Authors Electric

Sometimes I get stopped in my tracks when something I am currently reading has an unexpected to connection to something I see on the news, or on TV or in a play. You may remember a couple of months ago I wrote about The Great Divide , a novel I listened to which resonated because the Panama Canal was in the news at the time. A couple of months ago while perusing my to-be-read shelf (I have more than just a pile) I picked out a novel called A Song for Kitty by Angela Cairns . I had bought it at a local author event over a year ago and it is a signed copy. The titular character, Kitty, is a real person - Katherina Maria Schäfer born in Germany in 1871. Her stage name was Kitty Marion and she performed in the Music Halls before the first World War. She was also a prominent suffragette, standing up for women’s rights by participating in civil unrest, including arson. She was arrested and went on hunger strike on more than one occasion for the cause. Kitty Marion She isn’t the main char...

  All of my books are historical fiction, and they are fiction based on fact, as all good historical fiction is (in my view anyway!) Some historical fiction is based on real events, or on real people. Facts that, however loosely, can be woven into the fiction, to give the piece authenticity. For me those facts aren’t events or people, rather places. Actual places that existed in the 13 th Century, and the remains of which still exist today. Abbey ruins, castle ruins, holy sites and shrines. The legacy of the Normans and the Romans, the Celtic Christians and the Cistercians, these are what inspired me to write. Both of my novels and my novella have been published since Covid disrupted life as we knew it. When I began to write I knew some of the places I was writing about well enough to describe them accurately. I had visited them often, taken photos, done my research. I soon discovered however, that I was having to write about places that I hadn’t visited, or not for a long tim...

  Earlier this month I visited our local library for the first time in a very long time. In a relatively small space I was really pleased to see a good selection of fiction books, and especially to find some interesting historical fiction titles. I know it is not a genre that is to everyone’s taste but I always find myself gravitating towards historical fiction – it is perhaps no surprise that it is what I write too. It didn’t take me long to find several books that I wanted to read, and I had to restrict myself to four. And then just as I was persuading myself to walk away from the bookshelves I saw a book with a cover and an author’s name that just called out to me. It was this one. I didn’t even read the blurb on the back. I just grabbed the book and ran – well after getting it date stamped by the librarian of course! Alison Weir is a legend in the world of historical fiction, and an historian in her own right. Apart from fiction she has written many non-fiction books, based m...

  I had the absolute thrill to be asked by Wendy H Jones to contribute a chapter to ‘Creativity Matters : Find Your Passion for Writing’ *, a wonderful new anthology that published earlier this month.   My chapter is entitled ‘Why write historical fact-based fiction?’ and it was easy for me to write enthusiastically about a genre that I have a passion for. I love history and I love fiction, so when a fiction book has a good amount of historic fact included, I enjoy it immensely. For me facts add authenticity to the setting of the story but also inevitably set me off on my own research and reading. (I particularly like checking out the author’s sources!) My debut novel was inspired by historic facts – the Cistercians choosing to build abbeys in remote and beautiful parts of Wales, the life and times of the de Braose family, and the rule of Llewellyn the Great, first Prince of all Wales. Inspiration for my historical writing comes easy as I spend much of any free time that I g...

This month on the blog I was going to write about researching your books in the real, rather than virtual, world, then realised my podcast on the topic was coming out the same day. If this interests you then you can listen to The Nuts and Bolts of Researching Your Novel . As well as being out and about doing research and having lots of fun in the process, I have also been doing a lot of reading and having lots of fun in the process. I feel this leant itself to a blog post about reading widely, not only for enjoyment, but to help you get background for your book and to steep yourself in the world of your characters. Whether fact or fiction, there is always something to be found in the pages of a book.  My character, Thomas Graham, having sailed around the world in the Royal Navy, found himself in China in the early to mid 19th Century where he died and was buried. So, some of my reading has been about China to get a flavour of both China and Hong Kong during that time. When reading ...

In this post, International Writers' Collective teacher Karen Kao talks about what historical fiction is, the importance of research and how to weave actual historical events and figures into your story as well as the nitty-gritty of description, dialogue, and setting in a historical context. I hate history. I’ve no head for dates or names. And yet, my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , is a work of historical fiction. It is one of a planned quartet of interlocking novels set in Shanghai. My inspiration comes from my father’s stories of growing up in Shanghai. Of the uncle who gambled away his fortune to feed his opium addiction. Of the aunt who became a dance hall hostess to send herself to school. Maybe you, too, have an illicit bit of family history you’d love to share. Or, you’re obsessed with a particular historical time and place whose story is screaming to be told. In that case, you can use all the craft elements we teach at the International Writers...

 This is my last regular blog post for Authors Electric, so I would like to say farewell and thank you to everyone who has read and commented on my posts over the past couple of years, and for the support of both my fellow author/bloggers and readers. It’s been an exciting time for me since publishing my first children’s novel The Order of the White Boar in October 2017, and I’ve enjoyed sharing the ups and downs of life as a newbie indie author with you all. But I’ve come to realize that a commitment to writing a monthly blog results in time spent away from getting on with the novel writing itself (which is already rather far down the pecking order in terms of time spent). So I’ve sadly decided to call it a day. But I’m calling it a day on a day when the launch has happened of a wonderful charity auction of books! For the next 62 days, until the Friday that is the annual BBC Children in Need day, an auction of more than 500 titles across a range of genres will be underway at ...

It’s a poser, isn’t it. If you want to write contemporary fiction, what do you do? Writing anything that is set in the here and now is impossible unless you can publish it the following day, as everything changes so quickly. So you set it slightly in the future, and imagine Covid-19 has gone and everything is back to normal. But it won’t be, will it? We don’t have a clue how the world situation will have changed. So you set it further in the future, but that’s no good as no one wants SF any more. Historical fiction is still safe, and Hilary Mantel's  The Mirror and the Light came out at exactly the right time. Nice bit of lengthy escapism into a world where the plague was an everyday hazard. Not to mention the sweating sickness, which has never been identified but was probably a Hantavirus. That one disappeared as suddenly as it arrived, so let’s hope Covid-19 behaves the same way – which would give us another sixty-five years to wait before it bows out. You could be fine at ...

This week has seen the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) on 8 May and also the annual Europe Day on the 9th,  a celebration of all the years of peace in the heart of the continent. As part of the commemoration of those six years of World War II that came to an end in May of 1945, I was delighted to interview the authors of  six novels brought together in a collection titled   The Road to Liberation . The authors - Marion Kummerow, Marina Osipova, Rachel Wesson, J.J. Toner, Ellie Midwood and Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger -  offer a fascinating range of perspectives on that global conflict. They hail from various countries – Germany, Russia, Ireland, the USA – and their books (in the words of its blurb) ‘will transport you across countries and continents during the final days’ of the Second World War, ‘revealing the high price of freedom—and why it is still so necessary to “never forget”’. While my own writing has focused on a far earlier era, a...