Today I’m guest blogging at Devon Ellington’s site, talking about sequels series and all things related. I’d love to know what you think. https://biblioparadise.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/series-sequels-greta-van-der-rol/
My sister died last September. Oh, don’t feel sorry. She’d had a good life and towards the end, she was more than ready to go. Always an intensely private person, the inevitably intrusive care became harder and harder to take, increasingly an affront to her dignity. Even so, death has its impacts, mostly on the…
I’m one of those people who believes that when you write about real historical events, it isn’t your place to change facts. For example, unless you’re writing alternative history, you can’t move the Battle of Waterloo from 1815 to 1820, or 1795 simply because it suits your story better. In my novel, I’ve stuck to…
The fact that Fifty Shades of Grey took out the gong for most popular book of the year and E.L. James was crowned ‘Publishing Person of the Year’ has engendered quite a lot of outrage. “But it’s badly written rubbish.” “She pinched an idea from somebody else.” “You want good erotica? You can get it…
A lunar eclipse happened in my part of the world on 28th November, hard on the cosmic heels of a solar eclipse earlier in the month. As it turned out, the penumbral eclipse was a huge disappointment. No shadow across the moon’s disc, not even a reddening of the light. So the cirrus cloud partially…
I was reading an article from somebody, all enthusiastic about the exo-planets the Kepler probe keeps finding. They’re all many times larger than planet Earth even if they’re in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone. You know the one – not too close, not too far, just right. That is, a planet neither too close to its primary…
The more I read about the strangeness of our universe, the more I wonder if we, humanity, will ever colonise other planets. There’s not much chance we’ll settle on a diamond planet and I have to wonder how we’d go on many of the ‘earthlike’ planets already pinpointed. We are such fragile entities, we humans….
The Man Booker award has been made, and the winner (Hilary Mantel) will no doubt sell a besquillion copies of her historical novel, Wolf Hall. And to that, all I can say is bully for her. I mean no malice, no sour grapes. I can’t imagine anything I write qualifying for a literary award. As…
For many years, Australia was known as New Holland. Anything more different to the flat, verdant and continually damp polders of the Netherlands than the forbidding, parched land of the central west Australian coast is hard to imagine. Be that as it may, two young Dutchmen from the Batavia were the first white inhabitants of…
I saw in a Dutch paper that the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen which has proudly stood in the square in Hoorn for several hundred years, was to be replaced with a less controversial figure. The reason, it seems, was that he wasn’t at all a ‘nice’ man and his treatment of the Javanese when…