historical novels – how accurate are they?

I was talking to an elderly lady yesterday who complemented me on the accuracy of my wartime novels. ‘It must have been especially hard for you to get them right,’ she said. ‘As you weren’t there at the time.’ And that made me start thinking about how ‘right’...

Everyone loves editing, dont they?

Everyone loves editing, don’t they? No? I’m astonished. What could be more enjoyable than giving yourself the opportunity to reread your wonderful prose and to hone it into an even more compellingly readable piece of writing? Well, a nice holiday obviously, or a trip...

No time to read?

It’s an odd phenomenon. Everyone is writing novels. It almost seems as if more people are writing them than reading them. Certainly that is the impression you get if you take a quick look at Twitter. The problem is that having written them these new writers expect...

Story structure – the missing ingredient

So how do you write a really great novel? Well, you choose some interesting characters, a scenic setting, a fun plot and a suitable period of history, and then you start writing … simples (as the Meerkats say). Right? No, actually not so right, nor so simple (or...

Italy is …

I was thinking about writing a piece about recent trip to Italy (to research my next wartime novel) but my lovely husband Marc Mordey has summed it up so well in this poem, he has saved me the effort! Find more of his work at http://themarcistagenda.wordpress.com...