Five days to go… Five days until my next novel, Lucky Portbraddon is published on Amazon by KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing, and it will be out there on its own in the world! I was reading someone’s comments on how they felt about their child going to ‘big school’ for the first time, a mixture of pride, anxiety, relief, worry, nervousness, and then all the things they thought about once the child was in school ‘I should have told them this, I should have given them that, why didn’t I realise this that and the other…‘ In a way this is how I feel now about my book – I keep checking it and checking it, just like a parent might say to their school-bound child ‘have you got your thingmybob? have you remembered your thingamajig? did you remember to do your such and such?‘
I know I still have a bit to do, like checking the school uniform, polishing the shoes and packing the lunch, but I know in actual fact I am very nearly there, and will get everything ready on time. I know it is always like this – I felt the same with my other books at this stage, but with this book because it has taken so long from when I first had the idea of it, to me beginning to write it, to me finishing it, and then doing all the rewrites and edits etc, in a way this has been more of a struggle than any other.
So why.. why has it taken it so long? Well, long is the word, because it is long, longer than my other novels, but it is no longer than other well-known books; I’m not comparing myself to these great authors, I just write stories but here is how Lucky Portbraddon would fit in terms of length among other well-known novels:
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
- The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
- Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- Watership Down – Richard Adams
- Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- Lucky Portbraddon
- Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling
- A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- East of Eden – John Steinbeck
- Order of the Phoenix – JK Rowling
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
It might not be an epic, but it is the story of a family of six cousins, their wives, partners and children, and it shows how a bereavement can unravel the close connections people have in a way they could never anticipate.
if you haven’t read my other, (shorter!) novels, here is a link:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lois+elsden
Lois Elsden 