I’m in the throes of editing. I’ve written a good story but it needs some restructure and it needs a lot more romance. That last is a skill I have yet to properly master but I know and understand it must be done. Apparently I was quite successful in my Iron Admiral books, but not…
Forget the legends. Jesus was a Jew, and he hated the Romans. I know, because I lived with him and his followers for a year. That’s the first sentence of the blurb for Robin Helweg-Larsen’s novel “The Gospel According to the Romans”. I was brought up in a ‘Christian’ household and attended Sunday school as…
Have you ever wondered about how easy it is to cut off somebody’s head with one blow of a sword? No, I hadn’t either until I wrote ‘To Die a Dry Death’. It’s one of the most famous of the many murders, often quoted, how with just one blow with a sword, one of the…
Many books have been written about the infamous events surrounding the wreck of the Dutch merchantman Batavia in 1629. My novel, To Die a Dry Death, is just another one. But I believe I’ve given a different slant on events. Having grown up in Western Australia, I heard about the Batavia and the other Dutch…
Jeronimus Cornelisz, arch-villain of the Batavia tragedy, wasn’t a soldier or a sailor but when he divided the survivors of the shipwreck and sent them of to the several islands of the Houtman Abrolhos in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard, where he was based, he made sure they left their weapons behind. His intention with…
My historical novel “To Die a Dry Death” was recently reviewed by Kimberly Maloney on her blog Historical Fiction Obsession. While Kimberly rated the novel a five star read and had lots of nice things to say, she said she struggled a little with the unusual names, like Jacobsz and Bastiaenz, so herewith an explanation….
N. Gemini Sasson’s new book, “Worth Dying For” is a fitting successor to the first book of her seminal series on the life of Robert the Bruce, “The Crown in the Heather”. The book opens with a vivid, brutal, no-holds-barred account of the Battle of Bannockburn, just outside Stirling in Scotland, where King Robert and…
“The autumn wind was murderous cold. Small gray clouds raced like mountain hares above a drab and muddy billowing of land. Leafless limbs clattered in complaint against the onslaught of wind.” The wonderful use of evocative language is just one of the things that sets Gemini Sasson’s novel ‘The Crown in the Heather’ apart. The…
Everybody’s got a novel in them, so they say. And as I’ve mentioned before, the novel writing business has become an industry in its own right. Everywhere you look you’ll find another course on how to come up with plots, write convincing characters, create a scene that ‘hooks’, edit your book so that every word…
I’ve finally had a chance to watch ‘Hogfather’ the movie – based on Terry Pratchett’s book. After I’d watched the first episode (the second will be on Saturday) my other half said “I didn’t hear much laughter.” So true. I’ve had some time to think about what I’d seen and how it affected me. I…