29 Thursday Apr 2021
Posted in Scribbling
Yes, yes – I’m doing it again. Because I liked the jolt it gave me last year, and because otherwise, considering the writing course I’m teaching, and the looming Summer Season, and a couple of largish jobs I’ve taken, I might be tempted to push my writing aside for now… Continue reading
15 Thursday Apr 2021
Posted in Scribbling
Oh, the joys of Freewriting…!
Or Timed Writing, or however you like to call it. The deceptively simple act of sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper (or perhaps a keyboard and white screen), set a timer or a goal, and then… just write. Never stop, never edit, never overthink it, never mind grammar of spelling, never go back. Just write, as fast as you can. Just let if flow – until the timer rings, or the goal is met. Continue reading
01 Thursday Apr 2021
Posted in Scribbling
There is always at least one pupil like that.
Whenever I teach a writing course, the first time I give a maximum wordcount for an exercise, someone will look puzzled: how do you even know how many words are in a piece? Continue reading
11 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Books, Scribbling, Theatre
It’s a Dover Thrift paperback, thin, smallish, the pages rather yellowed at the edges, my initials embossed on the right hand corner of the frontispiece… and I can’t quite remember where I got it.
Published in 1997, the copyright note says – so it can’t have been in Cardiff, much less in Edinburgh. And it can’t have been London, because I know for certain that I already had the book by the summer of 1998 – and I wouldn’t move to London (however briefly) until a whole year later… No, my small collection of Crane stories must have come from Pavia, from one of several bookshops around the University that stocked books in the original language. Continue reading
25 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in Scribbling
Very brief. Flash excursions, in fact…
Because yes: after more than a year, I’m still tinkering away with flash fiction. Or perhaps, more accurately, I’m still struggling with it. I want to write flash fiction. I want to do it well. I try again and again (although perhaps not quite as much as I should), and still find my work wanting. And so I tinker on, and read flashes, and read craft books, and take courses, and try again, and spring my attempts on innocent readers. Continue reading
11 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in History, Scribbling
A few months ago, as I was working on Road to Murder, I found trouble in the form of a French town called Montreuil sur Mer.* Well, for various reasons, my sleuth Tom Walsingham finds himself spending a night there, much against his inclination, and I needed to have a good idea of the place for that… Continue reading
04 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in Books, Scribbling
Would you object very much to some more slight gloominess? Or perhaps it won’t be so terribly gloomy by the time we’re done – but let us talk of endings and beginnings, and Stevenson. I’ve always liked this thing that Stevenson wrote in a letter written from Samoa to J.M. Barrie:
If you are going tho make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
28 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in History, Scribbling, Stories
Tags
Historical fiction, murder mystery, Sapere Books, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Henry Cobham, writing
They stopped Walsingham and Paulo, my Italian, whom they seemed resolved to rob [… and] another Englishman in his company, called Skeggs, as I remember.
On the twelfth of November 1581 Elizabeth’s Ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, wrote to the all-powerful Secretary of State – and spymaster – Sir Francis Walsingham . It was almost in passing that the ambassador slipped in this bit of information about the misadventure of Sir Francis’s much younger cousin, nineteen-year-old Thomas, riding as a diplomatic courier between London and Paris. Continue reading
14 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Scribbling
A new year begins, and everything – and I belong to the list-making sort, if only marginally. So, with a lovely new notebook to start, what was more natural than making a list of writing projects for the new year?
It is, of course, one of those hopeful lists, with way more items than I can reasonably expect to tackle – although you never can tell – and written down in full awareness of the nature of the best laid plans. Continue reading
03 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted in Scribbling, Theatre
December again…
Had things been different – had things been normal – I’d be going through the backstage routine for the umpteenth time with the newest recruit of the Quick Change Team (whoever she or he might be), getting ready for tonight’s dress rehearsals of a Christmas Carol, discussing our Scrooge’s foibles – and perhaps trying on my own costume for Ruth Grimshaw in the prologue… All the while, also getting ready for our new big play – my own Verne adaptation, to open on New Year’s Eve. Also, Gemma and the good old Squirrels would be doing my Christmas Triptych on the 17th – so, even without being directly and officially involved in the production, more preparations… Continue reading
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