Category: writing

Ghost Encounters: The Lingering Spirits of North Devon

By Helen Hollick (With daughter Kathy Hollick)

Everyone assumes that ghosts are hostile. Actually, most of them are not.

You either believe in ghosts or you don’t. It depends on whether you’ve encountered something supernatural or not. But when you share a home with several companionable spirits, or discover benign ghosts in public places who appear as real as any living person, scepticism is abandoned. In GHOST ENCOUNTERS: The Lingering Spirits Of North Devon, mother and daughter share their personal experiences, dispelling the belief that spirits are to be feared.

Ghost Encounters will fascinate all who enjoy the beautiful region of rural South-West England, as well as interest those who wish to discover more about its history… and a few of its ghosts.

(Includes a bonus of two short stories and photographs connected to North Devon)

Book Links:
Pre-order the e-book on Amazon
https://mybook.to/GhostEncounters

Paperback published February 28th – e-book will also be available on Kindle Unlimited

WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT GHOSTS?

I wrote Ghost Encounters with my dyslexic daughter because we wanted to show that not all ghosts are hostile, because there are animal ghosts as well as people – and because we wanted to share this beautiful part of England’s West Country – and some of its history – in a slightly different (maybe quirky!) way!

A ‘ghost’ is quite possibly only the remnant of some sort of past energy, something relayed as a hologram-like YouTube-type video that can only be viewed by those who can access the correct wavelength. If you don’t have the right frequency, all you get is nothing or static. What created this ‘energy’, no one knows, it’s inexplainable, which is why the subject is so controversial. What chance do poor old ghosts have when their is no fact, scientific or otherwise, to support their existence?

Many accounts claim that ghosts are deceased people bent on revenge against some misdeed committed against them during life, or they are souls imprisoned on earth for foul things they did to others. Or maybe a ghost haunts a certain location because that is where a violent or unnatural death occurred. My personal belief against this last: while there are ghosts lingering near battlefields (I’ve had personal experience) how come there are not hundreds – even thousands – of ghosts sitting around at known battle sites? Waterloo, Agincourt, the Somme… if this theory was right these places would be akin to a London or New York rush hour!

APPEARANCE

Misty shadows, a vague blur, maybe a hovering orb? Perhaps merely a feeling of a sudden ice coldness or a brief breeze across the cheek? A sound, a moan, a wheezed breath; or a sigh or something knocked over when no one was near to knock it. All must, of course, be ghosts.

Many female ghosts are described as being a ‘Lady in White’. White ladies seem to appear in rural areas, died tragically, experienced trauma, or tragically lost a child or husband.

Birds were often thought to be returning ghostly spirits, especially the Barn Owl, its white (though sometimes light brown) shape gliding soundlessly as dusk settles. Cats have spiritual connections, again, probably because they are often silent, can appear from nowhere and, apparently, have nine lives.

To many, though, a ghost appears in body form with clear features, including the clothing worn at the time of death. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, shows the deceased in the afterlife as they were before death.

My adult daughter, Kathy, sees ghosts as clear as living people, often not realising she’s seeing someone who is dead unless she knows they have died, or are dressed in period costume. Anyone walking along our farm lane would not be likely to wear Georgian or Tudor costume! Often, though, she will only see part of a person, which is a bit of a giveaway. Or more frequently, she gets a glimpse only. The moment they realise they have been seen, they disappear. These ghosts, I am convinced, vanish because they are startled to be seeing her. In their eyes, she is the ghost to be frightened of.

Our frequent ‘visitors’ to our house are, however, aware of us and are seen clearly. Occasionally even heard, passing comment or remarks. Our ‘Maid’ (we’re not certain if her name is Milly or Molly) has been known to announce her disapproval of building work within the house (because of the mess, I suspect,) or that I chatter a lot. Another visitor, seen from the waist up with three-corner hat, neat-tied cravat and a waistcoat, likes watching our horses. He is, we have discovered, the Georgian equivalent of the modern Amazon Delivery. In his case, bringing goods shipped to the nearby trade ports of Barnstaple or Bideford here in North Devon.

My daughter, Kathy, (and many other ‘ghost-seers’ also encounter animals. Dogs are the most common apparitions, perhaps because dogs have an especial affinity with us humans? For ourselves, we have lost horses in the past, both Saffie and Franc, mother and son, who died within two months of each other, (now very much missed by us) have been seen grazing in our fields.

Kathy has also seen a bear and another beast from the very distant past in our woods – she’s not too keen on ever seeing a dinosaur, though, so hopes they stay firmly on the ‘other side’.

Discover more in Ghost Encounters!

ABOUT HELEN

Known for her captivating storytelling and rich attention to historical detail, Helen might not see ghosts herself, but her nautical adventure series, and some of her short stories, skilfully blend the past with the supernatural, inviting readers to step into worlds where the boundaries between the living and the dead blur.

Her historical fiction spans a variety of periods and her gift lies in her ability to bring historical figures and settings to life, creating an immersive experience that transports readers into the past. Her stories are as compelling as they are convincing.

Helen started writing as a teenager, but after discovering a passion for history, was published in the UK with her Arthurian Trilogy and two Anglo-Saxon novels about the events that led to the 1066 Battle of Hastings, one of which became a USA Today best-seller. She also writes the Jan Christopher cosy mystery series set during the 1970s, and based around her, sometimes hilarious, years of working as a North London library assistant.

Helen, husband Ron and daughter Kathy moved from London to Devon in January 2013 after a Lottery win on the opening night of the London Olympics, 2012. She spends her time glowering at the overgrown garden and orchard, fending off the geese, helping with the horses and, when she gets a moment, writing the next book…

ABOUT KATHY

When not encountering friendly ghosts, Kathy’s passion is horses and mental well-being. She started riding at the age of three, had a pony at thirteen, and discovered showjumping soon after. Kathy now runs her own Taw River Equine Events, and coaches riders of any age or experience, specialising in positive mindset and overcoming confidence issues via her Centre10 accreditation and Emotional Freedom Technique training to aid calm relaxation and promote gentle healing.

Kathy lives with her farmer partner, Andrew, in their flat adjoining the main farmhouse. She regularly competes at affiliated British Showjumping, and rides side-saddle (‘aside’) when she has the opportunity. She produces her own horses, several from home-bred foals.

She also has a fun diploma in Dragons and Dragon Energy, which was something amusing to study during the Covid lockdown.

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Website: https://helenhollick.net/
Amazon Author Page: https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick
Bluesky: @helenhollick.bsky.social
Blog: supporting authors & their books https://ofhistoryandkings.blogspot.com/
Monthly newsletter : Thoughts from a Devonshire Farmhouse
https://ofhistoryandkings.blogspot.com/2024/01/thoughts-from-devonshire-farmhouse.html

Kathy’s Official Website:
https://www.white-owl.co.uk/

Cover design: Avalon Graphics https://avalongraphics.org/
Cover image: Chris Collingwood Historical Artist
http://www.collingwoodhistoricart.com/

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 VI

Pages from The Diwan of Al-Mutanabbi,
Khalili Collections / CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons

Inspiration and understanding can come from the most unexpected sources. In my other blog, which focuses mostly on writing – mine and others’ – about the natural world, I mentioned, a week or two ago, that I was reading a collection of essays about landscape and place called Going to Ground.  One of these essays is by Amina Khan, on the link between Islamic writing about nature and the Romantic movement in English poetry and prose.

My fictional world isn’t ours, but I can’t pretend it isn’t based on ours, and in the cultures I’m writing about, trade with my equivalent of North Africa and the Middle East is an important part of the story. In an earlier instalment of this series, I wrote about my youngest point-of-view character, Audun, and his love for the sea and sky and saltmarshes of Torrey, where he grew up. Audun is seventeen, academic, and of course he’s written some juvenile poetry.

Audun, being who he is, is expected to travel, to learn more of the world before he enters a life of teaching, his dream being to eventually be the head of my equivalent of a medieval university. His great-uncle, whom he hopes to emulate, spent a few years in his youth travelling east, gathering histories, settling down to a life of translation and comparison with the histories of the west. Luce, his aunt, is a doctor, much of her learning done in eastern lands as well.

But what Audun was going to learn in those travels (outside of life lessons, of course) I didn’t know. Until I was showering today (why do ideas so often arrive in the shower?) and my mind made the connection between Audun’s love for nature and the Islamic writing Amina Khan described in ‘A Wild Tree Toward the North’, her essay in Going to Ground.

Organized religions don’t exist in my books, replaced by philosophy and personal faiths in a wide range of deities.  But religious writing can also be read for its poetry, and that’s how I’ll approach this. The bonus here is I’ll read some poetry that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and my world, like Audun’s, will expand.

Necessary Busyness

Watching the penultimate episode of Doctor Who last night, I realized (afterwards) that it was a rare hour in which my brain was totally engaged with story as it was unfolding. I wasn’t analyzing structure, looking for breaks in continuity or… well, I was going to say things that didn’t make sense, but then again, it was Doctor Who. Nonetheless, this is a rare occurrence now, my writer-and-editor’s brain always weighing if the narrative works, if it could be improved.

My brain is rarely still. It never was, but as a child my (undiagnosed) ADHD, of the day-dreaming, messy, begin-something-and-not-finish-it sort found what it needed by discovering new worlds in books. I once read six library books in a day (and they weren’t children’s books.) The Lord of the Rings was swallowed in three. Either that, or I was inventing my own elaborate worlds based on Star Trek or The Man from Uncle, or out in the fields and woods learning trees and birds and wildflowers. And like most people with ADHD, I could focus on a preferred subject for hours.

Somewhere in my sixty-six years, I learned to control my unquiet brain to some extent. But it can’t stand to be idle: I’m less obviously day-dreamy now, because that’s been channeled into the imaginary world of my books. But even though it’s a ‘preferred subject’ I can only write or plan for a few hours a day. And if I don’t have something else to focus on, I get bored. Moody. Unproductive. ‘Give me work!’ brain demands. (It doesn’t mean cleaning the cupboards, of course.)

Busy-ness is necessary for me. (And deadlines.) So, brain, looking at the year ahead – researching and writing the next book, a few short stories to write, a couple of editing jobs, chairing the community newsletter, said, ‘nope, this isn’t enough. Remember that creative writing group you were asked to lead?’  

I live in a 55+ community of active, retired adults. How many want to try creative writing?  Thirty. An impossible number for one group. Or even two. It’ll be four, occupying my Tuesday afternoons for the foreseeable future. Mostly beginners – but some novelists and poets already-published or agented-and-querying as well, people who have more formal education in writing than I do. I’ll get to learn, as well as teach, which is a bonus. But – the moment I agreed to do this, brain, which had been futzing around with character vignettes and some plot outlines for the next book, but no serious writing, said, ‘All right! Now it’s time to write! Fingers on keyboard, please!’  and began to unroll the story.

As perhaps I had secretly hoped it would. Maybe I do understand my brain a bit after sixty-six years. I will no doubt swear and whine and growl at it over the next months – but I will be writing and teaching, and researching and learning – all the things I love to do – and I won’t be bored.

But the cupboards probably won’t get cleaned, either.

Featured : Image by Megan Rexazin Conde from Pixabay

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 III

A novel – or its components: character, theme, plot, setting, language – has  many sources, many experiences, real and imagined, that work together to create something whose whole is greater than its parts. I am a writer of place, of landscape, and of characters who are shaped by the places they call(ed) home. Many of those places are drawn from my own experiences.

In An Unwise Prince, one of my characters, Cenric, has stuck close to home, a medieval trading centre. Kirt, his partner, has travelled widely, an explorer, a risk taker. Luce has travelled too, but in pursuit of her education in medicine. Then there’s the fourth—young Audun, Cenric’s son, seventeen or eighteen, just finished what might be considered his secondary education, hoping to go home for a while before his next term of study.

I knew Audun was from Torrey, a coastal village (it has a few brief mentions in the Empire series) where his mother runs a workshop making baskets from the reeds and willows of the marshes. I’ve been reading pretty widely on the pre-drainage landscape and ways of life in the fen country of England—not so much for research but because it’s a landscape I love, a love that perhaps has its roots in my genes—or at least in family stories. I’d had a few thoughts about how to use this information to flesh out Audun’s character a little, but they hadn’t coalesced.

Then I started to read Nick Acheson’s The Meaning of Geese, a book about the flocks of geese that return each year to north and west Norfolk to escape the Icelandic and Scandinavian and Russian winters. Acheson—who is a friend of the friend who insisted I needed to read this book—writes in part about his own teenage experiences in the coastal marshes of north Norfolk; about places I know, have walked, can picture in detail. I can hear and feel and smell and see the birds, the wind, the salt in the air, the long views. And suddenly, I had my key to Audun.

The Coal Barn, Thornham Staithe. My photo.

It’s not all there is to Audun, of course, but it lies at the heart of who he is. And gives him a knowledge that may prove useful, later in the story. Or so I think, at this moment in time!

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.