They’d never met before and lived continents apart, but that didn’t stop a Hartlepool lad and a Canadian self-help guru getting together to write a book. Sharon Griffiths reports.

IT IS a remarkable way to write a novel. Two authors who have never met, who live 5,000 miles apart in separate continents and who don’t meet until the work is nearly finished.

It’s an unlikely partnership too – Mike O’Hare is a Hartlepool lad, for many years a compositor on the Hartlepool Mail, then running his own printbrokering firm, while his writing partner, Elfreda Pretorius, who lives in Canada, is a self-help guru and hypnotherapist.

Yet together they wrote The Meadow, a love story spanning a thousand years and everything from ancient hunters to international espionage.

It’s about good and evil, light and dark and the Meadow of the title is an idyllic space between worlds, a sort of idyllic cosmic interlude where people go between their earthly lives.

It’s set in ancient Mexico and Africa, 17th Century America, Israel, the Himalayas... and The Spotted Cow at Elwick, near Hartlepool. The book starts in the Tees Valley where a small boy has a dream about an owl which can speak.

“It’s an idea I’ve had since I was 16 or 17 years old and carried with me all that time,” says Mike, now 65.

As a compositor he was more concerned in putting other people’s words into print, though for many years, initially inspired by Neil Armstrong on the moon, he has written small items, short stories. “But the idea for The Meadow was always there and kept coming back to me,”

he says.

ONE day he read an email on a friend’s website and found himself replying to the sender, Elfreda. “Don’t know why.

I’ve never done anything like that before.”

For some reason – again, he doesn’t quite know why – he mentioned the book he had in his head and told her the very rough outline.”

I was expecting a reply in a week or a month, But half an hour later this e mail arrived asking ‘Are you insane? You’ve got to write this now!’ So, inspired, Mike started writing and sending the chapters to Elfreda.

By the time he got to Chapter 3, they had become a writing partnership.

“We broke all the rules. I was a complete novice and just did things my own way. Elfreda had had books published. We started it, having no idea how it was going to end,” he says.

It was a volatile partnership. “We are complete opposites – opposing birth signs, opposing times of day – and we could fight like cat and dog.

But somehow it worked. One of the odd things was that we found out later that we both listened to the same music – the Engima Variations – while we were writing. And by combining our talents we wrote what I think is an amazing story.”

Mike and Elfrida finally met after a couple of years of work when the book was finished all but the editing.

“She came over and we went to my place in Spain and worked solidly. It was a gruelling 14 days, especially as we agreed it should be done in the American style, but by then we knew each other so well that it just worked,” says Mike.

It is a book born of the internet.

After hitting a brick wall with agents and publishers – “just like J K Rowling… we’re in good company” – they decided to publish it themselves in the US. And now Mike is busy promoting it online. “I’m on 30 social networking sites and the feedback is phenomenal.” When Elfreda had a book launch in Toronto, Mike was there too – by satellite link.

The Meadow’s characters include an autistic savant, a psychic child, a Tibetan monk and a Teesside vet. It is, says Mike, a book about life and love, about the connections between people and the natural world, and about the need to open our minds to new ways of thinking. “Some people call it New Agey, which I’m not sure about. It’s about real life, not fantasy and has some nasty characters in it,” he says.

As its characters fight to be together across the centuries and the cosmos, the owl and the eagle become a recurring theme. “Everyone interprets it in different ways. It has nearly 500 pages but I sometimes think what it says between the lines is important as the actual words on the page. What people can find in it will change their lives.”

Despite all the coincidences and strange happenings involved in the book’s creation, Mike is determinedly keeping his feet on the ground.

But he and Elfreda and are already working on a sequel, which they reckon will be even more powerful.

“Someone posted a comment online about the book saying ‘Eat your heart out Dan Brown!’ That would be great, wouldn’t it?”

In the meantime, the international author gets ready for a Saturday morning bike ride to Elwick. And perhaps more inspiration.

■ The Meadow, iUniverse, £18.14. The book launch will be at Elwick WI Hall, The Green, Elwick Village, Hartlepool, on November 12. The book is available on amazon.co.uk and more details are on themeadownovel.wordpress.com/