Another lovely Amazon Review of Not Your Heart Away

Whenever I get a nice review  on Amazon I post it up. Because I love sharing so much.

4.0 out of 5 stars NYHA, 18 April 2013
By
Sergio Andrade (Porto, PORTUGAL) – See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Not Your Heart Away (Paperback)

As we live and grow older, we cross several turning points, several junctions of existence.
Those “pit stops” of life, made up of Time and Space and desire and fear and hope and places and faces and people. People you used to know, people you used to be.
And sometimes, you just can’t help it but stop, turn around and look back into that specific point in your life, growing smaller and smaller in the horizon, and ponder on how things turned out for you and wonder how things might have been different.
“Not your heart away” is a book about that. It’s a book WITH teenagers, but I wouldn’t recommend it TO teenagers. Sure, it can be read by teenagers, and the brightest ones amongst them will even understand it; perhaps some will even relate it to some events in their lives. But I wouldn’t recommend it…it presents too much spoilers on life and the passing of time.
It is better meant for those of life who can and will look back…those who know the longing for the unreachable days of blue and golden youth…and ideal that crosses the boundaries of when and where.
NYHA has its centre in a specific time period, a specific place. Being a teen in England in the 1970s. But, relevant as those characteristics are, they do not close themselves from other times, other spaces, other lives. Its specificities can be blood-linked to anywhere, any when, any who.
Fiction as it is, you can sense the writer has poured out a lot of his soul on this book, this simple yet beautifully written little gem, poetical at times, with extra bonus references to paranormal (or metaphorical!?) entities, UFOs, and local folklore.
The greatest magic, however, is the way it sparks in each reader his/her personal memories and the way they can be related to the narrative, regardless of its time and space. And magic is real, just so long as you believe…

 

 

Call me vain, but I don’t have an agent so I have to do my own marketing and PR. Unless of course, you’d like to be my agent. If you want to talk about that, let’s do lunch, baby!

Call me. Laters….

 

 

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Checking out the movies

For the past few weeks I’ve been working against the clock to get a film script finished. The race was my own fault. I used to check the BBC Writers Room website religiously, to see what competitions were on, how to submit scripts and so on, the way you do. With the whole frenzy of publishing, editing, re-editeing, re-proofing, railing against my own stupidity and re-editing and proofing again, as Clint used to say, I kinda lost track of it in all the excitement here.

When I looked at it recently it was as if Christmas had come again and I was six. A film company, a real one, with offices with chairs and everything, was asking for film scripts with one proviso, which was interesting in itself. Not that they were being picky or anything, but they insisted the scripts had to actually exist before people sent the first ten pages in.

It reminded me of the old Californian joke: Dude 1: Like, I’m writing a screenplay? Dude 2: Awesome! Neither am I!

But I was. There was a strict 9am deadline on it for yesterday, 15th April, so I turned Not Your Heart Away into a screenplay. I hope I did, anyway. The first ten minutes has a shipwreck, Ben the narrator’s recurring nightmare;  a UFO as he lives near Salisbury Plain and a ghostly Spitfire, because of an old factory he drives past, because he’s English, because the film is about England and because. What more do you want while you’re still opening the Kia-Ora?

So we’ll see. I still have to finish the screenplay formatting, which is a time-consuming pain as I didn’t have time to learn any of the script-writing software packages and ended-up doing it in Word, the old-fashioned way. Still. It’s done. I was typing until half past one some nights and trapped a nerve in my leg from sitting still too long, but it’s done.

I also found a line that makes the final scene about a billion percent happier, sadder and just generally rounder, a real snappy ending. The storm that brings harm also makes fertile. I’ve got to get back to formatting. My eyes have gone a bit leaky now.

If you can’t wait for the film to come out, you can buy the book here.

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On a clear day you can smell forever

It’s a late Spring, the same sort of weather as the time Not Your Heart Away was set. The sky is grey but the birds are singing. And just as then a cold Spring that combined light evenings with chilled hands, a time someone recalled as one of country pubs, cold girls and warm cars. It’s odd remembering that as I’m trying to work against the clock trying to get the book turned into a film script for Monday.

It’s going well but I just don’t know if I’ve got enough time. Bolstered though by a rather lovely email I got today from the lady who runs the Suffolk Arts Club.

 

PS  Have read the last section of your book, excellent.  Have now lent it to Elaine who was here when you came last Saturday

Caroline Wiseman

Caroline Wiseman Modern and Contemporary

The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout and The Art House

 

I think I’ve found some new energy, after that. I know this: that I’ve never done anything better or more worthwhile than writing this book and this script, now. Wish me luck.

 

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Claire

The character Claire in Not Your Heart Away is fictitious. So it was a bit of a shock to find her picture on my laptop, or at least, how I imagined her to be. I was just tidying up, getting rid of some stuff, putting files in folders when I found her.

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I have no idea who took this picture or when. Sadly, it wasn’t me. But it’s definitely Claire. The big but not luxurious house in the English countryside late one summer afternoon. The coltishness. The waiting. The cigarette. I couldn’t have made this up if I’d tried.

But I still don’t know who owns the rights to this picture and I’d like to use it for the cover of the book. So if it’s your picture, please let me know. If you think you know whose it is, get in touch.

There is a reward, a free paperback copy of Not Your Heart Away. And yes, to save you the bother, I’ve already looked on TinEye. It’s not there.

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Turned out nice after all

Not Your Heart Away is getting some really lovely reviews. I haven’t done what some people have recommended, paid for them, not after I found someone in India advertising his services on Linkedin. Apparently you can just pay someone to ‘review’ your book. If you haven’t got any customers and you write crap you probably need to. If you can live with yourself afterwards is another matter.

But anyway, I didn’t pay. I can’t believe anyone would, but they obviously do.

You can find the latest five-star Amazon review I haven’t paid for here. I have not spoken to this person in the flesh for over 25 years, so I was quite touched to read this.

 

 

 

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Temporary Glitch

Well, sorry about this. The Kindle version of Not Your Heart Away is fine, no interruptions there, but the paperback version has a 48 hour hold on printing. It should be available again on Monday at the latest, so please check back. Just one of those printing things – I made a change to one word on the cover and had to start the review process over again!

Sorry. The best things are worth waiting for.

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The Treatment

Just checked into the BBC Writer’s Room after months not doing that, and paying the price for it. There’s a film script submissions ad. Yes, a real production company actually WANT people to send them film scripts.

The only snag is they want a full script by the 15th, 13 days time.

So I’d better get on with it. Another idea, “Dukey & Tamara” is going to have to wait until the film script is done. First I need to find some software I can understand. So far I’ve looked at Celtx and the Adobe one. Can’t quite get to grips with either of them, but I’d better try.

After all, I’ve got the MS done and the opening has a shipwreck then a UFO then a car crash. Some sex, some drugs, some actual tenderness, a big fast car then an inter-generational surprise. What more do they want?

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One Day Only

This Sunday, Not Your Heart Away is FREE on Kindle, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Heart-Away-Carl-Bennett/dp/1482602954/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364674007&sr=8-1. Love, big houses, fast cars and naivety one country summer.

This special promotion is to celebrate the paperback finally being published. That’s not free.

So do yourself a favour, get a drink. Sit down. Open the book and be back there, in the best summer of your life. You might need some tissues at the end though.

Sorry about that.

 

 

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Heart-Away-Carl-Bennett/dp/1482602954/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364674007&sr=8-1.

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Cow Town, Pig Town

I heard the trailer for Shane on BBC Radio 4 most of this week. I’ve never read it or heard the play, but I heard the Kenneth Williams spoofs on Around The Horne years ago. Where did he come from, that magnificent silent homme?

I’ve had the phrase Cow Town going through my head all day. I lived in Aspen once, but that was a Sheep Town, it being sheep that cropped the range in those parts back when silver was the only other crop there. The town I grew up in, Trowbridge, that used to be Pig Town. It was where Bowyers, the pork pie factory was, where we heard the pigs squealing for hours on pie day, then the silence, then the smell as the carcasses were flensed. Happy days, unless, obviously, you were a pig.

I don’t know anywhere like that these days. Just outside Bury St Edmunds there’s the huge British Sugar boiling plant, where they boil up sugar beet to make white sugar crystals; the Cloud Factory, a friend of mine used to call it, because of the steam that comes out of the place every day of the year and it being East Anglia, merging into the cloudbase not very high above most days.

Sugar Town, perhaps, although Bury St Edmunds doesn’t look as it it has much to do with In Watermelon Sugar, nor, to be fair, with iDeath.

I’m looking for a title, you see. Once you’ve got the title the rest of it will flow. Bound to, isn’t it? That’s my excuse for not writing today, anyway. I can’t think of the title. Nor the ending. I’ve got some of the plot.

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Out Now In Paperback

 

 

Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle

Well, it’s finally out in paperback.

I got four review copies nearly a month ago and sent them off to people who’d been involved with the book. Two of them haven’t bothered to read it yet. Thanks guys, glad I bothered sending it. One is still reading it. One I don’t know whether they’ve read it or not because they’ve stopped talking to me. I think they’ve read it and believed it to be a true story. It isn’t. It employs a literary technique what we artists call ‘making things up.’

It’s got three very good reviews so far and it’s also done a strange thing. Two people started sobbing after they read it. They told me it wasn’t because it was so utterly bad that they were weeping out of grief at wasting their time reading it, but neither one can tell me exactly what they were sobbing about. Times past, maybe.

Anyway, if your nose is blocked and you fancy having red eyes you can now go and get your own paperback copy, just like a real book, on paper and everything, thanks to the wonders of Amazon. Just click on the picture and the interweb will take you straight back in time. Sobbing.

 

 

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