils.

When we lived in rural Norfolk the first time, most Samhains were spent over in the garden of my friend Sam, with a bonfire and story telling into the night. Food was left out for the ancestors visiting with us at that time and candles burned on every window ledge. It was a magical, somewhat spooky time that I look back on with great fondness. The darkness was not to be feared, yet a frisson of fright certainly made me shiver more than once.

I struggle with winter more and more as I get older. The drawing in of the nights bothers me, and I have a SAD lamp on my desk for the days when the dull grey light seems to send me into a low mood. Yet there is a specialness to the darker days that I cherish too. There is the sense of retreating into a cave, of becoming inward and deeply thoughtful. I like my own rituals of lighting candles on the mantle-piece as the light fades each afternoon. I sleep a little better when the morning light does not appear at 4am to disturb my sleep cycles (indeed, sleeping in a fully darkened room is recommended to reset unsettled sleep patterns as the brain chemicals needed for decent sleep are only produced in darkness). I like the spectacle of the trees shedding their leaves in a flurry of colour and crispness and I love the clear naked shapes of winter woodland. Everything is stripped to the bone and you can start to see what is real, what is the foundation of a land and what was the ephemeral loveliness of petal and foliage. Readying a garden for winter means clearing away dead growth to the ground and in doing so, one usually sees the tiny points of bulbs poised and ready for spring.

Storytelling has been a huge part of human life as winter draws on. Sitting at a fire, telling tales to while away the long nights, connects us to our ancestors and makes a continuous line that stretches in both directions. At Samhain, ghost stories are the most popular tales, intended to terrify and tantalise. I’ve seen enough weird things in my life to accept the probable existence of ghosts and spirits, though I would not like to define precisely what they are. My father would maintain they are an etheric recording of past events, imprinted on stone and brick and the fabric of a place; others would say they are indeed the spirits of the departed, allowed to communicate with the living.

Light is important, but so too is darkness. Darkness allows us to rest, whether from our labours or from our woes. For me, when I am depressed, sleep is the most accessible refuge from the internal pain. Night is when many creatures are able to move and feed and live their lives. I’ve rescued (so far) two young hedgehogs, which had lost their mother, and each evening now I go into the garden with a torch to see if any more little hoglets are in need of assistance. I do not fear the darkness for it is a kinder thing than people believe.

In honour of the season, I am hosting a virtual party on Facebook, on Friday 31^st of October. The party is an opportunity to share stories, music, recipes, anecdotes and fellowship. It’s also to celebrate the release of a new book of mine, called The Hedgeway. It’s a longer short story or short novella, intended for this time of year. It also connects me to my own past. The original story was one I wrote at 17, and which turned up after our last house move. I could see that even then my ‘voice’ was distinct and recognisable. I rewrote the whole story, keeping the central idea and characters but otherwise reworking the whole thing. The Hedgeway is a ghost story that connects past to present in more ways than one. For the season of Samhain it’s going to be on sale at the price of just 77p (or local equivalent) for a limited time.

Do join us at the party and do some virtual apple bobbing with us, and share your favourite scary tales, your own ones welcome as well as the traditional ones by classic authors like M.R James.

Selling ice cream, writing and the ideal man- In which I interview Ailsa Abraham

For a change, today I am interviewing an author friend. I’ve known Ailsa Abraham for some years via social media and she’s someone I’d love to sit down with in real life and enjoy a few mugs of tea with and put the world to rights.

1. Viv: I know from reading your blog you have done a good number of unusual jobs. Can I be nosey and ask you to list the ones you liked most and the ones you liked least?

Ailsa: Strangely, selling ice creams was one of my favourites, along with vet nurse and my least favourite the year I worked in a zoo. I was trying to work on “change from the inside” and failed dismally.

2. Viv:I have read both your novels, Alchemy and Shaman’s Drum and I enjoyed them both. That said, I liked Alchemy more. I’d bought Shaman’s Drum ages back and started reading it but had stopped because the scenario it depicts, that of all major world religions being outlawed and banned, worried me. I’d seen this sort of idea from many atheist organisations and it makes me uncomfortable. It wasn’t until Alchemy came out and I could read the background to this state of affairs, that I felt I wanted to finish reading Shaman’s Drum. My question is this: do you think that the subject matter encompassing quite such a radical premise as a backdrop for the story is something that might put people off reading the book?

Ailsa: Possibly, which is why I don’t splurge that fact across my publicity. What I do suggest is that people read Alchemy first so they get the scene in context. Also, the banning of religion, as a solution, doesn’t work, as people will know if they read the books. Viv: So make sure to read them in the right order and it all falls into place? Understood!

3. Viv: As a writer, I know better than to ask whether the characters in your books are based on people you’ve known in real life. That said, both Riga and Iamo are both such distinctive people and are so vivid, I can’t help but wonder if they may be based on someone you’ve known. Are they solely the product of your imagination or have they roots in real life?

Ailsa: Yes. Riga is me when I was younger, military and more feisty! Iamo is a combination of many pagan men I have known and probably my “prototype nearly ideal”.

4. Viv: How much does your own eclectic spiritual path inform your writing? Both Alchemy and Shaman’s Drum include magic, shamanism and also a variety of other alternative practices (and a rather fabulous nun, too). Are these things from the realms of your imagination or are they things you have explored yourself?

Ailsa: All the things I mention are paths I have explored myself. I have studied many religions and known practitioners. Obviously my own experiences colour my writing.

5. Viv: Most writers veer between too many ideas and not enough. Which stage are you at right now?

Ailsa: Too many and an inability to get them down.

6. Viv: When I am working on some writing, I usually start by lighting a candle, burning some sweet-grass or some incense and taking a moment to centre myself. Do you have any rituals that help with your writing?

Ailsa: No. I just get my backside in the chair and start. This is because when I get the urge, I have to go with it. Even stopping to light a candle would put me off.

7. Viv: Many writers talk about The Muse. I’ve never managed to personify a muse for myself, and I’m not sure how helpful it would be to me. Do you have an entity that you look to as inspiration that you might term a Muse.

Ailsa: No, just my own imagination coupled with some time. Everything I see and hear is fodder for that.

8. Viv: You had a very serious accident recently that came close to killing you. I would imagine this has put a serious crimp on your writing. It’s becoming well accepted that writing helps heal psychological hurts, but do you think it might also help the brain heal itself after trauma? In other words, have you begun writing Book Three and if so, how is it going?

Ailsa: Book Three is on its way but yes, brain trauma has slowed me down. I am back to writing but not as often and much more slowly than before.

Viv: Thank you very much indeed. All the very best to you and your writing!

BIO – Ailsa Abraham retired early from a string of jobs, ending up with teaching English to adults. She has lived in France for over twenty years and is married with no children but six grandchildren. Her passion is motorbikes which have taken the place of horses in her life now that ill-health prevents her riding. She copes with Bipolar Condition, a twisted spine and increasing deafness with her usual wry humour – “well if I didn’t have all those, I’d have to work for a living, instead of writing, which is much more fun.”. Her ambition in life is to keep breathing and maybe move back to the UK. She has no intention of stopping writing.

As Ailsa Abraham :

Alchemy and Shaman’s Drum published by Crooked Cat

(Shaman’s Drum was nominated for the People’s Choice Book Award)

Four Go Mad in Catalonia – self-published, available from Smashwords

Twitter – @ailsaabraham

Facebook – Ailsa Abraham

Amazon Author Page

Web page

As Cameron Lawton

“I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that”- promo no-nos and personal integrity

“I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that”- promo no-nos and personal integrity

If you substitute the words “book sales” for love in that Meatloaf line, you’ll have a better idea of what I’m going on about. The last couple of months I’ve become a tad despondent about the amount of pressure to sell millions of books by any means available and legal. It’s as if authors really are starting to measure both their worth as people and the worth of their work in terms of how many units they have shifted that day, week, month or year. I’ve fallen into the bear-pit too often, lured into reading yet another article about how to increase your exposure and gain more sales. Net result is me feeling miserable and overwhelmed.

There’s no easy way to say this but selling books is hard. It might even be harder than writing them. It certainly gets in the way of writing them. There is an undercurrent of fear too, that says, take your eye off the game for a few days and you’ll lose traction and be swept away in the tsunami of slush and never be found again.

I’m also aware that one of the most delicate of things is under more threat than you’d imagine. Integrity.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had a couple of emails that have troubled me. Most months I get an email or two about advertising on this blog, or guest posts from random strangers trying to (I think) build their portfolio or similar. I used to reply politely but now I just ignore them all. I have concerns about the concept of advertising in general; it’s a clever, devious business of trying to convince someone they want what you’re selling. I have things to sell here: my books. I happen to believe in them, and while I do want my readers to buy them, I’m of the hope and conviction that to some extent the books sell themselves. But to host other products on this space, that brings up a host of awkward questions I’m not willing to try to answer and most of those questions are about how those potential ads impact on my own ethics and integrity.

Back to the new emails. The first was from a company I won’t name, who sell software that highlights grammar issues and other such things. They also have a lot of humorous memes on Facebook and other places, about grammar misuse. The import of the email was to ask if I would like to host an info-graphic from them, about a hot topic. In return they would make a $50 donation to a children’s literacy charity. It caused me pause, you might say. I have what you might call a still small voice that tells me when something is bothering me at a subliminal level. So I did a bit of a look around and had a think. There was enough material out there concerning this company to make me feel uneasy. Not a scam, not really, but there’s times when something can sail so close to the wind that it might as well be. I can’t really say any more but the topic of the info-graphic decided me on saying no. I believe the term is “click bait”, a subject so emotive it’ll have people screaming the odds and as impossible to make any real conclusions as asking which makes the better pet, dogs or cats. Final confirmation of my decision came when I heard of other folks being contacted with the same email from the same company.

The second email was harder still to deal with. I received an email from a journalist at a big national newspaper (again, will remain nameless) that is infamous for its sensationalist approach and its somewhat flexible attitude to truth. She was looking for adult women who believed in fairies and having found my website (this blog) she wondered if I would be interested in being a part of this article. I assume she would have interviewed me or something. This really did give me pause. National newspaper exposure for Away With The Fairies is not to be thrown away lightly. I dithered for a very short time before being reminded of how this paper always make people look totally stupid at best and mentally deranged at worst. Do I want my beliefs and convictions derided and laughed at? So that email has also been ignored.

Perhaps you might think me too precious about both these invitations but as I said earlier, I believe in my books and I don’t think they or I would be best served by being pilloried by the national press, or by being caught up in a hurricane of acrimonious debate initiated by a company about whose ethics I have some doubts. In the end, I don’t think that potential book sales are worth compromising my own integrity over. There will be other opportunities at some stage that do not give me such concerns. In the meantime, I will write my books and know that there is more to being me, the author, than how many or how few books I sell each week.

Is Britain still “Shell-Shocked”? A question for World Mental Health Day

Today I am hosting a guest post for my friend Suzie.

 

Suzie Grogan is a London-born professional writer and researcher in the fields of social and family history and mental health. Suzie’s first book Dandelions and Bad Hair Days: Untangling Lives Affected by Depression and Anxiety was published in 2012 and she also writes for a wide variety of national magazines. Suzie also runs a popular blog, ‘No wriggling out of writing’, and presents a local radio show on literature, called ‘Talking Books’.

 

In 2012 I edited a book entitled Dandelions and Bad Hair Days: Untangling lives lived with depression and anxiety. It is an anthology of poetry, prose and photos produced by more than twenty people good enough to contribute to a monthly guest post slot on my blog No wriggling out of writing. They were prompted by my own story ‘Mental health, motherhood and finding the real me’ in which I revealed my own struggles with depression, anxiety and OCD. Vivienne herself was a key contributor to the book, the title itself coming from one of her moving pieces.

I found sharing my struggles became easier; especially as it became clear there were many out there who were experiencing similar issues. Through chats with wonderful people like Viv I realised there is much that still needs to be understood about the nature and impact of mental ill-health. As I had already documented a family history story on my blog – my discovery that my great uncle Alfred Hardiman had murdered an ex-girlfriend and then committed suicide whilst of ‘unsound mind’ and that he had been affected by his experience in the Great War, I became interested in the idea of ‘transgenerational trauma’, and how the impact of the First World War might have affected my family across and down the generations. I was shocked to learn that two of Alfred’s sisters had ended their lives in mental hospitals and at least three other close family members had significant mental health problems.

Furthermore, my family are not in any way unique. I delved deep into the newspaper archives and found many similar tragedies, and evidence that shell shocked soldiers and their families, as well as their communities and society as a whole had experienced a kind of collective grief and shock, the repercussions of which echo down the century. It is, I believe, why we are still so deeply affected by the conflict a century on.

I pitched the idea of a book on the subject to Pen and Sword Books and was lucky enough to be commissioned to write Shell Shocked Britain: The First World War’s legacy for Britain’s mental health.

I was to look at the impact of the Great War not only on the troops, but on their families and the nation as a whole. Whilst doing so I was also going to examine its impact on the treatments available post-war and on attitudes to mental illness in the ‘20s and ‘30s. As I uncovered more and still more stories of tragic events continuing until the outbreak of the Second World War I saw how many of them seemed eerily similar to stories we continue to hear now. I quickly realised we have not made a tenth of the progress we ought to have made in a world where conflict is global and peace-keeping a fallacy.

Service personnel still break down. Suicide, domestic violence, alcoholism, relationship breakdown, violent crime – rates are all higher amongst ex-service personnel than in the general population. These were issues that had been faced by those shell shocked men returning after the First World War, to a world that had no language to express the horrors they had witnessed. Surely, I thought, it should be different in the 21^st century?

I have been told many times over the past two years of writing Shell Shocked Britain that ‘it was a different world back then…’ In many ways it was but we are currently going through a period of immense social change, much as they did 100 years ago. Globalisation and the information revolution as well as the speed of technological change leaves many exhausted and drained and even those who felt immune from mental illness can find themselves swept away by the intensity of it all.

We are, after all, still human. Those alive 100 years ago are our parents, grandparents and great grandparents. They loved and grieved for those lost and felt fear, anxiety, horror and revulsion at the atrocities that were being perpetrated. They may not have had the vocabulary we have now, or the acceptance of psychotherapy and the opportunity it offers to express the pain and deal with it positively, and were restricted by the social mores of the time, but they still searched for meaning in the horror.

One of the most interesting questions that I could not answer for certain related to those who appeared unscathed or saw the war as the making of them. Were they simply repressing the horrors described by so many others? And if so, did it matter?

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp wrote ‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour, suggesting that it is those unaffected who are responding in the ‘abnormal’ fashion. Those who can see the horror and remain sanguine are perhaps closer to insanity.

As service personnel continue to break down and find it hard to admit they need help for fear of it suggesting weakness, it is clear that those complex issues have not been addressed. One of the most telling phrases I read as I researched Shell Shocked Britain comes from a leaflet published by the charity Combat Stress:

‘The man who lost his life in Iraq now lives in Birmingham…’

 

Shell Shocked Britain: The First World War’s Legacy for Britain’s Mental Health to be published by Pen & Sword History October 2014. See http://www.facebook.com/shellshockedbritain or follow @ShellShockedGB on twitter for more details.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shell-Shocked-Britain-Legacy-Britains/dp/1781592659/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412924230&sr=1-1&keywords=shell+shocked+britain

 

The Tale of a Snail

The Tale of a Snail

I like snails. Perhaps that makes me odd. Well, odder.

We used to have a giant African land snail that my brother gave my daughter as a birthday present; when fully grown, she (yes, I know, they’re hermaphrodites) had a shell about as big as my fist and her body was a good twelve inches when fully extended. Once you got past the ‘otherness’ of such a being, she was quite beautiful and strangely responsive. She would turn her antennae towards you if you called her name, and she had her likes and dislikes. Everything was slowed down, though, so I wonder what she actually heard.

Even garden snails appeal to me. There is a beauty and a perfection about their design that pleases me.

So when I saw one trundling across a path a week or two back, I was concerned for it. I was out on my walk and the snail was out, sailing on a sea of concrete and slime. The likelihood was within the next few minutes, someone would step on it, whether by accident or on purpose. I bent down and picked it up. Usually, snails snap back into their shells as soon as they’re touched, but this one stayed out, antenna flapping around and her foot wriggling for all the world like she was trying to gain traction. If snails think, I can’t imagine what she was thinking.

No, that’s not true. I can imagine it. I can imagine it all too well:

“OMG. What is going on? I’m flying, I’m the world’s first flying snail. Wheeeeee!”

Then I popped it down in some grass on a bit of wasteland behind some houses and walked off.

It kept coming back to me, that snail. Not literally. At least, not as far as I’ve noticed anyway. What I’ve been thinking about is entirely anthropomorphic because, let’s be fair, snails don’t have complex brains. They do however have a strong homing instinct and will travel considerable distances to return to home territory. Taking bucket loads of them out of your garden and dumping them miles away shows this; marked shells show they will return to their original garden. It made me wonder where the snail was going and why. I suspect she had been lobbed across from one garden to another garden and was peacefully making her way back.

And then this giant hand comes down and moves her out of the path and ruins the journey.

Thanks Giant Human, thanks a lot, says the snail. Now I’ll have to cover all that ground again.

But, I say, you were in terrible danger.

What danger? I saw no danger, says the snail.

I sigh. There’s no way I can explain to the snail how I am so much bigger and how I can see the likely outcome of her day time voyage. I can’t explain that I care and want to help and that perhaps I might actually have a view of the bigger picture. I can’t ask that the snail just trusts me. The snail doesn’t know how.

I said it was anthropomorphic.

Anyway, the incident has stayed with me longer than a ten second diversion should and it set me thinking. Many years ago, and not so many years ago, I was very frustrated that despite getting to the desks of various editors, despite getting positive, even glowing feedback, no one said the YES I wanted so desperately to hear. One of them told me that it was a matter of time before I did write something they’d take on. It was head-bangingly maddening. Time and time again, the answer was no, but with such codas that I was encouraged to keep going. I had an agent. He turned out to be useless but I’d got that far. I’d got to chalk that one in a YES box. But the ultimate prize eluded me.

The other day, a friend of mine shared he’d got his royalty cheque for the last six months. He’s with a ‘proper’ publisher, one of the smaller mainstream ones but a respectable name. The book is an excellent one too. But the cheque was probably enough to cover a pizza and a bottle of plonk. The myth of writers rolling in it, dies hard but that’s the reality for all but the big blockbuster authors.

It comes hard to have to say it but I am glad those attempts to get signed up for a publishing deal failed. It’s not about the money side of things either. The industry is in a state of flux. Some might say a state of crisis or even free fall. I read today that an ebook is published every five minutes. There’s over three and a half million books on Amazon USA now. The world has changed since the gatekeepers presided over the slush pile and people’s dreams. Anyone can publish a book, and it seems some days that everyone has. I see this as a good thing, though many don’t. It certainly makes visibility a difficult task. I’ve seen my sales decline as the numbers of books on the market increase and I’ve had to take a step back and ask not just what is going on but why.

By why, I don’t mean issues of visibility or market saturation or anything else. Like the snail, wondering why they’ve been bumped off a path she thought she knew was the right one, I’m having to step back and learn to trust. With hindsight I can see that getting a traditional publishing contract would have been a disaster for me, certainly knowing my own methods of writing, my sensitivity and my attachment to my own books. Something that was right came along. I’d said I’d never self publish, but that was when self publishing was a) vanity presses and b) very expensive and almost always doomed. I’ve learned a huge amount through publishing myself and one of those things is that change is inevitable and adaptability is key to survival. I’ve also learned that I’m not very adaptable and I’m not comfortable with change at breakneck speed. I could start chasing marketing strategies and believe me, I know there are a lot of things I might do to try to increase visibility and find more readers. The trouble is, all of those take energy and time and determination and I’m running out of those commodities.

So I’m going to take a lesson from a snail and take it slow. I’m going to try and trust that there is a greater plan going on, that I’m too slow and close to things to be able to see. I’ve always felt that it was my path to be a writer, but there is not one but many paths to every destination and I’d rather travel one that has fewer risks of being trampled on or crushed in the rush. I do feel like that snail right now, suspended in mid air, foot wriggling to try and get a grip, antenna flailing to see and hear what’s going on. I’m going to try and trust that the big Hand that seems to have grabbed me, knows what it’s doing and that where I am going is better for me than where I am now.

National Poetry Day – and a special offer

Today is National Poetry Day.

For those who like or even love poetry this is a day when people quote favourite lines from poems, or post their own.

In honour of the day, Accidental Emeralds is now only 77p ($1.25 in the US) for the Kindle version.

It’ll be this price for around 24 hours before returning to normal price. The paperback is still £5 and jolly pretty it is too:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-Emeralds-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B00LM890TG/ref=la_B00766135C_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412262908&sr=1-7

http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Emeralds-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B00LM890TG/ref=la_B00766135C_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412262908&sr=1-7

For all other Kindle marketplaces, replace the dot co or dot com with dot whatever yours is ( dot fr dot in etc) and the rest of the URL should remain the same.