#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
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…
