Category: book series

October Updates

This past month, when I wake in the night, there’s almost always a tawny owl calling outside – which is a hint that I’m not in Canada. Several things brought us to England in September, largely research for An Unwise Prince, my work-in-slow-progress: a chance to tour a medieval merchant’s house that’s only open a few times a year; the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum (and its medieval exhibits); Peterborough Cathedral, built as an abbey in the 13th C, which will become the physical model (more or less) for the school in the new book.

Peterborough Cathedral Precinct. My photo.

But also, of course, the birds, and the long walks, and in the four weeks we’ve been here we’ve had four days of serious rain. Most have been sunny. We caught the last of the summer birds, chiff-chaffs still singing, and the first of the winter migrants, pink-footed geese and redwings, as well as two birds new for the UK for us, yellow-browed warbler and cattle egret. The saltmarshes are washed pink with sea lavender, the hedges are bright with rose hips and hawthorn fruit and blackberries, and filled with red admiral and fritillary and cabbage white butterflies. Deer – roe and muntjac, fallow and Chinese water – browse field edges and park, and on the mud of the marshes probe godwit and golden plover, redshank and curlew.

Burnham Overy Staithe harbour. My photo.

Yes, but how’s the book coming, you ask? I’m about 30,000 words into the first draft of what’s going to be the most complex book(s) I’ve ever tackled. It’s already clear it isn’t one book. I thought there were four point-of-view characters. Ha! I’ll be lucky to get through the story without adding at least another four. I’m borrowing from the Hanseatic League, medieval universities, Byzantium-North African-Arabic interaction, 12th C silk roads trade, intellectual exchange around the entire Mediterranean, the Mongol invasion of both the middle east and eastern Europe, Genoa’s near trade monopoly in the eastern Med, and the first crusade. All I can do is trust the process – do the research, let it marinate, and write down the words my characters dictate.

This are the tentative covers for the first two books. If it turns out to be more than a duology, the theme is easy to work with.

You may have noticed I’m not doing many updates here now. I will try to do monthly ones, but a much easier way to keep up with what I’m writing – short stories, poetry, non-fiction and a chance to read Empress & Soldier for free as a serialized novel – is to join me on Substack. My fiction site is History & Imagination; my non-fiction site is Landscapes of Memory.

Until November (I hope).

Marian

What if the world you create becomes real?

A spotlight on J.M. Tibbott’s fantasy series, The Pridden Saga.

A prickly young game designer finds herself in a medieval world reminiscent of the video games she creates. Magic, dangerous creatures, and political intrigue were fine as a fantasy, but navigating them all in real life is a different challenge. Will Kat find her way through the maze of this new existence?

An enchanting adult fantasy, The Arrival is Book I of The Pridden Saga. Six books are published; the seventh has a planned release of autumn 2024. Find out more at the author’s website:

https://jmtibbott.com/books/

 J. M. Tibbott is a prize-winning author, a writing instructor and editor. J.M. has been writing since grade school, and continues to study literature and the English Language. She believes there is always something new to learn. 

Her works include magazine and newspaper articles, newsletters, online blogs, and story collections. With the 6th book of The Pridden Saga published, J.M is deep into the final conclusion in Book 7. Another couple of series are tucked up her sleeve, the first with a decided Detective bent. After that, more are planned but only her muse is in on the secrets. 

A Book Develops, Part V

Trade routes from central Africa to the Mediterranean, c 12-13th C. Illustration Cleveland Museum of Art. My photo.

Inspiration comes from many places, some random, serendipitous, some sought out. This week I drove the 1000+ km to and from Cleveland, to see an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art called ‘Africa & Byzantium’, an exploration of mostly religious art produced in or resident in the lands of North and East Africa influenced by Byzantium.

But there’s no religion in your books, you might say. This is true – or rather, there are no large organized religions; personal faith is another matter – but it’s not religion per se that matters here. It was the communication, the translation of concepts and ideas I was interested in. The icon pictured below was possibly gifted to its Sinai monastery by Emperor Justinian himself, as he endowed the monastery in the mid-500s. It – and many other pieces of ancient art and writing – have been a part of the library of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine since then.

In the new series set in my fictional world, the role of monasteries as repositories of knowledge and houses of learning is replaced by what the Ti’acha, the schools, of the Empire series have evolved into – the equivalent of the medieval universities not just of Europe but of the middle East and north Africa as well. So what writings – of philosophers from Casil and Heræcria and lands further east and south; of Heræcrian and Ikorani and Marai travellers, or even, at a more personal (for my new characters) level, of Cillian’s or Colm’s, Lena’s or Tarquin’s or Gnaius’s – might have found there way there, in original or copy, for Gerhart or Luce or Kirt to discover and learn from in their travels? Trade, medicine, history, mathematics, music, science: the knowledge held, exchanged, sometimes forgotten, the disciplines and interpretation of thought and ideas – all that still holds, even removing organized religion from the world.

I learned more practical, tangible things, too: the gifting of large brass trays, beautifully inscribed, as diplomatic gifts from the Mamluk sultanate; that a written language called Old Nubian existed; the trade routes from central Africa to the Mediterranean (invaluable); what block-printed linen of the period looked like; the three sources of treasured ivory. All useful things to be tucked away and possibly used, if and when they fit.

And, with pure serendipity, wandering the galleries before my entrance time to the exhibition, I walked into a room and saw – whatever the artist intended nearly 200 years ago – a portrait of my character Luce as a young student, studying medicine in an eastern school.

The Young Eastern Girl, Friedrich Amerling, 1838. Cleveland Museum of Art.
My photo.

Driving home along Interstate 90, I could feel this information slotting into the background of my world, hear the characters taking it in, shaping it to their experiences (and being shaped by it), becoming part of the world and character building. Both the book(s) and I are richer for it.

A Memory of Murder

Book 5 in the Jan Christopher Series by Helen Hollick

A Memory of Murder is the fifth in Helen Hollick’s Jan Christopher series, set in a less complicated time (at least as far as electronic communication is concerned!). It’s 1973, and Jan (January) Christopher’s work as a library assistant is disrupted by the decorating of the library, and by one particularly annoying workman who won’t take Jan’s engaged status as a deterrent to his attentions. Her Easter holiday plans with her fiancé, DS Laurie Walker, are disrupted too: a young girl has gone missing, and odd-but-significant objects are appearing at Jan’s family home. At least the circus arrives on its annual circuit to provide some distraction!

The details of life in a London suburb in the 1970s (Hollick draws on aspects of her own life in recreating this world) bring a comfortable sense of nostalgia to A Memory of Murder. The pace is in keeping with the time and place, and while the book fits into the ‘cosy’ subgenre, with a limited number of suspects, an amateur sleuth, and minimal on-page violence, the story does have a darker edge. Hollick writes with both humour and a keen sense of human nature; she is a talented writer whose books in any genre don’t disappoint. I look forward to what comes next!

THE JAN CHRISTOPHER MYSTERIES by Helen Hollick

A Memory of Murder – a new  cosy murder mystery to solve –  along with library assistant Jan Christopher, her fiancé, Detective Sergeant Laurie Walker and her uncle, Detective Chief Inspector Toby Christopher.

Set in the 1970s this easy-read cosy mystery series is based around the years when Helen was a north-east London library assistant, using many of her remembered anecdotes, some hilarious – like the boy who wanted a book on Copper Knickers. (You’ll have to read the first book, A Mirror Murder to find our more!)

The mysteries alternate between Jan’s home town, and where Laurie’s parents live – North Devon, (where Helen now lives.)

In this fifth episode, there’s a missing girl, annoying decorators, circus performers, and a wanna-be rock star to deal with. But who remembers the brutal, cold case murder of a policeman?

Buy Link:

Amazon universal: https://mybook.to/AMemoryOfMurder

(e-book available for pre-order: published on 18th May –  paperback release to follow)

Or order from any bookstore(cheaper on Amazon)

Reader’s comments:

“Can I say this is the best one (of the series) yet? YES! For the depth of the writing, the maturity of the main character, and the complexity of the premise. It’s cosy…with a few chills for good measure!” Elizabeth St John, author

“I sank into this gentle cosy mystery story with the same enthusiasm and relish as I approach a hot bubble bath, (in fact this would be a great book to relax in the bath with!), and really enjoyed getting to know the central character…” Debbie Young bestselling cosy mystery author

“Jan is a charming heroine. You feel you get to know her and her love of books and her interest in the people in the library where she works. She’s also funny, and her Aunt Madge bursts with character – the sort of aunt I would love to have had. I remember the 70s very well and Ms Hollick certainly gives a good flavour of the period.” Denise Barnes (bestselling romance author Molly Green)

“A delightful read about an unexpected murder in North East London. Told from the viewpoint of a young library assistant, the author draws on her own experience to weave an intriguing tale” Richard Ashen (South Chingford Community Library)

“Every sentence pulls you back into the early 1970s… The Darling Buds of May, but Devon not Kent. The countryside itself is a character and Hollick imbues it with plenty of emotion” Alison Morton, author

“An enjoyable novella with a twist in who done it. I spent the entire read trying to decide what was a clue and what wasn’t … Kept me thinking the entire time. I call that a success.” Reader’s Review

ABOUT HELEN

First accepted for traditional publication in 1993, Helen became a USA Today Bestseller with her historical novel, The Forever Queen (titled A Hollow Crown in the UK) with the sequel, Harold the King (US: I Am The Chosen King) being novels that explore the events that led to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Her Pendragon’s Banner Trilogy is a fifth-century version of the Arthurian legend, and she writes a nautical adventure/supernatural series, The Sea Witch Voyages. She has also branched out into the quick read novella, ‘Cosy Mystery’ genre with her Jan Christopher Mysteries, set in the 1970s.

Her non-fiction books are Pirates: Truth and Tales and Life of A Smuggler. She is currently writing about the ghosts of North Devon for Amberley Press, and another, Jamaica Gold for her Sea Witch Voyages.

She lives with her family in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in North Devon with their dogs and cats, while on the farm there are showjumper horses, fat Exmoor ponies, an elderly Welsh pony, geese, ducks and  hens. And several resident ghosts.

Website: https://helenhollick.net/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helen.hollick

Blog: promoting good authors & good reads: https://ofhistoryandkings.blogspot.com/

A Book Develops, Part IV

I am deep into a book with the unprepossessing title of Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean. It is, if I understand correctly, an adaptation of its author’s (Jessica Goldberg) Ph.D. thesis, and it is, for me, absolutely fascinating.

This is, in part, how the world – and sometimes the plots – of my books develop: I read a research book, and every few sentences I think, “Oh, I can use that!” There are four trade alliances in The Casillard Confederacy series (as I currently envision it): one based on the Hanseatic League, one on the Scandinavian Kalmar alliance , one (well, ok, this isn’t an alliance) based on a blend of the Italian city-states – think Genoa with some aspects of Venice – and one based in my equivalent of North Africa.

I had some varying degrees of knowledge about the Hanse and the city-states and the Scandinavian alliance. (They all still need research, though.) I had none at all about North African trade in the 11-13th centuries, except to know, barely, it existed. But in the Empire series, I’d made my character Druisius’s family traders and merchants operating both in my Rome analogue, Casil, and from the southern coast of the Nivéan Sea, which is, of course, basically the Mediterranean.  The Casillard Confederacy is the same world, 500 years later, and the major characters are descendants of my original cast. Druisius’s family – some of them, anyhow – are still merchants and traders. Hence my need to learn about how trade worked in that period.

There are aspects of this book that don’t fit my fictional world – the focus is on the trade networks of Jewish merchants – the Maghribi traders – operating primarily in the eastern end of the Mediterranean (for an overview of the documents this detailed analysis is based on, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza) – but the organization of trade, the commodities, the methods of communication and transport, the difficulties to be overcome, how merchant apprenticeships worked – I can use all these. (And tidbits like the fact Jewish bankers in Old Cairo in the 11th C were using a double-entry bookkeeping system, predating any known usage in the Italian city-state banking systems.  Maybe. If I can slip that in without it sounding like, look, I did my research!)

This is just one aspect of how I build both a world and a character. I immerse myself in the history – in this case the world of Mediterranean trade  that Goldberg has so masterfully laid out, and it becomes part of one or more character’s story. If I’m lucky, that transfer will happen naturally, shaping who the character is, how they think, their loyalties, their presumptions of how the world works, the conflicts and dissonances that happen when confronted with another way of thinking and doing business.

But it’s not the only aspect. People are shaped by their cultural environment, but as I alluded to in the last entry in this occasional series, they’re shaped by their landscape, too. That will require a different sort of research. Meanwhile, back to bales of indigo and flax, and the tribulations of weather, markets, and unreasonable customs charges.

A Book Develops, Part II

Well, I didn’t expect it to be almost three months before I had anything more to say about the next novel! (The first part of this occasional series is here.) January, though, was mostly taken up with finishing other tasks, primarily getting Empire’s Passing ready for release and completing a contracted edit. February took us to Spain, a road trip for birds and Roman ruins and medieval city centres; one of the things I wanted to experience was how remnants of the Roman Empire (or the Eastern Empire, in my fictional world) appeared in a countryside that wasn’t Britain. Something beyond the familiar, to make me see.

Sadly, I don’t have a photo of the image that had the most impact: part of an aqueduct in a random field, and in that field, a man walking his dog. Living with this ancient piece of infrastructure as background to his everyday life. That was the sense I wanted; it will metamorphose, by whatever alchemy happens in a writer’s mind, into what it’s like, 500 years after we last saw my world, to live with the remnants — tangible and intangible –of a past empire.

One of the hardest things I had to find was some scholarly books with a good overview of European history of the later middle ages – roughly 1000 to 1400. Eventually, through discovering the online syllabus to a university course covering that period, and checking its reading list, I ordered two books:

I’ve also signed up for a six-week online course on medieval universities, as the Ti’acha of the first series have developed into something fairly similar (but without the religious context).

I’m still writing exploratory short stories, which can be found, one a month from January onward, on the A Muse Bouche Review. This is a way for me to get to know my characters, and some of the conflicts that the story will be based around.

As my research and character development continues, I’ve realized there are two big challenges ahead of me: which bits of European history to cherry-pick for the books (there’s a LOT going on in Europe and around the Mediterranean in these centuries), and, maybe even harder, to write a novel or novels with at least four POV characters. Two is the most I’ve done before.

But as the book gestates, moving from concept to reality, its lack of a working title was nagging at me. (Titles and book covers make an idea more solid, at least for me.) So here’s a cover mock-up: a place-holder image, and the working titles for both the book and the (presumed) series: All of which may change between now and publication!

‘A wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred.’
The Prince, Chapter XVII
Niccolò Machiavelli

Varril, the elected Princip of Ésparias when the story opens (at this point, at least!) is not a wise prince. Not at all. And on that, it seems, will hang the tale.

(As for the Casillard Confederacy – think of the Hanseatic League, often simply called the Hansard.)

More when there’s more to say!

A Book Develops: Part I

Even before Empire’s Passing, the last book in the Empire’s Legacy series, was partially written, people were asking ‘what’s next?’ To be fair, I had a glimmer of an idea – the same world, about 500 years later, with some aspect of the story derived from the trade alliance of the Hanseatic League.

Passing is done now; I’m just awaiting the paperback proof. It’ll be out in February. I’m in no hurry to write this next book, for many reasons. Key among them is that I know little of 13-14th C history, so I have a lot of research to do. But books evolve not just from plot but from characters—after all, it is the characters’ responses to the problems and conflicts they are faced with that makes a book interesting. And for me as a writer, characters simply appear, with much of their personalities in place, immutable except through personal growth, their responses to the circumstances of their lives.

Over the next—how long?—year? more?—I plan to record the development of this next book, as much to see if I can elucidate my own process as for anyone else. But you’re welcome to come along on the journey as this yet-without-a-working-title book emerges from research and imagination and craft.

So: where am I now?

Five characters of some importance, so far; one minor ones. Who do we have?

Cenric bé Casille, who describes himself as ‘a man of mature years and a merchant of standing and not insignificant influence’. He’d be about forty.

Kirthan del Candre de Guerdián en Leste, more usually known as Kirthan de Guerdián, another merchant, described by Cenric as ‘made of autumn oak leaves, shades of gold and brown from the short curls of his hair to the tips of his polished boots.’  A few years older than Cenric, known to his intimates as Kirt.

Luce bé Casille, Cenric’s sister. Physician, musician, mid-thirties.

Of some importance is Cenric’s son, Audun, who is about seventeen, and currently attending the equivalent of a cathedral school (equivalent because organized religion continues to play no part in my world) at which his great-uncle (Cenric and Luce’s uncle) teaches. The so far unnamed great-uncle will be an important secondary character, I think.

The first three characters (and the minor one of Cenric’s housekeeper) are introduced in an exploratory short story called The Onion Tart, published this month in A Muse Bouche Review. There will be more of these character-exploring stories: some may become part of the book, some won’t. I don’t think The Onion Tart will, but its description of the meeting of Cenric and Kirt will be background (and canon!).

Image by magdus from Pixabay

Meanwhile, while Cenric and Kirt and others tell me little bits about themselves, my first research book is Seb Falks’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. Its focus is the 14th C, but the advantage of writing historically inspired speculative fiction is I can borrow from adjacent centuries, as long (my own rule) I’m not blatantly anachronistic with technology.

More to come, when there’s more to say!

Part II is here.

Thor’s Wrath: Book II of the Viking Gael Saga, by J. T. T. Ryder: A Review

When we left Asgeir in book 1, he had saved his life (and his cat) but lost his honour. Now, as Harold Finehair works to unite Norway, Asgeir lands in the Orkneys, into conflict and battle: a chance for Asgeir to overcome his shame and redeem himself in his eyes and his gods.

J.T.T. Ryder continues to draw on his extensive knowledge of the history and archaeology of the setting – both time and place – in recreating a 9th century north-western European world. While Asgeir (and his compatriots) worldview is not ours, it is convincing: enmity and friendship flipping back and forth; the importance of personal honour; the role of single combat over warfare. This is a world of foresight, of visits from gods, of visions and portents–all are real, all are to be taken seriously.

The story moves quickly; the reader and Asgeir together are given little respite as threats are overcome, peace is agreed, only for another threat or a betrayal to begin the action again. Ryder’s writing is sometimes lyrical, especially in his place-based descriptions: ‘A whirlwind of puffins blackened the sky over the rocky, chilly islet… Mist shrouded the horizon like unspun wool, and the wind bit as remorseless as a fox…” In other places it echoes the alliteration of the sagas: ‘shocked him with sleet sideways.’ Even the occasional unusual word choice adds to the story, creating a sense of a world different from ours, refracted through time and distance.

The story is perhaps Ryder’s best, the complexity of Asgeir’s choices and of his thinking deepening as the youth matures into manhood. The telling is excellent. The editing, I am sorry to say, is less so.

(I dislike on-screen reading, so whenever possible I buy the paperback, so these comments pertain to the first paperback edition published in 2023.) I am tolerant of a certain number of typographical errors: they appear in even the best edited books, traditionally published or independent. But repeated sentences, repeated scenes, should not. Nor should a leg of lamb in one paragraph become a leg of pork in another. These errors spoke of a rushed production, an incomplete editing process, and one, inevitably, that jolts the reader out of the story. A second, corrected edition* is strongly suggested.

But! Thor’s Wrath is still well worth reading, and I look forward to the next book in Asgeir’s saga. (And yes, the cat is still Asgeir’s companion at the end of this installment.)

*Update: correspondence with the author assures me these errors have been or are in the process of being corrected.