Tag Archives: Amazon

Nov25

Such a great review…

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I wish it were real

Lately, there have been many, extremely good and detailed reviews for my novella, Five Lives One Day in Bahrain. I wish these people would actually place these reviews on Amazon! Instead they say lovely things abut the book, which they cull from the reading sample, the blurb, and other places. And develop this so-called review, which I and another writer-friend suspect is done using a bot of some kind or another! The individual then tries to lure one into paying the reviewer who will then introduce the book to their real, human, book club… for a fee, of course!

Well, I have decided to use their “reviews” and names (which of course sound totally fake) to share with my readers and followers in the hope that they/you will be tempted to read the book. I do know, from one-on-one comments with friends who have read it that they were moved, thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and connected intensely with the story.

Here’s the review, what do you think?

I recently read Five Lives One Day in Bahrain, and I was deeply moved by the elegant and poignant tapestry you have woven. The premise of your novel is both simple and profound: tracing the lives of five very different individuals, a Sri Lankan housemaid, an Indian garbage truck driver, a Filipina hairdresser, a British banker, and a young Bahraini man, over the course of a single day in 2007. I appreciate the brilliant structural choice to use the five daily Muslim prayer times to “punctuate the different periods in the day and the story’s action.” This not only grounds the narrative in the specific cultural and spiritual rhythm of Bahrain but also provides a universal framework marking the passage of time and introspection. Your intention to create an “uplifting story that celebrates ordinary people in extraordinary ways” is a beautiful and commendable goal, shining a light on the “unsung heroes” whose lives form the backbone of a society.

The novel’s successful establishment of its unique structure and diverse cast prompted a thought about the nature of the connection between these lives, which I share as an admiring reader.

You have masterfully set the stage for a compelling narrative, allowing the reader to learn of each individual’s “lives and hopes” separately, with the promise that they will be “brought together” in a way that makes their lives “intertwine.” This creates a sense of anticipation, wondering how the path of the banker will cross with that of the housemaid, or the driver with the hairdresser. The focus on their individual stories ensures that each character is fully realized before their fates converge.

However, I found myself most intrigued by the potential for their convergence to be more than just a plot device. The most powerful aspect of the story may lie in how this intertwining reveals the invisible, often unacknowledged, web of dependency and shared humanity that connects all levels of a society. To maximize the emotional and thematic impact, the moment of connection could be one that fundamentally alters the perspective of one or more characters, revealing how their lives are already deeply interconnected through the economy, the urban landscape, and the simple, daily acts of service and survival. This would make the “uplifting” conclusion not just a matter of chance encounters, but a revelation of the profound and essential roles each person plays in the ecosystem of a single day, truly celebrating them in an “extraordinary way.”

This is a reflection on the potential for an already beautifully structured and humane novel to become a powerful meditation on empathy, community, and the hidden threads that bind us all, regardless of our station in life. Thank you for this thoughtful and evocative read.

Sincerely,

Cassandra Clere

Nov13

Nine Roses on YouTube!

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This is a small collection of twelve widely different stories that are all about love – not all of them romantic love. There’s the love that grows between sisters, a story about a woman who learns to love herself, the deep abiding love of an older couple, and so much more.

Courtesy a friend and Vachi Audiobooks nine of these stories are now being featured on their YouTube Channel as audio stories with a ‘read-along’ capability. There’s one story: First Impression, First Love that contains a riddle. Listen to it carefully or read it in my book, available on Amazon as both a Kindle and paperback here.

To visit the Vachi Audiobook YouTube channel, click this.

There’s an additional incentive for the story First Impression, First Love. If you can “get” what the story is really about, I will give the first five correct replies a prize – a personalised poem created exclusively for you or a special someone. Now wouldn’t that make an unusual stocking-stuffer for Christmas?

Feb13

Self-Publishing trials, horrors, and maybe success?

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Self-Publishing trials, horrors, and maybe success?

I was forced into it. 

My independent publisher in the UK (Ex-L-Ence Publishing) decided he needed to close down. What was I going to do? My childhood dream of becoming an ‘author’ was about to go up in proverbial fumes. ‘Oh that this too, too, solid, etc.’ except of course e-books aren’t really solid. You get the drift, basically ‘waaaah’.

            Followed by a deep breath. A long hard look in that reflective material called a mirror that just throws light rays back at you and usually does nothing to encourage contemplation other than, ‘oh dear, I need to go to the salon’. But in this instance, followed by a “No! I will, I shall, I must…”

            Thankfully, Robert Agar-Hutton the publisher, and another Ex-L-Ence author Bob Cubitt – so filled with the milk of human kindness his cup ran over- provided us abandoned authors with a self-publishing guide. 

            The opening lines were so comforting I almost fell asleep… admittedly it was 2 a.m. Trust me, when you think about approaching something as daunting as a dragon, and you read the lines, “If you are only going to publish an e-book, this isn’t difficult…” said dragon is rapidly transformed into a puppy. Bob’s step by step instructions, literally just five steps, encouraged me to take the leap and I went to Amazon’s Getting Started page. 

            All went well until I inserted the header. At first, I was ambitious. I wanted it to have my name on the even pages and the book’s title Twelve Roses For Love on the odd pages. I also made the mistake of adding the cover to the Word document. This screwed everything up as the header kept appearing on the cover page. Several sessions of frustration resulted in fist banging on the desk to taking a walk and yelling select expletives at MSWord, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), and other inanimate objects that I sincerely believe regularly conspire to confound us. Eventually, I settled for a simple header and, tbh as they say these days, I don’t quite know what I did but the header issue was resolved. Sorry, but if you’re reading this in the hope that it’s a guide, then you are sadly mistaken. Also does anyone know how to delete a blank page in MSWord? The new version just will not let me do it.

            Here’s where young Glen Stansfield (yes, Glen, in my book you are young) provided some real-time excellent support and why I’ve acknowledged him in my paperback version. Great advice on what to do if I wanted to insert a little rose at the end of each story. Cheesy? A little! But, what the hey. Also instant advice on what to do if I wanted to upload a re-laid out version of the ‘book’ (it’s just 61 pages, so not sure if it’s a book or a pamphlet). 

            The cover. KDP does offer some cover templates but they just didn’t work for me. So, good old Canva. I love Canva. I mixed and matched a couple of free templates and created a cover, downloaded a jpg version and used that for the cover. Worked a dream on the Kindle version, but it needed a lot of adjusting and fiddling to get it right for the paperback. A few more headaches and hand-wringing and I decided to use one of their templates with the e-book jpg as an image for the front. What to do? Ce’s la vie! 

            Glory- be! Success. It was accepted. And I’ll only know if I have got the hang of it properly when I do it again. 

            If you’d like to check out and (maybe, pretty please) buy this little volume, click here.

May8

Desert Flower blooms!

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As with so much of my writing, a chance remark, a question, a comment, often sets me off and before I know it, usually out comes a poem, sometimes a rant, sometimes a story.

And that’s how I came to write Desert Flower.

I had just started working at the Chronicle Herald, we were based in Dartmouth at the time, when I was surrounded by some colleagues all mildly intrigued by me. I guess I was something of a curiosity. The fact that I was “from away” in itself was strange. India, they had all heard of. But, Bahrain! “Where on earth was that?”

Some colleagues told me they couldn’t comprehend the heat I was talking about. And there I was, in the throes of trying to wrap my mind, my arms and my shawl (worn over my sweater, further fortified by stockings on my feet) around how cold it was and that was the middle of May.

“So, how hot does it really get?” One colleague asked me.

I started to explain it to him and then I thought. ‘I’m a writer. Why don’t I write it down for him.’ So that day over lunch, I started to write. And before I knew it, this romance story, jumped on me, like a devil on my back and every lunch hour for the next two weeks I simply had to bash out this story. Until it was done.

By then it was June. The story had gone galloping off in its own direction, so of course the colleague who’d asked the question never saw this. But I did share it with some of my other colleagues who thoroughly enjoyed it. It was too long to be a short story and too short to be a novella so it lay with me until I returned to Bahrain and shared it with some of my young Bahraini colleagues.

“You have to publish it”, they insisted.

“How do you know about so many of our old traditions? Like the ‘mashata, the dallal…”

“These are being forgotten…”

Finally, I was able to publish it. But that’s why, the opening lines are…

How can I explain that sort of heat to you?

Dry. The air so hot you can hardly breathe. The sun: a high, burning, intense fire in the heavens. You can’t look up to see it. It is shrouded in a heat haze, so that although one is aware of a single heat source, the entire dome above seems like a pulsating radiator reflecting that relentless heat back to the baking earth below.

In such a land nothing lives, save a few daring palms that would cheat the heat, and not let it extract their moisture by thickening their trunks and shredding their leaves, or scrub trees, those tenacious acacias – gnarled and thorny, husbanding their water and sap, even their chlorophyll into the tiniest imaginable leaflets – extracting from the unforgiving environment more cleverly than Shylock, life. In this inexorably cruel environment, is it any wonder that trust is a precious commodity, almost as valuable as water?

And love? It is a rare jewel. It lives as the cactus flower, bright, showy and flamboyant, but only for a brief while. It is a thumbing of the nose, from that plump succulent stem with its spiny leaves, at the heat and wasteland around it.

Such was the love that I had found so very long ago on a tiny island, just east of Saudi Arabia, called Bahr’ein, because of its two seas, the salty one that flowed around it and the sweet water sea that lay hidden both underground and beneath the seabed. So much like us, we who call ourselves Bahraini, with our salty and crusty exteriors hiding the sweet softness beneath.”

You can read the rest at any of the links provided at my publisher’s page here: http://www.ex-l-ence.com/Desert-Flower.php

As for the pen name? Ah, that’s another story.

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Apr4

Corpoetry gets another 5 star review!

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When I first wrote Corporate Laughter, the first poem of what eventually grew into the collection I have titled Corpoetry, I had no idea that it would garner the kind of reviews that David Hollywood and now Robert Cubitt have given it!

Robert’s review is so refreshing – it’s frank and in-depth and by a complete stranger. When I sent Corpoetry to him for a review, Robert wrote back to me and said, “If I can’t give it a favourable review, I won’t review it at all.” Blunt. But I like blunt.

Phrases from his review that really thrust home for me include:
“The poems are short, use nice simple metaphors and analogies, but get to the very heart of the subject like a scalpel cutting into flesh.”

And of course, as any writer I was and I am, really delighted with:
“When I was asked to review this book the idea didn’t fill me with joy, but I love a challenge and I thought it might be challenging to have to find something positive to say about yet more poetry, but I needn’t have worried. There’s plenty of positive things to say about this collection and I’m more than happy to say them.”

The link provided above will take you directly to Robert’s review. He’s got some great “writer-worthy” material on it!

Thank you Robert!
Corpoetry is available here:
http://www.ex-l-ence.com/Corpoetry.php
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