The Hawk and the Dove (the first series rather than just the first book) was published in the traditional way, with regular publishers, over the course of about thirty years.
I wrote the first book in the series — The Hawk and the Dove — in 1989, and Kingsway published it in the UK in 1990. In the US, it was published by Good News, back in Al Fisher's time.
At that time, Tony Collins (whom I married about 20 years later) was just starting his Monarch imprint at Kingsway. He passionately believed in fiction as a carrier of ideas, and Monarch became the Kingsway fiction list. In the two years that followed, Kingsway published further books of mine under the Monarch imprint, including the next two Hawk & Dove books — The Wounds of God and The Long Fall.
My prayer partner Margery (who died in 2004) was a stained glass artist and banner-maker, and she did the cover picture for the Kingsway (Monarch) edition of The Long Fall. That became very special to me, because it was the last piece of art work she ever did. She was already growing old at that point, and her eyesight failed. It was while she was working on the cover for The Long Fall that the first signs of macular degeneration manifested; it developed very quickly, and her eyesight was functionally gone in a brutally short space of time. I felt so grateful and so proud that we were able to work together in that way before it was too late. Only rarely is a writer allowed to choose their own cover art, and it was because I had the blessing of working with Tony Collins at Kingsway that this opportunity came about. Meanwhile, I also wrote Thereby Hangs a Tale (short stories) for Kingsway, and a non-fiction book, Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People out of the work I did for some years as part of a hospice chaplaincy team, published by SPCK.
After those books (and a couple of others) I became immersed in working as a Methodist minister, and I was fully occupied with pastoring church congregations and wrote no more books for some years.
My first marriage ended when my husband left me for someone else. Among other initiatives, I wrote another novel — The Clear Light of Day — at that point; and again I asked Tony Collins to be my publisher. By that time Kingsway had closed down their fiction list, and Monarch had moved with Tony to Lion Hudson, who accordingly published The Clear Light of Day; David C. Cook took it for the United States.
I married again. My second husband died of an auto-immune condition a short while into that marriage.
Another year went by and I learned that Tony's marriage was ending. While, of course, that is always sad news, it blossomed into a very happy thing because at that point our professional relationship became personal, and we married in 2006. His work as a publisher was based in Oxford, so I left my work as a minister in Hastings to move up-country and be with him.
Good News publishers still had the original Hawk & Dove trilogy, republished as a one-volume edition around the year 2000. I asked them how they'd feel about my writing a further novel in the series for 2009, since that would be 20 years in from when I wrote the first story, and they were keen to do that — so, now released from church pastoral duties, I wrote The Hardest Thing To Do, but that expanded into five further stories, bring the series up to nine volumes. In the same time frame I wrote some non-fiction books for Lion Hudson. Because Tony and I were now husband and wife, he had to recuse himself from the publishing decision and process in respect of my work, so I had a different editor at Lion Hudson for a few years.
Then Good News began to close down their fiction list, so Lion Hudson expressed interest in acquiring the whole series, and thus it came back to the UK.
In 2009 Tony and I moved back to Hastings where the rest of my family is based — a very happy move. Here we live in a shared house with two of my daughters, Hebe and Alice Wilcock, both freelance artists.
Eventually Lion Hudson was bought out by SPCK, and almost all my work (about 20 books) therefore came under SPCK's auspices. For a short while, at that point, Tony also worked with SPCK, and I wrote two books for them — Equality is Biblical and Into the Heart of Advent.
As the years have gone by, self-publishing has become more realistic and enjoyable than once it was, and in 2020 I wrote Relinquishment, extending the thinking of my book In Celebration of Simplicity, written around 2008. We published Relinquishment with the Amazon Kindle platform, under our own imprint Humilis Hastings. Jonathan Roberts, a very gifted covers man from Lion Hudson, designed the cover for me and helped with formatting. Tony Collins edited for me, and Louise Stenhouse copy-edited. Good team!
In 2022 I became ill, and have since joined the ranks of the chronically ill. My life became much more limited, more contracted, but I could still write. So during 2022 I spent the summer writing This Brother of Yours and Brother Cyril's Book — more stories from St Alcuins Abbey where The Hawk & the Dove series is set. To avoid confusion, since SPCK had the first nine volumes, we published these as Series 2, under our Humilis Hastings imprint. Alice and Hebe did the cover art, Jonathan Roberts designed the covers using their work, Tony edited and Louise Stenhouse copy-edited.
We were also able to recover the rights of a rewritten and much expanded edition of Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People that BRF (Bible Reading Foundation) published around 2008, and brought this out with cover art by Hebe Wilcock under our Humilis Hastings imprint.
It felt very exciting to be working from home together like this — it reminded me of the way William Morris and friends worked in the Arts and Crafts movement. It has the same integration of work and friendship, and I love it.
And now, the next step of the journey.
SPCK has kindly agreed to give me back the rights to all my work. There are some non-fiction books that for the moment we will leave to one side, though we may republish them with Humilis Hastings in due course — but (I feel so pleased about this) we will be re-publishing in the Humilis Hastings imprint the entire first series of The Hawk & the Dove — all nine books.
Just today, the first one is ready — The Hawk and the Dove. Alice and Hebe Wilcock will be the cover artists for the whole series, and Jonathan Roberts is the designer and formatter. Tony Collins has edited and Louise Stenhouse has copy-edited. We will work through all nine books and publish them under our own imprint one by one as soon as we can get them done.
The cover will look like this, and it should be out on Amazon as an e-book and a paperback in the next few days.
