J A GORDON’S DIARY

A Capital Time

As I write this on November 3rd 2010 I’m waiting for the first sight of the printed copies of my new book ‘A Capital Time’, Book III in the Chronicles of Eternity series. As you can imagine it’s quite an emotional moment when you see your work in print, all beautifully bound and enclosed in its bright, shiny cover. When you’re writing a book, there’s plenty of opportunity to change things if you don’t like them or you feel that they don’t work but when, at last, it’s in print, it’s too late and, as you skim through the crisp white pages, looking at your words in final form, you pray that you still like what you see and you aren’t thinking ’Oh I wish I’d used a different word there and that comma’s in the wrong place’.

The good news though is that I’ve had such warm and encouraging feedback about ‘Moments in Time’ and ‘The Weight of Time’ that I feel I must be doing something right. There’s a lot of interest in the new book and a good number of advance sales bode well for its success and the continuity of interest in the series.

The launch party for ‘A Capital Time’ will be here in Shropshire on 19th November in the presence of Emperor Nero and I hope that some of the photographs of what promises to be a riotous evening will be respectable enough to be put onto the website. Keep a look out for these!

But I need to ask a favour of you, my readers - please put a review or, even better, a review of all three books, on Amazon. In order to do this, you needn’t have bought your copy from Amazon, you just need to have bought something from Amazon at some stage so that the company recognises you as a purchaser. The review needn’t be long, nor detailed - just say how you felt about the book(s). It would also be really helpful if the books could be made part of one or more of the online discussions on Amazon as that gets the word out there to more readers.

I’d like to assure everyone who’s bought my books in the past that I’ll be busy writing Book IV from January 2011 onwards and to say a big ’Thank you’ to my husband Ray and great friend Moira who read my work as I write it for their wonderful support to me in what would otherwise be a solitary occupation.

I hope that you find this new book as enjoyable as its predecessors and, as always, I love to hear from you.

The Weight of Time

I’m writing this on 5th November at what is an exciting time for me – just two weeks away from publication of ‘The Weight of Time’, book II in the Chronicles series. The book will be launched here in Shropshire at our home with a party on the evening of Friday 20th November at which Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni will give a speech before I read a suitably tantalising excerpt but which will give nothing away about the book’s plot. We had a really successful launch here for ‘Moments in Time’ in March this year and we’re looking forward to repeating that for the new book.

Followers of the fortunes of Graecus and his men will be pleased to know that ‘The Weight of Time’ picks up their tale from where ‘Moments in Time’ left them, making their way towards Dubris having landed on a pebbly beach in Britannia after their troubled crossing of the English channel and takes it forward to the clash with Boudicca and beyond but there are many twists and turns in the story which surprised me while I was writing it and I hope will provide the reader with thrilling insights into, and the events leading up to, the famous battle with the Warrior Queen. There are also intimate portraits of some of the historical names from the Legions, details of life in a large marching camp and information about herbs and poisons as well as how to make false teeth from natural materials.

We (my husband, Ray, and I) have had really encouraging feedback from readers of ‘Moments in Time’ and get a lot of pleasure from the fact that the Chronicles’ fans are people of all ages, from all walks of life and that the story appeals to men and women alike; Ray and I had a wonderful trip on the Queen Mary II in the summer, sailing from Southampton to New York and back after a five day stopover in the Big Apple and used the opportunity of being onboard with an amazing variety of people from all over the world to publicise the book and send it back with our fellow passengers to places as far away as Canada, New Zealand, Angola, Australia and South Africa. It was wonderful to be able to spend time over a cup of tea or a glass of wine in the elegant lounges of QMII talking to other voyagers about their lives and hobbies and telling them about my book before producing a copy for them to take back to their country as one of the Chronicles ‘Ambassadors’ to tell their friends and family about it. One lady we met on board so enjoyed the book that she sat up all night reading it as we sped our way at 34 knots per hour towards New York.

Of course, being in New York was too good an opportunity to miss and we met many lovely people in shops, restaurants and bars who were interested to meet a writer and enthusiastic about reading something new and different. Ray followed me from counter to counter in Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor and, as I sampled all the perfumes and face creams on offer, he chatted to the assistants giving out my card and whetting their appetites for a good read. He is worth his weight in gold.

Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy ‘The Weight of Time’ as much as I enjoyed writing it.

A video of Boudicca’s speech giving her opinion of the new book will be posted on this site and on YouTube as soon after 20th November as possible.

Moments in Time

As I’m a new writer, I’d like to tell you a little about myself. I’m 57 and married. We live in rural Shropshire with our two dogs.

I began writing three years ago but was an in-house lawyer for more than twenty years working with various blue-chip companies.
I trained as a barrister but found corporate life just as challenging as working in chambers and was lucky enough to travel widely as part of my job.

I was made redundant during the last recession and worked as a consultant to small businesses for ten years. Ceasing to be a long distance commuter gave me more time to think about things which had been at the back of my mind for some time and I began to read about reincarnation.

At first, my reading was more in the nature of satisfying my curiosity but, as I read more widely, I began to see that there was a much deeper aspect to it than just the spectacle of a stage hypnotist succeeding, for example, in taking a non-French speaker back to a life in 17th century Paris.

I began to see similarities in the beliefs of the major world religions which have reincarnation as a central tenet and realised that there is a core of wisdom which is common to all those religions. I later came to see that much of that wisdom is shared by pagan religions.

As I pursued my study of reincarnation, there were times when I felt that I was getting out of my depth and that I should concentrate instead on a more conventional subject but, five years ago, a very nasty experience which left me emotionally bruised and battered, led me to question conventional thinking even more than hitherto.

I began working with a Jungian practitioner and learned something of the workings of the human soul.

Much of this work was intensely painful but also exhilarating and enlightening.Out of this life-changing experience, I learned that the most important thing in the universe, the only thing that matters, is love.

Love, unconditional love, changes everything which it touches.

The Chronicles of Eternity is a love story and my great hope is that it will deeply enrich the lives of those who read it.