29 Thursday Sep 2016
Posted in Things
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 Mantua at times must stretch, curl or uncurl this or that street, and move gardens and squares and palaces – for either comfort or fun… Continue reading
13 Tuesday Sep 2016
Tags
Historical fiction, HNS Conference, Melvyn Bragg, Michael Caines, Oxford, Times Literary Supplement, Toby Litt
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.
He quotes from an essay of Toby Litt’s, affectionately calling HF a “deeply bogus” oxymoron of genre, in that its trick is done by conjoining “what was with what might have been”. Continue reading
06 Tuesday Sep 2016
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
Carol McGrath, Historical Novel Society, HNS Conference, Jenny Barden, joseph conrad, Oxford, Richard Lee
So I’m home.
I’ve had three wonderful days at the lovely and impeccably managed HNS Conference. As I said, it was my first writing conference, so I have no term of comparison – but Richard Lee, Carol McGrath and Jenny Barden created something so very stimulating, well-thought and friendly… I loved every minute of it. I met all sorts of interesting people, attended great talks and lectures, learned a good deal… and I pitched my novel. Twice.
The feedback has been most interesting… Continue reading
01 Thursday Sep 2016
I’m off to the HNS Conference in Oxford – leaving tomorrow morning, for three days of talks, workshops, networking, a gala dinner complete with costume pageant, and even two pitch sessions with literary agents.
This is my first writer’s conference ever – because there seems to be no such thing in Italy (much less dedicated to historical fiction), and I’ve never had a completed novel in English I felt confident about. But now is the time: the novel is finished and polished, the conference is comparatively close by, and so here we go. Continue reading
