Congratulations and Thanks…
8th November 2016
I am truly appreciative of all those of you who signed up for my newsletter and as a little incentive during the month of October everyone went into a prize draw to win signed copies of the whole Liberty Sands trilogy. Well, the draw has been made and I’m delighted to announce that the books have been won by Sandra Russell. I emailed Sandra to tell her she was the winner and she emailed back saying that although she has read my memoir, One Hundred Lengths of the Pool, she hasn’t yet read any of the fiction I have written. I hope she will like the trilogy as much as she said she enjoyed my first book.
For those of you who bought and read Life’s a Beach and Then... I have a thank you. You may not have realised when you bought your copy that ten per cent of the profit from every paperback and ebook sold goes to the Bloodwise charity. This was a decision I made long before the book was finished, let alone published, as I was so grateful to them for the funding they provide to help research in to new treatments for all sorts of different blood cancers. Without research, the treatment and prognosis for Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia, the type of blood cancer I have, would have been very different.
Those of you who have read the book will know that one of my characters, Rosemary, has CML and she was not as responsive to the oral chemotherapy drugs as I have been. In fact, there are still deaths every year from CML despite the development of new drugs for those who are unresponsive to the ones that have been around longer. So, I am delighted to say that this week I have been able to send a cheque for £1500 to Bloodwise and that represents a lot of books. A massive thank you to everyone who has helped me raise this additional money for Bloodwise, and it is ongoing so, if you are thinking of books for Christmas presents, please do consider Life’s a Beach and Then…
Unusually for me, I have actually started my Christmas shopping. QVC had a great deal on a bundle of two Amazon Fire tablets with cases and sd cards for under £100. My mum is ninety, and Chris’s mum, Audrey, is eighty-two but we are going to drag them into the 21st century. It will be useful for my mum to be able to send me her latest short stories via email and great for Audrey to be able to connect visually with family in Australia, and ‘see’ us more often too. I will be making sure that the Kindle app is pre-installed although I’m pretty sure that both of them prefer to hold a ‘proper’ book in their hands! That said, many books are only available electronically – my Time for a Short Story is a case in point until I have written enough short stories to make a paperback
anthology.
I have been working on a short story of around 3000 words called The Shadow of Her Smile which won’t be available to purchase separately. If you have signed up to my newsletter it will be available to download in the next few days – still working on the technology! Here is the first page to whet your appetite:
‘What time are you home tonight?’ Lisa asked, pulling the clothes out of the tumble dryer one by one and folding them into five neat piles. She always found it quicker and more efficient doing it at this stage rather than loading everything haphazardly into the plastic washing basket, allowing crumples to settle into the clothes as the warm air cooled, before tipping them out on the bed upstairs to sort through later.
‘Well, we don’t finish playing until 1am,’ Tim replied. ‘By the time I’ve packed up and loaded everything in the car and making allowances for the inevitable roadworks on the M25, resulting in a diversion through the back of beyond, I can’t see me making it back here much before half two.’
‘I won’t wait up then. Fin’s match kicks off at nine and it’s an away game so he needs to be on the mini-bus at seven.’
‘Mini-bus?’ Aren’t you going to watch?’
‘No parents allowed. It’s an indoor futsal tournament so there is nowhere for spectators to stand.’
Tim moved behind his wife and slipped his arms around her waist, pulling her into a hug.
‘Maybe you can come back to bed when you’ve dropped him at the training ground?’ he suggested, planting kisses on the back of her neck.
I hope you like the sound of it and will want to read the whole story which does take a slightly spooky turn, inspired by something that actually happened to my ‘other half’ – it should only take around ten minutes. I should also mention that he designed the cover page.
I wonder if any of you went to fireworks displays? We haven’t been to one for years but decided to go to the one at Wentworth golf course as it is quite close to home. The display was good, but started thirty minutes late due to the massive underestimation of how long it would take to get all the spectators cars parked. I’m not sure I would queue up for an hour next year- maybe just a few sparklers in the back garden.
Here’s something else a little spooky. I’m always looking for interesting things to tweet about my books so that (hopefully) people won’t get fed up with me. I remembered there was a scene in Life’s a Beach and Then… featuring a firework display so I got a book out of the cupboard to look for the page to photograph and tweet. No word of a lie, I opened the book, which is over three hundred pages long, on page 148 – you guessed, the page the fireworks featured on!
Well, that’s about it for now. I will have some news with a purple theme on my next blog
much love
Julia x
