#1 AMAZON BESTSELLLER, Alan Camrose
Two new releases on AMAZON
DIVAN INSPIRATION: Travels on the Road to Dreamland. Part One: The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly - Bedtime at the movies
A non-fiction bedtime story
and
BUILDING MEMORIES: Bricks and Murder
A darkly humorous coming-of-age magical realism PI love story thriller
Also: HEMINGWAY'S PUZZLE:Short But Perfectly Formed, an anthology of six-word stories
LOST IN PLAIN SIGHT, a magical adventure for grown-ups and cat-lovers
MAKING OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: A Merry Journey - a festive, funny journey back to the origins of our Christmas traditions
Alan Camrose lives in the South-East of England with his family and writes fiction and non-fiction while trying not to mix them up too much...
He loves noodles, Blues music, Terry Pratchett's books, curry, football, a negroni or two, Miles Davis, gnocchi, craft beers, Adam West as Batman, a firepit on a cold night, board games, hammocks, and General Wolfe.BUY ONE OF ALAN'S BOOKS NOW
MAKING OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: A Merry Journey is now completely LIVE and LAUNCHED on AMAZON Books in paperback and hardback!
There is a FREE DOWNLOAD OFFER of my eBook – FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. Don’t miss out!
Kindle Edition – FREE FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT – for a limited period
Hardcover – £ 24.99
Paperback – £9.95
Why do mince pies no longer look like coffins? How do you navigate yesteryear’s family games without a fire extinguisher? Why did Father Christmas trade in his wagon for a sleigh when he first came to town? Why should you complain if you don’t receive at least one gold ball from the Big Man? And how do the best Christmas songs jingle our bells?
A perfect festive stocking filler or present, this delightful book is illustrated with glorious pictures, and can be shared with your family and friends for years to come.
Working out what couda been a Christmas contender…
I wanted to share with you some of my thought process about finding the title for my new release Christmas book for a chilled out festive season.
It has gone through various incarnations before it goes live on 4 November 2021 – in hardback, paperback and eBook. On Amazon.
First up, it was going to be part of a series that I will be publishing in the New Year about how beds tuck into our popular culture. My Christmas book was going to be the first in the series, called Two Turtle Duvets.
The Christmas project evolved into a stand-alone book on how the Christmas traditions that we have come to know and love have evolved. Nothing too serious, nothing too heavy, but a playful look at our Xmas season.
That demanded soemthing else on the title front, something catchy. I thought I had found it:
Checking it Twice: A List of our Christmas Present
Quite pleasing, I thought, but a bit too “list-y”, not least because of the cunning use of the word “list” in the sub-title… It didn’t last long enough to make it to the spell-checker. I didn’t want a laundry list; I wanted a walk, a search, a romp (no!), a promenade (too formal), a meander (too waffly…)…
A Journey.
I wanted to play with the double meaning of “Christmas Present”, and arrived at:
What makes our Christmas Present – on some sort of journey. Like the Three Wise Men but with a lap-top.
First make it sharper and snappier: Making our Christmas Present. With a better sub-title, then.
First thing that came to mind was A Brief History. That made it sound like an academic treatise, not a journey. So, getting closer, I decided on A Jolly Journey, but that sounded like a booze cruise.
I chose A Merry Journey, because who doesn’t want Christmas time to be a merry way of looking at the festive season?
And here it is:
Making our Christmas Present gives you an idea of discovering Christmas as it now is, with a merry journey to get you there.
There. I’m done, from Two TurtleDuvetsto the final version, in the St Nick of time for Christmas…
Why do mince pies no longer look like coffins? How do you navigate yesteryear’s family games without a fire extinguisher? Why did Father Christmas trade in his wagon for a sleigh when he first came to town? Why should you complain if you don’t receive at least one gold ball from the Big Man? And how do the best Christmas songs jingle our bells?
All these questions that I wanted to answer about Christmas, packaged up in a glossy cover for my new book, Making our Christmas Present: A Merry Journey.
The answers and a lot more will be revealed from 4 November 2021.
This will be a FREE download, which I hope you will enjoy, and I would ask you please please please to take a few moments to post a review. It’s the lifeblood of authors like me, and I would appreciate it very much.
But enough of that!
I wanted to give you here a quick insight into my author thought processes around the book.
I wanted a snappy, Christmassy cover with instant appeal. I don’t know whether I managed that but this is how I got to where I am now.
The book looks at centuries of Christmas, and where the traditional bits came from that individually and together serve up most people’s vision of Christmas. It’s not a history epic or a social commentary or a heavyweight study. The heaviest it gets is fretting over Santa’s belt size…
So I needed light.
I started by thinking about Christmas. There is of course more than one major defining point:
But I fastened onto Santa and how he became the figure we know today – instantly recognisable for the cover, at least today’s version.
I thought about him using an evolutionary cover, something like this, with overlapping pictures merged together:
St Nicholas
Holly King
Santa 2021
Too complicated.
Too serious.
So, Plan B was initiated. A Christmas Kiss – otherwise known as A Christmas Keep It Simple, Stupid
Christmas trees. We all think of brightly-lit and decorated trees at Christmas time…
So why not go for a more sophisticated dark background, and a blurry tree.
Thanks to Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash for the pic
Much better. I like this but it’s a bit tooo sophisticated for a book that’s supposed to be merry while Santa is “Checking it Twice”. That had been the original title. This pic was too serious, looking like it was dressed up for cocktails…
Third time lucky, then.
I went for Christmas trees again, but not just any old Christmas trees. Toy ones, with the addition of a Santa hat on one of them.
I think (hope) that hits the more amusing, whimsical vibe that I’m after, which fits in with my writing style.
And here it is, in all its glory with the new title, the one that will be published on 4 November: on Amazon Books:
Ta – dAAAA!
More playful, less creaking with history, not so blingy…
I hope you’ve found this insight into this part of my creative process interesting
More to come on other stuff soon, and you’ll get it first on my blog…
