A Convenient Marriage unplugged…

I have a need to concentrate on word-count for quite some time and please forgive me for re-publishing this http://mesmered.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/a-convenient-marriage-unplugged/

The Naxos audiotapes were wonderful and introduced me to Georgette Heyer who was a writer I had never bothered with previously. After finding her, I then found the refreshing and worthy Lucinda Brant and who has featured in Amazon’s Top 100 for a few weeks now. All in all, I owe Naxos a great deal!

Please enjoy my fun post on my first ever engagement with Georgette Heyer and feel free to respond!

Villainy…

A timely post on the creation of villains. I’m re-publishing this because villains are intrinsic to my writing and I love writing them.

Villainy…

When is a historical fiction writer not a historical fiction writer?

I’m a fiction writer. Till this point in my life, I have written fantasy based on myth and legend. Two years ago however, I decided to write a historical fiction based around the legendary Sir Guy of Gisborne from the Robin Hood saga. Those who know of the book and who are followers of this blog will know it derived in part from watching the BBC’s Robin Hood series.

I decided to take Gisborne far from the familiar canon and set him upon an entirely different path. A fiction upon a fiction if you like. To do his position within the time frame justice, I needed to read. A lot. However, as I say in the author’s note at the beginning of Gisborne: Book of Pawns, historical commentary about the 1100’s is highly contradictory and thus I took whichever fact suited the needs of my characters.

Perhaps this is wrong. Perhaps one needs to go back and back through one’s research to find that most primary evidence from a commentator at the time who might have noted the thoughts of monk or master at arms, prelate or professional archer. Thus surely one then has the most definitive context for one’s story.

But then why haven’t historians done the same thing? And if they have, why do they disagree? Why is there so much conjecture over such things as bathing and cleanliness, ships, foodstuffs, fabrics and riding styles? These are merely a few that spring to mind.

I think there are two kinds of historical fiction writers. There are the purist HF writers who are in fact historians themselves. People like Dorothy Dunnett, who is and shall always remain my all time favourite. And many sterling others like Elizabeth Chadwick and Sharon Kay Penman whose narrative backbone is historical fact in its most exciting and articulate sense.

Then there are writers like me – HF writers that I take much pleasure in reading but who are softer with their fact, their stories character-driven within a historical scenario.

Whichever category historical fiction writers fall into,  I shall go on accepting both. Putting aside my own style, as a reader I enjoy the experience of both types of fiction. I don’t prefer one or the other. In both instances I rest easy in the knowledge that each writer has been loyal to their timeframe and not taken the facts lightly.

A painter will always paint in the style which is right for him. That is not to say that he has ignored the very foundations of his art.Perhaps one can say the same of historical fiction writers.

What do hist.fict readers think?

A Stitch in Time…

A stitch in time saves nine they say.

A week ago, I attended a masterclass of stumpwork embroidery in a shop called A Stitch In Time.

In fact I saved no stitches at all. I had hundreds of stitches to accomplish before the piece I was working on would be finished.

It will take AGES!

It’s a project that Master stitcher Jane Nicholas has designed for her new book on moths and butterflies: The Life-cycle of the Swallowtail Butterfly. The pressure in these classes is normally quite extreme with masses of homework that must be accomplished each night before we move onto new elements the next day in class and this class perhaps even more so if we hadn’t been fortunate enough to get an extra day for the class. We were thus able to take a breath and relax a little.

The challenge of this latest design is a caterpillar in vibrant lime green Au Ver a Soie silks, with navy and red stripes and obscenely small little red dots; another caterpillar (smaller) in navy, red and white with microscopic red dots; a chrysalis in green-tinted gold kid leather. And a butterfly whose wings beggar description: all in two shades of yellow, black, blue and red. The silks used are as fine as cobwebs, threads called Cifonda and with which I have a love-hate relationship.

We’re a loud and sparkly lot in the class: laughter, story-telling, eating morning and afternoon teas and wonderful lunches, celebrating birthdays, keeping up our flagging energies with bowls of jubes and jellybabies at the end of the day. We come from all parts of the island for this series of classes – some have been coming since 1994. It’s like a meeting of old scholars.

We joke that we’ll be doing this when we are on zimmer frames and looking at our work through glasses as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles. But the reality for me is that my sight has deteriorated massively since that first class many years ago. I hope I can keep going, hope that my stitches remain fine and small because there would be nothing worse than my work becoming less rather than more. Defeats the purpose of all those years learning.

But if not, never mind … the lifelong friends I’ve made will just have to fill the gap.

My mum the artist…

It’s only a few days till Mothers’ Day here in Australia and it prompts me to think about my own mum of whom I’m so proud and who is a bit of a role model!

My mother went to a small Quaker school called The Friends School for all of her academic life. In her time it was an intimate campus but now it is the biggest Quaker school in the Southern hemisphere. One of her favourite classes at that time was art and she showed some dexterity and facility.  The images below are from her sketchbook which takes pride of place in our family treasure chest. I always thought it was such a shame that she never followed up on her ability after leaving school before the war. I think the images speak for themselves.

Looking at life with the man who sees…

Many years ago, my mum used to subscribe to a homely mag called English Womens’ Weekly. Often, when I was visiting from ‘faraway’ and had nothing to read, I would lie in bed reading serial after serial and it was actually how I first discovered Rosamunde Pilcher. But toward the back of the mag, there was a rather nice regular  page called Looking at Life with the Man Who Sees.

It was and remains something special for me. In its time, I would cut out memorable quotes and stick them in a little notebook to cart around when I was ‘faraway’ and homesick for family and place. I suspect he was a local vicar or even a psychologist but the whole page would be on a particular subject each week and I would invariably find some sort of inspiration in many of the things he said. Here’s just a miniscule selection of the pieces in my notebook:

‘The more you rely upon yourself and the more challenges you accept, the faster will your feelings of self-confidence  develop.’

‘… if the outlook is wintry just now, well, Spring isn’t far behind.’

‘And talking about the Fairy Godmother’s gift at a christening: Bestow if you please, the gift for enjoying life – for that is only the assured happiness.’

‘Keep your priorities intact but have a second place where happy thoughts predominate.’

‘Do you remember that I once wrote about the value of keeping a scrapbook – things you’ve heard or read – that inspired or encouraged you?’

Of course mum, at 86, no longer takes English Womens’ Weekly which does still exist. And I remember towards the end of her subscription, the Man Who Sees finally retired from his column. It was inevitably a sad moment, and I suspect this many years later, that the gentleman with such clarity of thinking may have passed away. But isn’t it lovely that in my battered, exploding ‘This and That’ notebook, I have a mine of gentle texts for support in both the good and the passing ordinary times?

Cinderella…

A little while ago, my friend Corinne put up a wonderful blog post on the huge change she and her husband had made in their lives. http://chrysalis-farm.com/uncategorized/fashion-or-function/ Gone from the glitz of corporate life in Vienna to the hard life of farming in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa.

The other night my OH/farmer husband and I had the complete reverse.

We trotted off to a family wedding and just to show the transformation that had to be made, this is us normally:

The effort required for me to scrub up to mingling standard was HUGE!

1.30: Bath in some nice smelling oils.

2PM: Nails, cracked and broken on right hand as am right-handed everything. 45 minutes to do whatever you do to make hands smooth … exfoliate, that’s it! Then use cuticle oil, shape nails and paint with clear nail polish.

3PM: Wash hair. Use stuff called Morrocan Oil to smooth strands. Blow dry.

3.30PM: Put hair in whopping rollers to give body.

3.40PM: Begin facework, or what my father-in-law used to say was painting the masterpiece and what my husband says is using polyfiller! By 4 PM, the face had as much work as was reasonably possible.

4PM: Dress. The first time I have worn a dress for 12 years. My God. It’s like a wearing body armour! I slipped on the most sheer pantihose, gorgeous fine black Schiaparellis that have been in an unopened packet in my chest of drawers for 20 years. Then the pearls and finally the killer-diller shoes with toes as sharp as a stilleto. (Dagger, that is.)

Ventured out for photos and Pup immediately jumped up from behind and put claws straight through my treasured Schiaparellis. Oooh, Dog!!! Fortunately had bought another pair of very ordinary sheer tights the day before, just in case. Frantic rip-off of laddered tights and mad pull-on of new ones.

4.15: Mother arrives for me to tweak last bits of her.

4.30: Lock dogs up, race down to car, having packed:

glasses, camera, lippy, green stuff to take away the red flush I always get at functions, mints, my goodluck charm, a vintage white lawn hankie

all in a tiny clutch that is supposedly fashionable. Don’t the designers realise that when one reaches a certain age, one must pack glasses at the very least? That’s the clutch full! Mine barely closed.

The night of course was wonderful and it was really thrilling to wear red carpet clothes but like any Cinderella, everything turns to pumpkins and mice the next day and my feet would have done the Ugly Sisters proud!

PS: I managed, by judicious online shopping in NZ, London and Italy to bring in my outfit (shoes included) at $A200!