Locations (for writers)

I like researching locations for my stories. Contemporary stories in a foreign location are easily researched with tour guides, travel books and all the resources of the internet, but set the story in the past, and it’s a little bit harder to visualise. Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian locations are not too hard here in England as many of the streets and buildings are still extant, but when I made a 4 day trip to Dublin and found that the street I had set my heroine’s home on was still there I was surprised and delighted that I could walk up and down it. 

Why was I surprised? Because I had set my story in the eleventh century – almost a thousand years ago. (The fact that the street looked nothing like the scene I had envisaged didn’t spoil things for me. There might be fairly ordinary brick buildings there now, but the shape of the street was the same, I could see how steep it was, whether I could see the river or the sea from there, and it led to the cathedral that was being built at the time.)

Dublin was a famous Viking stronghold and an ancient settlement even when the Vikings arrived, so maps of the place in those days were easy to find online and print out thanks to archaeological studies. I could really get to know the layout of the Viking town from the maps and they showed the development from the earliest settlement to the 1200s, which covered my period of interest. Visiting the place showed me how narrow the river is now compared to how much shallower and wider it had once been before Lord Sitric confined it and reclaimed what had been swampy, tidal land.

All this came in useful when I wrote VIKING SUMMER published this year, and MAGICIAN'S BRIDE. 

Covers

Holidays are over and it is back to the usual preoccupations. I've actually lost count of the number of edits I've done on the wip. Possibly the fourth? I'm printing it out for the second time as I complete each chapter, because I am still making changes to the storyline, which makes me think this may be the third edit rther than the fourth. There was such a long gap between writing the first chunk of itan, then abdoning it and coming back to it a couple of years later that I can see where changes are needed, particularly at the latter end of the story.

I have lots of plans for the autumn season. Finish the wip,  of course, but also to renew the covers on my earlier stories, and to do a lot more promotion of them. I was surprised to notice that KENP figures are showing up for the weeks I have been away - and I have done not a jot of PR to earn them! The  Amazon Conference I attended in Newcastle  a few days before going to France made me think about it more closely, and e-mails  received from Mark Dawson have inspired me to try different methods. I can't bring myself to pay his price for the course, though I might have done if I were in my twenties, in full time employment and hoping to make writing my future career, but his ideas are wrth trying.

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday attempting to download a free trial of Adobe Premier Elements yesterday and got so frustrated with it that in the end I uninstalled it. It was a sstruggle to register, took fifteen minutes or so to download and then refused to "play." Kept reverting to passwords time after time. It did not encourage me to buy the product, I must say! So I kept my old software and managed to produce a cover - a supposedly ghost Viking ship to represent the Viking magician who pursues a young girl because her power, aligned to his, will make him enornmously powerful.

Publishing glitches

Busy right now. I suppose you could call it a Spring Clean, or simply getting rid of redundant paperwork. Like many authors, I have lots of it! I've also changed the cover on Magician's Bride yet again - does this book have a chequered history? This time it is to indicate that I have made changes to the formatting and re-published the book. Apologies to those readers who found my formatting so odd!

I don't know why now, but I must have thought that leaving two spaces  to indicate a scene break or a passing of time was enough. Evidently not. It looks all right on my ipad, but then I know what I did! So I've done the proper space-***-space formatting all the way through. There should be no formatting problems now.

I received a review for Magician's Bride from the Historical Novel Society and though it did not earn an Editor's Choice Award like The Craigsmuir Affair, it was still pleasing - "Ms Black does a good job of depicting life among the Norsemen who colonised Ireland and the western Isles of Scotland. Casual details are inserted with a light hand, bringing to life everything from the interior of longhouses to food and clothing...a fun and interesting read."

A new cover reveal

Had a great birthday yesterday - lunch out at Bradley Hall Gardens (http://www.bradley-gardens.co.uk/) followed by an afternoon walk with Tim where he met a new friend called Lucca and ran himself silly with her in the sunshine. Then dh and I went out for the evening and had a meal at the Black Bull in Corbridge. 1755 is inscribed in wobbly hand carving over a window lintle, and it certainly looks old inside - in a good way!
Our meal was good. Not fancy haute cuisine, but satisfying in a homely way.

One way and another I had a fair amount of  sauvignon blanc over the day, but felt wonderful  on it, both last night and this morning.  It's a good thing I felt OK this morning because I've already been out for a walk in the rain with Tim and it is only 9.30. Its a grey, grey day and fit only for doing lots of work inside. The washing machine is already purring away as I write.

Loaded a new cover onto Magician's Bride yesterday.  I paid money for this one ! so we'll see if it has any effect on sales.  I have two versions; one has no rose petals to signify the romance element. There's also a little less colour throughout, but I went with the more colourful cover. It is growing on me. I like it more and more each time I look at it.

First person POV

For me, this pic captures all the colours of high summer - blue sky, dense foliage and long dry grasses blowing in the breeze. Lovely. If only people wouldn't throw empty water and juice bottles around in such pretty places. Not to mention the crisp packets, sweetie packets, cigarette packets....have these people no appreciation for their surroundings, or are they just mindless?

Had a busy fortnight, but it has come to an end, as all things do. The back lawn, wrecked by dog pee, has been replaced by artificial grass and looks terrific - so no more mowing the lawn! It took a while to do the changeover; the best part of seven working days as the lawn was a fair size and I designed it (cough cough) with curved edges which the lads followed faithfully. In fact they evened it up a bit. All we have to do now is infill with soil around the edges and put in some little plants and settle down to some pruning, weeding and getting control of the garden again. Going to France for almost two months is fine but the garden does get out of hand while we're away.

Also it is time to work on my writing and start moving along again. I've spent the last few weeks re-writing one of my books. Viking Magic never did well and it took a while to figure out why - I wanted a heroine who would be judged by her actions, but it didn't work well.  She was misjudged, I think! Now I've re-written the whole thing, tweaking the story line into something better than it was, and now the heroine reveals her feelings right from page one. She is my first, first-person POV character and was surprisingly pleasant to write even though it limits what she knows at any given time. In some cases that actually helps the plot along. The changes have made MAGICIAN'S BRIDE a much better book than the original.