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Showing posts from September, 2025

#HistFicThursdays - Gothic Horror - Beneath a Darkening Sky

 Well, this is the last #HistFicThursday blog before I launch Beneath A Darkening Sky at an event in Thurso on Monday 13th . Shame it couldn't be a Friday 13th, but we can't have everything! One thing is for certain: October is the spookiest month. And not just because we have Halloween. Halloween could be a day later and October would still be the spookiest month... Look at how the light retreats at this time of the year: up here, the seasons' turning drains away the daylight at a rate of 2.5hours over the course of this month! Up here, anyway. Our ancestors knew, a long time before they tracked time using clocks, that this month we now call October was a time to look back at what has been and ahead to how we will survive the winter. Is it any wonder then that, with generations of people looking back, October became a month for souls and spectres? People we have loved and lost come back to visit our hearts, imaginations - and, perhaps, our homes - as we recall autumns of ...
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#HistFicThursdays - Cobblestones - S. R. Perricone - Book Excerpt

   Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to once again be teaming up with  The Coffee Pot Book Club , this time to share an excerpt from  S. R. Perricone 's fantastic new book  Cobblestones ! First of all, let's meet the book... The turbulent history of Post-Reconstruction New Orleans collides with the plight of Sicilian immigrants seeking refuge in America. Antonio, a young man fleeing Sicily after avenging his father's murder, embarks on a harrowing journey to New Orleans with the help of Jesuit priests expelled from his homeland. However, the promise of a fresh start quickly sours as Antonio becomes entangled in a volatile clash of cultures, corruption, and crime. In the late 19th century, Italian immigrants in New Orleans faced hostility, exploitation, and a brutal system of indentured servitude. Antonio becomes a witness to history as a bitter feud over the docks spirals into violence, culminating in the assassination of Irish police chief David ...
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#HistFicThursdays - Inspirational Series - Blackadder

 It's always easy when imagining history to assume that people spoke and acted differently from the way they do now. And, of course, that's largely true, in the sense that the language is permanently changing and that different fixations worm their ways into our day-to-day lives. But that's not to say attitudes have changed all that much. According to many, many Facebook memes, Cicero once wrote, "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." I am not a Classics scholar so will hold my hands up and say that I haven't verified whether this quote is accurately attributed, or whether someone else wrote it. But the fact remains: people don't change. Everyone looks back on a previous time and thinks things were so much better then. The film Midnight In Paris explores this perfectly. So, it's always wonderful when you find a historical series which doesn't take itself too seriously and, in the process, is acciden...
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#HistFicThursdays - Writing a Series

I started writing my first book when I was still at school. It wasn't historical fiction, it was high fantasy, and it was the first of ten books, under the collective title The Watcher's Heir . I knew from the word go that it was going to have this number of books, although I didn't really work out exactly what would happen in each one. Twenty-five years on and the books are still not finished, although I now only have a couple more to go! Every Christmas I settle down and manage to write a chapter or two more, and every New Year it is my resolution to finish them. I suspect this will go on for a few years more. In the passage of time since then, I've written more than a dozen books. I can't quite pinpoint what it is which keeps obstructing the conclusion of these books. It could be that I am not the same person I was 25 years ago (who is?!), and so the voice which began the books is almost unrecognisable. It could be that I have now passed the age almost all of my ...
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#HistFicThursdays - Gothic Horror - Eaves-Drip

 Well, we're so close to release day for Beneath A Darkening Sky , and I've celebrated this by becoming a member of the Horror Writers' Association ! I also had a set of author photos taken in a local graveyard, complete with an entire flock of sheep watching me as some previous visitor had left the gate open for them. So now, I'm faced with the decision of which story to share with you. We've been through a few for this blog series, and I'm left with three: Guidman Trowie (a tale set in Orkney and inspired by the unique folklore of the islands); Moonsong (a love song from a werewolf to the moon); and Eaves-Drip , which is the story I'm going to talk about in this blog.  It's no coincidence that these three stories have been left. Along with Ay Atomics , they're the short and (not-always-very-)sweet ones.  Eaves-Drip was written while we were on holiday in Perthshire one autumn, but it goes back to Lincolnshire, where I grew up.  Lincolnshire is ful...
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