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Showing posts from August, 2024

#MGMonday... Middle Grade Settings

 Middle Grade Settings: An Introduction Having photos in front of you can help you write about your settings I’m going to make a confession. Settings are not something I often spend time planning. Perhaps my stories are the poorer for it, but the settings come as I’m writing or editing. The Glass Room, in Taking Wing, is not something I planned before I started writing. Personally, I’m a very visual writer, seeing my characters as though they are a video in my head, and I write what I see. As such, the setting just happens! There are benefits and drawbacks to this. The main benefit is that the writing process is more interesting. Not everything is set, and my story can still give me surprises. The drawback is that, similar to AI, I cannot know that I’m not stealing settings from films and books I’ve seen/read previously. I certainly don’t mean to plagiarise but the concern is a real one! With that in mind, I have started to at least have a vague idea of my settings before I start t...
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#HistFicThursdays - Free Short Story - The Mermaid of the Aegean

For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be sharing this flash fiction piece from Judith. Set in the realm of magical realism, this is a story of Ancient Greece... The Mermaid of the Aegean Thessalonike’s sigh as she awakens becomes the wind upon the waves, spiralling over the deep. The foam is her hair: the curls she inherited from her father… she still feels the water which washed them, trickling from the flask. She had laughed at how it tickled her scalp and ran into her ears as her brother poured it onto her head, his own curls bent over hers in devoted concentration. It was that memory which had propelled her from the earth and into the sea when word came of his death, casting herself into the ocean to escape a world without him. Yet she had awoken from sleep not death, her body and soul still united in the deep… and the enduring significance of that flask excruciatingly clear. Her wrath at him for destroying her death split the sea into grey ribbons, and her s...
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#HistFicThursdays - Things to Inspire - Letters

The history of the written word is fascinating. It is largely easy enough to come across in the form of books and pamphlets, and through these we can get an idea of how society was structured - at least from the top downwards! But the best writing to tell you the truth about someone, comes in the form of letters. Over the years, I've collected many letters - some personal to me, others from and to complete strangers. As you might have gathered, we are a family of hoarders when it comes to history. There are letters from businessmen to clients, from parents to children, and from partner to partner. They provide a wonderful insight into the normality of life, something which I feel has helped me to better form my characters in my head so that, although these letters might never make the page, I know the backdrop to their conversations: what they chose to write about and what matters to them when they are at a distance from one another. One letter which did make it into my writing was...
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#HistFicThursdays - And now for something completely different... COMPETITIONS!

Today's blog is a heads-up on an Historical Fiction competition which is being run by Globe Soup. If you want more details, head over to their website here . At Crowvus, our competition season is in full swing: entries for our Ghost Story Competition have been coming in for the past couple of months and the deadline is 30 September. We’re looking forward to reading the stories which always form a key part of our autumn reading. If you’re looking for inspiration, look no further than Those Experiences , which is available as a free eBook from our website. This should give you a good idea of the kind of stories the Crowvus team find particularly chilling and, as we make up most (but not all!) of the judging team, that’s a pretty good place to start! This week, another competition was announced which is of particular interest to historical fiction writers: the Globe Soup Historical Fiction Challenge. It doesn’t give you much time to write your stories but, with six great historical p...
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#HistFicThursdays - Try Before You Trust: To All Gentlewomen and Other Maids in Love - Constance Briones - Book Excerpt

    Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to be sharing a book excerpt from  Constance Briones ' brilliant new book! I'm once again teaming up with  The Coffee Pot Book Club  to share an excerpt from  Try Before You Trust: To All Gentlewomen and Other Maids in Love ! First of all, let's meet the book... What if Taylor Swift found herself penning songs about love in Elizabethan England when women were required to be chaste, obedient, and silent? Isabella Whitney, an ambitious and daring eighteen-year-old maidservant turned poet, sets out to do just that. Having risked reputation and virtue by allowing her passions for her employer's aristocratic nephew to get the better of her, Isabella Whitney enters the fray of the pamphlet wars, a scurrilous debate on the merits of women. She's determined to make her mark by becoming the first woman to write a poem defending women in love, highlighting the deceptive practices of the men who woo them. Her journe...
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#HistFicThursdays - Ancestors - Mariner Hawkes: Charity Boy

 I've just got back from a week away hunting for ancestors. Yes, this might not be everyone's idea of a fun holiday, but Judith and I adventured around many churchyards and churches, looking for any names on stones or monuments which matched those already in our family tree. As well as taking photos of graves and monumental inscriptions, we also took pictures of the fonts where our ancestors were baptised. The font in Aldeburgh, where countless members of our family were baptised But one of my favourite discoveries was when we visited a library and raided their Local History  section. In one of the books we found the most random section about Thomas Hudson, a local tailor, who used to work sitting cross-legged on the floor. It's a trivial thing but, at once, I felt I knew him better. These apparently throwaway facts take a name on the page - or stone - and turn them into a real character. Ancestors are a great place to start with character-building. My most recent writing h...
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