The last of my series of promotional images: You Yet Shall Die is a mystery about dark family secrets, set on the Kent marshes near where I grew up, with flashbacks to postwar Oxford and the London nightclub scene. You can find details of this and my other novels on the My Fiction Showcase page of my website. My Amazon Author page includes my non-fiction books as well.
Except for those outstanding ones that acquire classic status, most modern novels lapse into obscurity within a few months of publication. This is a pity because they might well remain readable for years to come. The huge number of new books being released every day is one reason for declining sales. Another is a lack of ongoing marketing and, in common with many other authors, I feel uncomfortable with self-promotion. But there are times when it has to be done, so this post is about the revival of some of my earlier work.
Ten years have passed since I began my self-publishing career through Amazon kdp, with a short novel called Carmen’s Roses. Encouraged by its success I went on to write two sequels, Blue Moon for Bombers and The Windflower Vibration, published separately and then as a combined set called Three Novellas. To mark their 10th anniversary, and in the hope of reaching a wider readership, I am now reissuing them as low cost e-books on multiple channels through the Draft2Digital platform.
The first book Carmen’s Roses is set in Devonport, the Auckland suburb where I live. It is a story of mystery and romance which touches on some deeper themes. The narrator, Iris, is leaving the English winter to take a holiday in the New Zealand sunshine, with the intention of completing her recovery from a serious illness and making amends for a shameful episode in her past. But the shock of a sudden death, the shadow of an old love affair, and the onset of ominous new symptoms threaten to destroy her hopes of happiness and healing. The book, described by one reader as an “Interwoven tale of love, mystery and more than a touch of the paranormal'” received 5-star reviews on Amazon, for example “Jennifer draws believably on her medical background and in this story weaves a very tangled web indeed”.
The second book, Blue Moon for Bombers, is set in England in 2007, when an old man in his hospital bed is haunted by memories of serving with Bomber Command in World War Two. Meanwhile back in his country home, the continuing fallout from his wartime trauma leads to rising tension among the two younger couples who are marooned indoors by the summer floods. With testimony from an unexpected visitor, and some guidance from the spirit world, the family’s secrets are revealed and the emotional wounds begin to heal. Again, the reviews were positive: “Excellent strong plot … like a Victorian novel set in modern times” “Brilliant ending”.
Thirdly The Windflower Vibration, with action split between Takapuna in New Zealand and Malvern in England, continues and weaves together the stories from the first two books. A man dies while swimming off an Auckland beach, and a woman who witnesses the event becomes involved in its aftermath. Was the death due to natural causes hastened by medical malpractice? Or was it one strand in a complex web spread over two hemispheres and two centuries? Although I think this book is equal in standard to the previous ones it gained less attention, perhaps because it deals with characters in later life – just one 5 star rating, no reviews.
Rereading my three novellas recently I felt they deserved a new lease of life. So if you haven’t seen them before, please have a look at these ebooks, and some of my others, through this link. There are print versions on Amazon too.
Twenty-four years after moving to New Zealand, I am very fortunate to still have many friends and relatives in England and still be able to go back and see them. A consecutive Britrail pass provides the freedom to travel around the country on any train at any time, to visit people and places that played an important part in my earlier life and to take some pictures to remember them by.
My mother was brought up in Ramsgate and Margate, and during my own childhood we often visited these and other seaside towns in Kent.
My own childhood was spent in Gravesend. Returning there recently I found the town so changed that I hardly recognised it, and didn’t take any photos other than one of the house where I grew up.
Besides the outings to the seaside we often visited other parts of Kent.
My teenage years were spent in Yorkshire. I don’t often go back there now, but I took this picture during a delightful stay with an old school friend who lives in Wharfedale.
Oxford, where I attended medical school and spent most of my subsequent career, still feels like home. The city centre has deteriorated but walking by the river is lovely as ever.
And a favourite place full of memories – the College of Healing course, the Elgar museum, the walks on the hills – is Great Malvern.
A highlight of my time in London was a lunch party for 24 of the friends who have given me hospitality over the years.
As we all get older, and the state of the world gets more precarious, I know I may not see some of these people and places again. But I hope there will be more visits to England still to come.
The current interest in issues of gender identity prompted me to read Radclyffe Hall’s autobiographical novel The Well of Loneliness, which was banned after its publication in 1928 but is now regarded as a classic. It is about a girl born in the late Victorian era to a wealthy family living on a country estate near Malvern. Despite being biologically female, ever since early childhood her appearance and behaviour has been obviously masculine. Although her parents feel greatly puzzled and concerned by her condition they never speak of it. When she grows up and falls passionately in love with another woman, her mother is forced to acknowledge her nature, and rejects her as “a sin against creation”. During later life in London and Paris she achieves success as a novelist and forms a loving relationship with a younger woman, but is eventually unable to withstand society’s condemnation of “inverts”. Nowadays her condition would be more widely accepted and she would be a candidate for sex reassignment surgery. This sad book contains sensitive descriptions of the main character’s tribulations, and of English country life as it used to be.
I listened to the audiobook version of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. It is well written (by a ghost writer) and Harry narrates it fluently, He comes over as a fun loving but often troubled man whose most positive experiences have been his army service, his charity work with wounded veterans, and falling in love with Meghan. Although the text contains plenty of interesting material, it is pervaded by the author’s sense of victimhood, entitlement, hatred of the press and resentment towards the royal family. I feel these attitudes can only partly be justified by the trauma of losing his mother when he was eleven years old, terrible though that must have been. We await the next episodes of his life story.
Clare Chamber’s novel Small Pleasures is set in the suburbs of London during the 1950s. Jean is a middle-aged unmarried woman who works as a journalist on a local newspaper and lives with her demanding elderly mother. Her drab existence is enlivened after she begins research for a feature about a young girl who is allegedly the product of a virgin birth. The details of Jean’s domestic life, and the development of her character as she becomes emotionally involved with the girl and her parents, are engagingly described in a style reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor or Barbara Pym. It must have been difficult to devise a satisfactory ending to the story and the last few chapters are not up to the standard of the earlier ones. Despite this criticism I very much enjoyed the book.
Following a very eventful year, I have more big changes coming up.
Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of the death of my beloved husband Brian. We were together for nearly 50 years. Brian is always in my thoughts anyway, so I don’t suppose the anniversary will change the way I feel, but it does seem significant and I appreciate the friends and relatives who are helping me to mark the occasion.
In a month or so I am going to move house. Leaving the villa that was our marital home for 25 years will involve a mixture of regret and relief. I love the old property with its large garden, and all its memories, but it is too big for one person and requires continual maintenance. The new house needs a complete renovation, which is proving both exciting and expensive, but will be beautiful when it is finished. Going there will mark the start of a new chapter in my life.
And my 80th birthday is approaching. This milestone is making me more conscious of mortality. Having lost my partner, and being aware of all the other losses that come with advancing age, I have no wish to live for many more years. But so far I am still reasonably fit and healthy and enjoying life. I hope to make worthwhile use of whatever time is left, though don’t aspire to measure up to Joan Collins who starred in the recent film My Duchess at the age of 92, or novelist Edna O’Brien was 88 when she wrote the novel Girl.
Will I write any more books? I’ve nearly finished a short memoir about my marriage to Brian. I hesitate to publish such a personal document on Amazon, so will just print a few copies for any friends or relatives who may be interested. I don’t feel inspired to write another novel at present, but am running a professional marketing campaign for my back fiction list. Here are short video trailers for two of my books, No Good Deed and You Yet Shall Die.
https://go.screenpal.com/watch/cOXVbznyszo.
https://go.screenpal.com/watch/cOXVbunysaB
A period of my career back in the 1980s involved “life event” research. Life event experience is strongly linked to the development of depression, and to a lesser extent that of physical ill health. The impact of an event depends on the individual’s resilience, how far the situation is under their own control, how they perceive it – for example as a punishment or a challenge – and how well they are supported by social contacts and adequate funds. The majority of life events appear “negative”, but even “positive” ones can be stressful, whereas the negative ones often turn out to have a silver lining in the long term.
The home which my husband Brian and I shared for 25 years is not a suitable place for me to spend the rest of my life. A wooden villa built before 1870, with gardens and a pool, it is too big and expensive for me to maintain on my own. Now, almost a year since Brian died, it is time for a change. I will be very sad to leave this property but hope it can be sold to a young family who will love it as much as we did.
The prospect of moving with my two cats to a smaller, warmer, more modern house closer to the village is both exciting and daunting. Inevitably it means giving up many possessions. I don’t like the term “decluttering” because it could imply that these surplus goods are junk, which most of them are not, even if they may be too old-fashioned to have any monetary value.
William Morris said Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. More recently, in Marie Kondo’s popular system, the key question to ask when deciding whether to keep an object is “Does it spark joy?”
With the starkly named method of Swedish Death Cleaning, older people are advised to reduce their possessions to the essentials, so as to save trouble for their survivors. That sounds very noble. But although I do try to keep my things in good order and take unwanted ones to charity shops, I am reluctant to give up those non-essentials that will continue to “spark joy” for however long I have left to live.
There are many items that I want to keep for sentimental reasons. The wooden chest from a country fair with the initials B and J on top. The picture we bought the first time we went to a London exhibition. Brian’s vast library of books on diverse subjects, and copies of all his academic publications. The jewellery that I seldom wear but reminds me of our holidays together. The footstools and cushions that my mother embroidered with cats and flowers. And the many volumes of photos …
Continuing my series of promotional images: Unfaithful Unto Death is a satirical novel set in an English village where Cyril Peabody, the arrogant doctor also featured in Overdose and Fata Feverfew, investigates some suspicious deaths.
Continuing my series of promotional images: Fatal Feverfew is an old fashioned cosy mystery set in a healing retreat in the English countryside.
Continuing my series of promotional images: the stories in Three Novellas are set between England and New Zealand. They are loosely interlinked but each one is self-contained, and they can be bought separately as well as in this box set.
Continuing my series of promotional images: No Good Deed has an English domestic setting. It explores some medical themes, the psychology of marriage, and how attempts to help others can go very wrong.
Continuing my series of promotional images: Cardamine is a fairly light read, a mystery/holiday romance partly set on the lovely Waiheke Island, a boat ride away from my present home.
Along with the campaign that is currently running to promote my fiction catalogue, I’ll be posting images of some individual titles in the coming weeks.
Overdose was the first novel I wrote, so long ago that it now counts as historical fiction. It’s a tragicomic story which gives an authentic picture of life in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1970s. Much has changed since then and some modern readers may find the book rather shocking.
It seems like only yesterday that my husband Brian died, but it’s actually nine months ago. While not feeling at all like a “Merry Widow” I’m aiming to enjoy life as best I can, and so decided to spend another holiday in London this year. I’ve visited the UK on my own many times before, but it’s different now without the long phone calls every night to Brian back home in Auckland, and revisiting all the places we used to go together brings back bittersweet memories. In other ways it’s the same, and lovely to be back in my home country during the hot dry summer. Wimbledon, strawberries, and with my invaluable Britrail pass which allows unlimited train travel I’ve been overwhelmed with hospitality from family and friends living in (listed alphabetically) Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Kent, Merseyside, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex both East and West, Wiltshire and Yorkshire as well as Greater London. Here are a few photos.
Returning home without Brian to welcome me is the hardest thing, but I look forward to retrieving Magic and Leo from the boarding Cattery, and hope they will forgive me for confining them there.
