It’s interesting when you start to do some research for a story just how much incidental information you can pick up. For example, how far can you ride a horse in a day? Apparently a fit horse could travel anything up to one hundred miles in a day, provided that it could be rested for […]
The current work, Dark Roads, is set in the medieval period, 1201 to be precise. How people spoke then was effectively a completely different language to what is spoken now, so much so that we would not understand someone from those times, nor they us. Given that, how do we write dialogue that sounds sufficiently […]
Not sure how the pacing of the current work will pan out. It seems at the moment that the faster action always involves the Female Main Character, Eleanor, while the slow passages revolve around the Male, de Quincey (Mathew to his friends). Occasionally straying into the world of the bad guys, helps break up the […]
I suppose timing can be important in a story also. Perhaps not so much timing but pacing. Keeping a story moving, but not too quickly. So many of the books I’ve read lately have been non-stop action. The author throwing one problem after another at the cast and hoping that they can distract from the […]
It seems strange that the characters in story sometimes take over and shape where the story is going and what is likely to be happening. In the current story the male main character, de Quincey was always going to be the strongest. The one with the most action and in theatrical terms, the most lines. […]
A historical story, like any other needs a prompt, something to get it up and running. Dark Roads had several. The first I suppose was a gift one Christmas from my wonderful wife, of a book entitled Mapping the Roads, by Mike Parker, a fascinating history of map making in Britain. Having read Mapping the […]
It’s been a while, but although I’ve not been updating on here since December, I have been writing regularly. In the last post I mentioned a new, dark antagonist and I’ve now included him as the hidden, supernatural villain in a historical adventure. The working title is Dark Roads and it’s set at the start […]