Wages of Sin – novella – written So that’s the first chapter done. I’m planning to have about 11 chapters in total, each somewhere around 2500 to 3000 words long. In this one I have introduced the hero, knocked him down with a carriage, half suffocated him and killed his father. Next time I plan…
So yesterday the girls both reminded me that I’d said they could paint their bedrooms during the summer holidays (where ‘during the summer holidays’ = ‘two days before the end of the holidays’). If I’ve gone silent it’s because I’m up to my elbows in paint. Rose wants one black wall, and three a sort…
I’ve been starting to tackle the intricacies of 18th Century costume making. My brain is such that I cannot understand how to read or use patterns, so I’ve been tackling the easy stuff first. I have to make clothes for four people, but I’m starting with the children because it’s harder to get hold of…
The past. From my (admittedly not very extensive) experience of reading historicals and watching historical movies, I get the impression that for many people the past is conveniently grouped into four or five basic blobs which serve as settings for the majority of historical fiction: You’ve got ‘prehistoric’, inhabited by cavemen who may or may…
The English Imagination This is by way of a musing on Peter Ackroyd’s book Albion: The Origins of the English imagination. In which Peter Ackroyd attempts to discover whether there is a national character when it comes to the imagination of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and if so, what it is. I’m not…
Why do women write m/m romance? This seems to be a perennial question. Answer it once and it dies down like a dandelion only to spring up in three new places in a week’s time. People seem terribly concerned that women should do anything so strange, and they offer explanations which to me seem stranger…
We had our first event in costume with the Mannered Mob this weekend. We went down to Gilbert White’s house in Selbourne on Friday night and camped in a field adjoining his extensive back garden in order to be able to start, bright and early, on Saturday morning. Gilbert White was an 18th Century naturalist,…
I’ve been reading a book called ‘Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination’, by Peter Ackroyd, in which he examines popular thought and literature in Britain since the Saxons in order to identify common threads. That’s a book which deserves a post of its own, but more on that later. For now, I thought it…
There’s a great discussion going on here at the ‘Romancing the Blog‘ blog about one of the reasons NY publishers have for being unwilling to risk publishing m/m romance. Namely the idea that the female reader needs a female heroine to identify with. Someone’s also raised the ‘well it won’t sell as romance, but if…
Servant of the Seasons: Winter, by Lee Benoit I think I raved about the first episode of this series; Autumn, but Winter is even better. To sum up what happens so far: ex-dome dweller Edor has been ‘turfed’ – thrown out of his high tech world in the domes to survive, or not, in the…
