Three-legged race
ONCE again, I am freshly back from Christian Resources Together, that great gathering of authors, publishers, and suppliers: the three legs of the Christian book-trade tripod.
This year, I had the opportunity to give a talk with my two best friends about how writing has brought us together into a trio of support, encouragement, and pomodoros (the word, based on a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, means writing as if our lives depended on it for 25 minutes, and then checking back in with the others for five minutes to confess how much of that time was spent on social media).
Our preparation for this reflected our three different ways of working: one of us sent notes in advance; one sent a complete, beautifully written script the night before; and then there I was, still feverishly scribbling bullet points into my notebook that morning.
Thankfully, a decade of shared writing has led to such a firm friendship — not to mention intimate knowledge of one another’s foibles — that neither of the other two was perturbed.
Early reader
THE closing of the Christian bookshop in Norwich has left us with only two in the whole of East Anglia (as far as I know — I would love to stand corrected). Happily for us in Bury St Edmunds, the Green Pastures bookshop comes all the way from Dereham to provide a pop-up shop.
The first Wednesday of every month is now a cosy time of browsing, coffee-drinking, and chatting with fellow bibliophiles; and the gathering grows each month, as news of the bookshop spreads.
Encouraged by the staff at Green Pastures, I applied for a Speaking Volumes grant to start a church library at St Mary’s, and have been able to spend a delicious morning choosing books so that we can have them available even while waiting for the next pop-up.
I’m thinking of buying a library stamp to fulfil childhood dreams of becoming a librarian. Once the delivery arrives, I may have to take several weeks off: I can’t imagine a way in which I could stick the bookplates into the new books without accidentally reading them all.
Sales of the unexpected
I REVISITED my past to lead a training day for GenR8, a charity that provides assemblies, workshops, and prayer spaces for schools.
Long ago, I volunteered as an actor on the school-assembly teams, before writing some of their scripts; and, whenever I go back, it’s wonderful to see faces old and new on the team.
Before leaving the house (in a hurry, as ever), I was hunting for my copy of one of my books to read from as part of my presentation. Unable to find it, I snatched up a small box of books left over from the sale table of a different event, sure that the one that I needed would be in there somewhere.
On arrival, these were taken from me by a kind welcomer and laid out beautifully across a table, complete with the QR code that I use to link customers to a payment website. By the end of the day, every book had been sold. I’ve been learning tips and tricks to sell a few books at public events, but only among friends can one sell a whole box of books entirely by accident.
Unnumbered blessings
THE church children’s team is planning this year’s Lightcraft party: a Hallowe’en alternative that both focuses on light and allows the children and youth groups to prepare their contribution to an all-age Bible Sunday service.
Last year, we took as our central Bible verse “Your word is a lamp to my feet,” and I cut out dozens of tiny footprints and placed them around the church in preparation for the children to make lamps, follow the trail, and count the footprints.
In my enthusiasm for hiding the footprints, I completely forgot that the challenge was to count them; and I realised only halfway through the event, once it was already dark, that I didn’t know how many I had hidden.
St Mary’s is a very large medieval church — it apparently boasts the longest nave of any parish church in England — and I ended up crawling up and down it by the light of my phone torch, losing count, and having to start again, while the lantern-making activity was prolonged a bit too far beyond the children’s attention span and the leaders’ patience.
This year, we are telling the parable of the woman who lights a lamp to search for a lost coin, with a very similar activity — except that someone else will be in charge of counting the wretched things before they are hidden. Words I can manage, but numbers are not my forte.
Seeds of promise
TONY COLLINS, who has worked in Christian publishing for longer than I’ve been alive, said in a memorable talk to the Association of Christian Writers: “You should always ask: will your book give as much glory to God as did the tree that was felled to make it?” — to which I can only say that I hope my books are printed on recycled paper.
I can’t compete with a tree, but I do know that books share some of the magic of trees: they produce seasonal fruit (who doesn’t have a favourite Christmas book that they’re looking forward to reading again in a few weeks time?); they sometimes live to an extraordinary age; and, every now and then, they gather people under the shade of their branches to share in the wonder of their leaves.
Amy Scott Robinson is a writer, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist.