Quote:
Originally Posted by David Marseilles
How has year 1 gone? I'd love an update.
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David's message came as a shock. I seldom look at the date of messages, and assumed that the whole of this thread was from the last few days.
How about "Coffee and Danish" as a working title, Lene? Not least as it sounds as though what you are planning is a book of anecdotes about your early life in Denmark, the sort of thing you might tell to friends over a cup of coffee.
If I were doing something like this, it would definitely be written in the first person - "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills".
I would expect chapters to be mainly short, perhaps only a part of a page for some, perhaps a couple or three for others, depending, of course, upon the nature of the topic each time.
Another good idea, which I developed for a series of short articles, and which I gave the working title of "Home Thoughts from Abroad" (!) is to write an article about, say, Easter customs, or a specific Easter event, in time to be published around Easter, and so on, throughout the year. Write about the start of a new school year in, say, July. Do this for a couple of years and your book has written itself. Imagine that you are writing for publication in a newspaper, for example, and need to have your copy ready ahead of time.
In fact you might even consider seeing if your local newspaper is interested in a series of articles of this type, which would give you a bit of drive to actually get writing, give you a deadline, if you have to turn out a thousand words every week or every month. When I say "local newspaper" I mean the "Ipswich Gazette" rather than the "Queensland Herald Tribune". I don't know, but maybe Ipswich has a community of ex-Danes.
I think Neil might have been a bit more negative than he usually is. I have the feeling that there is a lot more interest in "the way things were" than he indicated, and this trend seems to be growing. Take a look at the books by "Miss Read", the pen-name of an ex-teacher at a village school in England. Some of them were ordinary novels, but others were just such anecdotes as I think you are thinking of. Even her novels include such
kåserier (hope you have that Swedish word in Danish, too) of village life.
When you're ready to look for a way to publish, think about Amazon's Createspace, which gives you a method of producing both black and white and colour books as POD books. But parallel with that, start sending samples to various literary agents in Aussie, and see if someone bites. If someone in the family can draw, set them to work putting together a portfolio of drawings to go with the book for a share of the royalties.
And remember, if you haven't already discovered it, that writing is like any other athletic activity. It takes a bit of time and effort to get the muscles working, but once you're over the threshhold, things begin to move very quickly.
Enjoy!