Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "family-sagas"

I woke up early this morning and it had arrived. The book we downloaded onto Amazon Kindle, not long before midnight, had arrived well within the predicted twelve hours labour. How many little Amazon Elves had been toiling away all night, typing furiously at the 195,000 words? I downloaded it onto my Kindle, checked the beginning and the end were there and welcomed our fourth Kindle baby into the world.
On Wednesday it will be our first anniversary as Kindle Self Publishers. Cyberspouse has produced the covers with camera and computer and provided calm technical support!
What started as a short story is on the way to becoming a trilogy. 'Three Ages of Man' is the preparallequel to 'Brief Encounters of the Third Kind'. A nameless character walked into the first novel uninvited, helped steer the plot and became a favourite. He narrates the second novel. These novels do not have a genre; family sagas that explore how ordinary people cope when faced with the extraordinary. The universe is unknowable and the events that happen to them could happen to any of us!
To find out more visit goodreads, Amazon Kindle and www.ccsidewriter.co.uk. I hope you enjoy a good read.

Can a family saga ever end? I have just finished reading 'Casting Off' by Elizabeth Jane Howard, the fourth and last of the Cazalet Chronicles, or at least it was - the fourth was published in 1995 and recently the fifth has been published. I don't know why the author decided to revisit her characters after such a long gap, proof perhaps that authors can never bear to part with their creations. In real life few families die out completely and in fiction a family saga could theoretically continue indefinitely. BBC Radio serial 'The Archers' has been broadcast every week day for over sixty years, longer than most of the cast and listeners have been alive and encompassing countless births and deaths. Ambridge Village has changed, the technology has changed; listeners can download digitally and listen when they wish, but it is still a family saga.
But the Cazalet family story is at an end now, the author died recently at the age of ninety...unless, as in recent trends, another author decides to write a sequel.