Book Two of The Tritptych Chronicle is following a pathway.
I hadn’t intended for this to happen when I began Tobias’s story in Book One. But Book Two, Guillaume’s story, is treading that same route and has caused a re-think about just who might be the focus of Book Three…
One of the things I was most afraid of losing from my life after the vestibular ‘event’ that I suffered four months ago and for which I am still having treatment, was my time away in our boat.
As I move through the treatment, one of the maxims they expound is to ‘test your balance and your brain plasticity by doing all that you did before’…
Matthew Harffy exploded onto the writing scene last year with The Serpent Sword, Book One of the Bernicia Chronicles. His books have had vast accolades and he has been compared with the iconic Bernard Cornwell, a tag he wears with humility. He writes about a violent and oft-misunderstood time in British history and I wanted to get behind the man and perhaps even a little behind the timeframe as Matthew sees it…
Prior to new Year’s Eve, Joe Konrath said: This year, I’m boiling my resolutions down to the essence:
WRITE!
Elizabeth Hunter wrote: I NEED the writing. It’s still my most-fun-thing. My escape. My happy place.
I love writing and want to write more books, but they can’t happen as fast as I would like and that’s okay. In fact, that’s better than okay. It’s normal and I’m perfectly fine with that.
And then there’s Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a commentator whose words always hold a distinct resonance and clarity for me personally. In her annual ‘Close of Business for the Year’ address she pointed out a couple of salient things…
‘The new world isn’t actively hostile, but it is difficult. And why shouldn’t it be? We’re working on an international level.
But one of the degrees of difficulty we’ve been dealing with since 2009 is that the new system hadn’t stabilized yet. Things changed, sometimes weekly, and those of us who jumped into indie publishing from the beginning were constantly revising expectations as well as ways of doing things.’
I joined the new world of publishing along with some of my closest writing friends, in 2008. We were published POD by an organization in the UK that was government funded with an annual Arts grant. We sold, we did well. But then we stepped out on our own and by 2010, dived into e-books.
Not just diving in I might add, but swimming whole marathons because the industry was mega-populated and the technology seemed to change by the hour…
One of the reviews of Tobias states…’good accurate sailing terminology.’
And it prompted me to think that my grandfather and my father would not have been best pleased if I hadn’t used the correct terms…
In the past when my kids were young, it was decorated when they got home from school with Christmas music playing and the first fruit mince pies of the season to eat as we hung tinsel and baubles.
Now, I do it at whatever time of the day I want. Just me and Dog – he sniffs the decorations as they are unpacked and then looks on as I hang this and that. Finally we stand back, look at each other and … go for a walk…
When I discover a reader who has ‘found’ my books, who has actually expended money on a book I have written, it’s a wonderful feeling…
‘Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.’
So you see it isn’t all arty-farty, you know. All painting, sculpture, writing and so on…
On this dreadful day, as we all wonder about Paris, a post such as this has little relevance.
I wrote it before the events in Paris and offer it up as a gentle escape for a short while…
