What do you make of ‘Happiness By the Way’? Just the working title of the new book which is obsessing my every waking, sleeping & bathing hour. Particularly bathing. If we only had a shower, I doubt I’d ever write anything again.

This is by way of an excuse for not updating the column to include the hugely important information that Lions & Liquorice is to be published in the USA this summer, under the new title: Vanity & Vexation. The American publishers didn’t reckon much to the original title – maybe with reason. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked just how I came up with ‘Lions & Liquorice’ in the first place. The answer is I scrabbled around frantically to find two words which echoed the rhythm and alliteration of Pride and Prejudice. And having come up with these two, I then had – hastily – to incorporate them into the story. Thus, the pub (with cricket team) became the Black/Red Lion, and the moviethe fearsome Mary was so desperate to make sprung from the Liquorice industry of Yorkshire.

I just happened to remember a Radio 4 Doc a friend of mine made about Liquorice, full of extraordinary fact-lets about liquorice not just being, like Rhubarb, a Yorkshire speciality (grown round Pontefract, natch) but being used as a medicine – and even in the manufacture of fire extinguishers. Not many people know that, etc. But I guess I have to accept that, as a title, it’s a tad obscure. So, Vanity & Vexation it will now become t’other side of the Atlantic. July 2004, publication details now included on the Lions & Liquorice page on the site – and it’s already listed on Amazon.

Must get back to my work crisis. Aaaargh.



  posted by Kate @ 9:59:47 AM