I’ve been looking at some of my answers published on-line yesterday, pleased to remember those foothill years as a novelist when I was planning my first novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love.
Sometimes, I’m amazed that I ever got it together and that it finally made it into print. Amazed and thrilled.

My fellow Ward Wood novelist, the Irish writer, Shauna Gilligan came up with some great questions when she asked me to do an interview with her for her blog, A Girl’s Writing Is Never Done. We did a question and answer session on my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love and it was a useful exercise for me to go back into my memory to find some of the reasons and motivations for my writing about Stephen and his progress through the late 1960s in his hometown of Brighton, Sussex. Shauna’s impressively sharp line of questioning drew out of me thoughts I didn’t know I’d had or that I’d forgotten. So thanks Shauna – much appreciated, especially the stuff about James Joyce and one of my favourite books, The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.

I hope, some time, that she will let me pose her a series of questions about her terrific novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere.

If you’d like to read our interview, here’s the link to Shauna’s blog:

http://shaunaswriting.com/wordpress/2014/09/colin-bell-on-brighton-music-and-his-own-stephen-d/

Thanks for asking me to do this, Shauna.

The post Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love: A novel inspired by The Beatles, Brighton and James Joyce. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was young in 1967, probably a lot younger than I realized. I was moved by the so-called Summer Of Love but I’m sure I can’t have understood the half of it. I felt it though and some of those feelings must have made it into my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love. I suspect a small part of me is there, hidden somewhere between those pages hoping not to be discovered now that the book is published and Stephen Dearsley, formerly “my” Stephen Dearsley, is out there with you all or with any of you that decide to read about him and his momentous young man’s summer.

I might know Stephen a lot better than I know the moody young man in the photograph at the top of this blog. Who I was then or, maybe, who I was trying to be then in the Summer of 1967 may have to remain a mystery to me as well as to the rest of you. I do remember though that even then I wanted one day to write a novel and to get it published as a paperback. That was very clear to me, as The Beatles sang that summer about love, it was easy. Young ambitions are not the mountains they look like from a distance. Those youthful summer days were for dreaming dreams. It would all be fine, it was easy. Well nothing’s quite that easy and a lot of years have passed before that sultry summer dream came true.

I remember the ambition just as I remember a song from that year – both were vivid, thrilling and, yes, I guess, erotic dreams and both, I was sure, would come true. It was easy.

The song, of course, was all You Need Is Love by The Beatles, first performed on the first ever simultaneous live international television relay on the 25th June 1967 to an estimated audience of 400 million people. It was, naturally, the answer. Love really was all you needed if everyone agreed to go along with that thought or so it seemed that day.  I was excited, maybe even more than that,  to be there as a witness to a moment of revelation. Then came the new Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and, for me at least, life was never to be quite the same again.

It wasn’t, as we all found out, that easy after all, love or people agreeing that love was all you needed, but it turned enough of us on at that time to make a difference. It wasn’t just the music but the whole counter-cultural shift that those records revealed to my innocently voracious eyes and ears. Even though The Beatles split up, became disillusioned, some of them died, were even murdered and the others grew old, I still can’t listen to that song of songs without the same thrill of optimism and the spirit of delight that awoke in me then and has never fully died.

When I think of Stephen Dearsley, I often say ‘poor Stephen’ and hope that he forgives me for all I have done to him. If you do decide to read my novel, be kind to him and try to think well of those idealists and dreamers who once thought achieving the sublime was easy.

It was a sublime moment too this afternoon when I first laid hands on a copy of my book. There’s no other feeling like this one.

——————————————————————————————————————–

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post All You Need Is Love: Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love is published today. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I came across a stash of old slide photographs recently and I have been trying to preserve them digitally. This one, like yesterday’s, was taken of me, horror of horrors,  in those halcyon days when everything and anything seemed possible and when the World itself seemed to be changing all around me. Well, it didn’t change as much as I hoped but I was still lucky enough to live through some very exciting times that matched my probably rather adolescent enthusiasms and passions. Strange then that I don’t feel that I’ve changed that much since then – in my head and heart at least even if the passage of time has been unkinder to all my other less adolescent bits. I haven’t seen this old photograph since around the time it was taken so it came as a vivid reminder of those days when I,  along with a lot of other young idealists, were listening to a song called All You Need Is Love. Odd though it may seem and wiser as I may have become, I still go along with those sentiments and whenever I listen to it, a bit of that thrill returns.

The post All You Need Is Love appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.