This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
Mehrangarh Fort - the inspiration for Caer Cleon in Doorway to the Sunset Writing a blog about writing settings is like writing a blog about the length of a piece of string. The fact is: the setting will likely depend on the genre and, as I have said many times, Middle Grade is an age range , not a genre. But, I can at least offer some hopefully-handy tips on how to get ideas for your setting. Firstly, it helps to have some idea of your setting to begin with. Do you want the scene to be in a forest, or perhaps you're looking for some building inspiration. This is where I get really controversial. When to use AI AI gets quite a bad press in the creative world, and for good reason. But to have a blanket ban on using AI to help you with the creative process is to shoot yourself in the foot. There is a time and a place for AI, and one of those times, I would argue, is when looking for inspiration. There are some good picture generators out there, and all you need to do is write a descr...