Can’t wait to get started but one or two things need to be straightened out before I summon up a new file.\u00a0 For one,\u00a0 I’m not sure I’ve even got my ducks together in one pond, let alone sitting in a row.\u00a0 For two, who is it for?\u00a0 I asked my editor that question, wondering who she was pitching it at, and she smiled and said, people like us.\u00a0 By that I assume she means readers of\u00a0 genre fiction but this\u00a0 always confuses me.\u00a0 Bearing in mind that there are no rules (see yesterday) I suppose it’s not a bad idea to have some vague inkling about the sort of novel you’re writing. What genre is it?\u00a0 Even lit. fic, is a genre these days.\u00a0 This must be crime, yes, because there’s always a body, but if the death isn’t caused by illegal means is it crime then, as such?\u00a0 this is where\u00a0 sub-genres come in\u00a0 –\u00a0 mystery, suspense, thriller, detection, whodunnit and so on.\u00a0 There’s even police procedural which for my own books set in the reign of Richard II, I’d dismissed until recently until I saw that\u00a0 it might have some go in it.\u00a0 Medieval lawmen went about things in as measured, thoughtful and rule-bound way as the police do today.\u00a0 They wrote it all down.\u00a0 They just used different names for what they did and the role they fulfilled.<\/p>\n
That aside for now, all I know about The Alchemist at Netley Abbey<\/em><\/strong> is that there’s a busy little port down there on the Solent receving shipments from across the Narrow Sea, there’s an alchemist doing his stuff, and there’s a body of a monk with possibly other bodies in the pipe-line, maybe literally.\u00a0 And there’s Hildegard, Hubert and Co conscious of the ever present danger to their beloved young king, Richard II.\u00a0 Oh, and there’s the great Owain Glyn Dwr of course.<\/p>\n Purists scoff at anybody who breaks their rules but I hate being bound by arbitrary nonsense.\u00a0 My real interest, anyway, lies in the long and tragic reign of King Richard II himself and for me\u00a0 his death transcends all others.\u00a0 We shall never know the truth about how he died and it seems blindingly obvious that Henry of Lancaster, usurper Henry IV, gave the order to get rid of his cousin to Swynford, his half-brother, who was constable of Pontefract Castle where Richard was imprisoned, but beyond those facts nothing is certain. There are offical accounts, chronicles purporting to tell the truth written up by Lancaster’s paid men, and stray documents and comments that need explanation, but\u00a0 I want to go into that more fully when Hilegard reaches 1399, the year of regicide.\u00a0 She has another ten years to go yet .\u00a0 Although\u00a0 the forces of darkness are never far away you might ask where is the mystery if we already know how it ends?\u00a0 Well, there’s what you might call collateral damage, beginning with Hangman Blind.\u00a0<\/em> <\/strong>Now, in book eight, first off is a corpse called Ranulph.\u00a0 But how and why did he get that way? And what has this to do with the king?<\/p>\n Ah, here’s another duck flying onto the pond.\u00a0 Let’s wait and watch for the others.<\/p>\n Back tomorrow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can’t wait to get started but one or two things need to be straightened out before I summon up a new file.\u00a0 For one,\u00a0 I’m not sure I’ve even got my ducks together in one pond, let alone sitting in a row.\u00a0 For two, who is it for?\u00a0 I asked my editor that question, wondering who she was pitching it at, and she smiled and said, people like us.\u00a0 By that I assume she means readers of\u00a0 genre fiction but this\u00a0 always confuses me.\u00a0 Bearing in mind that there are no rules (see yesterday) I suppose it’s not a bad<\/p>\n[Read More...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":631,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}