So, October is here, a full month has passed – and here we go.
Fourth draft, bearing in mind what I learned in Oxford. Mostly, that I need to trim the language…
“I’m not saying you make it easy for the reader,” I was told. “Just don’t make it so hard that they’ll give up.”
Sound advice. Not that I was deliberately trying to make it hard, mind you – only it seems that my grasp of what is “too hard” may need some adjusting. Also, I may have let myself be carried away with Elizabethan English. A little.
So now that’s what I’m aiming for: Elizabethan colour – just not too much.
I’ll let you know.
A quick, off-schedule post to let you know that Scribblings received the International Bloggers Association’s Award of Excellence for writing and design. You can see the badge down left, and I’ll say that I’m more than a little proud of it.
I get lost. Easily. It’s a joke among friends and family how easily I get lost. At times I manage to get lost in town – and I’ve been living around here all my life, although I have a private theory that 
I don’t know about you, but one of the things I love about my Kindle is that it allows me to carry around a huge quantity of books inside one compact object. Although mine, bought back in 2010, is almost a kindlesaur and somewhat bigger than the current version, it still does its job: wherever I go, I can pack a whole library in my bag. 
Because of Of Men and Poets next week, the Aeneid is rather on my mind. I must confess I quite hated it back in my school days, and still can’t make myself like Aeneas… My sympathy goes to Turnus, the young king of the Rutuli, who is minding his business, ruling his kingdom and wooing his cousin, princess Lavinia, when Aeneas barges in, armed with divine favour and Fate’s plans for Rome… 
Now and then I stumble across some article or essay whose author claims to have pinpointed the real life Lord Jim – and every time I can’t help wondering: does it really matter? What changes, story-wise, whether Jim was based on 
It is her year too, after all…
I wrote 
So the Times Literary Supplement was in Oxford for the HNS Conference, in the person of Michael Caines, who covered “us” with a nice set of musings about what goes on behind the curtain of historical fiction.
Here I am. The damn Charlotte thing is over, it went much better than I feared, and I’ve murdered nobody. Admirable self-restraint, if I say so myself.
Scribblings 