A Cover for Handmade

Cover, Publication Details, the Latest Totals - over £300! A Request & a Final Thought...

One of the happy things about self-publishing is that you get to choose your cover. (This is also true for my work with Linen Press, who unlike most publishers, are very considerate when it comes to authors’ wishes.) Making a cover however is a different matter. It’s not easy if you don’t have the requisite skills. Fortunately for me my daughter has these skills in abundance, and two weeks ago we sat together for a rare, uninterrupted, few hours to make the cover for Handmade.

We looked at a lot of memoirs. We talked about current trends, the use of bright, often neon colours, and graffiti style titles. We quickly agreed it wasn’t for me or for this memoir. We decided on a cover that was simple, pale, understated and that made use of an old photograph of me taken by a friend when I was eighteen. We thought about cleaning the image up but decided instead to let it show its age. The result might look easily achieved but it took great skill and my daughter’s keen eye for detail and precision to get us there. I am so grateful for her skill and her patience and I love the result. I will use it later in the year when I produce a limited edition hardcopy. I am grateful too for editor and author Lynn Michell’s early reading and cover copy.

For those of you new to Writing Days, or uncertain as to the memoir’s themes, here are what could be considered cover notes:

Set on an estuary in the tidal flatlands of Somerset, Handmade is the story of a daughter and a narcissistic mother. It tells of the darkness of life behind closed doors, while celebrating the beauty and salvation in the out of doors and in the ever-present sea. Told in clothes, written in a fragmentary and lyrical style, the chronological story is interspersed with reflections and contemporary notes.

My mother Alma was a force of nature. Trained by a tailor she was a skilled seamstress, an acknowledged beauty, a woman before her time. She was also a narcissist in the true, diagnostic sense of the word. As a small child I lived daily with Alma's fragile mental health, her grandiosity, her vulnerability. My duty as a daughter was to care for her and make her happy. It was an impossible task. I lived in constant fear of her rejection which in the end nothing could dispel but the act itself. The waiting was long, well into adulthood, when finally, as only a narcissist could, Alma disowned me.

NOW TO DETAILS OF PUBLICATION HERE: I’ve discovered that the newsletter format does not favour files that are too big. Mailboxes do not like them. I therefore intend to publish in Six Parts, over three weeks. This means you WILL RECEIVE TWO NEWSLETTERS A WEEK FROM ME FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS.

The text will be accompanied by the option of audio read by me. I wasn’t able to pause recording and had to read the whole part in one take, so I hope you understand it’s far from perfect

PART I - Monday 31st March

PART 2 - Thursday - 3rd April

PART 3 - Monday - 7th April

PART 4 -Thursday - 10th April

PART 5 - Monday - 14th April

PART 6 - Thursday - 17th April

You have the option to Unsubscribe if this is all too much, but I hope you will stay with me and if you read Handmade I really hope you will consider a paid subscription for one month. (It is easy to unsubscribe when the month is up but if you should have difficulty contact me and I will unsubscribe you)

One month amounts to $5.00 - though you can pay more if you wish. This is really the price of a coffee, and for this I’m offering you a book, a year’s work, a lifetime’s story…

All money from your subscriptions will go to Medicins Sans Frontieres.

On that note I am happy to tell you that I have just donated a further £74.19 and our total now stands at £314.18. I’m beginning to dream of reaching £1,000 by the end of the year. Could it really be possible..?

Thank you for your support here, for your messages, for your kindness. I will be back with my usual fortnightly musings, on April 24th, the week after the memoir publication finishes. In the meantime I am about to embark on new writing. I have several ideas brewing and can feel the heady excitement that comes with myriad possibilities.

But I want to leave you with this - Last week I did an online workshop with the poet David Constantine, about poetry’s response to the world we find ourselves in. One of the things he said has stayed with me: ‘We must not feel obliged to write about the horrors of now, being human is enough, a deed in itself enhancing the doer…’ More on just being human in April…

As always thank you for reading

Avril x