For the two weeks while I was in Jersey just recently, I was living two lives. The first life was my normal, Mumbai professional life but, due to my being in the UK, it took place between the hours of 5 am and 2 pm GMT. This left enough time for me to live a second life during the afternoons and evenings. This second life was one of a book-touring author.
Anyone who has ever tried to coordinate a playdate with me will know that I am a morning person. So is Dylan. And so, as might be expected, is Jasper. In fact, Jasper is such an early bird that he only understands a lie-in to be an African big cat with a fluffy mane and a hunger for limping zebras. My hard-wired circadian rhythm meant that starting my day two hours before dawn wasn’t too painful for me. Quite the opposite, to be honest, because not only did I get to squeeze two days into the time normally assigned for one, but I also got to have two breakfasts every day: one at about 6 am and another at 10 am. Both usually involved hot cross buns.
IMAGE: pre-dawn workstation and a portal to each of my lives. Oh, and my first breakfast of hot cross buns.
My stint in Jersey was the first time since Jasper was extracted, that I have only had myself to think about. All I needed to do between my alarm going off and my first call of the day was to fall out of bed, pull on some warm, vaguely presentable clothes (cold weather gear makes it easier to hide a half-arsed effort at getting dressed, I find), tumble down the stairs, nespress myself a hot coffee and log into my laptop. If my first call happened to be a video call, I would have to add a step to put on a face in order to avoid scaring an unsuspecting colleague but, even then, the predawn darkness outside the window and an energy-saving lamp behind me hid a multitude of horrors.
Over the years, I have realised I have a bit of a thing about timezones. While living in Beijing or Yangon, I got very used to being ahead of the rest of the world and loved being able to finish my day just as others in Europe or the US were getting started. When I lived in New York, however, I hated being the last to know everything and never could quite shake the feeling that I was ‘working late’ simply because my time zone dictated that I was the last of the international team to log off every day. India gives me just enough of a head start that I don’t feel like a laggard but, I now see, is close enough to GMT that, should I find myself in the UK again, it is entirely possible to keep Indian hours without becoming nocturnal. Of course, it also helps that nobody rolls into my Mumbai office until around 10:30 am so, at 5.5 hours behind, I wasn’t even late.
My double lifestyle was very much enabled by the generosity of my book tour host (also known as my mother, or Jo, to those not directly descended from her) who maintained hot cross bun stock levels, let me commandeer the living room every morning and even provided chauffeur services on several afternoons. When, at around lunch time every day, I emerged from my ‘office’ in search of lunchables, food was already prepared, too, leaving me with no responsibilities besides living my two lives.
And boy did I take advantage of the opportunity to get out and promote Not Quite to Plan. Since the launch event last October, my book promo activities have been limited to those which can be performed from my mobile phone (WhatsApping and Instagramming, begging the people I strongly believe to be in possession of a copy to write a review or, if that’s too many words and logins, at least to take a photo and tag me on social media); those which can be performed in my office during working hours (setting up a bookshop on top of a cupboard and adding a copy to the office library cart); those which can be outsourced (asking family members to send out books to giveaway winners or to gift copies to everyone they know). I have done a couple of media interviews on Talk Radio Europe and in the Jersey Evening Post, but if I didn’t believe the adage ‘media coverage does not equal book sales’ before, I certainly do now. Still, I am in this for the long haul and know from my real life job in marketing that awareness takes time to build.
While in Jersey, however, without the weight of a toddler on my shoulders (literally and figuratively) and finishing my day job while the sun was still high in the sky (high for winter, anyway), I was as free* as the proverbial bird to get out and find ways to talk about my book.
*As free as a bird whose passport was with the immigration authorities.
I had a short list of ideas as to where and how I might find the people I expected to be most interested in my book: mums. That’s not to say the book isn’t for non-mums, but I have to set my sights on a bullseye cohort who I believe hold the most power to enjoy and subsequently talk about and share my book, and that’s mums. Mums tend to hangout in child-friendly places, many of which are arguably more child-friendly than they are adult-friendly (think cramped playzone tube slides and underheated public swimming pools). I did not have to entertain these options, for I was far luckier. My first port of book-promo call was at the most child-friendly and mum-friendly playgroup imaginable: The Sheep Shed.
I was very generously allowed to pitch my wares from a table and chair right under a heater (essential for we tropical types), beside some comfy armchairs and just next to the farmyard toy section of the shed. Once I was all set up, I began to feel like a fraud. Not because I doubt my writer credentials but because I didn’t have Jasper with me. The Sheep Shed was our thing over the summer when we spent six weeks in Jersey. It was a surreal experience to be surrounded by 3-foot mayhem machines without having to worry about the whereabouts or behaviour of my own. This, of course, was a good thing in that it left me free to talk to the mums: when they let me. In a uniform show of classic British don’t-invade-my-space-unless-invited-ness, my proximity to the table of books correlated directly to the number of people who tried to take in the book through some almost imperceptible side-eye without so much as breaking stride. By moving away from the table by as little as two steps, I could double the number of browsers. And so I spent much of the playgroup trying to find the perfect hover spot from where I could be available to answer questions but without pressuring a sale. It was a dance. And not an elegant one.
In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I spoke with old friends and new ones about the book, about Myanmar and about India. I relieved myself of eight copies and drove back to my mother’s house with a real sense of joy; proud of myself, excited about how many questions people had about both the story and the writing of the book, and motivated to find more ways to get it out into the world.
Next on my list of ideas were a few locations in town: St Helier, for those of you not overly familiar with Jersey. There is only really one town on the island, and within that town there is only really one high street which makes shopping trips highly efficient. I wasn’t shopping on this occasion, however. I was doing my humble best to act like a confident, published author.
First I went to Waterstones to ask if they had a copy of my book. I played briefly with the idea of mystery shopping for my book—pretending to be a genuine customer in search of the copy that the store manager had promised me (over email) would be purchased for the store. But I decided that I was probably better just to be who I was (and still am, for that matter) and to appeal to the store’s more official side than to their staff’s reportedly sassy, unhelpful side which would then lead to me awkwardly backtracking when I had to reveal my true identity. I had a quick look on the shelves first, of course: we Brits never will never pass up an opportunity to avoid human interaction. And then I had a longer look just in case I had missed it the first time. Sadly, I couldn’t find it in the local Jersey author section, the travel section, the reference section or the biography section. And so, to the desk I went, to explain what I was looking for and why I believed it to be on a shelf somewhere. The cashier arranged his face in a ‘here we go again’ expression, did a quick search in the computer and failed completely to hide his disbelief as he exclaimed ‘we do have a copy! In the biography section!’.
We both traipsed back up the stairs to search for it. And again, we both came up empty. He explained that biographies were alphabetised by the last name of the subject/ person being written about. I have written under the amalgamated name of Milla Chaplin Rae, so I looked through C, and then I looked through R. And then suddenly, just as the cashier was setting off downstairs again to check if the system held any further clues, I found it—among the Ps.
I believe I was measured in my thanks to the cashier, and then spent ten very silly minutes shooting videos, taking photos and generally making highly unprofessional mischief in the biography section. To my knowledge, there was nobody else on the top floor of Waterstones St Helier while I did this, but if there were, they did the right thing by remaining hidden in such close proximity to a madwoman. It felt like everything and nothing all at once: I was so excited to see my creation sitting on a shelf surrounded by other things created by other people which are definitely described as books; I was a little sad that all that work came out as something so small (and that the Waterstones copies definitely do not look as beautiful as the ones I had printed in India); I was sorry that I hadn’t brought someone with me to celebrate the moment I got to see my book on a shelf; I wondered how I was meant to feel at seeing my book on a shelf, which is silly, because clearly there is no right or wrong way to feel. I wonder if it’s possible to be secretly starstruck by oneself? Either way, I enjoyed the feelings as they rose and fell inside me and then, 75 photos and 300 video attempts later, I had what I needed and I waltzed back out into the empty high street (it was 4pm on a Thursday) with a spring in my step and a grin from ear to ear.
IMAGE: Waterstones biography section. Not Quite to Plan is on the middle column, 3rd shelf from the top, in the middle.
From the fist of literary capitalism I set off for the soul of reader egalitarianism: the Library. I wanted to drop off a copy of my book because I would like to see it plasticked and catalogued, but I learned that it is, in fact, my duty more than my choice to do this. According to the British Legal deposit act of 2003, every UK published work must be deposited at the British Library, which I knew about. But according to Jersey law, a legal deposit of every book published locally/ by a local author must also be given to them. That one, legal deposit copy sits on file, in the reference section, and as many other copies as the author wants to give, can be lent out to library card holders. I handed over three copies: one out of duty, two out of generosity.
The third and final stop on my St Helier walking book tour was actually meant to be my second, but I had chickened out and walked straight past the shop on my first attempt. While not necessarily known for its books, Harriet & Rose is a beautiful, boutique, gift emporium with an aesthetic in which I could see my cover art settling very nicely. Plus, they have a strong tradition of championing ‘local’, whether that’s artists, designers or authors. On my second lap of town, high on the knowledge that my book IS on the shelf in Waterstones and channelling all the positive responses I had received at the Sheep Shed a day earlier, I wandered into Harriet and Rose with the day’s last copy of Not Quite to Plan in my handbag. I pitched myself as a local author with a book I believed would appeal to their clientele and with a very attractive wholesale price (a benefit of having had it printed in India) and to my absolute delight, they agreed to have a read and get back to me on whether and if yes, how many copies of it, they would be willing to stock. They took six copies, all signed and they are now in pride of place on the mantelpiece!
My stay in Jersey came to a close much sooner than I had anticipated because my Indian work visa (the reason for my trip) was issued in record time (less than 24 hours). Something I had pre-arranged before arriving in Jersey was a visit to a local book club, to join one of their evening gatherings to talk about Not Quite to Plan. The trouble was, the date earmarked for my appearance was February 7th, but my visa and passport were already back in my hand by the 29th of January putting an abrupt stop to my mum-guilt free ‘holiday’ from Dylan and Jasper. My default assumption is that people are busy, always, at all times and on all dates—too busy, surely, to have a last-minute book club thrust upon them a week earlier than scheduled which was already a week earlier than due—and I really hate to inconvenience or disrupt people, but I was so upset at the thought of not being able to attend, that when the book club host, Penny Byrne (another local author, of children’s book fame) offered to try and shift the date forwards to accommodate my early departure, I agreed without hesitation.
What I didn’t know about this book club was that the books were only the fourth most appealing thing about the get-togethers: after the people, the snacks and the wine (not necessarily in such diplomatic order). And so, a live author plus snacks, plus wine, plus books was all these ladies needed to hear. I have never attended a book club—neither as a reader nor a writer. I always expected I would enjoy one (after all, I like books, I like clubs and if there is wine, well, say no more) but, having missed out on joining one while I was young and in control of my own time, and having heard recently that friends of mine who were previously book club goers are sadly no longer, due to the aforementioned ages and time constraints, I had resigned myself to never having the chance. What this book club showed me, however, was that I am not too late. This book club’s majority membership was made up of women who have survived the gauntlet that is motherhood: Grandmas. What’s more, the format seemed more up my alley: instead of the usual (I think?) ‘let’s read the same book and discuss it together after’, this club took the form of ‘maybe some of us read a book last month and brought it along to share with others, but if you didn’t, then here are some snacks and wine. Settle in.’
The room was warmed by both the real log fire and the jovial chatter, although I still felt a wave of nerves as I took my spot at the front. I don’t know why I get nervous at the prospect of talking about a subject on which I have quite literally written a book, but I do. Soon, however, with a glass of wine within arm’s reach, and several familiar faces in the audience (a happy surprise in some cases) I was away and suddenly we had eaten up two hours of high-intensity question time and several packs of biscuits. My mum came along to the session and added some valuable heckles when I skipped over or totally forgot some of the more interesting details. The group were fascinated by Jasper’s origin story, by our former life in Myanmar and our life now in India. They were interested in Jasper’s upbringing and how different it is from how mine was in Jersey; how I am balancing my own cultural values with those of the society in which he feels most at home; how we do our grocery shopping and just how Indian his accent is at the moment. The more I responded, the more I confirmed to myself that I am on the right track thinking India will be my next book.
I was still buzzing from the book club when I boarded my plane two days later. A plane which, according to the captain ‘had difficulty waking up this morning’ leading to an hour delay on departure and then which had to pull up from an attempted landing due to ‘an obstacle on the runway’. The obstacle turned out to be another plane and my connection was well and truly missed leaving me with a day to kill at Heathrow. But if there is one thing my personal branding presents me as good at handling, in any of my lives, it’s a last minute change of plans.
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