I first met Jennifer Stevenson
in a Bookclub online… she’s always made me smile with some of her witty comment and when I asked if she’d jump in the Red Chair for interrogation, she agreed. Her early life in swamp country in the USA brings archtypical images to mind and I needed to know more.
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.
My guest today, Stuart Aken, says that he was born against the odds to a widowed mother in a neighbour’s bed. Then raised in a number of homes by an artist mother who knew what love meant and a step-father who lacked imagination but made up for it with affection and education in things natural. Stuart maintains he wrote all the wrong things for a lifetime until he learned who he was and I thought that apart from the initial burst into the world, all we writers have done exactly that: written all the wrong things until we ‘grew up’. Stuart welcome,
I don’t think many people really know how sweet my tooth is. Well, maybe Shea Mcleod does, as you’ll see on Sept 7th on her blog.
But I crave sweet stuff. If I go out, I look at the dessert menu first and then order small, ‘lite’ pre-cursers. I cook to stop the family from starving, but I truly ‘cook’ when I make sweet stuff. A terrible admission in these days of sugar overload. Actually, when the terrible January 2011summer storms wiped out the Queensland (Australia) sugar harvest, I, along with many others, stockpiled sugar in the pantry.
