Two Battles — the Battle of Hatfield
Part One of my two-part examination of the major battles that bookend Menewood.
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Buy My Book!
MENEWOOD is out in the UK in paperback. As any writer will tell you: the hardest part of being an author isn’t writing the book, it’s selling it to readers who are inundated with choice. I’m guessing even Bede sometimes shouted desperately: Buy My Book!
Read more "Buy My Book!"Feast Day of James the Deacon
Today is the Feast Day of James the Deacon, one of the original Roman mission to Britain, and a huge influence on Hild.
Read more "Feast Day of James the Deacon"Hild’s family tree
The new title for my novel about Hild is…Hild. It just makes sense 🙂 My hand-drawn family tree for Hild is now neatly printed and legible. I’m hoping readers of this blog will give me some feedback. click to enlarge As you can see, there are several names missing. For example those Æthelfrithings who died […]
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(This is a cross-post from my Ask Nicola blog.) Thanks to a generous reader, I now have a copy of Robin Fleming’s Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070. (I talk about why I wanted it so much here.) Yesterday, after lunch, before I went back to working on Hild, I flipped […]
Read more "Britain After Rome, Robin Fleming"Update on Hild, plus Where do they sleep?
illustration of 10th century (I think) sleeping arrangements I’ve been working on my Hild novel for a year now. She is twelve. I have 75,000 words. (To put that in context, most novels are around 100,000.) If you believe Bede’s suspicious symmetry, she lived to the ripe old age of 66–so this is turning into […]
Read more "Update on Hild, plus Where do they sleep?"Coincidence
Three days ago I wrote a scene where my protagonist, Hild (now aged ten), stands on the Whitby headland for the first time, by the ruins of an old Roman signal tower and a broken down old church complete with a thorn hedge and graveyard. Here she meets a young cowherd who informs her that […]
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Gemæcce 