Malika Ghandi has the fine credentials needed to write a novel based around the Indian independence movement. Born in India, her family have deeply ingrained roots in the sub-continent. It is my absolute pleasure to have Malika in the Big Red Chair today.
I would like to announce that A Thousand Glass Flowers (US purchase link, UK below) has just won a silver medallion in the 2012 Readers’ Favourite Book Awards.
Initially, to gauge finalists, the submitted novels are read by volunteer reviewers. If a novel is fortunate enough to reach the finalist stage, professionals within the industry then take over and the novels are read by judges drawn from the fields of publishing, agencies, editors, professors of english literature and/or creative writing and so on. So the books are very heavily marked for their quality.
This Friday, 10th August, and Saturday, 11th August, one of the five fantasy finalists from the 2012 Readers’ Favourite Book Awards (announced in September) will be offered free for Kindles as part of the KDP Select promotion on Amazon.
I haven’t been a very good blogger of late. 
I’ve been too busy #rowing, #eventing, #sailing, playing hockey, having a go at #archery and leaping from pillar to post in #gymnastics. I’m so busy, so tired and so filled with patriotic fervour. This despite the fact that at any other time of the year I hate watching sport on TV .
It seems odd to have a Red Chair feature so soon after that brilliant last, but I could not ignore the chance of talking to a favourite and highly successful author as he prepares to release his new book.
This weekend, I’m having the first free promotion ever of one of my books.
Gisborne: Book of Pawns which was in Amazon’s Top 100 initially on its release, is part of KDP Select on Amazon and as is to be offered free for two days.
Whilst away last weekend, I read an interesting article on solitude in The Australian Weekender magazine, by writer Nikki Gemmell. She says: ‘aloneness can have a vast restorative power … it’s a space for your mind to uncurl … in the lovely, glittery alone, a door opens to a possibility and it’s when novel ideas sneak in, titles roar with their rightness and surprising character arcs veer me back to excitement over a project that hasn’t been singing.’
Why the fascination with the Middle Ages?
It’s a question I was asked today and it’s something I’ve wondered about as well.
I think it began in secondary school. I fell in love with historical fiction the minute I had my own library card. At the same time, the beginning of the 60’s, TV had just begun in Australia and so I was beguiled by the black and white historical cinema of the time. I’ve just found a copious list of 300 movies online www.erasofelegance.com/entertainment/medievalmovies.html and went through to find the ones I remembered from my youth:
Many years ago, my mum used to subscribe to a homely mag called English Womens’ Weekly.
Often, when I was visiting from ‘faraway’ and had nothing to read, I would lie in bed reading serial after serial and it was actually how I first discovered Rosamunde Pilcher. But toward the back of the mag, there was a rather nice regular page called Looking at Life with the Man Who Sees.
