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back story and prepub notes
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Jamie and the Tree Troll
stories from Anna's Wood
story notes:- June 21, 2023
Jamie and the Tree Troll is a rural
fantasy story for children which is set in a real location in the South Downs
in Sussex in the hamlet of Clayton near Ditchling - which is on the North side
of the Downs from Brighton.
I wrote it for my nephew James Huggett in
fulfillment of a promise I had made to his mother - my sister Anna - in 2003.
Anna (who was suffering horribly from a terminal brain tumour) asked
me to write a story for each of her children - in character like
Alexander Woyte and the
Goblins. She heard the 1st of those before she died and I said I would write
a story for Jamie when he was a few years older so I could incorporate elements
of his charactert.
Jamie and the Tree Troll is part of a story set I
have called - stories from Anna's Wood.
The 1st story in this set -
Princess Laura and the Unsuitable
Dragon Suitors (written for Jamie's sister Laura) was actually written in
Clayton but set in a fantasy location which I called the Middle Kingdom.
The
2nd story in this set - Jamie and the Tree Troll - is located in the real
location of Clayton and in modern times (2005 approx).
The first
chapters of the Tree Troll story were completed and shared with the family in
2006. Written as a series during vacations the story was concluded in 2009.
The complete novella - Jamie and the Tree Troll - was published here
on this page on goblinsearch.com in 2019.
In 2023 I decided that this
story - like many others on my author website could benefit from being edited
again and slightly rewritten to make them more accessible to a wider range of
readers.
It's the 4th story (of about 8) on my rewrite and republish
list this year.
So - all being well - Jamie and the Tree Troll will be
published as an ebook and as a paperback in August 2023. | | |
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| Gunnar the goblin king always liked to get a
sneak preview of the news so he could cut out the most handsome looking photos
showing him | | |
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news
July 6, 2023
Jamie and the Tree TrollI'm currently working on the rewrite
and conversion to ebook format of my children's story
Jamie and
the Tree Troll - which is set in the South Downs near Ditchling in the
county of Sussex - in a hamlet called Clayton.
I'm
using 4 different writing tools to produce and combine the various textual
fragments of my books. The final stage (for me) being working online in the
Reedsy Book Editor.
For ease of navigation I thought it would help me
to mock up a temporary placeholder cover - which you can see here.
Its
main purpose is to make it easier for me to open the correct files and remind
myself what I'm working on as I'm doing active edits on 5 books at the moment.
I
remembered that 6 months before I started writing the first chapter of the Jamie
Tree Troll story (in the summer of 2005) my wife Janet had shot a short
documentary video on her phone of some of the real-life characters in the story
setting out into the woods around their house on an expedition to see if
they could rediscover the hole in the ground which we thought might be the
entrance to the Tree Troll's lair.
Jamie (then age 5) carried a small
dead tree which was almost twice as tall as he was - with the intention of
using it to measure how deep the hole was if he did manage to find it. As it
happens - it wasn't the right place.
In those days the resolution of
camera images was only 340 pixels wide so the video quality didn't look great
when I looked this morning. And for privacy reasons I chose a small part of the
frame grab which excluded the people in the scene. But the fuzzy image is an
authentic capture of the feel of the setting where the story is based.
It's
likely that the real book cover will be entirely different to the placeholder
image you see here. Jamie's sister Laura - who was also on that February 2005
expedition to find the Tree Troll's lair - and who recently (in 2023) created
the cover images for Princess Laura
and the Unsuitable Dragon Suitors - will design a cover which suits the
story. As soon as I've finished editing and rewriting it. The expected
publication date is August 2023. | | | |
