Lisa Manterfield

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September 12, 2019 - Lisa Manterfield Leave a Comment

THE SMALLEST THING Audiobook Blog Tour Starts Today

The new audiobook of The Smallest Thing is heading out on tour!

Beginning today, September 12, through September 18, you can follow Em as she visits audiobook bloggers and reviewers. I’ll be doing interviews and Q&As, as well as sharing some Top Ten lists. some of the bloggers will be sharing their reviews of The Smallest Thing.

Here are all the stops Em and I will be making:

Sep. 12th:
Valerie Ullmer | Romance Author (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview)
Viviana MacKade (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Top 10 List)

Sep. 13th:
Locks, Hooks and Books (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
The Book Junkie Reads . . . (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
Turning Another Page (Review, Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview)

Sep. 14th:
Country Road Reviews (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
All the Ups and Downs (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview)

Sep. 15th:
Jazzy Book Reviews (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Top 10 List)
Nesie’s Place (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview)

Sep. 16th:
Reading A Page Turner (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
Dab of Darkness Book Reviews (Review)
Eileen Troemel (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Top 10 List)

Sep. 17th:
Smada’s Book Smack (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
Nyx Blogs (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Top 10 List)
Always Love Me Some Books (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)

Sep. 18th:
My Creatively Random Life (Review, Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
KayBee’s Bookshelf, A Literary Blog (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
The World As I See It (Review, Top 10 List)

As the tour progresses, I’ll be updating these links so you find each blogger’s post. I do hope you’ll join me; it’s going to be a lot of fun.

You can find out more about the tour—and sign up to be a host stop—at the Audiobookworm Promotions website.

Filed Under: Book Love, The Story Behind the Story Tagged With: audiobook, audiobookworm, blog tour, Eyam, fiction, The Smallest Thing, thriller Leave a Comment

September 3, 2019 - Lisa Manterfield Leave a Comment

The Smallest Thing Audio Tour

The new audiobook of The Smallest Thing is heading out on tour next week!

From September 12-18, you can follow Em as she visits audiobook bloggers and reviewers. I’ll be doing interviews and Q&As, as well as sharing some Top Ten lists. some of the bloggers will be sharing their reviews of The Smallest Thing.

Here are all the stops Em and I will be making:

Sep. 12th:
Valerie Ullmer | Romance Author (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Giveaway)
Viviana MacKade (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Top 10 List, Giveaway)

Sep. 13th:
Locks, Hooks and Books (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
The Book Junkie Reads . . . (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
Turning Another Page (Review, Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Giveaway)

Sep. 14th:
Country Road Reviews (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
All the Ups and Downs (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Giveaway)

Sep. 15th:
Jazzy Book Reviews (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Top 10 List, Giveaway)
Nesie’s Place (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Giveaway)

Sep. 16th:
Reading A Page Turner (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
Dab of Darkness Book Reviews (Review, Giveaway)
Eileen Troemel (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Author Interview, Top 10 List, Giveaway)

Sep. 17th:
Smada’s Book Smack (Review, Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
Nyx Blogs (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Top 10 List, Giveaway)
Always Love Me Some Books (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)

Sep. 18th:
My Creatively Random Life (Review, Spotlight + Audio Excerpt, Giveaway)
KayBee’s Bookshelf, A Literary Blog (Spotlight + Audio Excerpt)
The World As I See It (Review, Top 10 List, Giveaway)

As the tour progresses, I’ll be updating these links so you find each blogger’s post. I do hope you’ll join me; it’s going to be a lot of fun.

You can find out more about the tour—and sign up to be a host stop—at the Audiobookworm Promotions website.

Filed Under: Book Love, Cool Stuff for Book Nerds Tagged With: audiobook, audiobookworm, blog tour, book review, fiction, The Smallest Thing, YA Leave a Comment

August 20, 2019 - Lisa Manterfield 4 Comments

Eyam: The Plague Village that Inspired THE SMALLEST THING

Imagine you live in an idyllic English village. Suddenly your friends and neighbors begin falling ill and dying of a deadly infectious disease. In order to stop the spread of this virus to the surrounding villages and beyond, you and your neighbors make a monumental decision. You quarantine your village; no one comes in, no one goes out.

For months you isolate yourselves, relying on the kindness of surrounding neighbors to provide food and supplies. You wait and watch, while the disease rips through families, sparing some lives and taking others. When it’s all over, 260 people—more than two thirds of the village—are dead, but the contagion has been stopped, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people—and your village will be remembered for centuries to come for its courage and self-sacrifice.

Sounds like a great premise for a novel, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s a true story. This is the story of the plague village of Eyam, a small village in the north of England, not far from where I grew up.

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In the mid-1600s The Great Plague ravaged London, killing more than 100,000 people. Thanks to a stowaway flea in a bolt of cloth, the disease made its way to Eyam, some 150 miles to the north. Lead by the local vicar, Reverend Mompesson, the villagers made the courageous decision to isolate themselves and prevent the plague from spreading further.

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I’ve always been fascinated by this part of history and the personal stories that have endured. There’s the story of Emmott Syddall, engaged to a boy in the next village. The two lovers continued their affair across the quarantine boundary from opposing riverbanks. Their story is commemorated in a stained glass window in the church.

There’s the story of villagers leaving money in a pot of vinegar (to disinfect it) in exchange for supplies from surrounding villages. And there are the tragic stories, such as Elizabeth Hancock, who buried her husband and six children, and yet never became infected.

I first heard these stories as a young girl visiting Eyam and they’ve stuck with me ever since. They’re an important part of my local history and I’ve always wanted to find a way to share them with a wider audience. I didn’t want to write historical fiction (plus Geraldine Brooks already did it, and undoubtedly better than I could have, in her 2002 novel Year of Wonders), and writing a contemporary version of the story was fraught with roadblocks, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine and technology.

But I really wanted to tell this story, so I started writing. I started with the characters of Emmott Syddall and Roland Torre, and wrote some scenes with them. And I kept writing, until a new story started to emerge.

The story evolved, as stories do, in ways I could never have imagined, until it became my novel THE SMALLEST THING.

You’ll have to read the book for a more intimate tour of Em’s village, but for now, I’ll leave you with a few more snaps of Eyam, taken from one of my research trips.

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You can still see the Plague Cottages, where George Viccars, the first victim lived. The cottages are still inhabited. You can also see the church and churchyard where some of the victims were buried.

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One of my favorite spots is Cucklett Delf, where Emmott and Roland allegedly met, where outdoor services were held during the quarantine, and where a memorial service is held each year to commemorate the incredible sacrifice.

You can learn more about Eyam at their excellent museum, where you’ll also find copies of The Smallest Thing.

The Smallest Thing is now available as an audiobook, narrated by the brilliant Charlie Sanderson.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff for Book Nerds, The Story Behind the Story Tagged With: audiobook, Eyam, fiction, museum, plague, The Smallest Thing, true story, village 4 Comments

July 24, 2019 - Lisa Manterfield 6 Comments

Falling in Love with My Book All Over Again

When I was eight, I had scrambled eggs for breakfast every single day for two weeks straight. By the end of that time, I was so sick of them I didn’t eat an egg of any kind again for more than twenty years. 

That’s a little bit what it’s like to write a book. There comes a point in the writing process where the author just gets sick of her story and, no matter how much she once adored it, they fall out of love.

I thought about The Smallest Thing for years before I started writing it, trying to figure out how best to tell the story that was in my heart. Should it be a historical retelling (been done) or should I tell the love story of Em and Ro, but with a modern twist (great, except the real ending isn’t very happily-ever-after). It wasn’t until I started writing scenes in my notebook, exploring Em and her world, that the book solidified in my mind.

Once I committed to that idea, it took me three years to draft, revise, and finish the book ready for publication. During that time I read the book dozens of times. There are scenes I’ve probably read into triple digits. The twists in the story were no longer surprises, and there were parts I grew to loathe. At some point I was so familiar with every word in the story I was sick of it. 

Falling in Love Again

But the process of producing the audiobook version of The Smallest Thing has made me fall in love with Em’s story all over again.

The audio files for the book were delivered last week. (Yes!) My job since then has been to listen to them and read along with the book to make sure everything is how I want it before the files go off for the final stages of production.

It is a very strange process to listen to someone else read the words I wrote. Even though I have read this book dozens of times, hearing the narrator Charlie Sanderson, read it, breathed new life into it.

As I mentioned in this post, Charlie is from the same part of England as me and grew up not too far from Eyam. She knowsthe characters in this book and she brought them to life in a way I couldn’t have imagined.

Take Mrs. Glover, for example. She plays a small but important role in the story. Charlie brought the perfect personality to her so that she lends a bit of comic relief, much needed as the story gets darker. I’m finding myself laughing every time Mrs. G opens her mouth.

Listen to an excerpt from Chapter One of The Smallest Thing here

I’ve also been crying, which is quite unexpected, given how well I know the story and that I have a reputation for being a bit stoic. But Charlie has found poignant scenes that touched me unexpectedly. 

There’s a scene where Em walks by a small memorial for her dad’s sister, a woman Em never got to meet. Auntie Sandra disappeared on a backpacking trip as a young woman and was never found. It’s a tiny moment in the story, a bit of backstory I wrote to help explain why Em’s dad keeps such a tight rein on her … because he knows firsthand that bad things happen to good people. He’s strict, not because he’s mean, but because he’s afraid for Em. My own dad was strict in a similar way (although I didn’t appreciate that as a teen) so hearing this little moment touched me deeply and quite unexpectedly.

Writing to be Heard

I’m learning a lot about my writing from listening to it read by someone else. I’m learning that text acronyms, like IMHO and LOL, work fine of paper but do not translate to the spoken word. I’m hearing how dialogue can light up a scene—a reminder that I need to get out of my character’s head and get her talking to others. 

And I’m solidifying something I’ve learned from reading books I love: that minor supporting characters, like Mrs. Glover, can be like chocolate chips in a cake—delicious, even though small, and something you look forward to encountering often.

Assuming I don’t encounter any major problems in the files (and I don’t expect to) the audiobook will be available across all outlets in mid-August.

If you’d like to get release updates and have the chance to win a copy of the audiobook, you can sign up for newsletter here.

Filed Under: Book Love, The Story Behind the Story, The Writing Life Tagged With: audiobook, Charlie Sanderson, Eyam, I hate my book, The Smallest Thing, writing, writing process 6 Comments

June 18, 2019 - Lisa Manterfield 22 Comments

Meet the Voice of Em

This week, the audiobook of The Smallest Thing went into pre-production. I am trying (and failing) to contain my excitement, but honestly, I cannot wait to hear Em and her story come to life. The person who’s going to make that happen is Charlie Sanderson.

Charlie is the voice over artist who’ll be narrating The Smallest Thing. I knew from the second I heard her audition that she was the one. She captured Em’s attitude perfectly, and really brought to life the characters and personality of the village. Wait until you hear her Mrs. Glover.

While Charlie has a talent for accents, Em’s voice won’t be too much of a stretch for her. Charlie was born in Yorkshire (like me!), grew up in Derbyshire, and went to school just a few miles away from the real-life village of Eyam. Really, it was meant to be.

View this post on Instagram

#chuffedtobits to be marking up my second to next read #thesmallestthing by @lisamanterfield_ so rarely get to read in my own accent!!!! #derbyshiredales #voiceartist #actress #audiobooks #thriller

A post shared by Charlie Sanderson (@countrylassactress) on Jun 17, 2019 at 10:25am PDT

You can find out more about Charlie’s work at her website, charlie-sanderson.com. You can also find on her Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Just be warned: she is Dog-mum to a very cute black lab puppy, who is a natural for the camera.

I can’t wait to share samples of the early chapters from Charlie. Meanwhile, here is the new audiobook cover for The Smallest Thing. It will be available later this summer.

Every month, from now until publication, I’ll be offering my newsletter subscribers the chance to win pre-launch copies of the new audiobook. If you’re not yet subscribed, click here. You’ll also get some free readable goodies and news from me once or twice a month. Good luck!

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: audiobook, Charlie Sanderson, Eyam, The Smallest Thing, thriller, voice over 22 Comments

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