Salamander Dreaming
Salamander Dreaming was Steve's first full length published book - a biography based on the diary kept by Jean Russell, a friend he made while making regular visits to the coastal town of Nerja in Andalucia, Spain.
A chance conversation led Jean to mention that she had once been shipwrecked... As her misadventures with husband George, their two young daughters and a former go-go dancer named Zoe emerged, Steve's curiosity and imagination were piqued - and Salamander Dreaming was born.
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This remains one of the author's favourites and has been enjoyed by readers who love real-life biographies of ordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives.
A little bit of background...
Steve Plummer was born in Hertfordshire, England in 1956 and spent much of his working life in a variety of public service jobs in and around the nation's capital as well as the valleys and south coast of Wales. His work provided him with ample opportunity to meet fascinating people, from self-important local politicians, over-zealous (1980's style) police detectives and dodgy small-time criminals, as well as those who willingly gave themselves to acts of extraordinary selflessness. All have added to Steve's rich cast of characters. They burst from his pages, often re-imagined, and bringing his books to life in a style that has been described as easy going, authentic and totally readable.
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It was in 2004, after completing "Salamander Dreaming", that he finally lost patience with the tight world of literary agents and commercial publishers - all of whom seemed intent on publishing only works with a celebrity name attached. He found an on-line platform which accepted his first book for distribution although sadly, and following a long legal wrangle between the website's proprietors and a group of authors, the company folded and Steve turned to Lulu Press to distribute his books.
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Today, they can be found on line at Lulu as well as via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Abe Books and many other on-line book sellers. They are also available as e-books from Lulu.com and, of course, as Kindle books from Amazon.
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All are published under the mantle of Cloth Wrap Publishing. Born in 2004, Cloth Wrap derives its name from the benevolent sponsors of struggling authors of the Edwardian and late Victorian era. These noble benefactors went out of their way to seek out writers who had failed to find a publisher prepared to take the financial risk of publishing their work. If the risk of losing worthwhile pieces of writing seemed too much to bear, funds were provided to publish the books privately and, typically, with cheap to produce bindings made of board and covered in cloth; a cloth-wrap.
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On the other hand, Cloth Wrap may just be an anagram of the small town in South Wales where Steve lived between 1984 and 2014. ​