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.
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.
The embroidered mirror frame continues to grow as A Thousand Glass Flowers wends its way across a reading population. 
This last couple of weeks, I’ve embroidered a couple of figs and an owl. Each segment was embroidered on a calico slip in a much smaller hoop, then cut out and attached to the main embroidery with little stab stitches and stuffed to give it dimension. The beads for eyes and seeds are added last.
Louise Wise is another writer who is reaping the benefits of the e-revolution. She and I ‘met’ at YouWriteOn.com as part of their print-published stable and I’ve always enjoyed her wit, not only in the forums but in her novels as well. I thought it was time she sat in the Big Red Chair, so here she is…
The Twilight Saga has just been read. Yes, I know I’m very late to the party but I seemed to subconsciously want the hype to go away so that I could draw my own conclusions.
My opinion of the books is of little matter to anyone but myself. But what I will say is how much I preferred the other male protagonist, Jacob Black, 
the Quileute werewolf. This prompted me to think on Finnian of the Færan, the male protagonist in A Thousand Glass Flowers and I felt the need to compare him with Edward Cullen (blasphemy) and with Jacob Black (secondary blasphemy).
