It’s already been mentioned, but here’s confirmation of the launch event for Pete Tanton’s New Novelist-winning debut Johnny Lonely. The launch will be on Thursday 26 July at 7.30pm, at Brick Works studios in Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne. Come along and enjoy a glass of wine or two, live music, and a reading from Pete. We hope to see you there. You can get venue directions here.

Guerilla promotion courtesy of Pete’s son’s school!
And thanks to Marianne for her blog posts over the last week, and for her hard work during her work placement. Her blog even merited a mention from Grumpy Old Bookman. As you can see from her posts, she was virtually running the place!

Paul

Hi everyone!

It’s coming towards the end of my placement now and I’ve just finished reading and editing the Jonny Kennedy manuscript, I feel a huge sense of satisfaction and I’ve only contributed a very small amount of time and effort towards getting this manuscript in a finished form, compared to the amount of time that Roger (the author) and Paul and Stu (the actual editors) have spent on this book, so I can only imagine the sense of accomplishment they must feel when one of their books is finally published.

Although I had heard about Jonny Kennedy before coming to work with Tonto Press I hadn’t actually seen the channel four documentary, so for me reading about his life story and terrible condition was a completely new experience, and now that I’ve finished the book I feel that I have gained a really good picture about Jonny’s personality. As a result I now cannot help but think of Jonny with admiration and respect – I certainly don’t think I could have coped as well as him, and have handled life with such humour, if I had been born with Epidermolysis Bullosa.

In the book that is due to be published in September there is a selection of photographs of Jonny chronicling his life from when he was a baby right up to the months leading to his death. There are also several pictures which show Jonny with his mother and different friends, and below is a sneak preview of a picture of Jonny with his mother when he was a baby. The second picture below also shows Jonny with his much loved cat Terbie, and of course one of his signature hats. These are exclusive pictures that haven’t been released yet, so I hope you appreciate how lucky you all are to be seeing them now!! Only joking, of course I hope you enjoy seeing them as well! And thanks for reading my blog over the past week, you’ve been a great audience!!

By Marianne Lund.

CityLife has a piece on the opening of Brick Works with quotes from Stu. See a PDF here.

Paul

Hi everyone!

It’s day four of my placement and I started the day by having a look at several different manuscripts that had been sent to Paul and Stu via email, which included short stories, outlines and chapters of books. This was really interesting as it gave me insight into the kind of topics that people choose to write about and what condition these are in when they are sent to publishers.

After this I spent some time planning the budget for the Johnny Lonely book launch, which is taking place on Thursday the 26th July at Brickworks building. I was also thinking about how to arrange the rooms allocated for the launch to best accomodate all the people that will come.

I also spent time writing the latest addition of the Tonto Press Newsletter which informs everyone about the upcoming book launch and also how you can now pre-order their books that will be published in September, on Amazon. These are ‘The Rocketbelt Caper’ and ‘Jonny Kennedy; The Story of the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’. In the afternoon I also continued reading through the Jonny Kennedy manuscript.

I have also decided to recommend my favourite book, dvd and cd to you all, so here goes!

One of the best books I have read in a long time was by Arundhati Roy and was called The God of Small Things, it is not religious like the title implies, but is set in an Indian town called Ayemenem and tells a very poignant and tragic story of a pair of twins and how their lives are torn apart through traumatic childhood experiences. This book is beautifully written, perfectly evokes the climate that is described and made me cry several times! This book also won the Booker Prize in 1997 and I always look out to see if the author has written anything else, but as yet she hasn’t!

The dvd that I am going to recommend is called Overboard and stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. This is a slightly dated film but is absolutely hilarious and is very firmly one of my favourite films. Both Hawn and Russell act their parts brilliantly and it is a typical slushy romantic film, but it’s also very funny! It’s one of those films that you can actually watch again and again so I would say that it’s not only worth watching, but also worth buying, here‘s a link to Amazon so you can do so now!

At the moment I have Snow Patrol’s album Eyes Open in my cd player so I’m going to recommend that cd to you today. I think the lead singer, Gary Lightbody has a fantastic voice, really smooth and easy to listen to. In particular I really like the third song on the album ‘Chasing Cars’ and also the sixth song, which I can’t remember the name of but it’s lovely and the start of it sounds like a lullaby. I also like the fact that all the songs don’t sound the same, which can happen with a cd from only one artist.

By Marianne Lund.

Hi everyone,

It’s day three of my placement and again I spent most of the morning reading through Jonny Kennedy’s manuscript…I am, slowly but surely making my way through it and hopefully by the end of Monday I will have finished it! Me, Stu and Paul also got together with all the other people that are in the twelve studios that make up Brick Works and went for lunch at the local pub.

This was the first time all the people working in this building have got together since the opening several months ago so it was really nice for me to be able to meet other people and hear about the different jobs they are doing. For example there are several different artists, web, interior and graphic designers, screen writers, film and video production and also Lens Based Media. So it was really interesting to hear about the different projects they are doing and the upcoming work they hope to do. After lunch we came back and cracked on with our work and I have continued to concentrate on Jonny Kennedy’s manuscript. The more I read this book the more I enjoy it and as soon as it hits the shops I’m going to be out there buying the book!

By Marianne Lund.

Hi everyone,

Today has been another interesting day, I spent most of the morning reading more of ‘Jonny Kennedy; The Story of the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’ and as I got further into the manuscript I learnt even more about Jonny, his condition and the life he led. Jonny successfully and at times poignantly recaptures his childhood for us and several experiences that stand out for him in his mind, which really demonstrates to the reader the extroardinary life Jonny led.

In the afternoon I began proof-reading another book that Tonto Press plan to publish in the near future, which is called ‘The Rocketbelt Caper; A True Tale of Invention, Obsession and Murder’ and is written by Paul himself. I enjoyed this as it gave me an example of a much more finished version of a book before publication and showed me a different stage of the publishing process. In particular I was looking out for any spelling and grammatical mistakes, but I only found one, which just shows how close it is to being ready for publication.

Later on me, Paul and Stu also travelled down to Durham for the annual meeting held once a year by Independent Northern Publishers. This was very insightful for me as I was able to meet other publishers and see what issues the meeting was focused on and what issues the actual publishers wanted to raise and discuss. I also gained more understanding about how tight funding is for all the publishers in the Northeast which is decided by the Art’s council and also which types of literature get preference over others. This was an invaluable experience for me and I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing what priorities different publishers have.

By Marianne Lund.

Hi everyone,

My name is Marianne Lund, I’m a second year English student at Newcastle Upon Tyne university and I’m working at Tonto Press for one week on a work experience placement, and this is my first day’s blog! To start with both Paul and Stu talked me through what kind of things I would be working on over the five days which was useful as it gave me some focus and a time line for the different jobs I would be doing.

So the first thing Paul and Stu wanted me to look at was the manuscript of the book ‘Jonny Kennedy; The Story of the Boy whose Skin fell off’. This is a biography as Jonny didn’t actually write it himself, instead his friend Roger Stutter wrote down, over the course of ten years, everything that Jonny told him about his life. There is also a very touching foreword by Nell McAndrew, who met Jonny several times. I found this very interesting because I was already aware about Jonny because of the Channel Four documentary a few years ago which chronicled his life and death. I also found it rather exciting that I was the third person to ever actually read the manuscript, apart from obviously both Paul and Stu who have been working with Roger, but more importantly I began to appreciate the amount of work and time that goes into preparing a manuscript before it is ready for publication. I spent the whole day working on this book and I only managed to get to page 28! However I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and trying to find ways to improve it and I think it will be extremely successful when it is published because it is such an unusual story, with surprising amounts of humour in it. I also think that this book will help raise more awareness about the agonising disease Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) that Jonny suffered from which is not currently widely known about in society.

In the afternoon I also sent an email around to all of the English students at Newcastle university informing them about an upcoming Creative Writing Course that Paul and Stu are putting on which starts on Monday the 23rd of July and lasts a week, until Friday the 27th of July. I thought lots of students might be interested in this but probably wouldn’t know about it so this was an ideal opportunity and way to publicise the course.

Students tackle a group writing exercise on the last course

Towards the end of the afternoon I went through all my suggestions about the manuscript with Paul and Stu. At this point they told me more about Jonny’s life and his personality, that they had learnt about from working for so long with Jonny’s close friend Roger and I found this very interesting. Overall it was a very enjoyable day and i’m looking forward to being able to finish reading the manuscript over the next few days of my placement!

By Marianne Lund.

The Newcastle Journal ran a piece on Jonny Kennedy and our forthcoming biography Jonny Kennedy: The Story of the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off last week (Final words of boy whose skin fell off).

Although we were delighted to receive the coverage, we couldn’t help noticing that a similar story ran in the very same paper almost 4 months ago (Jonny’s thoughts are to be published in a book), and another in the Journal’s sister paper the Sunday Sun on the previous day (Our Jonny lives on). None of these articles had anything to do with Tonto, which just goes to show that even the most carefully orchestrated publicity campaigns can sometimes have little bearing in what does and doesn’t get coverage! The book will be released on 24 September, and you can read more details here.

Paul