While we don’t manage many ‘author appearances‘ (living 30 miles apart and having very different lifestyles play their part in that!) Ron and I were able to run stalls at two Mind Body Spirit fairs in Plymouth recently – yippee!
This is how they went …
(NB I regret my phone’s camera has a fault which means that every photo taken in low light comes complete with its own violet halo! I apologise for the image quality!)
Ron sitting behind our stall before the Plympton fair opened
At both the Estover and Plympton fairs, we met stallholders from events we’d attended earlier in the year.
It’s a lovely boost to see some familiar faces when you turn up in a strange place laden down with your banners and your boxes and bags!
It was fun to reconnect with them, and to strengthen those fledgling relationships. It’s even better when synchronicities occur and we can offer a solution to someone’s ‘problem’! 🙂
Ron chatting with Maureen Rolls, angel and animal communicator, during a quieter spell [www.angelandanimalcommunication.co.uk]
We also chatted with customers we’d met at previous events – we love hearing how much new readers are
enjoying our novels and short stories – some of our customers are reading The Cordello Quest and Mosaic of Light a
second time (and asking when the third will be ready, eek!)
As for new customers, it’s always interesting to chat with people who value crystals, Reiki, life-force energy, and working with intuition and synchronicity.
The few crystals we place on our table often spark a conversation, particularly the opalite tumblestone and the lapis lazuli. 🙂
At the second of the fairs (Plympton) – thanks to a brainwave idea from Ron, ever the ‘practical ideas man’ – the books we sold went home in little paper bags, upon which he affixed one of our business cards with a beautiful wax seal (thankfully without setting off any smoke alarms as the flame burned and the wax dripped oh-so-carefully onto the bag and card!)
The first of our ‘special Lazuli Portals bags’! Large enough to take one copy of each of our paperbacks!
The design imprinted into the wax is the beautiful triskele, one of my favourite symbols.
The design seemed a good fit for us, what with Ron being Cornish, and the importance of symbols in our novels – and our customers seemed very taken with the idea.
It made the handing over of our books feel even more special! What do you think of it?
There can be downtime at these events – people are not always streaming non-stop through the doors (and not everyone who does is interested in reading!)
So apart from browsing the other stalls, and mingling with stall-holders/friends, Ron and I had plenty of time to chat about writing: the process, our series, and our plans, thoughts, and ideas, as well as the concepts and spiritual learning we weave into our work.
We don’t often get the opportunity to do that in-person, so when the chance pops up, we make the most of it!
Customers chatting with Elaine Drake at her Aromaware stall [https://aromaware.co.uk]
We also worked on short stories and poetry for reading aloud at Writers’ Circle meetings, taking advantage of quiet moments to get scribbling and typing, or to edit or format other writing projects we have underway.
I used my experiences at Estover (the atmosphere, the crystals I saw, the bustle of customers as they wandered from stall to stall) to form a short story based at a fictional Mind Body Spirit fair.
That piece – entitled Pick and Mix – was read aloud at Writers’ Circle last week. With writers, every experience can be of some creative value!
Some of the stalls at the Plympton fair, before opening time
We have a few weeks’ break from the fair circuit now. Our next one will be at Saltash, Cornwall, on 12 November.
If you think you might be able to come along, you can find out more here:
In the meantime we’ll continue to work on Lazuli Portals Novel #3 (which I am able to progress most weeks, health and time permitting), and writing more stories and poems for Writers’ Circle … and anything else we can find time and energy for!
And of course we’ll continue posting on Twitter and Facebook (feel free to connect with us there if you haven’t already!)
We’re giving Instagram a try as well, if that’s more your ‘thing’. 🙂
We hope you enjoyed this post. Our next one will hopefully be K is for Kaleidoscope (Cordello Quest A-Z series).
If you want to make sure you see future posts from us, please Follow our blog, if you haven’t already! 🙂
Until next time, and with lovelight blessings,
Joanna and Ron | The Lazuli Portals
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