Guest Comments by Christine Coleman

Editor's Note: The writer is a British author who based her latest novel, Paper Lanterns, in part on a series of love letters that she discovered written in the 1920s in China. She can be reached by email: christinecolemanauthor@hotmail.com

BIRMINGHAM, England -- Now that my novel, Paper Lanterns, has been making its way around the world, I have become interested in finding out more about the writers and recipient of the love letters from 1920s China that I used as inspiration. (I must admit it has become more like an obsession.)

I've got lots of photographs that accompany the letters, many of them apparently too small to see much detail. But now I realize that I can take photos of these and transfer them onto my computer. Then the screen enlarges them enormously. I've been playing around with cropping and resizing to make the shown men and women intriguingly “real”. I've been able to put names to a few of them, but can only speculate about others.

Now I'm building up more information about Douglas Bruce, the real man who inspired “my” character Rupert MacFarlane. My latest challenge is to see if I can find any of his descendants or anyone who knew of him or of “my” Belle (Bessie in real life) or “Ivy” (Margaret Hartle).