Special Early Bird price. Ebook edition and your name in list of Super Patrons in the front of the ebook
Only 20 available
$25
26 pledges
Super Patron
Ebook edition and your name in list of Super Patrons in the front of the ebook
$40+ shipping
7 pledges
Motorway Sketch
One of Lulu's one-off motorway sketches from her notebook. Plus everything at Super Patron level. Example below.
$75
4 pledges
Super Patron & Voucher
Everything from the Super Patron level, plus a £30 voucher for the author's shop: Seventy Seven Seas.
$100+ shipping
4 pledges
Giclee Print
A giclee limited edition print of artwork for ‘Gravity’ – a collection of excerpts of Caitlin’s words, illustrated by the author – plus everything from the Super Patron level. Example below.
Only 20 available
$125+ shipping
6 pledges
Handmade Booklet
A hand-made booklet of ‘Gravity’ – a collection of excerpts of Caitlin’s words illustrated by the author – plus everything from the Super Patron level
Only 40 available
$220+ shipping
1 pledge
Original Artwork
Original one-off art work by the author for ‘Gravity’ – an illustrated collection of excerpts of Caitlin’s words
Only ten available
$250
1 pledge
Launch Party
Invitation for two to the launch party, plus everything from the Super Patron level.
$440
1 pledge
Frontispiece
A personal dedication from the author in the front, plus everything from the Super Patron level.
Only one available
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In an isolated house surrounded by fields and woodland, Anna sits at her kitchen table, her cramped writing fills the notebook in front of her steadily, inexorably - people die at such a rate.
Anna scans the news for reports in which the victims of war or terror are presented only as a number. Dismayed by the indifference in the news items to people who die in distant lands, she writes portraits, one for each of the victims, in an attempt to acknowledge the real impact of their deaths. Her own life is held in check, restrained by grief. It is only in this vigil, this act of love for strangers, that she allows herself an emotional connection to the world.
Her daughter Caitlin had wanted to be an engineer, to build bridges. But she was killed on the eve of her twentieth birthday by her violent boyfriend. Since her death Caitlin has been subject to a perplexing dark odyssey, pushed and pulled past stars and distant planets. Sometimes, with sweet relief she finds herself once more held by gravity, as the unpredictable journey brings her briefly back to the earth. She pieces together her story, combining what she has learnt since her death and what she knew before, until she is finally able to reclaim herself from the debilitating effects of the violence that eventually ended her life, freeing herself at last.
With the release from prison of Caitlin’s killer, Anna’s uneasy equilibrium is thrown into disarray and she falls into long-suppressed fury and mental breakdown. As Caitlin is able to free herself from the tyranny of violence, will Anna be able to unburden the debilitations of grief and live her life with love and happiness once more?
“Twice the Speed of Dark is both lyrical and cerebral, exploring grief and loss from wholly original perspectives. It investigates how grief impacts on our humanity with a sharp clarity. It is a highly accomplished debut from a writer with a genuinely original outlook.”
Suzanne Harrington, journalist and author of The Liberty Tree.
L R Allison has spent most of her life as a visual artist. She attended Central St Martin’s School of Art then spent a number of years travelling and living abroad. Amongst the bar-tending and cleaning jobs, highlights of these years include: in New Zealand, playing drums for King Loser and bass for Dimmer. In Germany, making spectacle hinges in a small factory and nearly designing the new Smurfs. In Amsterdam painting a landmark mural on a four storey squat. In Fiji and California, teaching scuba diving.
After a decade of wandering, she returned to the UK, where she had two children and focused on art. She completed a fine art MA and exhibited her lens-based work and site-specific installations in group and solo shows.
In 2013 what began as an art project took her into writing and she unexpectedly discovered what she should have been doing all along.
Twice the Speed of Dark is her first book. She is currently writing a second, called Wetlands.
There had been a bomb in a distant market place. One of many bombs, the deaths caused by this event barely noticeable amongst the dreadful losses that filled the news every day. But a filament snagged and slowed the story down. Somehow that detail caught her; a market place, perhaps the most domestic public space there is. People shopping for food, plastic buckets, scarves, aluminium pans. Markets all over the world selling plastic buckets and aluminium pans. A place providing easy acquisition of the humbler tools of life; domestic wares, phone parts and gaudy cases, vinyl handbags, potatoes, eggs, cabbages. Mothers buying an evening meal, teenagers shopping for the excitingly new and obligingly affordable. A man buying a bucket so that he could clean his house. These ordinary people doing ordinary things, they would be the dead.
She thought of there being no dinner in some households, because the shopping never came back from the market. A husband whose anxiety makes him fear, as if finally by prophecy rather than grinding habit, that his wife has been killed. A family who wouldn’t know for long hours where their father had gone. Somewhere in a town where death might just as easily come at the hands of a check-point soldier, a sniper, a drone. Somewhere in a world where escape from such horror resulted in thousands of drowned bodies day by day as boats and brutal business men cast people to their fate in the deceptive, seductive glint of a blue sea that pretended to show the way to safety.
I wanted to let you know that my new book Salt Lick will begin funding on Unbound on Thursday 16th Janury, just three days from now. I would be thrilled if any of you would like to support Salt Lick. You can also sign up for my newsletter to get occassional updates and to stay in touch more directly.
All the best and many thanks for your support.
Lulu
Salt Lick in 100…
10th March 2018How are we doing?
Pretty well I think - thanks for asking! Twice the Speed of Dark is getting some wonderful reviews. Here is a sample:
I love hearing what people think about my book. Writing a book is, afterall, predominantly an act of communication and the most interesting kind of communication is two-way.
I hope that I can persuade some of you to add to the reviews. If I can reach 50 it will start to make…
8th October 2017I come bearing gifts
I am preparing gifts for my subscribers.
There will of course be pledge rewards making their way to those who backed Twice the Speed of Dark soon but in adition, I am putting together a free gift, a series of ebooks, for all those on my mailing list - which is separate from this Unbound list. I would love you to join up. Letters will be infrequent and will contain news on my book, on events…
29th September 2017Borrowed
My first library experience was the library van that came once a week to the village where I grew up. I loved it. Both the access to books, the neat little van, and the small bustle of village life. Once I got in enormous trouble for throwing Jeanie's coat onto the roof just before the van drove off. In my defence, on the walk from primary school down to Alma Green where the van parked, she had thrown…
18th September 2017Nearly nearly there.......
It is not long now until Twice the Speed of Dark comes out. The cover is nearly finalised and I am really thrilled with it. There is proof reading to do. I am still not sure of an exact release date but all of you backers will be getting notice from the lovely folk at Unbound.
This close to publication can I just take the opportunity once more to say thank you all for being a part of this…
20th July 2017Return to the Wetlands
The editing of Twice the Speed of Dark is near to complete. I don't have information on when publication will be, but we are getting closer. I am looking forward to the design phase, which will start very soon.
I am also looking forward to resuming work on my second book, Wetlands. In the time I have been away from writing it, I have come to see that I need to make some significant changes…
22nd May 2017What's this editorial development all about?
It's about getting closer to publication, and about getting to know your book even better. It's about stretching your head to keep a picture of the entire trajectory and keeping in view a tiny detail. It's about understanding more clearly the structures that instinct, bravado and sheer dumb luck pulled out of the thin air of imagination and teeth grinding effort. All of these are tremendously…
13th April 2017Flickers of light
Twice the Speed of Dark began as a project in which I wrote portraits to imagine what the real lives might be of the people who died in terror attacks overseas, whose stories were presumed to be uninteresting to us, or irrelevant. I wanted to engage with the complexities and tender beauties of ordinary lives that had been suddenly and brutally ended, then ignored.
I decided that I would revisit…
22nd March 2017Happy spring
The manuscript for Twice the Speed of Dark is currently with the editor for the first phase of the editing process. As I've never written a book before, I've never been in this positiion before. But I am really excited about it. I've never been worried about the interventions of others in my work, having discovered over many collaborative art projects that other people have so much to offer us in…
20th February 2017Filling Time Most Happily
I can't wait to get the editing process underway. My manuscript is, according to my inexpert eye, ready to go for round one.
I look forward to filling you in with progress on the publication of Twice the Speed of Dark as I go through the process, but in the meantime, I have a window of time for some good reading. Here is a link to my website where I have written a review of The Sympathizer by…
3rd February 2017In Every Corner
There has been a film going round my social media contacts, originating, I think, from a Danish television channel. I liked it very much, once I had got over the resentful expectation that I was about to be manipulated. And I was manipulated, but it was done with skill and the outcome was elegant, not directly of financial benefit to the makers. In the end, I can’t be sure that it is so very different…
23rd January 2017The Thrill of the Ride
I don't stop being blown away by the support of people, the goodwill that is shown when a pledge is made for an unknown entity, a book you can't even hold. From that alone, the world is made a better place. My own personal version of the world is made an enormously better place of course, but in a more general way, qualities that are an antidote to the frightening politics of the moment must surely…
9th January 2017Sunday Service
I hope that you have all had a great christmas and that 2017 has started happily. It is traditionally a time to be thinking about new things and perhaps more importantly to be rounding off old ones.
I think of January and February as the Sunday of the year, a time for catching up on what was missed, setting what has been in order. It seems barmy to characterise this most depleted part of the cycle…
12th December 2016Passing Strangers and what they want...
My funding is now at 63% which, in a bit over a month, is way more than I had expected. Almost all of what has been funded so far has come from people who know me. I am so grateful for the huge support. I had expected that I would need to reach a wider audience at some point but had anticipated that it would be for a great deal more than the remaining 37%.
I have been wondering how I can make…
1st December 2016Gift Pledges - Christmas gifts
As christmas shopping kicks in with the usual mix of joy, dread and panic, here is an option for the book lovers. If you make a gift pledge, I will email you a certificate (below) customised with your message and the name of your recipient. Any pledge at super-patron and above, I will, if you send me the address, mail out some information, a letter of thanks and a card. If the pledge is for any of…
30th November 2016If you go down to the woods today
Anna, one of the main characters in Twice the Speed of Dark, is stuck in a pattern of avoidance, of flight. She exerts huge efforts to skirt the traps and pitfalls that live, echoing loudly, chiming their danger, within. It is memory that she evades. She cannot think about her daughter without thinking about her death and being tormented anew by the pain of it. The book in part is an exploration…
14th November 2016Kaleidoscope Head
Firstly, I want to quickly acknowledge my most recent patrons, I will thank you personally elsewhere, but none of this happens without you all so a huge collective thanks, on behalf of myself (and independent publishing) for your support.
I think most of us will be feeling post-election dwoners. I discovered this film today and it felt like an uplifting vitamin B shot in the arm, so I thought I…
9th November 2016Nothing to do with my book, but....
It's a kind of solace to throw around black humour on days when inexplicable events happen. I have been re-posting some very funny responses to Trump's election, feeliing bleak, but glad of the shared sense of sardonic doom to help me through the baffling day.
But as I was just making myself a coffee, I thought about the conversations I have had this morning with my two daughters. Both of them…
31st October 2016Gravity
I have been working on images (paintings) for the hand-made booklet that I am calling Gravity. It will be made up of a combination of these imagess and the words of Caitlin as she tries to explain her experience of death. The images will also be availabe as original artwork and as a giclee print. She describes Gravity as an entity, something that has let her go so that she is subject to the wilder…
26th October 2016Eight Feet High and Rising
Thank you so much to early supporters, it is a thrill to get to eight percent over night. Really, thank you.
I feel that it will probably get harder as it goes along, but I have lots of ideas to build momentum. One of the things I am quite clear about is that at some point, I would like to be making a contribution to domestic violence charites and refugee groups, given the subject of my book, and…
These people are helping to fund Twice The Speed Of Dark.
