Judge a book by its cover…
If one is a mainstream writer, one rarely if ever has input into cover design. However, if one is indie, and one has an amenable cover designer, one can give them a brief and they work with it.
If one is a mainstream writer, one rarely if ever has input into cover design. However, if one is indie, and one has an amenable cover designer, one can give them a brief and they work with it.
concatenation; plural noun: concatenations a series of interconnected things.
‘A series of interconnected things…’ If you’re a writer, it’s most likely that someone at some time has said: ‘It would be great as a series.’
And the truth is that many writers write copious series. Myself? I’ve written three series and am now in the middle of the fourth.
Why you may ask?
Had a swift dash to the city to collect mail and make sure the little Matchbox was okay. And to pick up birthday presents. I dashed around the tiny garden, took five shots, and then in a bitterly cold Antarctic burst, drove back up the coast. No pics from here but tomorrow I will be planting rhubarb and purple asparagus and feeding the herbs.
I haven’t been around for awhile. It’s not that I haven’t been in the gardens, not at all. It’s just that my writerly work requires long hours at the screen and I couldn’t face blogging. It’s also difficult to load things where we live on the coast, as our internet has slowed dramatically and mostly, I have to work off my phone. But happy with progress on the latest manuscript, and with a hot chocolate drink seasoned with marshmallows and Lindt chocolate shavings, I feel revived enough to post about the gardens.
I’m writing a new novel at the moment. It’s tentatively called Oak Gall and Gold and is Book Two of The Peregrinus Series.
The series, like my others, is set in the twelfth century, and inevitably involves the machinations of the trading house of Gisborne ben Simon. This time, there’s an incomplete illuminated manuscript, a monk with no memory, and dealings with the Holy Roman Empire.
I follow blogs completely separate from the writing world.
I write daily, my life is wrapped up in word construction, so I choose to follow blogs a million miles away from writing.
A little bit of embroidery, a little bit of gardening, a little bit of lifestyle.
There’s a lot of lust steaming out of the first two.
I follow gardening blogs because they allow me to dream of what I could do in my own gardens if muscles, ligaments, climate change and advancing age weren’t encroaching. The embroidery ones are to learn from, to gaze at. I know I will never reach such standards of excellence but that doesn’t matter. I’m always in awe of embroidery artists, their designs, and the depth of their practical know how.
But the lifestyle ones are something else…
I’m excited to announce that the anthology, Sword and Sirventes, has just been released as an e-book. The paperback version will be released in the next fortnight.
‘A sequence of polished little gems that offer tantalizing keyholes to the past…’
The inspiration for my latest book, Reliquary, originally came from the research I carried out for the previous trilogy called The Triptych Chronicle. In the process of seeking facts on rare and valuable merchandise that may have been traded in the twelfth century, I came across mention of a silk called byssus and which is still harvested in the Mediterranean from a species of shellfish.