I'm quite confident that, if I start this blog with "remember the scythe?", most people reading it are going to immediately know where I'm pointing you to! That's right: Poldark. Now, I know that the series with Aidan Turner and his famous scythe was actually a remake of an earlier programme, but let's just focus on this more recent iteration of Winston Graham's novels about the eponymous Cornish hero. One of the things which is so wonderful about Poldark as a series - not only onscreen but even more so in the novels - is that it covers such a vast period of time. Because of the time in which it is set, there are huge local and global changes taking place around the characters and, when you have been invested in them for so long, you can really experience the upheaval alongside them. This is something I attempted with (what I hope) was a reasonable degree of success in my Early Story of the Rite trilogy. If it ever actually appears on bookshelves, it won...
I know I've posted a couple of times already about this object, but today I'm adding an extra slant to it, exploring the myths and stories of mirrors and the supernatural. If you would like to read about how I came by the mirror in the first place, have a look at this blog . I've wondered multiple times if this object was a great big hoax - certainly, there seems to be nothing about John and Ann anywhere - but it almost doesn't matter. The wood, the nails and the glass itself are all of a decent age, and there is no impossibility in the eyes of a writer. Recently, I was struck by how much light the stained and marked surface produces. One night, on a near-full moon, it was enough to throw a long stretch of light about twenty times its own size across the room. It must have seemed equally frightening and enthralling for people in the past, that this flat, cold surface could redirect not only light but heat. But mirrors were not readily available for many people until ve...