A Thousand Glass Flowers is giving me the time of my life. Initially it took off like a rocket on Kindle on Amazon.com and then I signed with a digital publishing group called MWiDP for Amazon.co.uk. Last week I was rattling away on Facebook that I was excited ATGF had managed a .co.uk #ranking at least once a week for the four weeks that I had been on MWiDP’s lists. Anything from #15 onward!
We scattered Milo’s ashes today.
Lest you not know who Milo is… he is/was my beloved fifteen year old Jack Russell terrier who died of cancer a month ago.
Milo the Magnificent
A couple of posts ago I mentioned the old Victorian scrapbook gifted to me by my great aunt when I was eight years old. There is a little bit of history behind the book. My parents moved whilst I was away at university (a long while ago) and all my books were placed in boxes and apparently moved with the housing contents.
In the beginning Katharine Eliska Kimbriel was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New SF/Fantasy Writer. Katharine’s work has long straddled the line: “too literary to be commercial, too commercial to be literary” — she has a list of itinerant occupations to prove it. What urged me to invite her to Red chair was that she had a pet gargoyle! Yes, really!
I was very surprised to see how many views my short little piece on Robin Hood was fortunate to have. But then perhaps it’s not really surprising. Old books have always drawn booklovers to them and a post about one is no different.
There is nothing I can say to introduce someone like Chris Dolley.
Colourful? Amazing? Eccentric? Funny? Read on!
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
My latest guest was born of academia, wanted to be a cat burglar, got high through the seventies (one is desperate to ask was it good?) hates diets but has never ever had a surfeit of life and in addition writes killingly observant blogs on the world of writing. Not only that, her latest book, Food Of Love, is amongst other things an homage to chocolate.
Writing the last part of Gisborne, I’m second guessing myself constantly. Is my language anachronistic, are my facts solid, how much variation from the accepted history am I allowed?
Recently I was re-reading the dates of Richard 1st’s reign and found that he was crowned in September of 1189. So… the beginning of autumn. That now requires me to go right through the whole novel to change the season in which Ysabel travels through France and England with Gisborne from autumn to summer.
That doesn’t just involve changes to the settings (eg colour of leaves on trees) but the kind of foods available, the clothes one might wear, journeys on the high seas, how thick a horse’s coat is, what flowers might be blooming, the presence of certain seasonal ailments and so on. In addition, I am now having to do a lot of counting of days and months so that the story ends at just the right point of factual history.
For me, so new to this venture, I read and re-read what I have written. Anything I am remotely unsure of I will change to red type so that I can re-read my research and insert the correct fact in the next edit. Even so, I am aware the true historical fictionistas, those whose reading and knowledge is exceptional, will find plenty to dispute and argue about.
Blondel de Nesle, Richard’s troubadour, appears in this novel and I can find no account of his physical attributes. Because he is a favourite of the king, and because Richard himself is known to have been golden and attractive and potentially bi-sexual, I am taking a great liberty and making Blondel to be lithely good-looking, bordering on the feminine. I am waiting for the trip-up, I can tell you.
Writing hist.fict is wonderful satisfying but it’s also a terrifying prospect releasing a historical fiction novel to a reading public that may know as much as, if not more than you. So much is known, so much must be respected. In many ways I’m glad my main character is essentially a character of legend as that gives me room to play, but with others like Richard the Lionheart, I am hamstrung by history and can deviate little from what is known.
I’m just wondering what other little gems I shall find on tomorrow’s read.
Earlier this month I was interviewed by Shéa Macleod and one of the questions she posed was ‘Chocolate or parma ham?’
Shea isn’t the only one who mentions chocolate… the more I wander amongst my favourite blogs, the more I find that chocolate is an absolute essential for the writer. I even found this http://bit.ly/fjaCn5 on a new blog today.
Somewhere in one of the Chronicles of Eirie, there is a statement by a male protagonist about love and the corollary of loss. I wish I could remember where it is because I haven’t the inclination to flick through the pages of three novels to find the line.
