Hild and Cuthbert’s Gospel

** This is a cross-post from my personal blog ** This is Cuthbert’s Gospel, the book that was buried at Lindisarne with St Cuthbert sometime after his death in 687. It is the earliest bound British—or even European—book to survive intact. It’s tiny, a pocket Gospel, written in Latin on vellum. It’s simple—no illumination, just elaborated initial […]

First draft of Hild is finished

I finished the first draft of the first volume of my novel about Hild. It’s huge: 976 pages (more than 200,000 words). I’ll lose a lot of that in the rewrite, of course, but it will still be long. Submitted as proof: Photo taken with crapcam (sorry about that). It turns out that 976 pages […]

no comparison

Today I got my copy of British Archaeology (May/June 2008) in the mail. On p.30-37 there was a wonderful, detailed article, “The Lost Royal cult of Street House Yorkshire,” on the finds at Street House Farm, near Saltburn, North Yorkshire, the ‘possible cult centre’ graves with the fabulous jewellery. Everything is now beginning to make […]

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 […]

Where It Began

This is the novel that I’ve been aiming for my whole life. I didn’t really understand that until early last year when I wrote my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life (a multi-media memoir-in-a-box about my life in the UK before I came to […]

History Meme Game

I’m writing a novel about Hild of Whitby, also known as St. Hilda, who lived in seventh century Britain. For about ten years I’ve been researching, on and off, the basics: language, the politics of conversion, food, arms and armour, textile production, etc. The more I learn the more I realise I don’t know. So […]

Gemæcce

The story of making a novel about Hild of Whitby

Whitby