The Boy comes home ...

... in a cardboard box ...










... and makes himself comfortable.



I have watched other authors whose books I  commissioned as an editor, when they first see multiple copies of their creations. They touch them and open them, flip the pages and slap them shut. And now, with a bemused and insuppressible grin, I'm doing the same. 


I have written other books, of course. I've received my statutory six copies from my publisher each time. And that has given me a thrill and made all the time and effort worth while. I sometimes see them, old friends now, on the shelves in book shops in ones and twos. 


But I have never had a whole box full of copies to stack up and sort into piles before. 'One for Brian, one for Alexandra, one for my son, one for my sister, one for ...' and so on. I stroke each one and set it aside. It is thirty-one months since I started on this project. This is a moment to savour.


Thank you, Connie and all at Trifolium Books UK. And thank you to my family, and the friends and colleagues who have helped me and supported me during these two years and seven months. 

(If anyone reading this would like a copy, they can order one through their local bookshop or on-line at Amazon. ISBN 978-0-9568104-4-1)

Spinal snag and last chance

spine comparison

On Valentine's day, it stopped raining for a while, but we were indoors, quietly concentrating as Kate went through a series of possible variations to the cover for The Boy with Two Heads. When she flipped the two heads to look the other way and turned the tag-line 'You don't get to the Olympics unless you're the best'  into a 'sticker', we all said ‘YES! That’s it!’ 

But the printout showed that the wording on the spine was illegible from a distance. I had asked that we made it read vertically to be different from other covers on a shelf. With the small letters necessary for that and because of the dark and light stripes in the background photo, it didn't look good. So Kate made some changes that improved it, and at last the cover was done.

On the days that followed, Kate worked on the maps and Connie on the prelims. We decided to put the map of Ancient Athens opposite the first page of the story to help the reader during those first important scenes. The other two maps will be near the end.

I read through my Author’s Note and Acknowledgments again. I wrote these some time ago and so needed to alter a couple of details.

Sketch map of Ancient Athens

We also combed the main text for the final chapter spacing and any ends of lines where a dash or other punctuation fell on the next line. We have proof-read the text many times, and on the last read-through I only found one error – which doesn’t mean there aren’t others, of course ...

So all the pieces were ready and Connie could bring them together, check the page numbers and finish off the Contents page.

She uploaded the cover and text files yesterday to Lightning Source – and that’s it. All done, except for the final proof. We should know the publication date in a few days.

So there will be no more chances to change anything. And I can think of more than one sentence that I want to rewrite ... A lot of writers seem to have this knowing-when-to-stop problem – painters, too, I’m told. 

This experience of preparing for publication with Trifolium Books has followed the same series of procedures as my experience in the main stream. But these procedures have been speeded up and personalised, so that I felt in control of my own work. Sitting beside Connie and/or Kate while they tried out and discussed possibilities has been exciting and worrying and enlightening in turns: overall, a fascinating experience!

And I can’t believe it’s over ...

My Olympics novel

Progress on The Boy

Last weekend I spent an afternoon and evening working with Kate of Amber Images on the cover of The Boy with Two Heads. And this weekend I’m working on the final check of the text and its styling. So there is progress!

There was a photograph of a statue we had seen on the internet that we wanted to use on the cover but we needed permission from its owner. After many emails and phone calls (the owner works for a huge international corporation with offices in London and the phone answering mechanism does not allow you to speak to a human being) and a visit to the offices where I was not allowed even to leave a message, we decided to try our fallback solution.

Alexandra, who lives in Athens, had taken some photos of the same statue. She sent them to us by email, but Kate and Connie felt that none of them would be crisp enough to use on a book cover. However, in the circumstances, Kate was prepared to have a go with one of them.

The Youth of Antikythera
Alexandra's 'before' photo

Kate's 'after' photo (with a little
help from Photoshop)

I cannot thank Alexandra (who held her camera way above her head to get a level image of the face) and Kate (who has a winning combination of patience and skill) enough for this image of the Boy, Themis.

The statue is called the Youth of Antikythera and is two metres tall. It was found in heavily corroded pieces at the bottom of the sea off the island of Antikythera in 1900. Elisabeth Myers has written a detailed thesis on it and Wikipedia also has a page about it where you can see how high Alexandra must have reached! It is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with hundreds of other amazing works of art from Ancient Greece. The Youth of Antikythera was their Object of the Month for January this year.

While Kate was working on this and other aspects of the cover, I was fascinated by her pet snake, two cats and a puppy. The snake lives in a huge glass tank and eats a mouse every week or two. Kate says he’s more than a metre long and three or four centimetres in diameter in the middle, but I only saw his head poking out from behind his log. He yawned at me.

The cats were almost as lazy, but easier to stroke… And the puppy was just adorable, a bundle of fluff either constantly on the move or flat out asleep on the carpet.

By the end of a day when all I had done was play with the animals and answer some questions as to preferences, magically we had the main components of the cover in place! Connie of Trifolium Books has put this picture on her blog, too. It's not 100% perfect, but we all feel it's getting there.