The Todmorden Tales

The Todmorden Tales is a collection of short stories that Brian & I wrote in the mid-90s for The Little Red Book, a little magazine we published at the time. We’d often talked about putting them all together into a book, and actually did so in 2020. It sold very poorly (mainly from lack of publicity) and we talked quite often of republishing them, paying for some advertising, and putting out a kindle edition on Amazon. But then B got ill and all our plans got shelved….

A few months ago, I decided to crack on with the republication. Looking at our print copy, I was astonished at all the mistakes and typoes that got through what we had thought was a pretty thorough checking process. But it was actually our checking process that was the problem – every time one of us finished proofreading the MS, we put it onto a memory stick and passed it over to the other, who would correct it, add or delete stuff (B was constantly thinking up rewrites and additions) and pass it back for more proofing.

I think you can see the flaw in that.

I, at least, tried to take care in retitling each new copy – todtalescorrected_final_final etc. But B hardly ever did, and inevitably things got mixed up and somehow an uncorrected final_final_final_FINAL copy made its way to the printers.

Additionally, I wasn’t happy with some aspects of the writing. Some of the language and references were very much of their time and needed bringing up to date (who remembers steel dustbins and Freeman Hardy & Willis?) So I got busy with an overhaul of every story. Halfway though that, however, I was distracted with an offer of designing and formatting a book for print and the Tales got put aside for it. But ultimately things didn’t work out with the client and we parted ways. So here I am working on the The Todmorden Tales yet again. And I hope to have it ready for sale well before Xmas.

(Below is a cover ideaI’m working on.)

Possible cover idea. I’ll probablyhave changed it to something completely different by the time you’re reading this….