Royalty Free Fiction

The Woman Who Loved Jesse James by Cindi Myers

2012-03-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

Zee James, wife of Jesse James, is one ofthose figures who hasn’t gotten much attention from historians. She’sovershadowed by her famous, flamboyant husband. Jesse is the man who madehistory with his daring robberies. Zee was the woman who worried and waited forhim to come home. In writing The WomanWho Loved Jesse James, I tried to bring Zee to life, and to share herremarkable story with others.

As a history buff, I can get lost inresearch. I love reading old newspapers and letters, as well as biographies andhistorical nonfiction. I’m particularly fascinated by some of thelarger-than-life characters in the American west – Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp,Jesse James. Mention Jesse James in anycrowd and almost everyone will have something to say about him. (A surprisingnumber of people will mention that he is a distant relative.) Everyone knows –or thinks she knows – about Jesse James.

One of the interesting aspects of Jesse –to me – is how much of a family man he was. Most people know he spent a lot oftime running from the law, but many don’t know his family ran with him. Theywere always right there, living under assumed names, too.

They say behind every great man is an evengreater woman. I started thinking about the kind of woman who would be so devotedto a man like Jesse that she’d follow him away from her home, change her nameand keep his secrets. Was it love that kept Jesse’s wife loyal, or somethingelse?

Thus began my research into the life of ZeeJames, Jesse’s wife. The story I found fascinated me – she was Jesse’s firstcousin. They fell in love while she nursed him back to health. She waited forhim through a nine-year engagement. She kept their family together through someamazingly tense and trying circumstances. Here was a woman who’d been a part ofhistory but had lived in the shadows. I realized I’d uncovered one of thegreat, though tragic, love stories of our time.

Unfortunately, no letters in Zee’s ownwords, or diary of her experiences exist. What I learned about her I had to piecetogether from mentions in newspapers, family stories and legend. Zee rates onlya few paragraphs in even the best biographies of Jesse. If I was going to tellZee’s story, I would have to do it through fiction.

The Zee I portray in The Woman Who Loved Jesse James may not be like the real woman –we’ll never know. But she is true to the woman I imagined, a woman who longedfor adventure, who loved her husband in spite of, and even because of, hisfaults, and who longed for a life she was never really able to have.

http://www.cindimyers.com/

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Sea Witch by Helen Hollick

2012-03-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

The agentsat in her office puffing at her cigarette. "What you need to do, darling,is write a fantasy novel."

"But Idon't do fantasy, do I? I write historical fiction."

"Yesbut Harry Potter is all the rage. Why not write something for teenagers?"

The authortrudged down four flights of stairs and out into the London rain wondering ifshe could afford tea at the Ritz. She really didn't want to write fantasy. Norfor teenagers. She liked writing historical fiction, she liked characterinteraction, the what motivates people, what makes them tick. She liked writingabout rugged heroes that were the sort of men you wouldn't want to get into adrinking contest with, but who would, all the same, be there to fix the fuse, andknow where the torch was!

A Holiday. Awet, windy October afternoon. The rain had poured all morning, but by earlyafternoon an apologetic sun was squinting from behind a barricade of greycloud. The author decided to walk the dogs on the beach.

All week shehad been researching her latest interest; the truth behind pirates. Now thefilm she had seen was all very well, but it was not historically accurate wasit? Tortuga, for instance, was cleared of pirates in the late 1600's; PortRoyal was just a naval base. Pirates did not turn into skeletons. But they didwear bright ribbons, wave cutlasses about, get drunk and have an awful lot offun.

As she waswalking down the steep cliff-path, minding the bunny-burrows and reminding oneof the dogs that it was not a good idea to get stuck down one again, shewondered; "What would happen if a charming rogue, such as Jack Sparrow,met up with a white witch? Not someone like Hermione in Harry P., someone more like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars?A good witch, who had the Craft. She can't do magic, has no wand or spells, butshe can summon a wind, or talk to her lover via telepathy.

At thebottom of the cliff, the author crossed the stream and stepped onto the beach.Immediately, she was almost knocked over by a blast from the wind, and the dogswent haring off after those two seagulls that had been bugging them all week.

The tide wasebbing, the breakers all white foam and rolling excitement. She walked alonglistening to the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean, cursing because theearpiece kept falling out of her ear.

Sitting on arock, she gazed out at the ocean. It was the English Channel really, but anauthor has a vivid imagination. It was not too difficult to picture the hotCaribbean sun; waving palm trees; the rich turquoise blue of the sea. It rainedagain. Quickly, she switched to a different scene. The Florida reefs, 1715. ElevenSpanish galleons went down laden with treasure.

What if... her mind wasracing, her heart beginning to thud with excitement. What if there was a 12thship? A pirate ship? A ship that a young, handsome rogue had just commandeered?His first captaincy... he survived the storm, would want to get another ship assoon as possible.... he had a brother, a half-brother, who had bullied him as achild. A brother who had burnt his only possession, a boat called.... Acorn! Theauthor was getting really excitednow! The boy fled the Virginia tobacco plantation and became a pirate. He had afew adventures, got rich on plunder, but was, underneath all the swagger andpretence, lonely. It was alright having crumpets and strumpets, but there wasalso the horror of the hangman's noose dangling over him. Then one day he meetsa girl. He was in deep do-do, wounded and being chased by East India Companyagents and this girl... no, not a girl... the white witch... rescues him. Theyfall in love, but he misses the sea. Because of er, because of (the authordecided to think of a because of later) because of dah-di-dah happening, there is a mix up. The pirate assumed thegirl didn't love him anymore. And the girl, who was really a white witch,thought the pirate didn't love her anymore.So they were both miserable for a few months. The pirate found solace in a rumbottle (as pirates do) and the girl gave in and married the rich creep who hadbeen pestering her all this time. Then the pirate's brother caught up with him(very annoyed because the pirate had stolen his ship)

The author's backside was getting a bit numb, so she walked on upthe beach.

The annoyedbully-brother is in league with the creep who married the girl... Tiola! the author thought, her name isTiola. (Say it as ‘Teeola’, not ‘Tee…Oh…La’)Tiola what? Tiola is all that isgood - a.l.l.t.h.a.t.i.s.g.o.o.d. Ananagram! Of... furious muttering... an anagram of Tiola Oldstagh!

The authorwalked on, she was nearing the far side of the bay now and the tumble of rocksthat were full of fossils and things. Or so the guide books said. She had neverfound one.

OK, so theannoyed bully-brother is in league with the creep. The two men are plotting tocapture the pirate and have him hanged - Captain Woodes Rogers, a real figurein history, has just become Governor of Nassau and is offering a pardon to allpirates. The two creeps arrange to meet at Nassau, guessing that the piratewill turn up looking for amnesty. Which he does - but the bully-brother nabshim and chains him up in the bilge of aship and heads off back to Virginia. He wants to have his fun first and punishthe pirate for stealing his ship.

Tiola lovesher pirate. She tells her husband to go jump in a lake and boarding thepirate's ship (which he has called Sea Witch) sets off in pursuit ofher true love - having to conjure up a wind to do so. Meanwhile, the author could see a small sub-plot coming here… somethingabout Tethys, goddess of the sea who wanted the pirate for herself?

The authorwas quite pleased. Lots of action, adventure and character interaction. Thechance to get to know these two young lovers, the tried and trusted boy meetsgirl, boy falls in love, boy loses girl then finds her again plot.

So all sheneeded was her pirate.

The widesweep of the beach was deserted. She looked at the wet sand where the tide wasscurrying in with lace-edged patterns of foam. Saw a man standing there, twentyyards away. He was tall, rugged. Had an untidy chaos of curled, dark hair witha few blue ribbons fluttering in the wind tied into it. He wore knee highboots, a faded coat and a three cornered hat. He was looking out to sea but heturned, grinned at her, showing the flash of two gold teeth. With his righthand he gave the author a small, acknowledging salute. An earring dangled fromone ear. An earring shaped like an acorn.

"HelloJesamiah Acorne," the author said.

And theauthor swears that every word is true.

HelenHollick

www.helenhollick.net

Facebook: www.facebook.com/helen.hollick

Twitter: http://twitter.com/HelenHollick
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Crestmont by Holly Weiss

2012-02-26T06:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you have heard the saying, “Barnburned down, now I can see the moon.” Ihated it when I first read it. Why? I was immersed in a barn burning in my ownlife. Post-polio syndrome, a condition that effects people infected with poliovirus as children, often returns when polio survivors reach the age of fifty.The poliovirus infected me in 1952. Well-meaning doctors encouraged poliosurvivors to push past the muscle weakness and paralysis. I became an expertovercomer. I received degrees from college and graduate school and went on to asuccessful three-decade singing career. When unrelenting back pain presenteditself after every concert five years ago, I had to retire. In addition, toconserve what little energy the post-polio syndrome left me with, I was forcedto cut in half other activities in my life. I grieved for years because myvoice, my primary means of creative expression, had been silenced.

Then, bing! On alark, my husband and I stayed overnight at The Crestmont Inn in thePennsylvania Allegheny Mountains. Our room was a luxury suite converted from astaff dormitory built in 1926. I envisioned what life must have been like foryoung people working a summer job at a bustling inn. Then I recalled thisquote:

“Anotheropportunity is given you as a favor—and as a burden.

Thequestion is not:

Whydid it happen this way? or

Whereis it going to lead you? or

Whatis the price you will have to pay?

Itis simply:

Howare you going to make use of it?”

…DagHammarskjöld.

Wecan be so entrenched in our idea of we want for our journey that we ignoreGod’s guidance in the turning of corners. He had to hit me over the head with atwo-by-four to show me to leave my singing behind, write a book about TheCrestmont Inn, and make use of what life handed me. One voice led to another.

AlthoughI had never written a book before, a wonderful experience opened before me. Iset the novel in 1920s Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. Researching the history ofthe real Crestmont Inn enriched me. My music inspired me to imbue Crestmont’s main character, Gracie withthe desire to sing. A Native American legend says that the Great Spirit floodedEagles Mere Lake out of anger. I gave that a different twist, wanting to setthe tone of grace around which Crestmontis built. In my novel, he cried tears of forgiveness. The eagles joined theirtears with his, both mingling together to gently fill the lake called EaglesTears or Eagles Mere.

Becausegrace had moved me past a sad impasse in my life, I wanted to emphasize itsconcept in the novel. Crestmont main character, Gracie(purposefully named) is a courageous young woman who knows she needs to leavehome to find herself. She’s not sure how she will work it all out. Allowingherself the opportunity to fulfill her desire to sing is uppermost in her mind.She says, “A dream, after all, needn’t be fueled byparticulars, only desire.” Did Gracie become a famous cabaret singer? You’llhave to read Crestmont to find out.One thing I can promise you is that she found a spirit of acceptance and graceat The Crestmont Inn.

Writing was a natural progression fromsinging for me. Every song requires a different persona—a unique character thesinger develops to make the song real. Inventing characters for Crestmont was an adventure I was wellprepared for after thirty years of creating them in song. Violinist ItzhakPerlman said “Sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music youcan still make with what you have left.”

I am thankful that one voice led toanother—the voice of a singer to that of an author. I loved every minute of thewriting. The characters of Crestmontrevealed their stories to me in imaginative ways and I thank them.

Several years ago my barn burned down, butmagically, now I can see the moon.

Holly's Website : http://www.hollyweiss.com/

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All Different Kinds of Free by Jessica McCann

2012-02-17T03:38:00.000-08:00

The story was inspired by actual events,specifically the U.S. Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842. I firstlearned about it when I was doing freelance copyediting for a book aboutSupreme Court justices. The case appealed the conviction of a bounty hunterfrom Maryland (Edward Prigg) chargedwith kidnapping Margaret Morgan, a free woman of color living in Pennsylvaniawho was alleged to be an escaped slave. The court case focused on state'srights, and the ruling represented the first time a major branch of the U.S.government made a proslavery stand. But I was most interested in Margaret andwhat became of her.

My original goal was to write a biography, and Ispent about three years researching her life -- or, at least, attempting toresearch her life. The sad truth is that Margaret and her fate were irrelevantat the time. The issue for most people in the mid-1800s was much bigger thanone woman's fight for freedom. Yet, to me, it was all about Margaret. When Irealized I didn't have enough facts to write a biography, I was devastated andgrudgingly packed away my research.

Then my mother-in-law loaned me a book, afictional biography about George Washington, by Mary Higgins Clark. It was anentertaining read, and it gave me the idea that a fictional biography might bethe only way I could tell Margaret's story and really do it justice.

That's how my novel was born. Tons of secondaryresearch went into the book. I devoured reference books, diaries, slavetestimonials, newspaper archives -- anything I could get my hands on to help mebetter understand what the average person experienced on any given day in that era.That research provided the factual framework of the novel, and I filled in theblanks based on what my mind, my heart and my gut were telling me as each sceneunfolded.

What really happed to Margaret Morgan? No oneknows. What I do know is that she suffered a great injustice. And it was asimilar injustice suffered by thousands of other women just like her -- wives,mothers, daughters -- during that dark period in U.S. history. That fact iswhat propelled the fictional story I ultimately wrote.

The history books will have you believe the storyof Prigg v. Pennsylvania is important because it ended in controversy andfanned the early embers of the Civil War. This book will have you believe thestory is important because it began with Margaret.

All Different Kinds of Free is available in trade paperback and e-book from Bell Bridge Books.Learn more at the official website http://www.AllDifferentKindsOfFree.com

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Asenath by Anna Patricio

2012-01-27T02:49:00.000-08:00

My debut novel Asenath is about the little-known wife of Joseph of themulticoloured coat fame. Hardly anyone knows who she is, and that is mostlikely due to the fact that the Book of Genesis mentions her only in passing.In fact, whenever I tell people I have written about her, the reaction I getmost of the time is, "I didn't know Joseph had a wife!"

So why write about this obscure Biblical character? Well, the mere fact thatbarely anything is known about her provides great opportunity for fiction. I amthus at ease to stretch my imagination as far as I please.

That is just the surface though. My deeper reason for writing about Asenathstems from my interest in the Biblical account of Joseph.I adore that story. It is a powerful taleof strength, hope and perseverance. I had known about it all my life, but itwas later on that I realised how moving it is. I admire how Joseph maintainedhis integrity even after all he had been through: losing his mother during hischildhood, being sold into slavery by his brothers, and being imprisoned for acrime he did not commit. He survived it all and emerged as a very seasoned man.

My newfound interest then drove me to delve deeper into the story. I readeverything I could get my hands on. First I began with Biblical commentaries,then later discovered other interesting accounts, such as Jewish folktales andPersian epic poems.

Along the way, I grew curious about hiswife Asenath. I wanted to know what sort of a woman married so admirable a personas Joseph. All the Bible tells us is that she was given to him as a wife afterhe successfully interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams.I wanted to see if there was more info onher. Alas, when I looked her up, I found barely anything on her.I found a few ancient tales such as the Greek'Joseph and Asenath' which has as its theme Asenath's conversion to Judaism.But other than that, nothing. Nothing to tell me of her childhood, her marriageto Joseph, her family life with Joseph etc.

In the contemporary fiction of Joseph thatI read, I was not too satisfied with the portrayals of Asenath, especiallybecause she wasn’t given much attention. I wanted someone to expand on her lifewith Joseph, albeit fictionally. But when I did not find what I wanted to read,I then thought to write such a story myself.

In addition, I have always loved fictionset in Ancient Egypt, and thought it might be an adventure to contribute to theEgyptian fiction offerings. I knew though that it would also entail a lot ofresearch, to try and stay as faithful as possible to the atmosphere of thatera, and that would be a lot of hard work. However, it all turned out veryfulfilling in the end.

Hence, Asenath.

http://www.annapatricio.blogspot.com

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A Song in My Heart by Roma Calatayud - Stocks

2012-01-24T02:35:00.000-08:00

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY:

Answers to this question from an interview by Billy Watkins from the Clarion Ledger Newspaper: June 18, 2011

Q: What are your earliest music memories?

A: My mother played recorded classical music every Sunday, which exposed me to various musical styles, but waltzes were my favorite.

Q: What appealed to you about orchestral music?

A: The music from composers around the world, the abundance of sounds, counter melodies, and when the main melody is repeated and performed by varying sections of the orchestra, giving the musical motif of the composition a different arrangement and emotion.

Q: Will you tell us about your book and where the idea came from?

A: It is about the life of Alejandra "Ale" Stanford who's born into a bi cultural family in Minneapolis in 1902. As a young pianist and budding composer, she resolves to become a conductor despite the obstacles. She will travel to the great cities of the world in pursuit of her goals.

The idea for the story was born in 2002 when I was producing a concert for the Minnesota Orchestra Volunteer Association. As the creator and artistic director, I selected the composers and the musical program. Then, it became clear to me what a privilege it would be to be a conductor and interpret the music of legendary composers.

In the early 1900s most of the musicians and all conductors were men. I thought "what if a young woman's dreams of being a conductor is at the core of the narrative?" That was a story that had not been told.

Q: This is historical fiction. How much of it is true?
A: Most everything around the characters' lives is true, from the debut of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, to World War I, to the Roaring Twenties.

All of the pioneers, composers, conductors, artists, dates, places and institutions are also real. What is most surprising and interesting is how the true historic time line fell almost perfectly with the fictional storyline.

Q: What is the message you want to convey?

A: It was important for the novel to be entertaining, yet written within a compelling period in history that people would enjoy.

A Song in My Heart highlights the contributions of many cultures and dozens of institutions, individuals, artists and composers from the U.S. and other countries through music and the arts.

I also wanted to convey music's relevance in our lives. And while there may be challenges in a person's life, anything is possible with conviction and determination, regardless of the odds.

The protagonist Alejandra "Ale" Stanford who faces many of life's challenges, is herself a virtuoso pianist and budding composer. The original soundtrack that accompanies the narrative serves to provide the protagonist's own creative and emotional expressions through music during pivotal times in her life.

A Song in My Heart is book one of a trilogy, and I look forward to completing the second book "Striking the Right Note" which begins in 1933, Berlin, Germany.

A Song in My Heart, A Historical Novel, Including CD with Original Musical Score written and composed by Roma Calatayud-Stocks. The musical score, with fourteen songs and instrumentals with classical, jazz, and Latin influences, to A Song in My Heart was composed by Roma Calatayud-Stocks and arranged and performed by Chan Poling and other excellent musicians who are listed in the book.

On a personal note, Roma serves as a trained volunteer docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, and also volunteers for Minnesota’s Vocal Essence’s Cantaré Program and MacPhail Center for Music.

Blog: www.WhyTheArtsMatter.wordpress.com

http://www.RomaStocks.com

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Strategos by Gordon Doherty

2012-01-19T02:19:00.000-08:00

Parmenion, Helikaon, Kalliades, Connovar, Bane...all of David Gemmell's characters live long in the memory weeks, months and even years after I have followed them in their quest through troubled lives and epic sagas. I never totally love them, I never quite dislike them but I always empathise with them and want to stick by their side right to the end. Then, when the end comes I feel like I've lost a good friend.

Why? Because Gemmell spiced each of his characters with something that simply 'clicks' with the human psyche. His characters don't just develop; they evolve, and rarely as they might want to. It is the choices that they make at the most intense and troubled times that truly shape their character. As any person knows all too intimately, nobody makes the right choice every time. Nobody is perfect and any reader can to empathise with that.

There are many fine authors out there who have crafted strong and memorable characters and some may well have been inspired by Gemmell's work. Indeed it is the tales of the Rigante, the Trojans, the Macedonians and the Britons that have inspired me to write of the Byzantine boy Apion in 'Strategos: Born in the Borderlands'.

Apion's life is riven in the most brutal fashion, his parents slain in a Seljuk night raid before his eyes. Orphaned, he struggles to survive in the volatile borderlands between the Byzantine and Seljuk Empires in an age where war is imminent. Then, when an old Seljuk farmer takes him under his wing, Apion is presented with a choice: to let go of his dark past and seek a happy future, or to track down the truth, knowing that it will bring conflict and pain on those he loves most.

That is where the journey begins; he will face choices in his life that will define not only his own destiny, but that of the Byzantine Empire itself...

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Moon in Leo by Kathleen Herbert

2012-01-15T02:13:00.000-08:00

Inthe 1980s Kathleen Herbert was a respected author, much in demand as a speaker,and selling her books all over Europe, the UK and America.

Imagine:a large abandoned warehouse. Nothing in it- nothing at all. Except an industrialsized fan. Does it work? OK. Move it to the middle of the warehouse. Now, onthe floor (none too clean) place two copies of the same manuscript, about sevenhundred pages each. Put them both down in front of the fan, go back to the wallsocket, and press the switch. Wheeee- that was fun. Now go away and leave dustand pages to settle. Come back every so often over a few years and try to pickthem up and put them in a pile. Eventually manage to cram the pages- everysingle last one of them- into two carrier bags- the sturdy sort that aresupposed to last a lifetime. Hand them to a friend- and six months later, Moon in Leo is in bookshops and sellingon Amazon.

Yes-I find it hard to believe too. Just over a year ago that's all I was- a friendto a writer. And now I am a publisher.

My friendship with Kathleen Herbert has lasted forwell over forty years. Like all friendships, it has changed, as I married andhad children (to whom she became a much loved and affectionate"Auntie") and she became a well respected author. There were gaps,high points and low points.
During the last few years there have been low pointsindeed, as the stroke that she had in 1994 started to take its toll, and shebecame prey to depression and delusion. During those dark years, we met rarely,and she allowed no-one into her house. She was often despairing and felt shewas being watched. She bemoaned her own incapability- on good days with a joke,on bad days with tears.

A constant in her conversation and letters though, was the book she knewsaid something important she needed to share:

I have looked over mynovel about Furness during the Popish Plot- which is firmly based on truth…during these last weeks, the story has suddenly become incredibly topical- … forthe background we have:

· a King called Charles, with a complicated marital and familylife

· a society of the rich and famous who produce a new scandalwith every edition of the newspapers

· a government that is not only stale but starting to smell

· an established religion that has run out of steam, andnumbers of cults that are boiling with enthusiasm- some for good, some forevil, both inside and outside Christianity

· and a large number of “alternative” Englands that are barelysuspected to exist by “official” England

· It’s 1678, but change the clothes and it could be today.

And later:

I wrote a novel aboutthe different folk who have come to our islands (for good, bad, fear, food,etc) and how they are still coming. I put the story into the past, so no folkcould be insulted or unhappy or frightened.

As she became less andless capable of mustering her resources to approach publishers and agents, Irepeatedly offered to help: She said a well meaning friend had offered totype it and had completely messed it up; she implied that he had taken it uponhimself to re-write bits of it, and had even lost the original MS. (Remember the two almost identical copies?)

Perhaps we could meet for coffee and a meal and look at what remained, Ikept saying. Despite several attempts to arrange meetings, they never happened,and there were times when she was so much in despair that I suggested shebundle it all up, put it in a box and send it to me by registered post.

Finally, gathering all her strength and all her pages,she managed to bundle the manuscript into two large carrier bags- "bagsfor life" - a lovely irony. And she gathered enough courage and energy tomeet me outside Burnt Oak station with the bags. That was in June 2010.
It took me two days to sort the two manuscripts and I wasthrilled to find they were both complete- (OK I lied about the industrial fan.)It took my husband several weeks to scan it and use OCR to transform it into amodern manuscript that we could present to publishers and agents.
How and why I lost patience and decided to short circuitthem all, is another story.
She had a week or two of great energy and optimism,when she rode on the wave that had buoyed her up to gather her book together,but it was a very brief upturn in what proved to be a rapid decline in herhealth and spirits. She had been neglecting the physical world of eating,drinking and sleeping until she was found wandering, far from home with adislocated shoulder, and taken to the nearest hospital.
Now, with proper food and warmth and care in shelteredaccommodation she is regaining strength and clarity day by day and delightedthat people are enjoying Moon in Leo,and that the message of tolerance- political, religious and personal- which isone of its strongest themes, is finally reaching those people she was sodesperate to talk to.
And why did I start a new business to publish thislost book? Because I agree with Kathleen- it is an important book which tellsus things we need to know; but most of all, because, having sorted it out, Ithen couldn't put it down!

Blog: www.trifoliumbooks.blogspot.com
Website: www.trifoliumbooks.co.uk

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Unexpected Journey by Christina St.Clair

2011-12-04T08:44:00.000-08:00

While I was part of a children's writer's group, trying to figure out what I could write (not much back then), I settled on attempting an historical fiction piece based loosely on the Gilgamesh Epic, which fascinated me. I wanted to create a heroine epic about an immature girl who left her homeland, had to go through many trials to eventually become an outspoken young woman. Too, looking back, Unexpected Journey, in some ways, began as an attempt to explain and understand why I left England when I was eighteen.

I picked the 1730s because I came across an interesting tidbit about rich young women being pressed into marriage and I also love colonial American history. It seemed so much easier to learn than the many British Kings and Queens I was required to memorize as an English schoolgirl.

A handkerchief that once belonged to Rachel's mother was pivotal in the initial story, originally titled Momma's Handkerchief, as a symbol of persistence and hope. Rachel used it to stuff her bodice to fool people into thinking her older. Without it, Rachel might never have ended up in Colonial Philadelphia, might never have met the Native American, Gishuk, might never have overcome the narrow-minded views of her culture about other races. Amazing, really, where one tiny fact led.

When I was writing the first draft, a new character, Anna, a streetwise girl who befriended Rachel, leaped into the story, and I eventually wrote a whole section about her. She became my favorite because she had to go through so much and was often kinder than anyone ever was to her. She was also incredibly stubborn. My mother told me I am incredibly stubborn too, which must be true, or I'd have given up on finding a publisher for this novel years earlier.

Another character who became an integral part of the novel was Gishuk, a Lenni Lenape shaman. He was so much fun to write about. Gishuk used to talk to me by using a green pen to answer my questions written in black ink! Partly, he emerged because I came across a library copy of the Walum Olum, a pictoral record of the Lenni Lenape people. I wanted to learn more about this interesting culture. I loved to roam the woods where I lived in Pennsylvania so I set Gishuk's village near a pond where I often walked.

I did a lot of research which I thoroughly enjoyed, including visiting a replica of a squarerigger ship, not to mention spending time in reconstructed colonial villages. I had fun trying to find details about clothing and foods. It was like a treasure hunt. The book took years to complete--every so often, I would dust it off, revise and send it out to publishers again. I was astonished when it was accepted by a publisher.

The book is available as an e-book or print version:
It's also available on Amazon Kindle:

www.christinastclair.com
www.christinastclair.com/blog

Out Today! The Courtesan's Lover by Gabrielle Kimm

2011-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

GETTING CLOSE TO THE COURTESAN

It’s strange, when you are writing a novel, how sometimes a character simply won’t leave you alone. Just when you think it’s safe to go back to the keyboard, they start badgering away at you again, demanding more of your time and insisting on being heard. Francesca Felizzi, the central character of my new novel ‘The Courtesan’s Lover , was a bit like this. She originally appeared as a secondary character in my first book, ‘His Last Duchess’. As I wrote that first novel, though, I had no plans to continue Francesca’s story. ( In fact, at one point, one of my sisters even began exhorting me to kill her off! My instant certainty that this was a total impossibility should perhaps have warned me that Francesca was not planning on going quietly at the end of the book.)

‘His Last Duchess’ (Sphere 2010) tells a possible back story to Robert Browning’s well known monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, and fictionalises the ill-fated marriage of the fifth duke of Ferrara and the very young Lucrezia de’ Medici in the mid sixteenth century. As part of that story, I gave my duke a mistress. He is a damaged and difficult man, though, and I knew that anyone prepared to cope with the demands of a relationship with so volatile and dangerous a lover would have to be a seriously resourceful woman. Which is exactly what Francesca turned out to be. Spotted by the duke and rescued by him from life as a street-whore in Ferrara, she spends the best part of eight years as his paid mistress, and learns much about survival and self-preservation along the way. Francesca is beautiful and sexy and clever and fundamentally adaptable, and she uses all these attributes shamelessly.

I finished ‘His Last Duchess’, with a strong sense of having completed my journey with my characters. I was happy with where they all were at the end of the story, and I really didn’t need to know any more about them. I was ready to say goodbye to them. Except for Francesca. I couldn’t get her out of my head. She just kept on and on intruding, interrupting, elbowing her way to the front of my thoughts, and demanding to be given more space to exist. I knew I was going to have to listen to her.

It took time to discover what she was going to be doing in the course of this new book, in which she was going to play the starring role, though. She was, I knew, going to be fighting hard to become a courtesan – a cortigiana onesta - and she was going to be doing this in Naples. In his book ‘On Becoming a Novelist’, John Gardner says that ‘setting exists so that the character has some place to stand, something that can help define him.’[1] I had to stand Francesca somewhere, and it had to be somewhere new, away from the setting of the previous novel. The Naples of the sixteenth century, unwillingly under Spanish rule, was a chaotic, anarchic, ebullient melting-pot of a city- a perfect place in which to allow my complex, confused courtesan to tackle her problems.

As you can imagine, I read and read and read about the great courtesans of history – Veronica Franco, Ninon de l’Enclos, Harriette Wilson and Cora Pearl amongst others – and I was simply blown away by the courage and independence of these extraordinary women, who basically functioned in society as autonomous, successful businesswomen in centuries in which their more virtuous sisters had little or no freedom, either financially, socially or sexually.

The courtesans were, in many ways, amazing. And seriously naughty! Even by today’s standards, in some cases. As an example, one nineteenth century Parisian courtesan appeared at a high-society fancy-dress ball one year ... as “Eve”. Wearing not even a fig leaf! I can’t imagine even the most outrageous of today’s celebrities getting away with that. Can you?

Life as a courtesan was not all plain sailing though, for even the most successful. Penury, danger and disease lay in wait around every corner and many of them ended their lives in anonymous poverty. As Veronica Franco says, (in a quote I decided to include at the beginning of my book) “It is too miserable, and contrary to human reason, to force your body and energy into such slavery: terrifying even to think about.” She goes into graphic detail about the terrors that await the unwary courtesan – not least of which was the ever-present fear of going to hell. I was anxious not to allow myself to be too caught up in the romantic exuberance of the great courtesans, and wanted to be certain that the potential danger and degradation of Francesca’s situation would not be overlooked as I began to tell her story. So to bring myself back down to earth, I read a number of accounts written by modern, contemporary sex-workers – frank, honest, vulgar, frightening, touching, heartbreaking descriptions of a way of life most of us can’t actually even contemplate. These accounts were sobering and shocking, and they provided the contrast I needed.

I felt I understood Francesca better, for having heard in such detail from her twenty first century counterparts. I hope, if any of them read the book, they will feel I’ve understood them.

It’s been an extraordinary journey for me, getting this close to a courtesan. Something of a privilege. Francesca’s story – ‘The Courtesan’s Lover’ will be published by Sphere (an imprint of Little, Brown) in November 2011.

http://www.gabriellekimm.co.uk/

Twitter @gabrielle_kimm

[1] from On Becoming a Novelist (Norton 1983 p52)

Middle Time by Priya Vasudevan

2011-11-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

I first saw Hampi by moonlight, the outer battlements of the city wall glimmering, and the enchantment slithered into my subconscious, unfurled and remains to this day. The next day, sitting in the Queen's Bath, I slipped back in time and Achale danced before me, out of the keys, onto the page. While Achale remained a part of me, I heard the first faint whispers of her story only when I read about the strange case of the boy-saint, a widow's son who came out of the temple pond with his sacred thread, in the colonial gazetteer.

This is a true story, which happened in Virinchipuram, Tamilnadu, India. In the book, I set this incident in the fictional village of Alur, near Hampi.

The theme was born out of the desire to rewrite history from the woman's perspective, not as a victim as she is so often shown, but as an individual, making the best of her circumstances. Hence, Achale, courtesan but not prostitute, a career woman who gets waylaid but not derailed, by life. Maya, the other protagonist, seemed to me the ideal counterpoint to Achale- the modern career woman- how far has she journeyed?

What started me on this journey was an article in the woman’s journal, ‘Manushi’ about women saints and sainthood being an act of liberation. Religion, even in modern India, occupies not only the headlines but page three as well. More so in Vijayanagara, where an empire was established allegedly to rejuvenate an ailing religion. The sacred and the profane are closely interlinked in the religious discourse and sexuality is but an expression of love for the divine. I was intensely interested in AK Ramanujan's translations of Tamil poetry of the saints in ' Speaking of Siva,' the meta physical yet erotically charged imagery of secular poetry and Hindu philosophy which links Creation, procreation and destruction in the dances of the Gods.

The title ‘Middle Time’ alludes to the medieval era, of course, in which part of the novel is set. It is also a reference to the continuity of time, its cyclical nature. Between Hampi in the middle ages, and Chennai in 1996 there is a similarity - in that society was changing and economic opportunities were growing. As well, there was a religious revival sweeping through India in both periods and governance was at an all-time low.

www.facebook.com/pages/Priya-Vasudevan/107403402680564

Priya's blog- http://priyavasudevan.wordpress.com/.

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Polly's Story by Jennie Walters

2011-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

The ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ trilogy: ‘Polly’s Story’, ‘Grace’s Story’, ‘Isobel’s Story’

It was dates that inspired me to write my three ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ books. I suddenly realized that a young Victorian girl could have had a daughter of that age in 1914, on the brink of the First World War, and a grand-daughter her age in 1939, on the eve of the Second. So there was the timeline for my three novels: these fascinating periods of history. I decided to root the stories in a grand old English country house, large enough to accommodate an army of servants besides the aristocratic family who’ve lived there for generations. I wanted the house to become another character, regarded in a very different light by each of my three heroines. Polly, who comes to the house as under-housemaid in 1890, wants nothing more than to stay there and serve the Vye family for the rest of her life. Her daughter Grace, a reluctant kitchenmaid, is stifled and suffocated by the Hall; she manages to find work in the stables when the male servants go off to fight in the war, but still feels the restrictions of servant life – especially when she falls in love with a member of the Vye family, and he with her. And although Grace is determined her own daughter, Isobel, will have nothing to do with Swallowcliffe, she has no choice but to send her there to convalesce after a bout of TB in 1939, when the country is on the brink of war. Isobel is captivated by the Hall’s crumbling beauty and the chance of sanctuary it provides for Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

Each girl’s reaction to the house and to the world of service gave me a clue into her character, a starting point to examine all sorts of other thoughts and emotions. I became fascinated by the way in which the world changed between 1890 and 1939, all in the lifetime of my first heroine, and realized my own grandmother had lived through the same tumultuous time. If only I could have asked her about it! I also loved finding out about the strict code that governed the servants’ hall in a big country house: the upper servants departing to take their pudding in the housekeeper’s parlour, the under-housemaids who were only allowed to dust the legs of drawing-room furniture rather than the surface, the condescending ‘Rules for the manners of servants in good families’: do not smile at droll stories told at the table, do not enter into conversation with your mistress, give any information required in as few words as possible. ‘Downton Abbey’ has its appeal, but it’s just as well those days have gone and we’re living in more open, fairer times today.

For a wealth of background information into the stories, including original photographs, extracts from servants’ letters, and much more, visit

www.jenniewalters.com

where you can also purchase the book as an e-book or in print

Alice in Love and War by Ann Turnbull

2011-10-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

I first had the idea for a story set during the English Civil War more than a decade ago, when I was researching the background to my novel about the early Quakers, No Shame, No Fear. Among the details in my research folder I see that I made a pencilled note: “A girl falls in love with a soldier and follows him to the wars?”

That wisp of an idea became Alice in Love & War.

I knew the girl wouldn’t be wearing a low-necked silk dress and the soldier wouldn’t be a cavalier – or indeed a high-ranking officer from either side. My interest has always been in ordinary people and how historical events affect them. But exactly who my characters were would depend upon where the story began. I researched the war, its causes and its military progress. The conflict lasted several years, and I knew that a large part of my story would be about an army on the move. I would need to focus on a short but dramatic period. I chose the nine months or so between the King’s victory at Lostwithiel in September 1644 and his defeat at Naseby in June 1645. After the battle of Lostwithiel the King’s army was billeted for several days in and around the village of Peter Tavy on the moors above Tavistock. I placed my main character, 16-year-old Alice Newcombe, on a farm outside the village. She lives there with her abusive aunt and uncle. She’s unhappy. And then she meets handsome Robin Hillier, a corporal in the army and a charming rogue.

Alice in Love & War is a story of love, friendship and of a girl growing into maturity faster than she would have liked. Alice loves Robin and believes he will marry her. She runs away with him when the army leaves, joining the women who follow the baggage train. Most of these women who trudged behind the army on foot were either prostitutes or the wives and girlfriends of soldiers – women who’d chosen to share their men’s life on the road. Some may have had useful skills; others probably craved change and excitement. For some – like the young Welsh wives Alice makes friends with – their life in the camps was better than the life of arduous rural labour they left behind.

Most of the people Alice meets know nothing about the war. Their concerns are immediate: Where can I get food? Where shall we build a shelter? Am I pregnant – and if so, what can I do about it? What matters to them are their lives and loves, comradeship, mutual support, and survival in difficult circumstances. It is only when Alice, by chance, spends the winter season at a house of the minor gentry – a family and servants who are suffering loss and imprisonment – that she gains glimpses of the wider world.

The Civil Wars devastated Britain. Thousands died for a cause they barely understood. Soldiers froze to death sleeping in the fields. Armies moved across the land, looting and abusing. Alice is appalled by the hostility she encounters, and shocked by the cruelty she sees in her friends. But she holds fast to her own values, and in the end finds peace in uncertain times.

www.annturnbull.com

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The Secret of the Glass by Donna Russo Morin

2011-10-18T02:47:00.000-07:00

Like so much of life, the story and the title of my second novel really came to me in the most unexpected of ways. When Katie Couric became anchor of the CBS Evening News, I decided to watch to support her, even though I’m not a great fan of television news programs. Within that broadcast was a two-minute feature story on the glassmakers of Murano. One point in particular caught and captured my imagination: for hundreds of years the glassmakers of Venice were virtual prisoners in their own land, captives of a government determined to keep the prestige and profit produced by the glass. Within a half hour of viewing that story, I had a two page synopsis written, a plot that mapped out a story about a young Murano woman who must somehow save herself while protecting ‘the secret of the glass.’

In the physical sense, Sophia, the protagonist, is based on Sophia Loren; I think she epitomizes Italian beauty and she is a woman I greatly admire for her talent and her choices in life. The crux of Sophia’s conflict in The Secret of the Glass—whether a person can serve the needs of their family while honoring their own—is one I was grappling with at the time of the writing. My marriage had long broken down, and I struggled with the decision to divorce. Through her tribulations, and her decisions, I found my own path. As a second generation Italian American and a writer of European historicals, I really wanted to set a book in the land I consider my second country. Then, when I started my research, I found Galileo. I was unaware of how much time he had spent in the magical city of Venice. I knew nothing of the symbiotic relationship between him and this wonderful land. But I was astounded when I learned the professor suffered from a chronic illness, one similar to my own. I found kinship in his tale of determination, one echoed in the story of the land itself and the people that had made it so unique. Buona Fortuna, Donna Russo Morin

www.donnarussomorin.com

www.donnarussomorin.blogspot.com

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The de Lacy Inheritance by Elizabeth Ashworth

2011-09-30T01:13:00.000-07:00

Although I’ve been a short story writer for many years I had never planned to write a novel −until I came across the story of a hermit who had lived in a cave under the castle at Clitheroe in Lancashire.

The idea took form when I was researching a non-fiction book, Tales of Old Lancashire, for Countryside Books. Whilst looking for more information about the hermit I discovered that he was claimed to be a member of the de Lacy family. As a local, some of the history of the de Lacy family, who were Lords of Blackburnshire, was already familiar to me, but when I realised that the hermit would have inherited a fortune except for his leprosy I wanted to know more about him.

Richard was a real person. He is recorded as Richard of Chester and as Richard, a leper. In those days, around the turn of the 13^th century, those who suffered from this terrible affliction were forced to hear the Mass of Separation and make vows that included not entering any church or marketplace and not touching the rim or rope of a well except with gloved hands. Lepers were also excluded from inheriting, which is where the basic idea of my book came from.

When you go back a thousand years events are not always well recorded and that can be a good as well as a bad thing. Lack of finite detail gives the opportunity to fictionalise the gaps between the known facts, although known facts can be worked into the story.

So where does the truth end and the fiction begin in The de Lacy Inheritance? That’s not as easy to answer as you might think. One thing you learn when you’re researching for a historical novel is that there are many, many versions of the truth. Inaccuracies are often copied from source to source and sorting out the reliable from the unreliable is difficult and time consuming.

The lives of women and lepers are not so well documented as those of nobles, and there is much more information about Richard’s brother Roger de Lacy than there is about him and his sisters. The other main character in the book, Johanna, is based on a figure who is recorded as being a daughter of Roger de Lacy, but for the novel I decided to make her a sister of Richard and Roger as the ages seemed more appropriate. There is no clear historical record of her name and sometimes she is referred to as Maud or even confused with another family member Helen de Lacy, so I took a leap of faith based on very flimsy evidence and named her with the feminine version of John, who was either her father or grandfather.

In the end this is a story. It is fiction. Although it is based on known facts and on an old legend it is my interpretation of the lives of people who lived almost a thousand years ago. But they are very real and important to me and I hope that I have told their stories with integrity and not done them a disservice. As I continue with my research into the history of the de Lacy family I may discover facts that are at variance with the ones I’ve presented in the book. But I hope that doesn’t detract from anyone’s enjoyment of the story, because, in the end, it is a novel and not an academic history.

My webpage/blog is: www.elizabethashworth.com

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Legionary by Gordon Doherty

2011-09-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

It was a characteristically bleak autumn afternoon in Northumberland as I sauntered along the tumbled ruins of Hadrian’s Wall. After an obligatory imagining of myself kitted out in legionary armour, barking out orders to my cohort, I sat down to take in the landscape. I tried to envisage the rolling hills in the age when the auxiliaries of Britannia would have lined this ominous frontier and garrisoned the forts, milecastles and watchtowers. I imagined a firm and seemingly eternal signpost shouting out to all and sundry ‘This is Rome and she’s here to stay!’ Yet now I could see only the squat remains of foundations and surrounding rubble and the Romans were long gone. A question entered my thoughts, demanding to be answered: how had the greatness of Rome faded from the invincibility of the pax romana to this?

Fast forward a few years: I was strolling along the inner tier battlements of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople/Istanbul (or more accurately I was tentatively inching along them and trying not to look down – they’re pretty high up and a bit crumbly) around the Golden Gate area. The structure extended north into the smog of the city, sentinel-like towers standing empty but eerily defiant after fifteen hundred years. The place was electric, the air crackling with history and I felt that hunger for an answer again: how could the Roman and Byzantine grip on Europe, Western Asia and Africa have dwindled to nothing, leaving behind a behemoth-like architectural carcass like this?

Having done my reading I now know the textbook answers to the two questions above, but have been left with something far more valuable: a sustained intrigue, nay obsession, over the decline from the pax romana to the post-Roman world and the real answers to these questions.

While the order, prosperity and pristine legions of the high principate are a fascinating blend, I find it somewhat too perfect. What really fires my imagination is the 3rd century AD and onwards, an age which sees Rome’s forts and cities decaying, her pagan ideals being swept into history by Christianity, her economy stagnating and her legions thin, scattered and all-too-mortal. What events could have occurred in this era that have since been lost to the ghosts of the past, echoing along the battlements of these walls and fortifications? What of the people of these times, they would have had to live with the reality that greatness was slipping away from them while they still clung to the ideals of their recent ancestors. And then there were the ‘barbarians’; with the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, Parthians and Huns just a selection of the powerful and now militarily equal peoples pressing relentlessly on the empire’s borders, fiery conflict and desperate and heartfelt emotion must have been rife.

So all this has me jilting the perfection of invincible Rome and falling for the complexity of her flawed descendant and that’s why I sat down to write Legionary. Perhaps it is my admiration for the spirit of the underdog that nudges me this way and I feel that one day a psychiatrist might confirm that. Whatever the reason I’m just grateful for what has turned out to be a perpetual fuel for my writing.

And even now when I visit the ruins, I’m still seeking true answers to those questions that demand to be answered.

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www.gordopolis.com/writing

Deliverance from Evil by Frances Hill

2011-09-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

Writing Deliverance from Evil was like coming home. After working as a journalist for many years I had in the 1980s published two novels and hoped my future as a writer lay in fiction. But then unexpectedly I found myself writing a non-fiction book about the Salem witch trials. It had happened because when I visited Salem in 1992 I discovered there was, amazingly, no good, accurate popular history of this fascinating episode; I strongly wished to fill the gap. The result was A Delusion of Satan, The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials, published by Doubleday in the US in 1995 and Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 1996. That book led, as a result in the first two cases of suggestions by publishers and in the third to my desire to express my strong conviction about the dangerous folly of war with Iraq, to three other non-fiction books, The Salem Witch Trials Reader (2000), Hunting for Witches, (2002) and Such Men Are Dangerous, The Fanatics of 1692 and 2004, (2004). After that I thought I had finished with the witch trials.

But the urge had been gradually growing to flesh out some of the characters and events of this tantalisingly elusive, though so well documented, episode, in fiction. In particular I felt I wanted to explore the personality and experience of a man who played a pivotal part but is far less well known that characters such as John Proctor, John Danforth and Rebecca Nurse. He was a charismatic Puritan minister who became one of those falsely accused. I had become fascinated by him during my research because of his intelligence, courage, wit and even, I confess, looks: he was "dark like an Indian," according to one of the contemporary sources, short but lithe and extremely stong, clearly highly attractive to women. I realised I wanted to explore George Burroughs' tragic but inspiring story in a way only possible by adding imagination and invention to patient reading and research.

When I began to do so, I found it thrilling to be writing fiction again, with George Burroughs and my other characters coming to life under my hands, beginning to make their own moves, speak their own lines, see through their own eyes . . .
Thanks to my American publisher, Overlook, Deliverance from Evil is blessed with a wonderful cover. It has now also been published, with the same cover, in the UK by Duckworth.

I have nearly finished another historical novel, this time not based on research for previous non-fiction works but again for the most part on historical characters. As every novelist knows, the joy of such creation is like no other.

Deliverance from Evil is available from amazon.com in the US and amazon.co.uk in the UK and from bookstores in both countries.

My website is www.franceshill.net

Surgeon's Mate by Linda Collison

2011-08-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

My first historical novel Star-Crossed (Knopf 2006) was conceived at the helm of the HM Bark Endeavour replica in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to explore what it might have been like to have been a young woman on a tall ship in the age of sail. Star-Crossed, which took nearly seven years from conception to publication was recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the Books for the Teen Age -- 2007. I had not written it as a Young Adult novel, but had told the story from the point of view of a teen aged female protagonist. The idea consumed me, and still does.

Knopf, however, had bought Star-Crossed as a stand-alone; they did not want to publish a sequel. Yet I could not forget about Patricia. I wrote the sequel, a rather disturbing account, based on all the research I had done for Star-Crossed as well as my 13-plus years in acute care nursing, and my own sailing experience. I was sure Knopf would change their mind and publish Surgeon's Mate, the follow-up. But they did not. My agent advised me to give up on the sequel and write something else. Months later I had not produced any new novels she wanted to represent, and so my agent dumped me. Kindly, but a dump is a dump and I felt as star-crossed as my protagonist, Patricia.

Three years passed. I had gone back to college for a second degree in History, with a minor in French, and I was working on another historical novel. I had almost forgotten about poor Patricia MacPherson, out there in the Atlantic Ocean where I had left her. And that's when Tom Grundner, Editor-in-Chief at Fireship Press contacted me through my website. He was very interested in both Star-Crossed and my sequel, Surgeon's Mate. In fact, he hoped I would write a series about my cross-dressing character! Oh, joy, Patricia lives! I carefully edited my manuscript, made some revisions, and sent it off to Grundner. Fireship Press publishes mainly historical fiction and nonfiction, and it seems a perfect fit.

Surgeon's Mate; book two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series was published by Fireship Press in April, 2011 and is available in trade paperback and electronic editions, worldwide. Grundner hopes to republish Star-Crossed if Knopf chooses not to run a second printing. Right now I'm working on Book Three of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series, drawing on my research, my sailing and nursing experience, and driven by the character herself. What an adventure in writing and publishing!

Thanks for the opportunity to share my story on your blog; I've enjoyed reading some of the other authors' inspirations.

Yours, aye,

Linda Collison

www.lindacollison.com

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Conquest by Julian Stockwin

2011-08-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I was a software designer. I’d just signed off on my biggest and most fraught project. As I sank exhausted into an armchair, my wife thrust a large tumbler of whisky into my hand and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said, ‘get a life!’ Her suggestion: that I write. And about the sea...

Once I’d overcome the initial shock and decided to give it a go, I realised there was a lot of sense in what she said. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been bewitched by the sea. Going to a decent grammar school was wasted on me; on the school bus I’d gaze out across the Channel at the low, grey shapes slipping away over the horizon on voyages to who knows where, taking my imagination with them. As a young boy I remember the thrilling drama of the Flying Enterprise, when Captain Kurt Carlsen refused to leave his sinking ship and, with First Mate Dancy of the ocean salvage tug Turmoil, heroically fought to bring her within sight of port before she tragically sank. Then, too, London Pool was packed with ships flying the red ensign, and it was also the time of the very last of the square riggers: theoretically, you could still sign up outward-bound on a commercial voyage.

The only member of my family to have any connection with the sea was a distant relative we called Uncle Tom. A gentle, quietly spoken old man, he’d been around the Horn in square sail, and whenever I could I would sit spellbound and listen to him talk about life before the mast on the seven seas.

My father thought he’d knock all this sea nonsense out of me, and sent me to a tough sea-training school at the tender age of 14. It didn’t work; there was no contest – Latin and algebra or splicing and boat-handling! So at age 15, I joined the Royal Navy, eventually becoming a petty officer and later a lieutenant commander. And 40 years later, I sat down to write about the sea.

I’m ‘Old Navy’ with a deep respect and admiration for the service, so it had to be the Navy I’d write about. I chose Nelson’s time, the great climax of the age of sail and a magnificent canvas for sea tales. This was an era when the sea was respected and wooed by men who didn’t confront the sea with steam engines and brute force. I also wanted to bring the sea itself into a more prominent role, but was, as yet, unsure how to achieve this.

I soon realised that there were things from my time in the Navy that I wanted to bring to my writing; small things, but so evocative – a shimmering moonpath glittering on the water, the sound of voices from invisible night watchkeepers, the startling rich stink of the land after months at sea, the comfort of a still hammock when the ship rolls about it, the unreal beauty of an uninhabited tropical island in the South Seas.

There were the darker memories, too. Savage storms at sea when you feel the presence of nature like a wild beast out of a cage; close inshore in a gale when you wonder if a mistake at the helm will end with those black rocks suddenly bursting in. I was duty watch in the carrier Melbourne that night when we collided with and sank Voyager – there from the seaboat I saw men’s courage at work while 80 sailors drowned.

To achieve that more prominent role for the sea, it seemed logical to take the perspective of the men who actually did the job out there on the yardarm, serving the great cannon or crowding aboard an enemy deck, rather than of those shouting orders from behind. So the lower deck it was – and then I came across some amazing statistics. In the bitter French wars at the end of the 18^th century, there were, out of the several hundred thousand seamen in the Navy over that time, only around 200, who by their own courage, resolution and brute tenacity made the awe inspiring journey from the fo’c’sle as common seaman to King’s officer on the quarterdeck. This meant of course that they changed from common folk to the gentry; they became – gentlemen. And that was no mean thing in the 18^th century.

And of those 200, a total of possibly 16 became captains of their own ship – and a miraculous half dozen to Admiral! Yet not one left any kind of record of their odyssey, how they must have felt, what impelled them to the top – and so there I had my story! They would be the basis for my central character; I’d write the story of how he endured from the level of press‑gang victim to hoisting his own flag as Admiral.

I’d deliberately take the perspective of the common seaman as my point of view, instead of the more usual officer shouting orders from behind on the quarterdeck. This would mean I could pit my hero first hand against the reality of the sea, and let him taste the salt spray in his teeth, the fear of serving one of the great cannons on the gundeck, the courage needed to work aloft on madly flogging canvas.

In fact I soon realised my book would be a series.

My initial conception of the length of the series, eleven books, (which at the time seemed almost impossibly daunting) has now been revised considerably, upwards. The more I delved into the historical record the more I found to inspire the creative juices! My twelfth book CONQUEST is just out and I am working on book 13 to be published next June. A further eight are planned.

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The Eloquence of Blood by Judith Rock

2011-08-04T01:54:00.000-07:00

How to say where something began? Start tracing the root of anything, and it twists and coils and doubles back more sinuously than you knew. When I try to trace the root of my Charles du Luc historical mystery series, it seems to begin in my doctoral research, done in Paris, on the 17^th and 18^th century ballets the Jesuits produced as part of teaching rhetoric at their school called Louis le Grand, on Paris's Left Bank.

During the research visits, I fell in love. With the Jesuit ballets, Paris, French history. And with the Jesuit Cultural Center in Chantilly, half an hour's train ride north of Paris, where I lived and got to know the warm, welcoming, brilliant Jesuit community there. They became my French family and I went back year after year, long after the dissertation was done.

One evening, I stayed in Paris after the libraries closed and went to see Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Molière was educated at Louis le Grand, and as I watched the play, I wondered if his theatrical experience had begun there. I also remembered that I'd first seen the play during high school, at a transplanted 18^th century theatre in Sarasota, Florida. So the

root coils back to the Florida Gulf Coast, where I took my first step toward France.

From there, it wound through my university study of religion. And then it twined around my knees. I became a professional modern dancer, and after twenty years of dancing and choreographing, my knees informed me that they were doing no more jumps, no more plies. Which left me with the heartstopping question of 'now what?' Left me still an artist, but without an art form. So, like a good Monty Python fan, I decided that it was time 'for something completely different!' I became a police officer. But knees turned out to be useful in law enforcement, too. Then I became a dance professor, and during that time, another college commissioned me to write and perform a one-woman show for a lectureship. I wrote Response Time, about what happens when a middle-aged female artist hits the street as a cop.

I left teaching and toured the show around the U.S. Which let the root run along the stage of a small theatre in New York, where one night after a performance, a woman came backstage and said, "I really love the writing in your show. What else are you working on? I'm a literary agent." When I found my tongue, I said, "I'm working on a mystery novel." That novel didn't get published, nor did the next one or its revision, but the wonderful agent stuck with me. Discouraged by all the failure, I turned back to the long ago research in Paris, wondering if I could turn it into a story.

The long, gnarled, twisted root heaved up the floor of my study, and I wrote and wrote and wrote, loving every word, caring not at all what happened or didn't happen to what I was writing. Everything I'd ever done or been came together and gave itself to The Rhetoric of

Death : love of history, interest in religion, the doctoral research, love of theatre, working as dancer, choreographer, playwright, actress, professor, cop.

The novel's hero, Charles du Luc, is a young 17^th century Jesuit, teaching rhetoric--the art of communication--and producing ballets at the college of Louis le Grand. In The Rhetoric of Death, he finds himself working with the first Paris police chief, Nicolas de la Reynie, to catch a student dancer's killer--while trying to keep his vows and be faithful to what he loves. To my great joy, Berkley/Penguin has made the Charles books a series and the second novel, The Eloquence of Blood, comes out September 6^th. In it, Charles is faced with proving the Louis le Grand Jesuits innocent of the murder of a young woman who was disputing an inheritance with the college. The third Charles book is two thirds written. The fourth is prowling on the shadowy edges of my imagination.

Tracing the root of the Charles books reminds me that nothing is ever wasted for the artist who keeps working, who keeps making, no matter what's lost or won.

www.judithrock.com

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A Place called Armageddon by C.C. Humphreys

2011-08-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

What inspired me to write this story?

In a word: Constantinople. The city that was. And Istanbul. The city that is.

I had been researching my previous novel, ‘Vlad: The Last Confession’ in Romania in 2007. I thought: I am this close, I should visit Istanbul. So I did, for five days. Did the full tourist thing, was suitably awed by luxuriant Topkapi and dazzled by the Blue Mosque. Took my boat across the Golden Horn and up the Bosphorus. Played backgammon in alleys in Pera. Bought a rug in the grand bazaar and smoked narghile filled with apple tobacco in a place just beside it. Ate it, drank it, smoked it. Loved it… and left.

What I didn’t realize was that I had caught a fever from the city and its people. It felt so… relevant, still the centre of the world in so many ways. Not just the cliché ‘where two continents meet.’ Its totality. So much had happened there over so long a period. It had been central to so many people, their faiths, their cultures. And the more I thought about 1453, the more I realized: this is where two empires ended – the Byzantine and the Roman they’d sprung from. 2000 years of history right there. And this was where another empire began: the Ottoman who, though they had conquered much of the Balkans by then, truly established themselves by felling those two ancient worlds. And when I delved further, I discovered this: that despite all the massive preparations of assault and defense, it all came down to one moment of fate. To a single bullet.

What I most gained from a second, targeted, still too-brief visit in 2010, was a sense of the people. I talked with citizens, from warriors to publishers to concierges. To a man I’d met over a pipe before, the gentle philosopher, Akay, disciple of Omar Khayyam. I soon realized that my ambitions had shifted. If I’d ever conceived this as a story between good guys and bad, between gallant, outnumbered Christian defenders and hordes of fanatical Muslims, that concept swiftly changed. The people I talked to had ancestors who had fought either side of the walls. And they were united now in their love of what they’d fought for. The city moved me, as few have ever before – and I have travelled far.

I began to conceive characters that would give me viewpoints both sides of the walls, to tell the whole story. My central one is Gregoras: exile, proclaimed traitor, toughest of mercenaries who vows never to return to the city that took his all and does the very thing he vows not to. An outsider can see what others cannot. One who was once an insider sees more. But I also truly wanted someone who did not fight for the things ordinary men fight for – God, gold, glory. Along came Achmed who fought so that no child of his would ever die of starvation again.

I don’t like to give history lessons in my novels. But to understand the characters you need to understand their context – religious, social, military, political. I found men and women who would lead me into all those areas and tell the readers what they needed to know because they needed to know it.

The city was the key to everything. Walking those still-standing walls, you can only marvel at the courage that it took to both attack and defend them. Why would men and women do that? Because Istanbul inspires that level of love. It did in me, resident for just a few weeks. What must it do to those who live there?

I wrote of this love, from the point of view of a nameless Greek, addressed to his enemy: ‘I watch the sun pass directly over me down the line of the Bosphorus, setting the dome of Divine Wisdom afire, falling on every column that marks our history, transforming the waters that surround and sustain us from the blue smelted steel of our swords to the green of an empress’s eye. In its daily course the sun casts an even light upon the whole city, lingers like a lover reluctant to part . . . then flees suddenly, unable to look back, anxious to swiftly return, as it always does.

As shall I. If I am too tired to lift my sword, I will lay my body in the breach to trip your foot; and if my sacrifice is not worthy enough to mitigate my sins, perhaps it will yet be enough for God to grant one prayer: that I spend purgatory as a stone in Constantinople. Under that light, breathing those scents, part of that history. Part of the greatest city on earth. As was. Is. Forever will be.

I am Constantine Palaiologos, Emperor, son of Caesars. I am a baker, a ropewright, a fisherman, a monk, a merchant. I am a soldier. I am Roman. I am Greek. I am two thousand years old. I was born in freedom only yesterday.

This is my city, Turk. Take it if you can.’

What inspired him, inspired me. Constantinople. This is where the book begins and ends, stands and falls. With that city and with the people who lived and still live there.

Chris's website: www.cchumphreys.com

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Hooked on family history, and a writer who can't stop writing

2011-07-14T06:04:00.001-07:00

Two more writers share the journey of their books. Harry Nicholson tells us the story of how he came to write of a humble farmer caught in big events. Celia Hayes tells us of how once she starts a story, she can't stop.

Deborah

Tom Fleck by Harry Nicholson

2011-07-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

Why I needed to tell the story of an unknown man.

Do we ever wonder about our distant forefathers and mothers, those who lived before our great-grandparents, and even before their great-grandparents? What can we know of them? Beyond even our parent’s parents there is sadly just white fog - for most of us.

We can penetrate the fog a little. Family history research has never been more popular. Folk beaver away through the mass of data now on the internet. But what does it yield? Seldom more than the bare bones of names and the dates of baptisms, marriages and burials, and those only if you are lucky and persistent. Personality is not found; we don’t see tears or hear cries of joy, there are no flushed cheeks and beating hearts. No whisperings in the night time.

A few scraps of bone we might find here and there, as we search back through time – but then we reach a solid wall. That barrier is the darkness before the start of parish registers (in England, 1566). This is the end of the search for our ancestors - unless they were aristocrats or notorious rebels.

I’ve trodden this way, back to a mysterious ancestor: Lancelot Horsley (probably a fisherman). In 1573, he buried his first wife and two infants, then remarried and had two healthy sons. That is all I’ll ever know of him; his beginnings are on the far side of that barrier, so there is not a single mark on parchment to show that his parents ever existed.

But what if I write a story? A story about the life and times of people perhaps two generations before Lancelot? I can research how the ordinary folk of his district lived, how they spoke, what they believed to be true, and how events beyond their control swept them along. Why not? So I went for it!

One rare name stepped forward from the Hartlepool records and caught my attention – a little family called Fleck. I imagined their great-grandfather as a Thomas Fleck, a humble farm labourer. He would be a young man in a formative year. 1513 was the year of the Battle of Flodden, a conflict that gave rise to the haunting Scottish lament: "The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away". Fine – so how could I contrive a situation where the humble Tom Fleck would have to leave his kindred and re-discover himself in the midst of international struggles beyond his comprehension?

First, I built his world from scraps of social history and old maps, gave him personality and a family, gave him troubles and yearnings, gave him turning points, cross-roads, helped him deal with enemies and make hard choices. His struggles with love across the boundaries of race and religion took me into fascinating areas of research. All this in order to try to understand how some of our ancestors might have walked the land.

It is done. A whole generation has come alive. They walk and run through the pages and I love them all - even the villains.

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Harry's website

Daughter of Texas by Celia Hayes

2011-07-14T05:28:00.000-07:00

Very early on – by the time that I could actually read easily, I was particularly drawn to accounts of the American frontier in the 19th century. This, to judge by the inscriptions in books that I was given as gifts and recalled reading as soon as the ribbons and wrapping paper was off them, would have been about the age of eight or nine. It started with a deep and abiding love for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, about her family experiences as her parents moved between Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and was refined by my mother’s perspicuity in having a subscription to American Heritage Magazine (in the days when it was a hard-bound quarterly and without advertisements) and leaving it around where I could read it. Which I did, repeatedly, and from cover to cover; I was particularly drawn to stories about the westward immigrant trails – of families who packed up everything they owned in a covered wagon and headed west, on barely-explored paths into two thousand miles of howling wilderness.

After twenty years in the military, and twelve years of that spent assigned in Europe, I came home. My last assignment was in San Antonio, Texas – where I stayed, for various reasons, one of which was that the place began to grow on me. Texas turned out to be . . . well, a much more complicated and nuanced place than anyone would think from having watched movies. It’s more than just the Alamo – which everyone knows about in a superficial way, but there is so much more than that. Texas is kind of a demi-glace, a boiled-down reduction of the frontier – and by extension of the American experience –where a good few different cultures clashed and mingled. I discovered this dramatic and eventful – and relatively unknown history just by living a short distance away. After my first novel – about a practically unknown wagon train party on the California Trail, I was casting around for the next project; had to be the frontier, had to be 19th century and relatively unknown. And then I thought – why not the German settlements, in the Hill Country north of San Antonio? It’s a terrific historical anomaly, which hardly anyone outside of Texas knows about. Slap-dab in the middle of Texas are several counties and several towns which were settled almost exclusively by German immigrants in the mid-19th century. I thought I would do a single novel about that: an entrepreneur scheme, thought up by a group of well-meaning and well-financed German noblemen, the Mainzer Adelsverein (or the Society of Noblemen of Mainz) to bring over settlers from Germany. This would reward them with lots of land and acclaim for having done a very good deed; helping farmers and craftsmen settle in a new land, with lots of opportunities. Unfortunately, the Mainzer Adelsverein went bust after two years – but not after dumping 7,000 immigrants onto the Texas frontier.

I made a family saga, so that readers could relate: I created the Steinmetz family; parents, three daughters, two sons and a son-in-law, who come and settle in Texas. I also needed to create another character, a Texan German-speaker. He was intended to serve as a bridge to the new life they must embrace and as a heroic and romantic interest for one of the Steinmetz daughters. That led me to create another family, the Beckers; German by heritage, but long established in Texas. Almost in passing, I gave the hero-character an older sister. I described her as being a woman who kept a boarding house in early Austin, married twice, and who knew practically everyone of consequence in Republic-era Texas. In the first chapter of the Trilogy, her brother says in passing to another character that his sister had been left to raise four sons when her husband died of tuberculosis. I should emphasize that she started as a fairly minor and secondary character – but when I came to thinking about what my next book was to be, I thought, why not write about Margaret Becker?

Do the whole story of her life and her experiences: coming to Texas as a young girl, marrying the schoolteacher, and seeing the beginnings of the war for Texas independence from her home in Gonzalez. And then the whole of that war, the ‘Runaway Scrape’ – where almost the entire Anglo civilian population evacuated back to east Texas under horrific conditions – and what she did to rebuild her life. That story could be a gripping account of a woman meeting the challenges of that time. Tell the story from her point of view, move her experiences from just something mentioned briefly to front and center, write of the people that she would have met and known over the years of her life, from the age of twelve in eventful times and a special place?

Like the Adelsverein Trilogy, Daughter of Texas started out as a single volume, intended as a prelude to the Trilogy. But when I had gotten up to about 350 pages of manuscript, the events of the war, the Runaway Scrape, the death of her first husband – and I hadn’t even gotten into the romance with her second, or very far into all sorts of interesting but relatively little-known happenings during the years of the Republic of Texas – I decided that I would save all the rest for a second book about her life. So that’s where that stands. Daughter of Texas is now available at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and in Kindle and Nook editions. The sequel, Deep in the Heart should be available in December, 2011. No, I don’t have a problem with writer’s block – why do you ask?

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http://www.celiahayes.com/

Moving house inspires a moving tale

2011-07-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

For Mary Sharratt a move to England was just the inspiration she needed, read her story here...

Deborah

Daughters of The Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt

2011-07-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

How I Became a Daughter of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt

In midwinter 2002, I moved from the Bay Area in California to Lancashire, England. I’ve traveled around the world and lived in many different places, from Germany to Belgium. But what ensued from this relocation was the biggest culture and climate shock of my life. In Northern England, the winters are so dark and oppressive—I felt as though I were trapped inside some claustrophobic gothic novel. My husband and I moved to an old industrial town, our newly built house on the site of a demolished factory. Surrounding all this post-industrial bleakness was a landscape straight out of a fairy tale. In spring the hedges were lacy with hawthorn. Ewes birthed their lambs in the meadow behind our house.

Our house looks out on Pendle Hill, famous throughout the world as the place where George Fox received his vision that moved him to found the Quaker religion in 1652. But Pendle is also steeped in its legends of the Lancashire Witches.

In 1612, nine people from Pendle Forest were executed for witchcraft. The most notorious of the accused, Bess Southerns, aka Mother Demdike, cheated the hangman by dying in prison. This is how Thomas Potts describes her in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knowes. . . . no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Once I read this, I fell in love. Reading the trial transcripts against the grain, I was astounded how her strength of character blazed forth in the document written to vilify her. She freely admitted to being a healer and a cunning woman, and she instructed her daughter and granddaughter in the ways of magic. Her neighbors called on her to cure their children and their cattle. What fascinated me was not that Bess was arrested on witchcraft charges but that the authorities turned on her only near the end of her long, productive career. She practiced her craft for decades before anybody dared to interfere with her.

Bess’s life unfolded almost literally in my backyard. Using the Ordinance Survey Map, I located the site of Malkin Tower, once her home. Now only the foundations remain. I board my beautiful Welsh mare at a stable near Read Hall, once home to Roger Nowell, the magistrate responsible for sending Bess and the other Pendle Witches to their deaths. Every weekend, I walked or rode my mare down the tracks of Pendle Forest. Quietening myself, I learned to listen, to allow Bess’s voice to well up from the land. Her passion, her tale enveloped me.

I’m often asked if it was a depressing experience, writing about Bess and her family when I knew very well how their tale ended—on the gallows of Lancaster Castle. Although it was harrowing to write of the injustice they suffered, it was my duty as a novelist to serve their memory and bear witness. And not just that—to me, their story is transcendent rather than purely tragic, and I do hope that comes across in the novel. Death was not the end of these women. The original title of the book was A Light Far-Shining and I believe that theirs was an inner radiance and power that death could not extinguish.

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. As a writer, I am obsessed with how the true stories of our ancestors haunt the land. Long after her demise, Bess and her fellow witches of Pendle Forest endure. This is their home, their seat of power, and they shall never be banished. By delving into Bess’s story, I have become an adopted daughter of her living landscape, one of many tellers who spin her unending tale.

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http://www. marysharratt.com/

A Fantastic Family Saga

2011-07-06T02:36:00.000-07:00

Claire Lorrimer comes from an artistic family. Her grandfather was a musician and both her uncle and her grandmother were writers; another uncle was an artist, as is her daughter. Her mother was the best selling novelist Denise Robins. Below she describes the inspiration for The Chatelaine, first in the series of The Rochford Trilogy.

Enjoy!

Deborah

The Chatelaine by Claire Lorrimer

2011-07-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

Of all the many books I have written, THE CHATELAINE – the first of the historical family saga I called ‘The Rochford Trilogy’, is my favourite. The first saga was more or less written to outlines provided by a literary agent hitherto unknown to me. He was aware I had had over thirty light romantic novels published and persuaded me there was a dearth of historical sagas in the States. I said I would have a try!

The trilogy, The Women of Fire, (shortly to be published by Piatkus) went straight into the bestseller list in the States and was reprinted thirteen times in the first year. However, I now found I was enjoying this new genre of writing, and a report in an article about a missing baby started me wondering what had happened to the child. This evoked ideas which led to THE CHATELAINE.

By the time I wrote Chapter 1 of this book, I had learned how to go about plotting these lengthy sagas. I had begun my first effort in the same way I had written the light romances – put a piece of paper in the typewriter, type Chapter 1, and plough straight on to the happy ending. My first effort at a saga came to an abrupt halt when I discovered an elderly retainer serving drinks in Chapter 1, had reached the age of 120 but was still the family butler by Chapter 3! Likewise, a pregnant dairy maid had, poor girl, remained pregnant for two and a half years. Consequently, I devised a working chart and by the time I was writing THE CHATELAINE, I was minus these interruptions to the creative flow, so its creation was a lot less hard work and great fun to do. I’m happy to pass on a copy of my chart to any young aspiring author!

When planning a book, I choose a period of history which suits my story rather than the other way round. Historical data is secondary to the story itself although an historical event may trigger part of the plot. Educated on serials in women’s magazines in my youth, I aim to end each chapter with my reader desperate to start the next! I get so involved with my characters by the end of a book I want to write more about them – hence the trilogies.

Starting a book is always a bad time for me. I want to get on and tell the story in my head, and although I know the major characters, I have to describe them to the reader who can’t see into my mind! Red hair, blue eyes, quick tempered etc, etc. I note these down in a character description book so I don’t suddenly make a man ‘tower menacingly’ above his companion when he’s unusually short and fat. They must also behave in a way true to their character as I’m sure this is the way to make a reader believe in them just as they have become real to me. I have sometimes had serious discussions with my secretary as to whether a character should do or say something, both of us forgetting that a fictitious character can do or say whatever the author wants! They do become very real, even to the point where, when editing a chapter in a book called FROST IN THE SUN, I felt close to tears near the end – silly, I suppose, but that’s how real they seem.

People interest me enormously – far more than what they are wearing, what they look like. It’s one of the reasons I find young children so fascinating. They get to the core of a person and disregard the trimmings. I am impatient when I have to stop the action to dress who someone who I can see in my mind but have to remember the reader needs to be told the facts.

I have been writing books since I was ten years old, probably because my mother was an author and encourage me to do so – partly to divert my imagination into less disruptive channels than was my wont in those early days. It is close on a century ago that she began writing light romances for Mills and Boon and even now, is still read extensively in the libraries. People often say they don’t believe she wrote as many as 200 books, but I myself wrote three of these simple love stories every year, hence my uncompetitive total of 80!

Last week, one of my granddaughters telephoned me to say she had started reading an old copy of THE CHATELAINE which was the only book to hand, and that it had kept her awake most of the night and made her late for work next day. This gave me almost as much pleasure as when a woman came up to me after one of my talks to libraries, and said THE DYNASTY had enabled her to cope when for hours and days on end, she had sat by her terminally ill husband’s bedside. It had, she said, enabled her to escape into another world.

When I am writing a book, I am indeed in another world. I lose count of time and dare not leave anything in the oven lest for the umpteenth time, I ruin yet another casserole or cake. I have a timer on my desk to remind me I am due somewhere and I must leave my world and return to reality.

Do I enjoy writing? I don’t know how to answer that. All I can say is that when I get an idea for a plot, it nags me like a bad headache until I can get it down on paper and out of my mind. I am near completion of a new saga at the moment, and none too happy to set it aside in order to write this when I should be getting my current heroine out of her crashed car before it is too late!

www.clairelorrimer.co.uk

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The power of the wind and the power of memory

2011-06-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

Two more great historical reads - Sarah Bryant's latest historical novel, Serendipity about the power of the wind, and a love lost and found, and Marianne Wheelaghan's The Blue Suitcase - an editor's choice in the Historical Novel Review.
Deborah

Serendipity by Sarah Bryant

2011-06-24T03:35:00.000-07:00

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most common question people ask me when I tell them that I’m a writer, and it’s definitely the most difficult to answer. It’s not so much that I don’t know (although at some point, flash-in-the-pan inspiration is always a factor) but that the origins of my books are usually so distant, so mundane, or so apparently unrelated to the finished product, that people either don’t believe me, or are disillusioned by the utter banality of the truth.
“Serendipity” is no exception. Its point of origin is seventeen years ago, my second year of university, when I was a competitive dinghy sailor. I woke up one morning from a dream about an old white wooden sailboat named “Heaven”, wanting to write about it, and sailing’s addictive quality, and of course, being a rose-tinted twenty year old, about love. The result was an abysmal short story about a girl who loved sailboats, and a boy who loved her. It sank into my “stories” folder without ever seeing the light of day, and I forgot about it until the following year, when my first real relationship ended in a spectacular mess.
Among other fallout, I quit sailing. I had to, if I didn’t want to see the boy in question every day. I missed it at least as much as I missed him, but there was no question of going back to either one. So what to do with the sudden, gaping hole in my life? Write about it, of course! I dusted off the sailboat story, trashed most of it, but kept the two characters and a few sentences belonging to each of them. Then I started listening. The guy was silent. But the girl had a lot to say about love and loss and disillusionment. I started writing.
It wasn’t until the following summer that Meredith’s pages of broken-hearted rumination began to take shape as a novel. But oddly, it had nothing at all to do with Meredith, or even sailboats. I was working that summer on a small teaching farm – a little bit of the nineteenth century marooned in the Massachusetts suburbs. Before I knew it, a world was forming in my head: one which took shape around that farm, as it might have been in a different time or place. And out of it, unexpectedly, the silent man began to speak. He was intelligent and wry and as-yet-inexplicably damaged. I put Meredith aside, and started writing Silence. I knew that they were connected, but how? Writing a novel about a sailing prodigy and a farmer seemed like a fool’s errand.
The answer came out of nowhere. Well actually it came from Adam, a friend I’d made at that farm, who announced one day, “My new favourite word is ‘serendipity’.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because serendipity explains everything.” I said, “Right, whatever,” but I found the word knocking around my head the next few days as I demonstrated the joys of cow milking and composting to a lot of hot, bored suburban children.
And then Adam took me to see his family’s farm. It had a huge old red barn, intriguingly empty. It was like a cathedral. It was big enough to hold a boat. And that was it, the flash in the pan: Silence was building a boat in his barn! And sooner or later he was going to need help; enter Meredith. Serendipity, indeed.
I’d like to say it all went smoothly from there, but that quote about love’s course hold true for novels too. I took “Serendipity” with me onto a writing masters program, thinking it was great. The tutor hated it, and did her level best to fail me. A year later, I was lucky enough to find an agent who loved it, and I thought I was sorted. Wrong again: the agent couldn’t sell it, and ultimately gave up on it. So did I.
I wrote other books, found publishers for them. It wasn’t until I was writing my third historical novel that “Serendipity” got its Eureka moment. I was bogged down in that third book, with two small children and too little time to do the research it required. Then something strange happened: I was slogging away at 19th century Edinburgh, but it was Meredith and Silence who kept speaking to me. And they were saying, “When are you ever going to figure it out? Our story belongs here!”
I still can’t believe that when I emailed my editor and said, “Um, about that book you’re expecting…is it okay if I write a completely different one?” she said yes without hesitation.
I took “Serendipity” back out, rewrote the first section as set in the 1890s rather than 1990s, and everything just fell perfectly into place. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to see that this story had always belonged in an earlier era. At long last, despite myself (and with a little help from Bob Dylan – just read it, you’ll see!) I knew exactly how to make “Serendipity” into the book it was meant to be. And if it took me seventeen years? Well, better later than never!

http://www.sarahbryant.net/

The Blue Suitcase by Marianne Wheelaghan

2011-06-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

Why did I write The Blue Suitcase?
My mother very sadly died few years ago. Shortly after her death, I was helping my father sort out her personal things when we came across a collection of letters, diary extracts, old postcards and faded documents, all in German. They dated back to before Mum came to Scotland – Mum came to Scotland after the end of the WW2 and trained to be a nurse in Leith Hospital, Edinburgh, where she met my dad. Dad, who was Scottish from Leith, was very keen I translate these documents and letters (I'd studied German and had lived in Germany so not as mad as it sounds).
You see, Mum's early life was a bit of a mystery to the family: all we knew about her life before coming to Scotland was that she was from Silesia, which didn't exist, and that she never saw her parents again after she left Germany. To be honest, I was uncomfortable with the idea of reading my mum's things, she'd been a very private person (and it was going to be hard work, I'd not practised or read any German for years). However, Dad finally managed to persuade me.
I started by translating a diary extract, which I first assumed had been written by my mother. However, it quickly became clear the diary extract(s) had been written by my aunt, Antonia, who had gone to live in Argentina after the end of the war. From her letters, it became clear Antonia had been very unhappy in Argentina. She wrote to Mum regularly and when she wrote she included an extract from her dairy, which dated to before the war and which she'd painstakingly retyped on sheets of airmail paper. This was what I was translating. The very first extract I looked at was dated 1947. It was one of the last she sent. I was shocked at the contents of Antonia's diary. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. Much of what I discovered was distressing. I needed to know to if it was true so I went to the library to find historically accurate, factual, unbiased books, which would help me make sense of my mother's life.
By the time I finished at the library, I knew I had to write about what I had discovered: if only so that my children would know what life had been like for their granny.
At first I thought I would write a biography, but I felt uncomfortable doing that: firstly because of the gaps in the diaries and letters, it was difficult for me to know for sure what had happened to my family throughout the whole of this period (1932-1947), secondly, I simply couldn't write about Mum. It was too personal. Eventually, I had an epiphany: I would create a fictional family, which would be like Mum's family, but not the same. And this is what I did. I also created a fictional main character in Antonia, who is a combination of my mum and my aunt. Much of what happened to my fictional family happened to my real family, but much didn't, although it could have done – certainly, everything that happened in the novel is based on true historic fact: if didn't happen to my family, it happened to someone else's family.
Next, I had to decide “how” I was going to tell Mum and Antonia's story. I eventually decided to develop the format of a diary and letters: I wanted to try and recreate in the reader that same sense of 'discovery' I had experienced when I first translated the documents. And that's how The Blue Suitcase came to be: it's the undertold story about life under Hitler for an ordinary German family, but it's also a story about a young girl growing up and surviving against terrible odds.

Why did I feel so compelled to write this story? I wanted to right a wrong: when I was young there was an unspoken belief that all Germans were “baddies” and Hitler's “willing executioners”. And I am ashamed to say, I remember feeling embarrassed at times because my mother was German. Now I know that not only were many ordinary Germans also victims of Hitler's terrible regime, but that my mother was a refugee, and like millions of other German refugees, forcibly expelled from her home at the end of WW2. It seemed to me wholly unjust that the suffering of my mother and my aunt, and so many other aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers like them (on all sides), should go unacknowledged.
http://www.mariannewheelaghan.co.uk

A Georgian sleuth and a Napoleonic Cavalryman

2011-06-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

Have a look at two more highly recommended historical reads with not a royal in sight. The witty sleuth, Dido Kent in her latest ladylike adventure, "A Woman of Consequence", and the story of two cavalrymen in 1805, "Walls of Jericho."
Deborah

A Woman of Consequence by Anna Dean

2011-06-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

When I am not writing my series of Georgian murder mysteries, I have a wonderful job as a guide at William Wordsworth' s home: Dove Cottage in Grasmere.

Many of the people who come to the cottage are – like me – as interested in the life of William's sister Dorothy as they are in the great poet himself, finding the domestic details and meticulous observations of her journals endlessly fascinating. But visitors often raise their eyebrows when I tell them that Dorothy, lived with her brother for most of her adult life. Sometimes there are expressions of sympathy for William's wife; sometimes there are questions about the exact nature of William and Dorothy's relationship: was it, people hint darkly, unnaturally close?

The twenty-first century notion of how an unmarried woman ought to behave is very different from that of the early nineteenth century. In 1802 (the year of William's marriage) more eyebrows would have been raised over a young, single woman living alone than one patiently settling down with her brother and his wife – helping with the running of the house and eventually assisting in the care of five children. Independence now is a necessary part of self-respect; then it was dangerous, shocking – and rather selfish. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (published 1814) Sir Thomas Bertram laments over 'that independence of spirit… which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence.' It is an opinion with which many of Austen's original readers would have agreed.

With no expectation of independence and, frequently, insufficient income to maintain a home of their own, a place within the extended family was a spinster's 'pleasantest preservative from want,' (to adapt another famous Austen phrase). And I have always had a sympathy for this half-hidden army of spinsters who lived their lives subsumed within the needs of their brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces.

What was it like to live like that? Always poor and yet prevented by ideas of what was 'proper' from taking paid employment. Condemned to a lifetime of dependence.

When I created my Georgian spinster-sleuth, Miss Dido Kent, I decided that she – like Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen – should be entirely dependent upon her brothers for her livelihood. Like her real-life counterparts she hardly has a moment to call her own, for, in return for her allowance, her brothers feel that her time is entirely at their disposal when it comes to, 'illnesses, lyings in, funerals or house removals.' Being always at hand, dealing with an endless round of mundane family crises, is not an exciting life. It's far removed from the glamour of royal courts and political intrigue. But it is the kind of life which thousands of women actually lived; and one which I think is well worth exploring.

I considered the idea of making Dido an outright rebel. For there were some women who rejected the life of dependence and humility – striking out to make a career for themselves in a male dominated world. Mary Wolstonecraft, for example, earned her living by writing and had a delightfully scandalous love life.

But I decided that it would be more interesting if Dido was not one of these rare exceptions, but was rather one of the many thousands of women who accepted their fate – not exactly without question, because I doubt any intelligent woman could do that – but with dignity, humour and no loss of self-worth. One of the thousands of women who attempted to live a decent, fulfilled life within the restrictions forced upon her.

And being always upon the periphery of society – always a looker on, regarded as of no importance – may be humiliating; but it also has its advantages. It is an excellent vantage point from which to observe your fellow men and women. It was a situation which turned Jane Austen into a brilliant commentator upon human nature: and made Dorothy Wordsworth into an excellent diarist. I reasoned that it could turn Dido Kent into a very effective amateur sleuth.

By solving mysteries Dido finds an outlet for her abilities and, with her success, comes a growing self-confidence. As the stories progress she finds that, when she feels it is the right thing to do, she is able to rebel in small, crucial ways… But no, actually Dido would not put it quite like that. As she remarks to her would-be lover, William Lomax, when he is shocked by her behaviour: 'I seek only to act as my conscience dictates. It is a matter of integrity, not revolt.'

http://www.annadean.co.uk/

Walls of Jericho by Jonathan Hopkins

2011-06-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

Every felt so annoyed about something you just have to stick your oar in?

You tell your friends how cross you are. Facebook it. Blog about it, maybe. Phone a radio show. Send a comment to the newspapers.

That's how I felt.

Why? It's a slightly complicated story.

Some years ago, my wife nagged me about...the usual stuff, really. About not being romantic, never buying flowers...etc, etc. So I had a brainwave. For our anniversary I'd deliver her flowers as...a Napoleonic Hussar, on horseback. Can't get much more romantic than that, thought I.

The horse was no problem, but saddlery and equipment was. No patterns available, you see, so I would have to make everything from scratch. That meant reading proper history books (ugh!). Lots of them. Trying desperately to glean enough information from contemporary pictures and diagrams to make accurate copies of bridle and pistol holsters. And other bits 'n pieces.

The thing was, every historian I read, with a couple of honourable exceptions, had a single view of the British cavalry fighting Napoleon. They were rubbish.

And as I read more and more disparaging comments I got more and more frustrated. The cavalry couldn't have been all that bad, could they?

It was when I started to read the few published cavalrymen's diaries, both British and French, that a quite different picture began to emerge. A story of lives full of even more hardship and tragedy than the average redcoat could have imagined. After all, at the end of a march the infantryman had simply to find food, a place to sleep, and clean his musket. The cavalryman had another life to consider before his own. Even this one obvious fact had been simply glossed over by most academics.

Well, they're not horsemen, are they?

So I decided I'd put the record straight. And because I'm no historian, I wrote a novel; the story of two young cavalry recruits. A journey from boyhood to manhood, for privileged and pauper alike. In it I've tried to give readers a feel of what these men's lives were really like.

Because historians don't seem to care. And in my book, that's not playing fair with men who fought and died for their country.

The wedding anniversary went fine, by the way!

Blog: http://cavalrytales.wordpress.com/

Web: http://www.cavalrytales.co.uk/

Winner of The Lady's Slipper Giveaway

2011-06-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

And the winner drawn from Random.org is Carol at Dizzy C's Little Book Blog.

Congratulations Carol!

A Victorian gothic debut, rags to riches in Ancient Rome and The French Revolution

2011-06-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Today's posts are by Diane Scott Lewis from the US, and Stella Duffy and Anita Davison from the UK. Congratulations to Anita whose debut is out today!

Stella like myself is also a member of the
Historical Writers Association http://www.thehwa.co.uk/
Visit their website to see her page and to find out about historical fiction and UK events near you.

Deborah
http://www.deborahswift.blogspot.com/

The Giveaway for The Lady's Slipper is open until Sunday for anyone who leaves a comment on any of the books.

Theodora by Stella Duffy

2011-06-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

In September 2006 I had never heard of Theodora, Justinian or the Ravenna mosaics, so the literary festival I was visiting organised a trip to see the mosaics.
A near-empty church, a few tourists, and an astonishing, vibrant, 1500-year-old mosaic of Theodora. I figured she had to matter. In the gift shop, I bought a bunch of postcards and the booklet about Theodora. One of those postcards has been on my noticeboard for coming up four years now. The booklet took maybe five minutes to read and, combined with the mosaics, lead to four years of work, with at least another six months to go on the edit for the sequel.
Theodora’s life is astonishingly rich. Born to the bear-keeper of the Constantinople Hippodrome in about 500 AD, her father died when she was five. She became an actress, a dancer, a mime, a comedian – none of our modern terms fully cover what her work would have been in those days. A physically-trained comedy improviser is perhaps closest, and by the age of 15 she was the star of the Hippodrome. She was also, as almost all actresses were at the time, very likely a child prostitute. Theodora walked away from her amazing career at 18, leaving Constantinople to be mistress of the man newly-appointed Governor of (modern day) Libya. When he dumped her, soon after, she joined a religious community in the desert near Alexandria, experiencing a religious conversion. She travelled on to Antioch where there are suggestions that she worked with Macedonia, a dancer and a spy for the Roman government.
At 21 she returned to Constantinople, met Justinian, who was yet to become Emperor, and they became a couple. Justinian had one law changed to raise her status to patrician, and another created to allow her to marry – ex-actresses could not legally do so at the time. When his uncle died and Justinian became Emperor, ‘Theodora-from-the-Brothel’ became Empress of Rome.
It’s a powerful rags to riches story, made richer still by the contemporary view of her, which seems to have been somewhere between Victoria Beckham/Yoko Ono on a bad day, and Princess Diana on a good one. All of which made her a joy to write – while there’s loads of history written about the time, Theodora herself has remained largely hidden. Yet there was enough in her life that I do understand, especially the theatre and comedy which I continue to work in, to make some informed guesses about her character. So that’s what I’ve written, a character in a story. And I’ve had a great time doing so, because I’ve spent the past four years writing about the juiciest woman character this side of Lady Macbeth. Theodora is the kind of hero you couldn’t make up without being accused of over-doing it, and yet can’t tell her story without making a lot of it up. A perfect balance for fiction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXgW1aFxaNE

Trencarrow Secret by Anita Davison

2011-06-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

I was born in London, a city which has a unique atmosphere; a sense of time past that I connected with, even when I was young. When the other children on the school trip coach were throwing the contents of their lunch boxes at each other, I was staring out of the window at the ancient buildings, imagining men in wigs and heeled shoes coming out of coffee houses and climbing into sedan chairs on the cobbles outside St Paul's Cathedral.

Strangely it was walking through Paternoster Row with a dear friend, discussing books of course, when the idea for the story of Trencarrow Secret came to me. One requirement of modern writing, is you cannot simply write a story, it has to be categorised, put into a box so it is instantly recognised. My critique group, and my agent, say time and again that romances are the largest market in the fiction genre, and in an attempt to break into the world of traditionally published authors I decided to step outside the world of Restoration London and into the heads of characters of another era. I haven’t managed it yet, as Trencarrow Secret is Inde Published, but I still have some stories to tell which may make it.

Isabel Hart evolved, beginning as a Jacobean character, she turned into a Regency one, eventually finding her own time in late Victorian England. Her reserved character belonged in the rigid, uncompromising days of the British Empire, and I gave her strong reasons for seeing life as many of us do when we are young; in black and white, where right and wrong are clearly defined and there is no blurring of the two. Trencarrow Secret is a love story, and during one fateful summer, Isabel discovers that marriage is no fairytale, but an enigmatic and unique bonding of a couple which may appear unsatisfactory to outsiders, but each comes with its own chance of success.

In Trencarrow Secret, Isabel’s romantic illusions are dispelled and she comes to realise that people, even those closest to her, are not perfect. People are flawed and we make mistakes and yet we find the capacity to forgive and learn to move on – that we love them anyway because that’s what families do. Through her unique relationship with her brother, David, Isabel struggles through revelations, self doubt and danger before she finds her soulmate.

The Hart's summer home in Cornwall is a house I have visited often - also the village of Marazion and St Michael's Mount have not changed much since the late 19th Century, which made them easier to portray realistically. I tend to write about places I know so I can portray them with a level of credibility.

Writing historical fiction is complicated and challenging, but my spirit lives in the past and I cannot imagine myself writing anything else.

http://trencarrowsecret.blogspot.com/
http://thedisorganisedauthor.blogspot.com/

The False Light by Diane Scott Lewis

2011-06-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

My novel, The False Light, takes place in England during the French Revolution. I became fascinated with history after a holiday in England and it sparked my old desire to write. Everyone seemed to be writing Victorian or Regency novels, so I chose the earlier Georgian period. I was tired of reading about kings, queens or dukes, and immersed myself in the common people.

My heroine is a displaced aristocrat who must survive in bawdy Cornish tavern after being tricked by a devious servant. I delve into the reality of the lower classes—no sugar-coating here. Bettina may be from the higher classes but that aspect is never shown as she finds her strength with the help of two unflappable Cornish women who’ve struggled their entire lives to eke out a living. Bettina also finds herself attracted to a man who is rumored to have murdered his unfaithful wife. Before the days of the internet, I researched at the Library of Congress. I wanted to know how people ate, drank, started fires to keep warm, used herbs for healing, and the Cornish superstitions that shaped the ordinary person’s existence.

My story is a woman’s journey to understand the revolution that ripped her family apart—and her determination to begin a new life as she learns the skills to survive.
http://www.dianescottlewis.com/

Great Historical Fiction and a Giveaway

2011-06-05T03:06:00.000-07:00

The paperback of The Lady's Slipper is now out in the UK, and in celebration I declare this blog officially open! Here is some fantastic historical fiction for you to enjoy, along with the writers' inspiration behind the book.

Anyone who leaves a comment on any of the books will be automatically entered for a draw to win a copy of The Lady's Slipper. Closing date 12th June.

And Authors, if you want to feature here just follow the instructions on the "for authors page."

Readers - all the posts are listed by the Author's name in the "Fictionary"- just click to find the book you're after. The blog will be updated with tantalising new fiction three times a week.
Deborah

The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

2011-06-05T02:21:00.000-07:00

John Clare is often referred to as peasant poet, genius and madman and it is true that mental illness dogged his later life, his identity fragmenting so that sometimes he would think himself to be Admiral Nelson, Lord Byron or a boxer of the day called Jack Randall.
Although I had enjoyed John Clare’s poetry for years, I had no knowledge of his madness until I came to live in his home county of Northamptonshire and started researching his prose writing at my local library. On that day, I was only intending to spend an hour researching but three hours later I was still scrolling through the microfiche, interpreting the elegant but curlicued handwriting of his letters. The letters that had caught my attention so thoroughly were those written to his family from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Through his own words you could trace his heartbreaking mental decline.
Despite being kindly treated and given every comfort at the asylum, at times he is clearly distressed and afraid; he refers to it as a ‘Hell’ and a ‘Bastille’. He speaks of his ‘captivity among the Babylonians’ and warns his sons not to visit him in case they are ‘trapped as prisoners’. Most touching of all is his continuing desire to return home; he longs to ‘hunt in the woods for yellow hyacinths, Polyanthuses and blue Primroses as usual and go in the Meadows a-fishing.’
His final letter, written in 1860 in reply to a well-wisher, Mr. James. Hipkins, reads:
Dear Sir
I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE

Reading a man’s actual words as he becomes more and more lost and bewildered is a moving experience and I felt that I had made an emotional connection with the person and not just the poet. I decided to find out more about his family, and how his illness had affected them: in particular his wife, Patty Clare.
It was while reading his journal, ‘Journey out of Essex,’ that it became apparent that John had absconded from his place at a previous asylum and walked the eighty miles home, not to return to his wife and family but to find his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce. I discovered that he had remained obsessed with his early love and believed himself twice married, to both Patty and Mary. What must it be like to be married to a man, have nine children with him, two of whom die in infancy, and then find that you are losing him to his illness and to his delusions about another woman? This was something I just had to write to find out. I felt sure that there was a powerful story to be told: of love and loss, broken identity, poems and passion.
My journey took me along field margins and through brambled ways, from the mansion of Burghley House, where John once worked as a gardener, to tiny cottages dwarfed by the vastness of a fenland sky. The contrast between the splendour of a building where even the hallway is as big as a barn, and the cramped accommodation of the cottages with their dirt floors and low eaves, was sharp. At one point, eleven of the Clare family were sharing a cottage with only two rooms. Such proximity wasn’t only an inconvenience in terms of privacy; when illness struck it ran rampant through a family forced to share their sleeping quarters. As I stood in the hall at Burghley with its marble and richly painted ceilings, the huge polarity between rich and poor was starkly evident. Another theme began to develop, the greed of the powerful at the time of enclosure of the common land, and its impact on the rural poor who no longer had grazing for their beasts or were even allowed to collect firewood on land owned by the huge estates.
I visited most of the settings used in the book, not only to collect the small details and sense impressions that help a writer to bring a place to life for the reader, but because I needed to get as close as possible to my characters. There’s nothing quite like standing where you imagine a character to have stood for allowing you to fully inhabit them and to see with their eyes. Standing at the foot of Mary Joyce’s grave in the churchyard at Glinton, I remember pondering a while upon Patty’s ambivalent feelings about her rival. Placing yourself in the character’s setting and just being quiet and still is one of the best ways I know to listen in, as it were, to their thoughts.
This novel evolved to include many things. It’s about a woman’s attempt to restore her husband to his true self, as his identity begins to fragment. It’s about the struggle to hold a family together and about memory and its power to sustain us through the trials of a difficult present. But most of all it’s a story about married love, widely experienced but written about less often than romantic courtship, a love that is inevitably more difficult when rooted in the reality of everyday life and assailed by losses and misfortunes over time but also deep, knowing and forgiving. In writing the novel I hoped that readers of ‘The Poet’s Wife’ would become as fond of Patty as I was and that her story would move them, just as I was moved when I first read John Clare’s letters home.

http://www.judithallnatt.co.uk/
Blog at : http://authorsplace.co.uk/judith-allnatt/

In The Shadow Of The Lamp by Susanne Dunlap

2011-06-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

I’ve always preferred my heroines to be ordinary people in their historic times, interacting with extreme circumstances, famous historical events, or finding themselves involved in some way with famous people. To me, that’s one of the remarkable qualities of historical fiction: an opportunity to imagine life on a real, down-to-earth level in a different time period. So far I’ve written a young singer, daughter of a luthier; a pianist (well, she was noble, but down on her luck) in the romantic world of Liszt; the daughter of a violinist in Haydn’s orchestra. My one exception was the grand duchess Anastasia. But with my recent novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAMP, I’ve actually created one of my lowliest heroines yet.

Nothing could be more ordinary than a parlormaid in Victorian London. Except that Molly becomes extraordinary through a combination of circumstances and her own gritty, honest personality.

I have to say, the kernel of the idea for this novel that follows Florence Nightingale to the Crimea came from my editor at Bloomsbury, Melanie Cecka. She was fascinated by Florence, and casually suggested over lunch that I write something about her. The problem was that the famous “lady with the lamp” was 35 years old at the time of her biggest adventure. Not exactly appropriate for a young-adult heroine!

As I started thinking about who would be the heroine, I kept hearing a London East End accent, and the image of someone desperate to escape her lot and make something of herself began to form. Soon, spunky Molly emerged, an honest, hard-working young girl wrongly accused of theft by a jealous kitchen maid. She hears about the nurses going to the war in Russia, and decides to take a leap of faith.

It was a challenge to get Molly’s voice right. I am fortunate because although I am American, I lived in London for ten years, and had many friends of all different social backgrounds. My friend Dolly’s accent was my pattern for Molly. Molly and her fictional friend, Emma, speak in their East-End voices for dialogue, but Molly’s narration is neutral, relying on her mode of expression rather than tricky spellings to convey her character and status.

In the end, I became so fond of Molly that I can honestly say she’s become a favorite among the heroines I’ve written. Funny how that can happen. We live with our characters for months or years, so that we know them better than we know ourselves, and yet still they can surprise us. For me, that’s most possible when dealing with the little people, the ones fallen through the cracks of history, or types that have no voice of their own until an author decides to give them one.

That’s the real magic of making stories.

http://www.susannedunlap.com/

The Vice Society by James McCreet

2011-06-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

The pleasures of the unknown city

CCTV cameras now see virtually everything we do in public. Our web footprint is recorded through IP addresses and cookies. Our spending patterns are logged in vast computer systems. Each of our identities is a mass of ever-accumulating data that maps our existence more comprehensively than any biography could.

So imagine a time and a culture in which even a man’s name was unreliable. People could appear and vanish at will, changing identities as easily as they changed their clothes. Photography was in its earliest infancy – an expensive and arcane pseudo-science seen by most people as a fad.

Now imagine you’re a detective standing in a city of two million souls. You’re looking for a villain whose name is unsure, whose whereabouts are hearsay, whose associates are too afraid to say a word about him. Where do you begin? How do you navigate a city changing so quickly that maps are changing faster than they can be printed?

This is the essential premise behind my Victorian crime thrillers.

London in the 1840s straddled historical eras – caught mid-stride between Elizabethan squalour and the industrial miracles of the steam age. Criminals were more modern; crimes were as black as the unchanging immorality of city dwellers since the beginning of time.

In such a place, the detectives had to choose whether to take the path of justice and honour, or to resort to the methods of their quarry. My books present a suite of investigators – good and bad – who take distinctive routes to the solution. Inspector Albert Newsome plays the game by his own rules, whereas George Williamson is a man of principle. For Noah Dyson, self-preservation is the first priority, while ex-constable John Cullen dreams of a place in the lauded Detective Force.

I love trawling through archives for forgotten facts. I love the crime genre. Most of all, I love books that entertain me until the last page. If you’re the same, you might like the McCreet version of Victorian London.

http://www.jamesmccreet.co.uk/

Perhaps Tomorrow by Jean Fullerton

2011-05-31T08:15:00.000-07:00

Since I read Katherine by Anya Seton in my early teens I have had a lifelong love of historical fiction so it seemed natural when I started writing nine years ago to set my stories in the past.

I chose the Victorian period as it reflects many of the concerns and issues, such as the introduction of new technology, the impact of scientific and medical advances on society, that we have today. It was also a period when centuries of long-held beliefs were being questioned. Slavery was abolished, Catholics were emancipated, philanthropists pressured successive governments to improve the working conditions of the poor, and women started to challenge the male preserves of education, politics and the professions.

East London, where I was born is a very special place for me and as a fifth generation Cockney I wanted to bring the story of my own ancestors who lived in the vibrant, poverty stricken dockland area to life. My first novel, No Cure for Love, was set in Whitechapel 1832 during a cholera epidemic. The hero was Doctor Robert Munroe, who battled to improve the plight of the poor and the heroine was Ellen O Casey, an Irish pub singer desperately trying to scrape together the passage money to take her family to New York.

My second book, A Glimpse at Happiness, continued the story when Josie O’Casey, Ellen’s daughter, returns to England twelve years later in 1844 and my latest, Perhaps Tomorrow, the third in the Wapping series, is set three years after that. The idea for Mattie’s story in Perhaps Tomorrow came to me as I was writing A Glimpse at Happiness as I felt she needed a handsome hero of her own. All the books are linked but can be read as stand-alone stories.

Mattie is a widow struggling to keep the family coal business solvent and herself and her family out of the workhouse -which, in a time before the welfare state, was a plight many women found themselves in. The situation was made even more difficult by the fact that women weren’t allowed to own property, operate bank accounts or have dealings with commerce of any kind. Of course, there were always women who fought against the odds and built business empires but they had to work doubly hard to succeed.

And for the women who went before us the daily grind was back-breaking. The day started before dawn when you had to rake the ash from the grate and light the fire before drawing your water from a stand pipe in the backyard. You physically did the washing and scrubbed the floor. Before stainless steel you had to keep you baking dishes clean by scrubbing them with sand. There was a constant battle to keep bed-bugs, cockroaches and head lice at bay, not to mention the mice and rats. In addition to this they had to cope with often a yearly round of pregnancy and the dangers of childbirth but surely the most heart-breaking part of their life must have been coping with the loss of a child which almost every mother in the 19th century would have experienced.

Although Perhaps Tomorrow is a fictitious work I have trawled through research papers and contemporary diaries to bring women’s everyday experiences to life. After reading contemporary accounts of their lives I couldn’t help but admire the hundreds of unnamed women, our great-great-great grandmothers in fact, who worked every hour God gave them to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s heads. I hope that my book sheds light on their stories and, in a small way, honours their struggles.

http://www.jeanfullerton.com/

Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance

2011-05-30T03:22:00.000-07:00

A scribbled sentence in sepia ink; the scrawl of someone who drew the short straw and took the minutes of a meeting in 1756. I was looking through the archives of Chester Infirmary when I found a detail that spoke of lives and stories lost to history.

The note recorded that the infirmary's porter had been sacked for drunkenness. This wasn't a one-off bender – he'd been warned about his drinking before, and had now used up his last chance. The governors paid him his wages plus an extra 10 shillings, and sent him on his way. That note is pretty much the porter's entire contribution to posterity. Without the booze, he wouldn't have left any impression on the historical record at all. And if that had happened, he'd be like most people who have ever lived.

What was he like as a person, I wondered? Why did he drink so heavily? What had happened in his past and where did he go after he was booted out of the hospital? Why did the governors give him that 10 shillings?

This snippet of information inspired the gin theme of Kill-Grief and the porter, Anthony Wells, became one of the main characters. He's not a typical romantic hero. On the contrary, he's wasted much of his past and, to begin with, doesn't see much of a future either. But the story isn't really about him. It's about Mary Helsall, a young woman who becomes a nurse, challenges the prevailing stereotypes about women in medicine, and fights for survival against the shadows of her past and her own flawed character. The inspiration for her, too, came from brief mentions of nurses in the infirmary records. I was intrigued by the fact that a nurse called Mary Kelsall (I changed the spelling for the book) only lasted a few weeks in the job, to be replaced by someone called Mary Jones. What if, I wondered, the two names belonged to the same person?

Eighteenth-century nurses didn't (and still don't) have a great reputation – they are often seen as drunk, incompetent slatterns – but they were individuals coping with exhausting work, inadequate resources and violent patients. It would hardly be surprising if they sought to numb their emotions with alcohol, but I wanted to bring them into the light and portray them as individuals.

Mary finds herself on the receiving end of the stereotype – her perceived lack of morals meets with either disapproval or prurience from others – but although she is sometimes infuriating and self-destructive, she begins to discover just how capable she really is. She and Anthony realise that they don't have to accept what life has dealt them. Instead, they can use the only thing they have left – determination – to carve out their own future.

Although I started out by looking at historical sources, the book is completely fictional. I've no idea whether the real Chester Infirmary had anything to do with smuggling, murder, gin-fuelled romance or dodgy dealings in body parts – but through some tiny snapshots of real lives long forgotten, the characters emerged, and their story took shape around them.

Website: http://www.carolinerance.com/
Blog: http://thequackdoctor.com/

The House of Women by Anne Whitfield

2011-05-30T02:46:00.000-07:00

My story ideas are born from all sorts of sources. Usually when I’m doing something mundane, like ironing or washing the floor etc, and ideas will come into my head then. Sometimes they might come from researching. I might be flipping through my research books and I’ll see something interesting that leads to ideas for a story.

I love the Victorian era. It was a time for immense change. Populations were growing rapidly and people were no longer content to stay in their own village. Of course, there were circumstances which forced many people to leave their homes and search for new lives, and this only highlights the way people adapted to new changes. The Victorian era gave women freedom to travel and explore and in many ways educated them beyond their role as mere mothers and wives. A fascinating time.

The House of Women was a great book to write. The idea came from wondering what it would be like to have a young woman at a cross roads of her life. Grace was always busy taking care of everyone else and not listening to her own wants and needs. I loved the idea of a large family all pulling different ways. With a selfish mother, a tyrannical father and seven daughters, the family was complex, but add to that a lost love, a heroic butler and a handsome stranger - well, the real fun began then!
I wanted to know how far I could push Grace. I wanted to see what she would do and how she would react to certain situations. Above all I wanted to show a strong yet vulnerable character, who did what she thought was the best for her family and ultimately herself – only it takes a while for her to really find out what that is and along the way she runs a gauntlet of emotions and experiences.

http://www.annewhitfield.com/
http://annewhitfield.blogspot.com/

Testament by Alis Hawkins

2011-05-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

Testament started life as the germ of an idea for a radio play – a vague image of a ghost in an Oxford college lodge. The usual questions followed to see if there really was a story there: who was the ghost, why was he there, who was he haunting, why?

The answers to those questions soon exceeded the scope of sixty minutes’ radio drama and my imagination overran the bounds of any real city. So Testament became a novel and I set it, not in Oxford where I would have had to stick to what actually happened there in the fourteenth century, but in an entirely fictitious city - Salster.

My central character is a mason – more than just a mason, actually, a master builder – but I wanted him to be an outsider so I made him something of a pariah within his craft and gave him a patron who, as well as being monumentally rich, was also a heretic. I also gave him the son he and his wife had been waiting twenty years for. But the whole point of the book – the central reason for the book’s existence, in fact - is the boy turns out not to be the son he had hoped for.

Toby, the master mason’s son, was what the ghost in the college had turned into; no longer a ghost but a real live fourteenth century boy. A real live and very different boy.

So far so expansionist. But my imagination hadn’t finished with the narrative yet. I decided not to write it as a straightforward historical novel. No. I wanted to have somebody in our own time looking back on the story, trying to piece it all together, to make sense of it, the way we do with real historical narratives.

So, I needed a device to link two narratives separated by more than six hundred years. But what?
Newly discovered documents? Hackneyed.
Dreams? Flaky.
Time shifts with some kind of vaguely supernatural/quasi-psychological underpinning? Irritating.

A medieval wall painting hidden by circumstance until now? Perfect. Medieval wall paintings are fascinating – often containing little narratives all of their own.

Nothing about the people or the buildings or the circumstances in Testament could be said to be an everyday tale of fourteenth century folk.
The building Simon – my master builder - plans is extraordinary.
His patron is out of the usual run of magnates and is a Lollard heretic.
Simon’s master carpenter is none other than his wife.

Did things like this really happen, people always want to know.
Not often, is my response, and never – as far as I know – in exactly this way; but they could have and that’s the fascination of writing historical fiction. This could have happened.
Women did, in some circumstances, practice male crafts and were even masters.
There were Lollard heretics who – seemingly out of the blue – believed things that differed sharply from the orthodoxy of the day.
The extraordinary building Simon creates could have been built in the city I’ve invented. The university, both very like and utterly dissimilar from Oxford and Cambridge, is a plausible institution.

And, from the point of view of the twenty-first century characters in Testament, all of it did happen. The fourteenth century narrative represents part of the history of Salster, where the college Simon built for his patron still stands. The people who inhabit the college now – twenty-first century people who fill the book with blog-posts and email and cyber-attacks – are as much of their time as Simon and his family are of the fourteenth century and it’s in the meeting of these two times, in the grasping of the present to understand the past, that the key to the book lies.

The reader is privy to Simon’s story in a way that the twenty-first century characters aren’t. From a vantage point of privileged knowledge, the reader watches Simon’s life and work being pieced together by the twenty-first century characters in a patchy, sometimes inaccurate way and that’s the way I wanted it. I didn’t want my contemporary characters to fully understand events in the fourteenth century because, in the real world, that’s never possible. We can understand certain things, see through a glass darkly, but we will never completely understand the past and the people who lived there. We can’t.
Damia Miller – marketing manager to the twenty-first century college and would-be wall-painting decipherer - discovers enough of the mystery of Simon’s life to enable the college, mired in financial difficulties, to move forward confidently into the future; but she doesn’t uncover the whole truth.
Only the reader is given that.

http://www.hawkinsbizarre.blogspot.com/

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller

2011-05-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

Before I started writing novels (this is my second, following The Return of Captain John Emmett, which is a current Richard and Judy book club choice) I wrote about history and travel. These themes all came together when I set my novels in the early 1920’s, with flashbacks to the Great War. Just as travel books are, most importantly, about creating a powerful sense of place, so historical fiction uses many of the same ideas and techniques to recreate a place in time as well as physical locations.

When I’m reading I dislike feeling I’m being lectured to or that the author’s research, however virtuous, is too dominant. So I tried to let the background to my novels be something that a reader could absorb rather than be told about. But what I found hardest were the little details of the period. Did middle class men have pocket or wristwatches? How many houses had electricity? How much make up did a ‘nice’ girl wear and would a couple have sex before marriage in 1921? How many servants were kept in a small country house? How long did it take to drive 80 miles?

But there was also research specific to the plot of The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton. My first book had mostly been set in London and Gloucestershire – my home county. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton is set in Wiltshire in an area I also know quite well, from the dense Savernake forest to the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge: extraordinary and mysterious archaeological remains that I had studied at university. I remembered the lecturer standing by Silbury Hill and pointing about him (through the drizzle!) describing the whole area as ‘a vast ancient ritual landscape.’

Where better to set a book about death, the disappearance of a child, and layers of secrets?I started researching hedge mazes - a very old feature of gardens, many of which vanished had in the twentieth century and which had always fascinated me. Then there were Saxon churches and the first hydro-electricity installations in private houses, sometimes wondering as I wrote how novels always seem to take off into unknown areas. But perhaps the most fun was looking into the massive British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, which was intended to raise spirits crushed by the losses and privations of war (it was, incidentally, the early scene in the film The King’s Speech where the future George Vith made his halting and embarrassing first address). The original Wembley Stadium was built as the centrepiece of this show. It was the largest exhibition ever held and attracted 27 million visitors to a strange (and wonderful for a writer) mix of worthy industrial exhibits, a fun-fair, a specially constructed sea-side, replicas of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Taj Mahal and a coal mine, a full Canadian rodeo, massed marching bands and much else besides - not all of it smooth-running. It is even less smooth-running in my novel, where a second girl vanishes into the chaos, crowds, noise and spectacle of the exhibition and where the connections between war, families and landscape are slowly unravelled by a psychologically bruised former infantry officer helping restore a village church.

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

2011-05-25T02:17:00.000-07:00

It was strange how my novel came about. I’d been thinking of something quite different when one hot summer evening I went along to a performance at Wilton’s music hall – a dilapidated venue in London’s East End still open for public events today.
That performance – Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a baroque and beautiful operetta that tells of unrequited love and results in tragedy for all. It went on to become the plot around which my own Victorian story unfolded, even using sections of the libretto to head up individual chapters.
That venue – Wilton’s hall is built at the back of a bar, an intimate rectangular theatre full of arched niches that used to hold mirrors, and a high vaulted ceiling from which there once hung a glorious crystal chandelier. The balcony is supported by elegant brass barley twist pillars that glint and flash when reflecting the lights. And while gazing at those cold metal posts I felt my mind spinning through spirals of time, imaging Wilton’s in its prime, almost able to hear the popping of corks, the raucous laughter, the music hall songs. There wasn’t a moment of doubt in my mind that this was where my novel would start.
The next morning I woke with three distinct characters in mind. I really don’t know where they came from. It was almost as if they’d simply been waiting for me to bang the knocker on their door – which fronted a grand Victorian house in Tredegar Square in East London, not that far at all from Wilton’s hall. And inside was a dark-haired young woman called Phoebe who lived with her mother, Maud, a strictly religious widow who campaigned for all theatres and bars to be closed. Their home was shared with Cissy, Maud’s much younger, more glamorous sister who once had a singing career on the stage to which she was about to return, performing as Galatea at Wilton’s music hall – a performance that Phoebe goes to watch – and what Phoebe sees and does that night heralds change for the lives of all three of them.
If you read The Somnambulist I hope you will share the excitement I felt that first night when I visited Wilton’s hall, and I hope you will share my affection and fears for my heroine, Phoebe Turner as she gradually wakes from long years of deception and opens her eyes to the tragic truth that has haunted her life since the day she was born.

http://www.essiefox.com/
For more information on Wilton’s music hall, see Essie’s blog, The Virtual Victorian http://virtualvictorian.blogspot.com/2009/10/wiltons-music-hall.html

Ten Historical Fiction Gems

2011-05-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

The first ten are up! Take a look at the fascinating stories behind these fantastic books. Each author describes their inspiration and impetus for writing their novel. And - not a King or Queen in sight!

Another ten coming soon.

Whisper My Name by Jane Eagland

2011-05-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

One of the main inspirations for Whisper My Name is something that’s intrigued me for years, but I couldn’t see a way to write about it. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is because that would reveal a key mystery of the plot!

Then I was researching for my first novel Wildthorn when I came across references to Victorian spiritualism. That’s one of the delightful things about research – what you chance on when you’re looking for something else. What I read hooked me in and, combined with the topic-I-can’t-identify-without-giving-away-the story, gave me the seed for Whisper My Name.

Until then I’d not realized how popular séances were in the nineteenth century. Even Queen Victoria was not averse to a spot of table-turning, apparently. Like her, many people treated it merely as a pastime, but there were others including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who truly believed that it’s possible, via a medium, to communicate with the dead.

I found the whole subject fascinating, especially accounts of what fraudulent mediums got up to. A ‘spirit hand’ appearing through a hole in the middle of the table turned out to be a stuffed glove on the medium’s raised foot. Mediums handcuffed inside cabinets could release themselves with a second key secreted in their mouths and ‘appear’ cloaked in white muslin to thrill their audience. One such who was caught in her underwear claimed to have been stripped by an evil spirit.

I was entertained by all this, but you’ll have to read the book to see whether my mediums are frauds or true believers. What moved me most, though, was the serious side of spiritualism – the powerful desire to believe that the people we love have not disappeared, that they are still ‘with us’ and that it’s possible to make contact with them.

From that impulse, my main character Meriel Garland was born. Motherless and still grieving, by chance she takes part in a séance…

Though spiritualism gave me the framework for my story what interests me most when I am writing a novel are the characters and their relationships. As soon as I started thinking about her, Meriel sprang to life. Lively, determined, she’s the sort of person it might be fun to know. But she’s not without her faults and here I wanted to set myself a challenge – to see whether I could portray the less appealing aspects of her character without forfeiting the reader’s sympathy. Whether I’ve succeeded or not, I don’t know.

Once I had Meriel, I then thought about Sophie Casson, the young medium, a very different character from Meriel. Quiet, enigmatic, I knew she also had a story which I had to uncover.

I brought the two girls together and the mystery began to unfold.

www.janeeagland.co.uk

Jubilee by Eliza Graham

2011-05-19T06:58:00.000-07:00

I live in a very beautiful part of the South of England, very close to White Horse Hill in what used to be Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire. I’ve always been aware of just how long human beings have lived here. Up on the hill stretches the White Horse itself, which predates Abraham. Wayland’s Smithy, the mysterious Sarcen stone burial site, is about three miles from my house.

My first two novels were set in Dorset and West Poland (formerly German Pomerania) respectively. When it came to my third book, Jubilee, I wanted to write about where I live, about the hills and fields I see every day when I’m walking my dog.

As I strode through fields of sheep I thought back to the families who’d farmed up here in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, as livestock and farming methods improved. Some of them had lived here for centuries. They’d just weathered the slumps after the first world war when the second world war started. Life changed. Prisoners of war from Germany, Austria and Italy came to work on the farms. Evacuees arrived from London. Some of the local young men who’d signed up died or faced years of imprisonment in European and Asian POW camps.

I thought of a protagonist for this new book: Jubilee, He’d be Robert Winter, a young yeoman farmer, not quite gentry, but well-placed in the village. A member of the local cricket team. Someone who’d spent his youth out on the hills with the sheep. Someone who’d seen the tough side of life and probably come across a few people he didn’t much like but generally thought of other human beings as reasonable.

Put a man like this, a man more sensitive and highly strung than might have been imagined, into a Japanese POW camp where he witnesses atrocities and deprivation. Where his own health suffers. He survives his incarceration and comes back to his picturesque farm on the Downs. He knows he’s fortunate, that he should be grateful, that he should pick up where he left off, throwing himself into the rhythms of the farming year.

But he can’t. What happened to him in his camp in Thailand is still replaying itself in his mind. Every night he goes to sleep and ghosts come out to reproach or taunt him. Still living on the farm are the young evacuees who arrived in 1939, now older, but still expecting to pick up the relationship they’d developed with Robert before he went away. They grow increasingly scared as his mood swings and delusions grow more intense.

I’d chosen jubilees as the linking theme for this book, though it has nothing to do with the monarchs themselves. For small villages in this part of the world coronations, royal weddings and jubilees are a kind of glue that binds the community together. People come out and celebrate. Bunting goes up. Cakes are baked. I used the coronation in 1953, the silver jubilee in 1977, and the golden jubilee in 2002 to show how the past informs the present, how people go into the future always half-looking behind them at what’s passed.

Jubilee was at proof stage by August 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the second world war. On the morning of Bank Holiday Monday I was vacuuming my house before we were to go down to the local agricultural show: an annual family excursion. Someone knocked on the door. A man in his seventies was standing there. He told me he’d come to live in this very cottage as an evacuee in September 1939 and had returned to the area this weekend as there was going to be a sixtieth anniversary commemoration of the evacuees’ arrival in the village primary school.

Goosebumps pricked on my skin as he told me about life in the cottage during the war, about the Italian POWs in the camp 100 metres down the road from us. I’d fallen into my own book! Jubilee had come alive in a way I’d never expected.

www.elizagraham.co.uk

The Apothecary's Daughter by Charlotte Betts

2011-05-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

How it began.
People often ask, ‘Where do your ideas come from?’, as if there is a particular store where you can go to pick up a bargain. It’s true that sometimes a dazzling idea for a new novel pops into my head but, alas, it’s never fully formed. For me, a novel takes time to grow; I have to live with an idea, running it like a constant sub-text in the back of my mind while I ask myself questions such as, ‘What if? ‘and ‘How?’

When I finished my previous novel, set in World War II, I decided I had enjoyed the research so much that I’d like to write a proper historical novel. (The second world war happened in my parent’s lifetimes so that hardly counted as historical in my book.) Where to begin? What period of history really interested me and hadn’t been overworked? I’d studied very little history at school. Henry VIII came up on the syllabus two years running and I remembered something about the Enclosure Act and the Potato Famine. There were rows of Regency Romances on the bookshop shelves but, although I wanted to write a love story, I didn’t fancy writing a category romance. Philippa Gregory had cornered the market with her wonderful novels based in the Tudor period. But Charles II interested me, partly because I loved his flamboyant clothes and he always seemed to be having such fun with his mistresses.

My father lent me his copy of the Diary of Samuel Pepys. I took it to bed with me one winter’s evening and fell asleep over it in the small hours. What fascinated me was how very vivid and alive it all was, even after over three hundred and forty years. Pepys’ character shone through and as I read about his worries and joys, his sense of humour and his misbehavior, it struck me that people from history were as much flesh and blood as you or I. They may have had a different perspective, coloured by political and social attitudes of the day but they still fell in love, worried about their businesses and grieved if someone they loved died.

Since my own historical knowledge was mostly derived from reading novels, I started to research the seventeenth century more widely. There was plenty going on; civil wars, religious fervor, plagues, great fires, kings being beheaded.

Unusually, it wasn’t a character who settled it but a city. I found an old map of the City of London before the Great Fire of 1666. I pored over it for hours, mentally walking the narrow streets, alleys and courts of Restoration London. I began to imagine what it would have been like to live there. The timber framed houses were cramped together, all higgledy-piggledy with the first floors jettied out over the street and cutting out the daylight below. Sewage ran in open drains. I had a sepia picture in mind of a dark and airless city, hot and stinking in the summer, bone-chillingly cold in the winter with a permanent pall of smog and the stench of the tanneries hanging over everything.

Then I visited India and was shocked by the close juxtaposition of great wealth and the utmost poverty. People lived in the streets in little shelters fashioned from packing cases, making fires and cooking in the open, while dogs nosed about in the heaps of detritus that banked up against the buildings. Suddenly my vision of Restoration London was brought to life in glorious Technicolor!

London was a cosmopolitan city, even then. The docks were noisy, busy and smelly. Business flourished in the coffee houses. Rum, sugar, slaves and tobacco were traded. I wanted to paint a rich, sensual picture in words of what it felt like to be a part of that world. But how would I deal with the sensitive subject of slavery in such a way that it was a true reflection of the times but without upsetting the modern day reader?

I began to imagine a young woman living in this bustling, malodorous city. Who was she? I pictured her green eyes, as clear as water, and her chestnut hair shining out through all the grime. She would be strong, impatient perhaps, but able to cope with everything that life threw at her. Susannah came into being. Then, visiting a second hand book shop, I bought a copy of Culpepper’s Herbal and suddenly Susannah’s purpose became clear; she would be an apothecary. Except, of course, that there were no female apothecaries. Women in the seventeenth century either stayed at home with their family, married or worked as a servant.

What would happen if a young woman, contentedly helping her father in his apothecary shop, was suddenly ousted from her home? And what if the plague stalked the streets and friends and family were dying like flies around her? Who could she turn to? How would she live? What would happen to her? Well, you’ll just have to read The Apothecary’s Daughter to find out. Here is the opening.

Inside the apothecary shop Susannah stood by the light of the window, daydreaming and grinding flowers of sulphur into a malodorous dust as she watched the world go by. Fleet Street, as always, was as busy as an anthill. The morning’s snow was already dusted with soot from the noxious cloud blown in from the kilns at Limehouse and the frost made icebergs of the surging effluent in the central drain. Church bells clanged and dogs barked while a ceaseless stream of people flowed past.
Susannah’s eye was drawn by the tall figure of a man in a sombre hat and cloak picking his way over the snow. Something about the way he moved amongst the hubbub of the crowd, like a wolf slipping silently through the forest, captured her curiosity ...

The Apothecary’s Daughter will be published by Piatkus, (an imprint of Little, Brown) in August 2011

http://www.charlottebetts.com/

Darcy and Fitzwilliam by Karen V Wasylowski

2011-05-09T02:05:00.000-07:00

The story behind Darcy and Fitzwilliam began years ago when I first saw Laurence Olivier as Fitzwilliam Darcy. This man was chic. The character was a stylish alpha male without being a bully, sophisticated without losing a sense of humor. He was arrogant at first then humbled before a master of the cutting word – his Elizabeth. Why is it all women love to see a haughty man made weak at the knees with love? Who am I kidding?

My adoration for Darcy had begun.

Then there was Colin Firth in 1995 in all his beautiful Firthiness - exquisite smile, gorgeous hair, just enough masculinity to dazzle with a touch of vulnerability to make him loveable. He was a more aggressive Darcy, more in your face (hubba hubba). And love him we did. Most fervently.

But…it was not until the 2005 movie that I could no longer hold back my true Darcy feelings. It was Matthew Macfadyen, in all his Macfadyness that pushed me over the brink. He is a very big man that somehow comes across as elegant. He brought shyness to Darcy (never saw that coming) and a reason for his reticence to dance with Lizzy at the Assembly was suddenly more than mere snobbishness. When he batted his lashes at the end, muttering, “I l-l-love you – most ardently,” a few hundred thousand hearts were added to the Darcy heap. Mine among them.

I kept zeroing in on one scene, however, in the movie. The scene at Aunt Catherine’s when she grills and grills Lizzy about her mother, her sisters, her accomplishments, or lack thereof. Darcy is clearly mortified – his eyes glance at his Aunt’s face. She must appear to him to be a modified form of Mrs. Bennet, with better style sense.

He then glances at his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam.

Fitzwilliam glances at him.

That was the birthplace of my book - a shared look by two young men, one uncomfortable and one snickering, one bemused and another embarrassed by an older cranky relative. My mind whirled with the associations, their secret look told me more than even the director had intended. They had a history with this old bat, as we all have a history with our crazy aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers. I identified completely.

I began to write.

http://www.karenwasylowski.com/

Sweetsmoke by David Fuller

2011-05-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Inevitable

By David Fuller

I hold in my hands a hardcover copy of Sweetsmoke. It is real, it is solid, and when I open it, familiar words fill my eyes. The words seem to have a life of their own as they carry me into the 19th Century and into Cassius's world, and it takes a moment for me to remember that these words were written in this chair, here at this desk, in this office. The book rests in my hands as if it were inevitable, as if the future held its breath waiting for these pages to arrive.

Couldn't be further from the truth. There was nothing inevitable about the creation of this novel. Its birth followed a series of steps and missteps that played out over years of work, and if not for other supposedly "inevitable" projects that fell short of their inevitable status, Sweetsmoke would not have existed at all. My life could easily have traveled a different path whose final destination would have been far afield, yet appeared equally inevitable.

Let me take a moment to note the distinction I make between inevitability and Fate. Fate, to me, is Homerian. Fate suggests gods and goddesses with some soothsayer's sense of foreboding. Fate determined the early death of Achilles, but first he had to make the choice to go to Troy. And it was a choice, offered by his mother, Thetis: he could live a quiet life into anonymous old age, or go out in a brilliant, explosive flame of combat that would cause his name to chime through history. Even in Homer's world, fate was not inevitable, although many would argue that Achilles could make no other choice.

In my definition, fate has a storybook sense of propulsion. The best writers foreshadow fate in their texts so that a reader is not taken by surprise when a character reaches his or her... inevitable end.

Inevitable is a different beast. Inevitable plays out in hindsight. By that rule, everything in life is inevitable. I choose not to see Sweetsmoke as inevitable. Certainly, key elements in my life guided me to Sweetsmoke. To begin with, family history. I have been told that more than 140 of my ancestors fought, on both sides, in the Civil War — also known as the War Between the States, or the Recent Unpleasantness. Among those ancestors was a famous Confederate general. I discovered, while doing research for the novel, that he was a slave owner. The fact of this history (including the slave-owning ancestor) does not make a book about a slave on a tobacco plantation inevitable, of course, nor does it make inevitable that I would write about the Recent Unpleasantness. But it is a marker by which you can track the decision to start the research (research that took over eight years) that led me to write the book. Here is another marker: when I was seven years old, my family moved to Europe and we lived there for four years. This gave me an outsider's perspective, one that allowed me to see the world through the point of view of other human beings. I'd like to think that I had a natural empathy, as well, but this experience certainly turned on that light. The most important outsider's perspective came to me in a stunning revelation when I returned to the United States: I suddenly saw my country in a different, unexpected, and unflattering light. This was a larger step to seeing through the eyes of a slave in Civil War Virginia. But again, it did not make writing the novel inevitable.

As a teenager, I worked for an African American production company and did illustrations, paintings, for a multi-media presentation about black history in the United States entitled We Are Black. Add that marker to the path, but keep in mind that it was by accident that I absorbed African American history. In college, I gave up painting as a possible vocation and took to filmmaking. I recognized I would need to learn to write if I was to become the filmmaker I hoped to be. Another marker, this time a step in the direction of eventually writing prose.

My screenwriting career touched many moments of inevitability while it was unfolding, at least from the point of view of friends and family. If certain movies had been blessed with better timing, more appropriate directors, different studios or producers or stars, it is possible I would never have written prose at all. If that big budget action movie had been better and sold tickets, I might have been typecast as an action writer, and possibly, inevitably, evolved into a director of action films. One television pilot seemed, at the time, so inevitable to everyone in Hollywood that my agent began to look for new clients so that he could start to build their careers, as my career (with my writing partner) was obviously set. The pilot had a fine script, a hot actor, a major studio, and one of the big four networks behind it. Agents of other writers were so certain we were on the air that a stack of writing samples began to arrive so we could build our writing staff. We did not make it on the air, and to this day, that pilot remains unseen. The reasons for its demise were so random, that as the façade of inevitability fell away, I was left baffled by the entire experience.

Very well. Let's just say that Sweetsmoke stands on the backs of many failures. Had any one of those failures come to fruition, then that piece of work would have seemed inevitable and left Sweetsmoke somewhere out in the rain.

What is inevitable, if you know me and my writing, is that for this work to exist, Cassius could not be a victim, despite the fact that he lives in a world of extraordinary oppression. In order to be able to write Sweetsmoke, this was an absolute. It was my way into the story, through Cassius's strength, not the horror of his circumstance. It was also inevitable, if I was to tell the story, that I would not depict noble slaves toiling under the gaze of mustache-twirling, Simon Legree-like masters. Slaves and planters alike would have to be complex, conflicted, political human beings, as intelligent, stupid, conniving, and generous as every other human being. While this may connote an unfair use of the word inevitable, it is the only way I see it applying to my book.

The story of Sweetsmoke was born and evolved inside me, maybe from the moment I returned to the United States as a boy, or maybe from the time I learned African American history. When it emerged, it came fully formed into my mind. I knew it would have to be set in Virginia, on a tobacco plantation, during the war. I knew Cassius would be a carpenter, as carpenters had more freedom than other slaves. I knew there would be a mystery and a murdered woman, and I knew she would be a freed slave and a spy for the North. I knew that her back story would involve Cassius on a personal level. I also knew that the mystery would provide the bones that would allow me to apply the muscles, blood, and skin of historical fiction in order to explore the character of Cassius. I did not know that Cassius and his story would bother me, push me, and force me to continue until the book was done. It would not let go. It was as if, once the story came to me, seeing it through to its conclusion was inevitable. Or perhaps it was Fate.

http://www.sweetsmokedavidfuller.com/

The Master of Bruges by Terence Morgan

2011-05-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

The story of ‘The Master of Bruges’ began when my wife and I went on a tobacco run on the Hull ferry to Bruges in Belgium. We arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and once having bought her cigarettes (the work of about ten minutes) we could spend the rest of the day looking around the various churches and museums of that lovely city.

One of the places we went to was the Memlingsmuseum, which contains mainly works by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hans Memling. At this time I had never heard of him, but I was enjoying wandering about in there to the accompaniment of complaints from herself, who was desperate for a fag and couldn’t understand how I could spend twenty minutes looking at a painting while she was forced to stand there without any smoke issuing from her buccal orifice. As I say, I knew nothing of Memling and I knew even less than that about art (I’m really doing a top-class sell on this book, aren’t I?), but I did notice that he tended to use the same model again and again for the Madonna, and idly wondered to my dear good lady wife who the model might have been.

She cast an eye over a couple of the paintings, and then said, “I don’t know who she was, but she doesn’t half look like Claire from Corrie,”* and there the matter might have ended. I was eventually dragged out of the Museum into the open air, where she lit up and then demanded a sit-down and a beer, and we went into the main square to an open-air bar where she could indulge two of her legal drug addictions, nicotine and alcohol, and I was allowed to watch and, in due course, pay the bill. At the end of this time I expressed a wish to pop into another small museum across the road, where there were some paintings and a bit of sculpture, but Her Ladyship said, “No, you go. I’ll wait here with another beer that you’re going to buy me,” so I went across on my own.

It was not, it has to be said, a very interesting museum. The sculptures were nothing special, and the only painting that caught my attention was a very large dramatic Victorian one showing a forest scene, with a young lady swooning on the ground on the bottom right, a horse running away and a crowd of men and servants all legging it towards the girl. The picture was called “The Death of Princess Mary of Burgundy”. I was about to turn away when a lady on my left said a sentence that I can truly say changed my life.

As I stepped back from this painting in Bruges I overheard a conversation between a couple behind me. He said to her, “Who was Mary of Burgundy?”, and she replied, – and this was the life-changing sentence – “I don’t know…but she doesn’t half look like Claire from Corrie.” And indeed she did.

When I got home I looked them up on the Internet. Mary of Burgundy was the only child of Charles the Bold, the fifteenth-century Duke of Burgundy. She lived most of her life in Bruges, was the Princess Diana of her day, and like Diana died young, in her case in a hunting accident in 1482 – hence the painting I had seen.

I wondered if she might have known Hans Memling. It turned out that this was possible; he had flourished in Bruges from 1465 until his death in 1494, and thus was an exact contemporary of the princess.

And that got me thinking. What if the Mary of Burgundy who looked like Claire from Corrie and the Memling Madonnas who also looked like Claire from Corrie were one and the same? Is it possible that Memling might have been painting Charles’ daughter? And if so, why?

What if, and why – the two archetypal writer’s questions. And that, basically, is the point that my book started from. I had to find out if the events I was postulating were possible and, if so, when and how they could have happened. There I struck writer’s gold; nothing at all is known of Memling’s early life, not even, to within ten years, the date of his birth, so I had carte blanche. There’s a lot of conjecture; he was known to be German by origin, but had settled in Bruges in the mid-1460s. He was thought to have been once a soldier; he was thought to have trained in the studio of the painter Rogier van der Weyden in Brussels, but nothing definite is known beyond the fact that he was a painter in Bruges. As with Shakespeare, odd references to him turn up in the Bruges records – paying taxes, buying a house, joining a confraternity, the birth of three sons and so on, but otherwise very little is known for certain. I began to feel the stirrings of a plot.

My next novel, ‘The Shadow Prince’ will be published at the beginning of next year. In a sense, it’s a sequel to ‘The Master of Bruges’ in that I take a minor character from this book and follow his adventures over the next few years. Like ‘The Master of Bruges’, it has been a great deal of fun to write, involving many research trips-stroke-tobacco runs over to Belgium and a great deal of sitting in bars and sampling various Belgian beers as I try to work out how to get my protagonist into another fine mess.

* The character Claire Peacock, played by Julia Howarth in Coronation Street for the non-brits among you.

terrymorganmgs2@aol.co.uk

The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber

2011-05-04T02:51:00.000-07:00

It all started with a sod dugout on the outskirts of Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The dugout, called Prairie Homestead, was easy to overlook; from the two-lane road it didn't look like much. The sign, however, advertised that the 1909 sod dugout was listed with the National Register of Historic Places, and that was enough for me. I was on a camping vacation with plenty of time so I pulled into the empty parking lot and paid the admission fee. Since that day, nothing has been the same.

The Prairie Homestead consisted of a sod dugout, a root cellar, an outhouse, a barn, and antique farm equipment. My tour guide was owner Keith Crew whose grandparents had been Badlands homesteaders. The two of us walked up the slight rise to the sod dugout. There were prairie dog holes everywhere, and Mr. Crew warned me to stay on the dirt path. "Step in a hole", he said, "and you can snap an ankle." I stayed on the path.

Inside, the three-room dugout had a dank, musty smell. The dirt floor was so hard-packed that it felt like standing on cement. Sheets of yellowed newspapers were tacked on some of the interior walls to cover the rough-cut sod bricks. On the walls that were bare, shoots of grass grew between the sod bricks. To my surprise, Mr. Crew pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it, and started burning the shoots. "Got to do it nearly everyday," he said. "If you don't, the prairie takes over."

The bedroom was just big enough for a low-slung bed that stood a few inches above the dirt floor. There was a potbelly stove in the parlor and because wood was scarce, rock-hard cow patties or cowchips, as ranchers called them, were stacked in a nearby bucket ready to be burned for fuel. I asked Mr. Crew if they smelled bad when they were burning. "Not much," he said.

It was the shiny black cookstove in the kitchen that stopped me cold. The dirt around the cookstove was worn down much like a path. A woman, I realized, might have stood there for the better part of each day preparing food. I tried to imagine this. This woman had cooked three meals a day, day after day, year after year. There must have been times when she hated that cookstove, when she felt trapped by the constant demand to feed her family. Yet there, on the oven door, was an embossed ring of ivy making the cookstove an object of beauty. It might have been the woman's albatross, but the cookstove was hers and hers alone. It must have made her proud.

A few days later, I stopped in a roadside museum in South Dakota and saw a photo of an unnamed African-American woman sitting by herself in front of a dugout. This surprised me. I had never heard of black settlers in the West, but there she was in the photo, her mouth set and her eyes steady. Long after the vacation ended, I kept thinking about her, wondering who she was and why she was alone in the photo. Her name had been lost to history, but she must have had a story and I wanted to hear it. I gave her a name, a dugout with a cookstove, and I began to write.

The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is the story of what might have happened.

http://www.annweisgarber.com/

The Highest Stakes by Emery Lee

2011-05-04T02:42:00.000-07:00

Since THE HIGHEST STAKES' release, I have been asked a number of questions about my inspiration and creative process, and how I researched the novel. I would like to take this opportunity to answer some of these questions and share some thoughts and insights on the novel itself.

It is always said that one should write one's passions. In my case, this would mean converging horses, history and romance. A love story set in the world of horseracing began churning around in my head and invading my dreams at night.

The premise involved young lovers torn between two worlds. I wanted to create a hero who would overcome many obstacles to find love and happiness, with his ultimate fate hanging on a horse race. But where to begin?

I started by researching the history of horseracing and learned that nearly all Thoroughbred racehorses can trace their blood back to not only the Arabian horse, but three very specific sires - all imported to England from the Middle East in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Bingo! I thought. Why not start with the origin of the thoroughbred itself?

Suddenly, I had my setting- mid-18^th century England in the reign of George II, a time in which horseracing became an obsession of the uppermost elite, and fortunes could be won or lost on the racing turf. I then narrowed my time period to the decade that preceded the formation of the first Jockey Club in 1751.

Once I knew the when and the where of my story, my additional research into this select historical period truly was exhaustive. This was an era of corruption, arranged marriages, and high stakes gambling; when racing and breeding became the obsession of the uppermost elite, and a match race might replace a duel in settling a point of honor.

Over many months, I delved into all aspects of upper class 18^th century English life, to include the War of Austrian succession, the British military campaign in which my characters play a part, the shifting politics of the times, arranged marriages, and of course 18^th century horseracing and breeding practices.

My goal was then to vividly recreate in the reader’s mind this fascinating and titillating, hard-drinking, vice-ridden, horseracing world of Georgian England.

Interestingly, the horses in THE HIGHEST STAKES play nearly as important a role as the human characters, as Sir Garfield’s racing stud is as essential as his niece and daughter in his schemes to gain social advancement.

Sir Garfield’s niece, Charlotte, is a young girl who is orphaned and forced to live with her uncaring and socially ambitious relatives. Lonely and neglected, she seeks solace within her uncle's racing stables, where she discovers two lifelong passions, Robert Devington, and her uncle’s racehorses.

The young and ambitious Devington is a lowly, but talented stable groom, who leaves his employ for the military, in order to better himself in the eyes of Charlotte's uncle, who will never see him as good enough. When Robert is still rebuffed upon his return from war to claim Charlotte's hand, a racing wager seems the only pathway to win her.

Through this love story of Robert Devington and Charlotte Wallace, a tale of drama, danger, thwarted love, and retribution unfurls.

Enjoy the ride!

Emery Lee

http://www.authoremerylee.com/

The Lady's Slipper by Deborah Swift

2011-05-02T02:20:00.000-07:00

The story behind the story.

One Sunday I was out for a walk with a friend in the countryside, and strolling down a leafy un-made track, we came across a white tent right in the middle of the path. It was blocking our way, so we peered inside. An official-looking man was sitting there who told us he was from an organization called English Nature. His task was to guard the rare lady’s-slipper orchid which was in flower a few yards further on. Apparently orchid enthusiasts were so desperate to get hold of the plant that in 2003 half of it had been dug up by a greedy collector and since then it has been guarded whilst it is in flower.

A bit taken aback that a guard should be patrolling such a quiet country footpath, and full of curiosity, we followed him to view this rare orchid. Nestling against the green of the hedgerow, it was strikingly different from most other English flowers. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the sight of it took my breath away. I had never seen anything so exotic-looking growing wild before - the creamy yellow “slipper”, surrounded by the twisted blood-coloured ribbons. It struck me at that moment that every time anyone saw this, generation after generation, they must have experienced the same awe. The thought that it could be lost to future generations, sobering.

We stood and stared as our guide described a little of its history. The species was on the brink of extinction in Britain but when a single plant was rediscovered, the Cypripedium Committee was formed, a sort of plant mafia, designed to protect the lady’s-slipper and develop a conservation strategy involving propagating or cloning the species.

The committee are obsessively protective of the plant - In one TV programme explaining this much-publicised and expensive conservation programme the interviewer asked one of their members what would become of the original - "Will people be allowed to see it?" he was asked.

"No," he answered, "and if I have my way it will live the rest of its days unseen and die in isolation."

This seemed an interesting paradox and whetted my imagination. It seemed strange that the Committee were able to effectively “own” the plant in their attempts to preserve it. Eventually this became one theme I wanted to explore in the novel – but I am jumping ahead.

I did more research. I trawled internet sites and orchid books and read scientific articles on plant cloning. This is the sort of thing I used to do when writing a poem – looking for snippets of language, unusual words or fragments that I might craft into poetry. After a few attempts at beginning a poem, I realised it just wasn’t working. It seemed a bigger, more wordy idea than there was room for in a poem, more of a narrative. The plant on its own was nothing without characters to see it, so I drafted chapter one of what was to become The Lady’s Slipper.

At the same time I went to a philosophy workshop in an old Quaker meeting house at Yealand, a short drive from my home. The old meeting house is full of atmosphere, built in 1692, the silence of the meetings over so many hundreds of years seems concentrated into its very walls. What moved me most on that particular day was the graveyard. It is a typical Quaker burial ground where all the headstones are exactly the same – plain granite, thumbnail-shaped stones with a simple name and date. It is the ultimate expression of death as a levelling process - whoever you were, however rich or poor, you would have the same memorial and be returned to the land. This idea of equality is not so startling today, but how would it have been viewed in the class-ridden system of seventeenth century England when the movement began?

I started to investigate Quaker history. I was fascinated by the Quaker strict code of morality and the strength of their convictions for peace in those early times, particularly as when the movement began,

England

was still recovering from the bloodshed of the English Civil War and the subsequent Puritan repression. I began to visualise the character of Richard Wheeler as a Quaker.

Fortunately I live near the birthplace of the Quaker movement, so visits to their first meeting grounds and houses such as Swarthmoor Hall where George Fox himself actually stood, played a large part in the background to the book. There is nothing like inhaling the smell of seventeenth century panelling, or looking at a view of a garden from inside mullioned glass. George Fox kept a diary which provided me with not only a time-frame, but also a flavour of the particular language of the period.

As I was researching I found I was haunted by “what if” questions such as, what would happen if a Quaker had pledged not to take up arms but then was put in a position where he must defend the person he loves? I was interested also to explore the whole question of territory, and what it is that makes people defend their territory.

Not just in an obvious way, but more subtly too - for example, Thomas becomes indignant when Ella encroaches on Alice’s territory.

The lady’s-slipper for me represents the land. It rouses a patriotism in me, something that has become a somewhat unpopular idea of late. And I think many people are asking questions about soldiering, and the paradox of using conflict to bring about peace. So the character of Richard Wheeler enabled me to explore these questions without implying the answers, but just to raise them.

The Lady’s Slipper grew in an organic sort of way. Although I was aware of the crafting process as it went on, in some respects I feel the story was already “out there” somehow, and I am just the person who happened to pen it down. So I feel immensely grateful to the characters for letting me tell their story.

http://www.deborahswift.blogspot.com/
http://www.deborahswift.co.uk/