Guest Post by Essie Fox - plus Prize Draw to win a signed copy of The Somnambulist!

THE SETTING THAT INSPIRED MY NOVEL…

What could be lovelier at this time of year than a walk in the English countryside, with everything so fresh and green you can almost taste the sap in the air?

These days I live in London, but I often return to Herefordshire and have such happy memories of childhood walks in the local woods, where I used to run along sun-dappled paths, where the darkness around seemed magical. But I always stayed very close to my mother. I never wanted to go and get lost, because who knew what monsters those trees might hide.

The romance and mystery – and fear – of those woods went on to inspire my novel. The heroine, Phoebe Turner, is raised in the bustle and grime of East London. But then, one hot summer she leaves her mother to work in a sprawling country house – and that house is surrounded by miles of woods where Phoebe often wanders alone, unaware of what dangers and secrets might lurk in those shadows...

‘My skirts brushed against the damp grasses. Directly ahead trees were steaming with moisture almost as if they were living and breathing. I hesitated, and all Nature’s sounds seemed to hesitate too, as if those woods sensed my arrival, the stranger about to enter their dawn realm of dappled green gloom.’

The house in which Phoebe goes to live is as real and alive as those woods to me. It has haunted my thoughts for many years, ever since those Sunday afternoon drives where, on one particular route, I would peer through the car’s back window and see tall iron gates looming out of the verge, and beyond them a long straight gravel drive at the very end of which was a house – and the feelings I had on seeing that are echoed on Phoebe’s arrival …

‘I shivered and yawned with exhaustion, finally letting my eyes droop closed – only stirred when Jim pushed my head from his shoulder, when he jumped from the cart to close up some gates which, being of iron, very heavy and large, made the most horrible clanking sound. And now, wide awake from that raucous alarm, as we drove on past expanses of lawns, nothing prevented my view of the house – a central square tower above an arched entrance, castellated walls running either side, and so many windows, I couldn’t count – and each one unlit and unwelcoming. But, as the moon’s face broke through fast-scudding clouds I saw something else that quite took my breath, the thing that was lying behind that house, spreading upwards and outwards for several miles: the dense, sloping woodlands that glistened like silver. And, being quite overawed, and sounding far more like Old Riley than me, I exclaimed, “Strike a light! What a wonder. I’ve never seen so many trees in my life.”’

I always felt a tingling excitement whenever I saw that view. To my fanciful eyes it seemed to be the setting for a fairy tale, and surely a sleeping beauty must be hiding somewhere within those walls. But, as the house was privately owned no opportunity ever arose to see if my suspicions proved true – until one hot summer holiday when I came home from university and was offered the job of a cleaner; a post I accepted immediately, and though not particularly fond of the work it did give me the chance to explore every room and soak up the wonderful atmosphere – a mixture of mediaeval splendour combined with the later Victorian wings. One moment I was polishing ancient suits of armour, the next I was dusting ornate sets of china, or changing the linen on four poster beds, or gazing into the orangery; a glass house designed by Paxton who also constructed the Crystal Palace that once graced Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Hampton Court in Herefordshire – renamed in my novel as Dinwood Court – really is worth a visit today, if only to see the redesigned gardens which are absolutely glorious, or to sit in the elegant café converted from Paxton’s orangery – though personally I’d much rather see it filled up with pots of palms and ferns. And perhaps, when you’ve had your cup of tea, why not venture on up into the woods and imagine my heroine’s spirit there – just sleeping, just waiting to come to life.

***

Essie Fox’s debut novel, The Somnambulist, is a Victorian gothic mystery published by Orion Books on May 26^th. To be in with a chance of winning a signed copy, leave a comment below and we'll draw the lucky winner's name out of a silk-lined top hat.

Essie’s website is: www.essiefox.com

Essie blogs as the Virtual Victorian: www.virtualvictorian.blogspot.com

The Hampton Court official site: http://www.hamptoncourt.org.uk/

Guest Spot: Novelist Christina Courtenay explains how it's not always as simple as we'd like it to be...

Hello and thank you for inviting me to be a guest on your lovely site!

I’ve been having a look at all the great posts here, but what really caught my eye was your statement in the ‘Welcome’ section that you are ‘a group of writers with an enduring love of the craft of writing – a love which requires great resilience in the face of recurrent self-doubt, writer’s block and rejection.’  I can really relate to that!

Like a lot of people, I thought it would be dead easy to write a novel and get it published.  I had the idea that I could just cobble together a Mills & Boon romance and that would be it – I’d be an author and earn lots of money (this was back in the 1980’s when there were stories in the press about rich M & B authors – I’ve no idea if they were true).  With enthusiasm, I started writing and as the words flowed so well, I actually wrote two Mills & Boon historicals in a row.  Since I liked them both, I thought I’d send them off at once and naively expected the editor in question to either choose one or perhaps offer to take on the two.  Yes, you’ve guessed it – they came back very quickly with a rejection letter.

That could have been the end of it, of course, but by then I’d been bitten by the writing bug and realised I enjoyed it so much I didn’t want to give up just yet.  I enrolled in a correspondence course, but eventually quit as it wasn’t aimed at romance (which was my chosen genre).  Then I discovered that there were writing magazines and in the back of one of them, I saw an advert for the Romantic Novelists’ Association and their New Writers’ Scheme.  I promptly enrolled and it was the best thing I’ve ever done!

I sent them one manuscript a year for critique and eventually learned where I’d been going wrong.  There are so many beginners’ mistakes, very easy to correct if only you know about them, and as I started to attend the RNA’s talks and conferences, my writing improved.  The other good thing about joining an organisation like that is that you get to meet people – especially other writers.  Networking is not something I’m good at, but it’s not as daunting to chat to agents and editors at a party for instance, rather than in a formal situation, and eventually you might strike lucky.

I did when I met my editor at one of these events and managed to get up the courage to ask if she’d be interested in a historical romance.  She was, and my first novel Trade Winds, was published last September.  My second one, The Scarlet Kimono, is coming out soon, which is very exciting.  So all I really wanted to say was that when people tell new writers to grow a thick skin and persevere and that it’s the only way, they’re right.  It took me twenty years to get to this point, but it was worth the effort and the best thing is the support from other writers because this is what we love to do!

Thanks again for having me!

The Scarlet Kimono is published by Choc Lit on 1^st March, ISBN 978-1-906931-29-2   (For more details see www.choc-lit.co.uk ) 

Blurb:

Abducted by a Samurai warlord in 17th-century Japan – what happens when fear turns to love?

England, 1611, and young Hannah Marston envies her brother’s adventurous life. But when she stows away on his merchant ship, her powers of endurance are stretched to their limit. Then they reach Japan and all her suffering seems worthwhile – until she is abducted by Taro Kumashiro’s warriors.

In the far north of the country, warlord Kumashiro is waiting to see the girl who he has been warned about by a seer. When at last they meet, it’s a clash of cultures and wills, but they’re also fighting an instant attraction to each other. 

With her brother desperate to find her and the jealous Lady Reiko equally desperate to kill her, Hannah faces the greatest adventure of her life. And Kumashiro has to choose between love and honour …

My website and blog are at www.christinacourtenay.com and I also regularly blog in the Choc Lit Authors’ Corner at www.blog.choc-lit.co.uk

(Trade Winds has just been shortlisted for the RNA’s Pure Passion Historical Novel Prize 2011)

We are the past

I click a lot of links on Twitter. Often I cast an idle glance at what's there (picture of a cute cat doing something cute; the Daily Mail's latest calculated attempt to stir up outrage) and then click away again. A few weeks ago, however, I followed a link to the documentary Morning in the Streets, made in Liverpool and other parts of the North West in the 1950s. Although it's 35 minutes long, and therefore way beyond the attention span of the 'younger generation' to which I tragically still pretend to belong, I watched it from beginning to end. As well as a joke about a budgie, it contains footage of some schoolkids, about the age my parents were at the time, singing a playground song:

'Write me a letter, and tell me when you're better, and don't forget your good friend Pat.'

The song has stuck in my head ever since, as if it were there already, and watching the video made me think about people's approach to the past and how I want to approach historical fiction.

I was surprised to feel a sense of nostalgia while watching – after all, I wasn't around in the 1950s so any memories I have of that time are second-hand, passed down from family members and absorbed through literature, photography and film. I did feel nostalgia, however – for the sunshine and the hand-knitted cardis and the traffic-free streets – even though the sensible part of my brain was well aware that there has never been a golden age. Will the early years of the 21^st century ever be viewed in the same way?

It's hard to imagine people in 2111 looking back and thinking how lovely and simple life must have been before the advent of flying cars and implants that allow messages to be sent direct from one brain to another. But surely they will. With medical advances, some of us might even be alive, complaining about young people and remembering how much better things were in our day. Others will laugh affectionately at pictures of unwieldy iPhones that required you to spend many seconds typing out a whole text message.

We will be someone's concept of the past – we are continually creating the history of the future, living out the nostalgia of later generations. Yet it doesn't feel like that, does it? It just feels like life. While attempting to write historical fiction, I find it worth remembering that I'm an inhabitant of history too.

I don't think there is much room for nostalgia in histfic, because it seems to me that it's not really about the past. It's about the present - just a different present from the one in which we happen to live. Historical fiction is about the here and now that belongs to individuals - not 'Victorians' or 'Georgians' or 1950s Liverpudlians, but people with a story to be told.

Hiding from prying eyes

Longhand or computer? is one of the questions we pose to the guests in our Quickfire Questions series, and when I answered the interview myself last year, I didn't hesitate to say computer.

I envy those who are able to answer longhand, because I love the idea of writing uninhibited first drafts with crossings-out and squashed-in extras in the margins. It would give me a sense of freedom, as well as a link to writers throughout history who have used the same basic tools and honed their craft without the help of cut 'n' paste and find 'n' replace.

For research notes and some of my non-fiction stuff, I use an unlined Moleskine and a fountain pen with purple ink, which probably makes me sound like one of those writers who say in interviews that they regularly send off for a certain kind of pencil from a market stall in Ulaanbaatar otherwise they simply can't channel the muse, dahling. When writing longhand notes, I find that the information embeds itself more deeply in my mind, I can recall it with clarity and continue to process it while I'm engaged in non-writing activities. I would like to do this for fiction too – so why don't I?

Well, it all goes back to my early teenage years, when I first realised that writing was the one thing I really wanted to do. I tried to keep a diary, mainly because Judy Blume characters did, but this soon became a source of hilarity to my family. No matter where I hid my journal, I became paranoid that they were rummaging through my stuff, ready to read it out in a silly voice. The daily entries dwindled to a few inane comments about what I'd had for dinner, and soon fizzled out altogether.

I was even more secretive about fiction, because if anyone found my stories – or on the rare occasions I dared show anyone – they just did not seem to grasp that I had made it up. The heroine must obviously be me, and if another character happened to be a bloke, then Oooooh, I must have a boyfriend, ha ha ha! An admittedly dire historical story with a Saxon prince anti-hero resulted in my mum joking that I secretly wanted to kill my dad.

OK, so this is not a big deal – the lame teasing of an awkward and oversensitive kid is hardly anything new, but for years I felt that everything I wrote was public property and therefore had to hit the page perfectly formed. Even when I got a computer and could password it up to the eyeballs, I retained the belief that someone was looking over my shoulder and would laugh if I wrote about anything beyond my own limited experiences.

Years passed and I eventually got a grip and started writing what I wanted to write, discovering the fun of first drafts, where it's OK to churn out crap (or rather, what appears to be crap but often ends up better than an agonised-over sentence.) I can now write articles and blog posts and send them out into the world on pretty much the first take. I can show my non-fiction work to anyone without feeling remotely hurt if they suggest improvements.

Fiction, however, still feels like something to be kept secret until I'm really happy with it. Though I no longer bother putting passwords on my files or closing them down every time I move more than a metre from the screen, it would be a big step to choose the vulnerability of writing longhand on paper that could fall into anyone's hands. Writing on the computer is – for now – a way of giving my work the safety that enables it to go beyond being safe.

The Authenticity of 'Now'

There's a scene in my first novel where the main character, a nurse, sweeps herbs over the hospital floorboards in an attempt to mask the smell of the patients. It's no big deal; just part of what she happens to be doing at the time, but several readers have mentioned it as a fascinating historical detail; an example of how carefully I must have researched the era.

But the truth is... I, er... made it up. I don't know whether it was routine practice for 18th-century hospital staff to spread herbs on the floor – but equally, there's nothing to say that one resourceful individual in one hospital wouldn't try it out.

Is this, therefore, historically accurate or not? I believe it to be authentic – herbs were around then, brooms were around, smells were around, it makes sense to use the former to deal with the latter. But what if someone, having read the book, starts telling their friends the interesting fact that 'in the olden days, hospitals used to put herbs on the floor!' Is it unfair on readers to make them believe in something when it's just an illusion? 

Personally, I don't think it's unfair at all – history involves a lot of individuals doing individual things, and sometimes those individual things aren't what a GCSE history book says 'the Georgians' (or whoever) homogeneously did. In fiction, what's important is whether something is possible and believable within the context of the time.

In a recent piece for the Guardian, James Forrester pointed out a mistake in an un-named book set in the 14th century – the narrative mentioned that there were 'no priests within a three-day ride,' and Forrester's knowledge of history enabled him to work out that there would in fact have been several thousand.

Now, I don't know what this book was, and chances are the author really couldn't be arsed to get the facts right, but unless the story has a modern, omniscient narrator, then it's being told from a historical point of view – the point of view of someone living in their own version of 'now'. I don't know about you, but in my 'now' – the 21^st century – there is an awful lot of stuff I'm unaware of and an awful lot of stuff I get wrong. Should a 14^th century character really be expected to have accurate details about every single thing that is going on in their 'now'?

Maybe the narrator has no idea about the priests, but makes the statement anyway so as to appear authoritative. Maybe they've been told this by someone with an ulterior motive, and are naïve enough to believe it. Or perhaps the statement is an intentional teaser for knowledgeable readers; a hint that something is amiss and that the narrator has intriguing reasons for giving the wrong information. Maybe it's a way for the author to conspire with his or her audience, and reward the alert ones with an extra clue to the mystery.

Readers are quite entitled to enjoy feeling clever when they perceive historical inaccuracies, but there's also a danger of congratulating yourself so much that you miss out. If the 'mistake' turns out to be an early warning of the political machinations that ultimately endanger the hero's life, then it's even cleverer – and more satisfying – to have used your superior knowledge to work that out. 

Ooh, all that research!

If you tell a normal person you write historical fiction, the reaction is usually something like 'Ooh, I'd never have the patience to do all that research!' (Translation: 'You're a bit sad really, aren't you?') While I believe all genres require us to find stuff out - or risk regurgitating our own lives onto the page - it's true that research is a big part of writing a historical novel.

When I was working on that book I wrote a while back, I did most of my research in archives and libraries. I loved it - it’s wonderful to experience the texture and smell of documents that have been touched by someone 250 years ago, to imagine the circumstances in which some love-lorn, happy, depressed or bored person was writing – whether they were secretly scribbling a letter and hoping their mother didn't look over their shoulder, or whether they were falling asleep at work, writing down the last records of the day and looking forward to going home for tea.

This time around, though, I have the internet, and boy does this make life easier. To some people, online research sounds plain lazy – surely most of the web is cobbled together by a few pasty 13-year old American boys while they trawl The Google for pictures of boobs?

Living next door to the British Library and having no other commitments might make 'proper' research a doddle, but few writers live in this ideal world. Some are working 12-hour shifts, some are looking after elderly relatives, some have disabilities that make public transport a nightmare, some have toddlers climbing over us all day... and all night. No matter how committed we are, we can't always drop everything to go and Be a Writer.

I'm not advocating having a glance at Wikipedia and taking it as The Truth, but I am hugely enthusiastic about the digital resources available. Here are a mere five ways I use the web for research:

1.Digitised facsimiles of original books or documents. Google Books and the Internet Archive come in very handy. Project Gutenberg also allows you to download free transcribed ebooks of public domain works and there are iPhone apps to give you access to these on the go.

2.Academic papers. I use PubMed Central a lot, but that's just my area of interest - there are many more, and Intute lists reputable sources. Google Scholar lets you search a huge number of articles in all fields. Some services require registration, and others make you pay to download a paper, but this could still work out cheaper than travelling to a library at the other end of the country.

3.Services from the local library authority. This varies depending on where you live, but your library might subscribe to resources that are only available to institutions rather than individuals, and let you access them from home by logging in with your library card number. For example, I have free access to the British Library’s 19th-century newspapers archive this way.

4.Checking the location and availability of documents or books you might want to visit 'in person', or easily requesting an inter-library loan.

5.Viewing historical images. Sometimes a painting or photo can inform or inspire you far more than text. While I use Wellcome Images and the US National Library of Medicine quite a bit, there are more general pictures at the National Gallery, the Mary Evans Picture Library, the LIFE archive, Wikimedia Commons... and plenty of others.

These are only a minuscule proportion of what I use, never mind what's available. I'd love to hear about your favourite online resources too.

.

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http://thequackdoctor.com

Forsooth! Thy Dialogue Doth Not Worke

The issue of accuracy in historical fiction is one I'm often asked about. Does the word 'fiction' give a writer licence to ignore historical detail where the story demands it, or should the story be moulded to fit within the known facts, perhaps with a resulting lack of drama?

When people talk about historical inaccuracy, they are usually thinking of outright anachronisms – medieval serfs scrubbing germs off potatoes, or a Tudor apothecary doing CPR. Often, however, it's not that black and white. If I wrote a full exploration of historical accuracy in fiction it would be somewhat too long for a blog post, so I'm going to concentrate today on dialogue – an aspect where getting it 'right' can actively thwart your chances of creating a novel that works.

Let's take an extreme example, and say your book is set in Roman Britain. Are you seriously going to have your Roman characters talking in Latin? What about your heroic underdogs from various Celtic tribes? The likelihood of a significant number of modern readers been well-versed in each of these languages is slim, to say the least. Historical accuracy, in this instance, would prevent the novel ever reaching an audience. Even in the event of someone desperately wanting to read in Latin and Iceni, they would never get the chance because no publisher in their right mind would take it on.

Less extreme dialogue issues crop up for other historical periods – in my first book, set in 18th-century Chester, I had to consider a regional dialect that even people in other parts of the country at the time wouldn't have understood. An exact rendering of the way people spoke would at best slow down the flow of the story and at worst leave readers wondering what on earth was going on. More generally, using thees and thous, forsooths and do-not-yous – although perhaps perfectly accurate to the time your novel is set – can now look clichéd and forced.

On the other hand, to have characters speaking in an identifiably modern voice is equally unsatisfying (although it can be done successfully for comic effect). Dialogue needs to meet the reader's expectations of what is 'historical' without annoying them or making them flick back to a glossary every few lines.

My way of doing historical dialogue is to let myself go completely overboard in the first draft. I don't care how archaic or regional the dialogue sounds – I put whatever instinctively feels right, and at that stage, no one is going to read it anyway. I just bung in as many unusual words and colourful slang as I feel like – it's fun! Later, during the editing process, I replace many of the obscure terms but keep the sentence structure. This is like excavating the bare bones of the speech patterns, so that the dialogue is accessible but still clearly not of our own time.

On occasions, however, a word not in modern use is the perfect word for a character to use, and in these instances I am all for including it. Usually it's possible to make the meaning clear from the context, and most readers are intelligent enough to work it out. (And if not, well... there's not much you can do for some people!)

Writing historical dialogue is not about being historically correct but about using sleight of hand to create an illusion. You have to find the balance that makes the dialogue unobtrusive, so that it fits in so well – it's just so obviously how the characters would speak - that it doesn't even excite comment on whether or not it's accurate. And with that, forsooth, 'tis time for me to ende this blogge-poste and let thee wende forth thy merrie waye.