Writing Processes Blog Tour

My thanks go to Lindsay Townsend for getting touch about this Blog Tour. I've probably given her hives as I dithered about taking part, contacting other writers and generally messing about. Like most things, once I stopped bleating and got down to it, it was easier to do than I thought. Lindsay is a very successful writer of historical novels and romances, and truly deserves your attention. Go to her website and see her fantastic list of titles, and read how she answered the blog tour questions. The link is:
http://www.lindsaytownsend.net

So, on to the questions :

What am I working on?

Depends what day it is. I always seem to be playing catch up - if it's not time for a blog post, it's time for promo. If not those, then there are crits required by my crit partners and then - there's my book. Well, books. Right now I've just finished polishing two chapters of a work in progress - it is tentatively called Blood Feud, though that may change if no blood is ever shed. It is set in north west Scotland in the eleventh century. It uses the setting and some characters from Far After Gold, one of my early books about Vikings, but  their lives have moved on ten years. Oli is now a rebellious teenager who falls in love with the wrong girl and almost begins a Viking war. With luck and a fair wind, it will be published around Christmas time. Right now my two lovelorn characters are approaching Dyflin in a Viking longship and not at all happy to be there.

I'm also submitting partials to agents for my main historical - To Capture a Queen. This is set in the 16th century, in the court of the Dowager Queen of Scotland, Mary of Guise. She rightly fears Henry of England will take her daughter to England by force if he can, but does not know that my main character is Matho Spirston, is already in Scotland and planning the attempt.

How Does my work Differ from others of its genre?

I think my books could be called cross-genre. Not because they blatantly mix science-fiction and history, but because they're a little more than romance. A reviewer once said Dark Pool was a bit gruesome for a true romance - but she loved it anyway! I like my heroines to face reality, and in historicals, that translates as danger. I'd like men and women to read my books, too. It may be a faint hope, but there you go. 

I understand that religion, superstition and that dreaded word ritual, so beloved of archaeologists, figured largely in the ancient world. But I like to give my characters a bit more freedom in their choice of actions. They can believe or not, as they choose. But like most of us today, I don't think ancient man spent days worrying about who made the world. It would be more a case of getting through the day without dying. Right up until the early nineteen hundreds, you could die from sustaining a cut finger, and it would not be a  gentle death. I studied History and English at university and I try and keep up with recent research  where it touches my stories.

Why Do I Write What I do?

Why do you eat chocolate? Because you love it. Because ancient life and times seem so much more interesting to me than modern day stories.  With all the books currently flowing out about the Second World War, this is not a good time for me. I want to read about medieval times. I can be quite partisan on certain topics, having been a staunch Richard III supporter since I was a teenager, and believing, like Dorothy Dunnett, that Thorfinn and MacBeth were the same man. Don't tell me Marie Stuart was a fool - I would ask what you would have done differently in her position!

How does your writing process work?

Life has changed recently for me. I got a puppy. A Dalmatian puppy. Now, pre-puppy, I could write all day if I chose,  tinker with blogs and crits or stay in bed until noon. Now, I have a different regime. I'm up reasonably early every day to give my growing dog long walks, whatever the weather. My writing fits around him.

I don't know where the ideas come from. Reading, I suppose. I read about MacBeth (who hasn't read about him?) and that led to The Banners of Alba, my first published book. Often its a location - The Gibside Estate and the sad tale of Mary Eleanor Bowes gave me the idea for Reluctance, and Aydon Castle made me think of Alina Carnaby in Fair Border Bride.

 These days I write straight into the computer. The first draft is always a rush to get the story line down, and I go back often - the next day, and again and again, though I know the experts say you should not. My excuse is that the story line changes, and I want to change the name, the heroine's hair colour or the month before I forget that I changed it. It isn't too onerous for the first 6 or 8 chapters, but once there are 50,000 words to go through, I admit defeat and leave it for the Second Draft. You know, the serious kind that requires so much effort it merits capital letters.

I research as I go, using Google Earth to track the location, and all the other wonderful texts available to us writers these days. It would be silly not to, when they're there at the click of a button.

Sometimes I use timelines. I have drafted out entire storylines as advised by Donald Maass and sometimes I've written stories without planning much at all. Whatever it is I do, I do it all in silence. Don't want or need music - just the pictures in my head.If my husband pushes sandwiches and coffee through the door at regular intervals, I'm happy in my own little world. Since you are reading this on my blog, I can only suggest that you click on the page detailing my book titles!

So - don't forget to visit Lindsay's blog, and next week there will be more ~

Next week, on Monday 2nd December, please visit the following authors to see their part of the Writing Process Blog Tour.

Rosemary Morris
Bio:
Historical novelist Rosemary Morris was born in 1940 in Sidcup, Kent.While working in a travel agency, she met her Indian husband who encouraged her to continue her education at Westminster College. In 1961 Rosemary and her husband, now a barrister, moved to his birthplace, Kenya, where she lived from 1961 until 1982. After an Attempted coup d'etat, she and four of her children lived in an ashram in France. Her book shelves are so crammed with historical non-fiction which she uses to research her novels that if she buys a new book she has to consider getting rid of one.
Rosemary's blog is here:
www.rosemarymorris.co.uk

Anita Davison
Bio:
Anita is the author if Royalist Rebel, the story of Elizabeth Murray, countess Dysart, who survived the English Civil War, married to keep her inheritance, and spied for her king in a land where Oliver Cromwell's army persecuted her kind. She has had two other 17th century family saga novels published and two Victorian Romances - Trencarrow Secret and Culloden Spirit from MuseItUp publishing which will be available in paperback early next year. She is now writing historical cozy mysteries and lives in Cheltenham with her extended family, and contemplating adding a dog to the chaos.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anita.davison
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnitaSDavison
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1027164.Anita_Davison

Anita's blog is here:
http://thedisorganisedauthor.blogspot.com

This celeb thing

Good pal Anita Davison has a blog up today entitled Jane Austen Didn't Have a Critique Group, and the thought made me smile. But for all we know, she may well have the equivalent around her in family and friends. I know she supposedly wrote in secret, but given the time writing a novel longhand takes, her sister at the very least must have been curious. How many letters can one person write? Especially when they don't go out to the post!

The main thrust of Anita's piece is that everyone seems to be writing a book these days. Anita and I live at opposite ends of the country, and I can safely say that but for the twenty or so people in my writers' group, no one else I know is a) writing a book or b) interested in writing one. Unless they're doing a Jane Austen and keeping quiet about it.

But like Anita, I deplore the number of celebrity novels out on sale. Some of them are not celebrities in my mind. I used to read Hello and OK magazines occasionally - mainly because I liked their range of photographs, but these days I recognise very few of the so called "celebs." A case in point - until yesterday I had never heard of the latest, greatest ever boyband One Direction. Now I've seen them, they look like very young teenagers, all with carefully coiffed hair. I know the Beatles looked young when they first hit the world, but heavens! this lot talk about it being difficult to leave their mums to go on tour! One wonders if they're old enough to go into a pub and order a drink.

I bought Rafa's biography because I'm interested in his tennis career. He was 25 when it came out, but in tennis terms, he'd had a life as a pro player from fifteen or sixteen. I suppose people buy celeb biogs because they're interested in acting or being a celeb themselves. Maybe they want to know how those people made it through the crowds of other young hopefuls. It's almost the same thing as everyone wanting to write a novel - everyone wants to be famous these days.

Here's a link to Anita's blog: http://thedisorganisedauthor.blogspot.co.uk

Third time lucky

My book is up there on Kindle for all the world to see. I'm reading it on my newly acquired Kindle and it looks  fine. The only glitch I've spotted is that sometimes an Em-dash turns into a tiny question mark inside brackets, but hey - when did you last read a print book copy that didn't have a glitch in it? Ever since computers got involved in printing books, the typographical errors increased.
This book has had a checkered history. It got tied up in the Triskelion bankruptcy case when the American tax people froze all books and assets for over a year until they'd sorted everything, and it's had an uneventful couple of months with Sapphire Blue until that independant e-publisher decided to close last month. Since the rights came back the same day the company closed, I decided to go for the simplest option, which was Amazon's Kindle Publishing programme, and priced it very low.

I described Shadows as "a chilling tale, written with humour and drenched in the sights and perfumes of the rural Dordogne... a must-read tale for those who like a romance with a ghostly twist."

Anita Davison loves a great ghost story and thought Shadows "definitely does not disappoint...an exciting read...powerful and fast-paced writing...endearing and memorable characters."

Lindsay Townsend thought "Jen Black writes subtle, powerful characters, very nicely shaded, and I felt I understood Rory and Melissa and why they acted as they did. The older story of the ghosts is teased out in a compelling way and is genuinely moving and other-worldly - to write of ghosts as well as this takes some skill."

There's a book trailer as well -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGml0vxiJU8

Trencarrow Secret

Today I introduce good friend and critique partner Anita Davison, who has a book published in three day's time. Anita describes her story, and then tells you a little about herself ~

Trencarrow Secret by Anita Davison
Victorian Gothic Romance

Isabel Hart is afraid of two things, the maze at Trencarrow where she got lost as a young child, and the lake where her brother David saved her from drowning in a boating accident.

With her twenty-first birthday and the announcement of her engagement imminent, Isabel decides it is time for her to face her demons and ventures into the maze. There she sees something which will alter her perceptions of herself and her family forever.

Isabel’s widowed aunt joins the house party, where her cousin confides she is in love with an enigmatic young man who surely cannot be what he pretends, for he is surely too dashing for homely Laura?

When Henry, Viscount Strachan and his mother arrives, ostensibly to use her ball as an arena for finding a wife, Isabel is determined not to like him.

As more secrets are revealed, Isabel doubts she has chosen the right man, although her future fiancé has more vested in this marriage than Isabel realizes and has no intention of letting her go easily.

Will Isabel be able to put her preconceptions of marriage behind her and take charge of her own life, or is her life destined to be controlled by others?

Anita tells us about herself ~

I was born in London, a city which has a unique atmosphere; a sense of time passed that I connected with, even when I was young. When the other children on the school trip coach were throwing the contents of their lunch boxes at each other, I was staring out of the window at the ancient buildings, imagining men in wigs and heeled shoes coming out of coffee houses and climbing into sedan chairs on the cobbles outside St Pauls Cathedral.

Strangely it was walking through Paternoster Row with a dear friend, discussing books of course, when the idea for the story of Trencarrow Secret came to me. One requirement of modern writing, is you cannot simply write a story, it has to be categorised, put into a box so it is instantly recognised. My critique group, and my agent, say time and again that romances are the largest market in the fiction genre. In an attempt to break into the world of traditionally published authors, I chose to step outside the world of Restoration London and into the heads of characters of another era. I haven’t managed it yet, as Trencarrow Secret is Inde Published, but I still have some stories to tell which may make it.

Isabel Hart evolved, beginning as a Jacobean character, she turned into a Regency one, eventually finding her own time in late Victorian England. Her reserved character belonged in the rigid, uncompromising days of the British Empire, and I gave her strong reasons for seeing life as many of us do when we are young; in black and white, where right and wrong are clearly defined and there is no blurring of the two. Trencarrow Secret is a love story, and during one fateful summer, Isabel discovers that marriage is no fairytale, but an enigmatic and unique bonding of a couple which may appear unsatisfactory to outsiders, but each comes with its own chance of success.

Isabel’s romantic illusions are dispelled and she comes to realise that people, even those closest to her, are flawed and make mistakes. She has to find the capacity to forgive and move on – and to continue to love them anyway because that’s what families do. Through her unique relationship with her brother, David, Isabel struggles through revelations, self doubt and danger before she finds her soulmate.

The Hart's summer home in Cornwall is a house I have visited often - also the village of Marazion and St Michael's Mount have not changed much since the late 19th Century, which made them easy to portray realistically. I tend to write about places I know so I can portray them with a level of credibility.

Writing historical fiction is complicated and challenging, but my spirit lives in the past and I cannot imagine myself writing anything else.

Trencarrow Secret is scheduled for release on 10th June 2011
Available here: https://museituppublishing.com/bookstore2/

Trencarrow Secret Blog: http://trencarrowsecret.blogspot.com
Anita’s Blog: http://thedisorganisedauthor.blogspot.com