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.
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.
They arrived today, thanks to a really fast delivery from UPS. Now I have to sit and read through and shred them to pieces to get rid of any mistakes and clumsy usage that has made it through this far.
Very strange feeling handling these proofs. I like the cover a lot. It comes in at 312 pages and 110,000 words. It’s quite sizeable. Somehow I thought it would print smaller.
But it’s here at last. Now to do the final edits and see what happens.
You can click on the picture to go to the Amazon site for a Kindle copy now. If you want an analog version you’ll just have to wait until they’re proofed. Won’t be long.
Well, it’s done. Final edits of Not Your Heart Away are all done, the synopsis is written and it’s off to Jenny Brown, the literary agents. I hope they like it. I can watch The Sweeney on TVCatchup now.
Next, I don’t know. I might write the rather odd story about the things that happened writing the book. On the other hand it would make a decent screenplay, with UFOs, car crashes, 1970s music, the National Front, dope and quite a lot of sex and Lebanonism as well.
On the third hand, I’ve still got an idea about a man who worked in the Twin Towers and went out for a coffee just before they came down. That one’s been gnawing at me. As someone said at the time, they weren’t all heroes. They can’t all have been missed.
Just starting to finish editing the Not Your Heart Away MS for Kindle. It’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I can’t quite believe I typed that badly. But I also can’t believe Microsoft Word is such a pile of crap that it leaves in things that simply aren’t there on screen. Quite where it gets its ideas about English is something else again.
So what’s it about?
Ben met Claire in the late 1970s, the summer before everyone left for university. And in many ways, that was it. After a magical trip to the theatre Ben discovers she’s about to leave for America, starting a summer job that might just last a lifetime.
After a bohemian week of drifting about London and with the sense of the ice cracking under their feet, Ben comes to realise how much she means to him. And then she disappears.
More than twenty years later Ben thinks he’s found her again, thanks to an old school-friend and a little help from Facebook. But the course of true obsession rarely runs smoothly. Neither does friendship, cars, history, wife-swapping or love. Especially not love.
Haunted by the spires and farms of that summer and the blue remembered hills of Claire’s jeans Ben keeps asking himself the question Bob Marley sang at every party back then. Is this love? Is this love that he’s feeling? He wants to know now. Before it’s too late.
Meanwhile, back to putting in the hyperlinks on the Contents page. Is there any coffee going?
