Hi loyal readers of The Guest Who Stayed.

 Here's a bit of exciting news.  About a month ago I was contacted by some people who are setting up a new site for books with audio tracks – www.booktrack.com.
 The idea is that authors add music and effects to their novels to create a new reading experience. 
I was asked to do this for ‘The Guest Who Stayed’.  So  far I’ve worked on chapter 1 and you can see how it works by going to  http://goo.gl/cgN0c1 .

The launch is tomorrow. It’s supported by Google and could be  the next big thing in book publishing. Why not take a look and be one of the  first to try it out. It appears to be free.

The software is clever. You can vary your reading speed but the sound effects still happen at the right time. Don’t know how they do it but it’s pretty cool.

Enjoy – and let me know what you think.  If you tell me it’s good I’ll do some more chapters.

Best Wishes

Roger Penfound

First of all, huge apologies for not keeping my blog going. After the first euphoria of launching ‘The Guest Who Stayed’ on Wattpad and Amazon, I lost direction a bit. But I’m starting to get myself sorted out
now.

 So what’s been happening? Well I guess the biggest thing is Wattpad.  (www.wattpad.com). What a fabulous site that is. Millions of readers downloading self -published stories for free and feeding back their
comments to the authors. I’ve already had 110,000 downloads. Just think, until  wattpad (and others)  - authors  manuscripts simply festered in the waste bins of literary agents who were deluged with unsolicited scripts. Now this vast army of rejected authors has a platform and we’re able to talk to our readers. I don’t want to boast but I can’t resist sharing a few of my favourite bits of
feedback.

Just Wow. Amazed to have found such an amazingly written novel on Wattpad. I literaly couldnt stop
  thinking about this story every time i had to stop reading it, it made me think of reading Daniel Steels novels and compare this story to hers and let me tell you it is pretty ang close to her novels. Simply amazing story i will always remember. Your a great author! -
SamanthaMcAfee9

AND

Well written.. The best story I have read! Keep it up.. : - )YuriXhaei

And

awesome book..awesome story...it made me cry...if i can vote thousand times i will vote it again n again - 
Blinker_Diva

I’m getting about twenty new followers a day. As I said – its free downloads so not yet one of those millionaire authors (dream on!!)


The other bit of news is that I’ve started my second book and I’m serialising it on wattpad as I write it. Its
temporary title is ‘Dying to be Different.’  I’m almost certainly going to change the title because I’m not sure a title with ‘dying’ in it will be a good marketing hook. 

This is quite different from the other story. It involves a newspaper hack, sacked for phone hacking (listening into mobiles.) His son is in a relationship with a Sikh girl who has been promised to a boy she’s never met in India. In parallel, he’s researching a murder which took place four hundred years ago when a father killed his daughter as she attempted to elope with her ‘betrothed’. As you can probably imagine there are subtle and intriguing parallels between the contemporary and the historic events. Follow its progress on wattpad and let me know what you think.

As promised. I’ll keep my blog going on a weekly basis now.  Thanks for stopping by.

Best Wishes. Roger Penfound.


  


  


  

 
I came across an interesting interview recently  with Julian Barnes, a Man Booker prize winner for his recent hit novel ‘The  Sense of an Ending’.  The interview  resonated with me because having to decide how to describe sexual encounters was  one of the more pleasurable challenges I had to confront when I sat down to  write ‘The Guest Who Strayed.’

Barnes warns in the interview about the dangers of assigning metaphorical names to body parts – he particularly takes exception to root vegetables including the humble yam which seems to have metamorphosed in a recent John Updike novel from a cashew nut to the more noteworthy tuber just  mentioned.  Barnes describes the three cardinal sins of bad sex writing as being too pornographic, too facetious or overly solemn.

When confronted with my own character’s sex scene in ‘The Guest  Who Stayed’ – in this case a bodged attempt to consummate a marriage – I began  by trying to banish my own inhibitions and write clearly and descriptively about my two newlyweds first union - (you see I’m already using euphemisms). However
the technical aspect of describing sex does seem to call upon a list of body  parts which somehow dominate and take over the story. I spent a whole evening trying to decide what to call poor Jed’s appendage and settle in the end for his  ‘manhood’. Only marginally better than a  yam.

In desperation I abandoned my attempts to write a ‘Haines’ technical manual and tried instead to focus on the underlying emotions which I  felt underpinned the physical action. This led to some long periods of  reflection and inner turmoil, but out of it came a more comfortable approach to writing the story. I can claim no special skills in the area of erotic or emotional writing – there are many who are more practiced than me, but there are one or two lines in my novel of which I’m quite proud. I think the best is the letter written by Alice to her daughter when Alice is dying. The letter is not to be opened until her daughter is eighteen.

‘My darling, at eighteen you may have  experienced, or you may be about to experience, a relationship. This will  present you with many different and powerful emotions – love, loyalty, desire  and possibly despair. But the strongest of all emotions is passion. It’s  powerful because it comes not from the mind, but from the heart, deep inside you. It lacks the logic of the other emotions yet it has the power to drive your destiny has forward in unexpected ways. You can’t avoid passion if it comes your  way but be ready for the chaos it brings with it. Passion is difficult to  identify until it has engulfed you. It can cause you to destroy those things that you hold dear whilst at the same time seducing you with sublime joy.  Passion has many faces my dear and I urge you to beware.’

Well I like it anyway!!

 
One of the annoying things about being a self-published author is that everyone I talk to knows someone who’s just  published a novel –usually a proper one - you know, a real book with a cover and pages. I’m resorting to a few well rehearsed phrases to explain why I haven’t published a proper book. These come
down to three main lines of reasoning:

 1)     
Traditional publishing is dead. E publishing is much more exciting and  modern.

2)     
I’m just trying my novel out. Once I’ve got all the feedback I need I’ll appoint an agent.

3)     
I want to keep control. I don’t want to be exploited by an unscrupulous publisher.

 Of course all this is rubbish. If an agent knocked at my door I’d bite his or her hand off in my rush to get signed up.  But it does provide a good conversation piece for dinner parties, country walks and that sort of thing. I think I’m developing some expertise at expressing the pain and trauma of being an author. Good lines include:

1)     
I had to re write my novel once I had discovered my true writing style. (implies dedication and
commitment)

2)     
I didn’t know how the novel would end. I had to let the story unfold naturally. (implies a reckless
creativity)

3)     
My characters are based on true people, but I’ve changed the location to hide their identities. (implies
a moral dilemma)

I’ve already had some tentative (i.e. not firm) suggestions that I address various book clubs. Maybe this is where my true talent will lie, not in writing but in wandering disconsolately from book club to book club in search of an audience.


 

I was really pleased yesterday to be rung up by a male friend who had just read the book. I had become convinced that men don’t read books unless they’re sporting autobiographies or war memoirs. This chap – an accountant by profession and a man not given to frippery, provided a succinct but glowing rating on Amazon.

This is what he said.

“This is a well constructed and beautifully written book, cleverly drawing the characters together in a story of betrayal. I found I was drawn into the story, which has various twists and turns. The book makes you care for the characters and what happens to them. I read the second half of the book in one go as I was so keen to find out how it all worked out.”

Well thanks mate – I’ve glimpsed your inner soft personality that you’ve hidden from me on all those previous drink fuelled binges.

The next day another friend e mailed and said

‘The offspring gave me a Kindle for Christmas and the first thing I downloaded was The Guest Who Stayed. Thoroughly enjoyed it and was quite sad to have to say goodbye to them all – made my life seem really rather boring! MY Kindle then ended up in (husbands) hands and he read it too even preferring to read YOUR book to his daily obligatory Sudoku.'

This really pleases me. When I first conceived the story, I felt passionately that it was about the evolving relationship between two men as defined by their very different experiences of love for the same woman. However, when I sat down to write the story, I found that I really wasn’t very good at long agonising polemic about the nature of love and the impact on the two men of an imploding love triangle. So I invented some action – some story – and found that I quite enjoyed writing this. It took the pressure out of having to explore every motive and every nuance of behaviour. By the time I’d finished, I’d almost forgotten about the destructive love triangle and was more elated by what I felt to be  - a dramatic story.

Then, when I finally made myself sit down and read the completed novel again – it was there – the evolving and transient relationship between Jack and Jed – at one time burning with hatred but in later life, dependant and supportive before it implodes once more.

So what I think I’m trying to say is that I have written a romance that is relevant to men – complex men, spiteful men, but always vulnerable men.

It reminds me of one of the first reviews I received on my favourite site ‘youwriteon.com.’

The reviewer said:

‘I like the way Jed cried in the prologue as this goes against the mainly tough stereotype of men often presented in books and is much more interesting. As I’ve written this, I realised that you have presented the male characters to be weaker and the female characters to be stronger………’

Oh dear. I’d better find a macho alpha male for my next novel. Any ideas?

I think I’ve made a very important discovery about being a new writer. I was judging success by the numbers of my book that had sold, by the size of the Amazon sales cheque and by the number of blog / twitter / facebook comments received. By all those criteria I’m a massive failure. 

But then I discovered a new and rather satisfying aspect. Friends and people I know have started coming up to me to discuss the book and tell me how much they enjoyed reading it. Suddenly, chance meetings have a new focus. Even dinner party conversations have elevated me to the status of minor celebrity as people ‘ooh and ah’ at the discovery of a self published author at their table.

“Is there any sex in your book?” is the usual question. To which I now have the pithy response. “Of course, there’s lots of it about you know”. One very charming lady leant across and whispered, “You could do with a bit more of it you know.”

Yesterday at the doctors, as I nursed an infuriating cough in the waiting room, the lady doctor leant across the counter and demanded, “ Your book – is it the ‘The Man Who Stayed?’

“No,” I spluttered. “It’s ‘The Guest Who Stayed’”

“That explains why I couldn’t find it on Amazon,” she exclaimed as she hurried off to tend to some other snivelling wretch.

Reading my wife’s e mails (which I shouldn’t do but she reads mine) -  I came across a long missive from a friend of my youngest daughter. Nursing her first child, she was seeking weaning information from my wife (who is expert in this stuff) and there it was – at the end of all the baby talk – “just finished reading Roger’s book. It normally takes me ages to read a novel but I finished this one in two days. That says it all.”

I brimmed with pride. Now I’m not telling you all this to be boastful. As I said, by normal commercial criteria I’ve bombed as author. But on a different level the expanded range of my social interaction is somewhat pleasing and has encouraged me to seriously contemplate my next novel. Watch this space.

Welcome to readers of the The Cromer Times, The North Walsham Times and The Sheringham Independent. I’m assuming your saw my ad in your local paper and that is why you’ve landed on my blog page. I’m very happy to meet you and now I have to persuade you to take the next important step – to buy ‘The Guest Who Stayed’.

Let me start by telling you my reasons for setting the novel in your part of the country. There are two. First, I ‘studied’ at The University of East Anglia in the early 60’s – heady days of indulgent youth culture and a healthy belief in the hedonistic life style.

UEA in those days was very new. The concrete pyramids, so much a feature of the new campus, rose furtively from surrounding rough pasture and meandering streams. Not then the haughty arrogance of the Sainsbury Centre or the magnificence of the artificial lake – still many years away.

My first two years were spent in the surreal environment of the former RAF base at Horsham St. Faith. Plucked from the relative comfort of a middle class home, I found myself encamped with others of my age in the old quarters – still known as ‘blocks’. Mine was P block. Like all camps, there was a fragile government which strove to maintain order. As chairman of the Horsham Hall Committee I fought fearlessly to abolish the law forbidding men and women to remain in each other’s rooms after 11.30 and waged a dogged campaign to install contraceptive machines in the toilets – both conceded by the authorities with unseemly haste.

These were exciting days. Students were on the march in London. The Queen visited UEA as a potential academic retreat for Princess Anne, and had to endure the spectacle of students turning their backs on the Royal Cavalcade. Princess Anne did not come to UEA. We had our own ‘sit in’ in the Social Science block (where else?) but no one seemed to care much. We marched out when the Easter Holidays began.

So how do Cromer, Sheringham, North Walsham, and the Norfolk broads fit into this distant world? These were the places I went to when I had to get away – as I often did. These were places where real people lived, eating Sunday lunch, painting the house, walking the dog, playing in the park. A part of me still craved the order and familiarity of all this.

Cromer in the summer drew me to it’s bustling seaside – to it’s stately pier, to its seedy arcades, to its sandy beaches inter-cut with ancient groynes and to its faded Victorian grandeur. Cromer in the winter drew me to its emptiness, to its windswept promenade lashed by angry seas and to small sea front cafes where people retreated from the cold dressed in plastic pac a macs.

I mentioned a second reason for setting the novel here. Well most of it actually took place – here in East Anglia. Of course the town of ‘Frampton’ is made up though you can easily guess what place I had in mind. I won’t tell you the exact location – it wouldn’t be fair on family members still alive. But the essence of the story – the guest who arrived and stayed, the relationship which destroyed a family, the lie that was conceived to protect the culprits and the impact on the next generation – is all true. I’m not certain that the first fatal meeting took place in Cromer on a hot bank holiday in August 1921 – but it might well have done.

And so the story unfolds slowly against a backdrop of rural East Anglia struggling to come to terms with a new world order at the end of the ‘great war’. Our main characters seek release from the poverty that has bound them to menial rural lives, but as they venture out into the brave new world, they are seized by forces beyond their control and buffeted by emotions they don’t understand. As the story moves into the next generation, the tranquillity and innocence of East Anglia is brutally interrupted by the arrival of American GI’s to help wage war in Europe. As Flying Fortress bombers and Liberators thunder low across the flat countryside, their bellies full of explosives, the sounds of swing and the chewing of gum symbolise an uncomfortable union of two cultures with repercussions that reach out across two continents.

This is a story of passion and deceit. But it is also a story of ordinary people caught up in major global events which shook a sleepy corner of  England long before the M11 and A14 had extended their inexorable tentacles into the region and changed it’s character for ever.

I hope I have encouraged you to download the story. Please let me know what you think – or better still, a review on Amazon would be much appreciated.

Very Best Wishes

Roger Penfound

 

  Number of sales – 12

Ok, so it’s not gone viral but sales are rising and I’m getting more organised with my marketing strategy now. I’ve got 3 reviews on the Amazon Kindle site and the book is rated 4 stars and a bit. I’ve also persuaded 2 of my readers to join a select group who will read my next novel as I’m writing it and feedback to me as I go along. There’s information about the new novel on my web site www.theguestwhostrayed.com. As with my first novel – the new one is based on a ‘true’ and remarkable story that I’ve grown up with. I will use literary license to embellish the story for dramatic effect. If you would like to read sample chapters as I write the book, let me know via the comments box and I will welcome you with open arms to this select group. I am not seeking anodyne praise. I want you to be honest about your thoughts so that I can fine tune and hone the story as it is being written.

So about this marketing. Well I’ve had my ‘social media consultant’ (pretty posh ay) here today to help me make sense of twitter, facebook and the rest. His advice was to focus on twitter first as he felt that it offered the best scope for reaching a wide market fast. He’s set me up with a canny bit of software called TweetAdder which manages my account. It miraculously searches for people with matching interests. I’ve used tags like reading, self publish, author etc. It then lets me ‘follow’ their tweets and the hope is that they follow my tweets in return. It also sends out  disembodied tweets from a data base at regular intervals from my account  -  like SOS messages from a mariner stranded in a life raft at sea ‘help help – is anybody out there?’ So far I’m following 132 people and I have 6 people following me. So hello if you’re following me. I feel a sort of responsibility now to say something purposeful in my tweets. Maybe next time – it’s getting a bit late now.

Number of sales>. 10

And I probably know who those ten people are. So thank you people for your kind support. I've got  a couple of reviews on Amazon now and I definitely know who wrote those.

Well I expect you're wondering what happened to the big marketing campaign. If you remember, I was about to launch myself onto social media. Well the truth is, it's all so extremely tedious - sitting in front of the computer for ages trying to decide which discussion forum to join and what I could possibly write that might be of interest to anyone. I'd rather take the dog for a walk. Frankly, most of the discussion forums seem to be taken up with people saying hello to each other -  perhaps they're thinly disguised dating sites.

And there's another problem. Most of these sites don't work properly. Having mastered registering on Facebook, I then managed to get my profile pictute up there. All very good. But why then on the same page, does another picture show a very large close up of my forehead taken from the profile picture. Not that my forehead doesn't deserve global promotion - it does  - but it wasn't where I wanted to concentrate my marketing strategy. All very mysterious so I spent two hours trying to do something about that when I should have been having witty and pithy dialogues with other like minded forum members. 

I'm busy now trying to navigate the mysteries of UK Kindle users forum www.kuforum.co.uk and the Good Read site . www.goodreads.com . Both purport to be author friendly and offer advice on reaching their millions of insatiable literary fans. First results not good. Having  spent ages registering myself and my treasured work on goodreads.com - I sneakily logged onto the site from another computer and typed my name and title into the search function. Result? - 'we have no record of that book or that author' 

Perhaps I'm speading my net too wide. Next week I'll concentrate aggressively on one site and report back.

And don't forget - www.theguestwhostayed.com  Thanks.

OK - so JK Rowling may be beating me in the e book stakes, but watch out. I'm about to launch my marketing campaign. I have software that will integrate my twitter account with my facebook account, with my blog, with my linked in account and probably prepare my shopping list if I ask it. Its going to be subtle. No cold calling - just edging my way into various chat forums and leaving my cyber business card.

On a more pedestrian note, still meeting people who have downloaded the first 2 chapters for free but have failed to flock to the Amazon site for the remaining 18. Makes me think that next time, the end of chapter 2 will have to contain some absurdly gripping story line which forces people to read on. Suggestions welcome.