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...
First of all, thank you to everyone who got in touch about the Science Fiction in Historical Fiction blog a few weeks ago. It is great to have such feedback and super to hear that these two genres are rubbing along so well! At the moment, I'm doing very little writing. It's not intentional, it's just other things have been taking me in other directions. I'm truly honoured to have been asked to be a critical reader on a book set in 1490s Florence. I can't even begin to describe how much it means to have been asked! I finished it earlier this week and you can expect a post on it when it hits the bookshelves! I've also been spending time in the Realm of Family Tree. This landscape is justly given its capital letters and, historical writers, I cannot tell you how important this is to your research. It is worth having access to genealogy sites just for the information, whether the people there are your ancestors or not. It's the looking beyond the names which su...