How Soon Is Too Soon?

It must be said, I am a fairly prolific author.

(I’m lucky enough to have a publisher who encourages my profligacy, too.)

I have promised myself no more than two books a year – one Civil War, and one Restoration – or I’m going to run out of battles and that will make me very sad indeed. Almost as an aside, I cannot bear the idea that there is ever going to be a death scene for any of the characters I love. The idea of setting a book in, say, revolutionary America featuring the further adventures of Hollie Babbitt’s descendants – and it’s been suggested – I couldn’t do it, because that would be like admitting that Hollie does, at some point, die.

So I’m currently twiddling about with a pregnant Thomazine, her other half, and Aphra Behn, waddling over on the boat to Holland to indulge in a bit of mild chicanery c. 1666. (That’s book 2. You know about book 2.)

And I’m excited about it. I’m getting quite into Aphra Behn (but then again, who hasn’t? – says Thomazine) I’m planning a trip to Bruges, maybe, I’m poking about with 17th century ships and seamanship, and spying under the Commonwealth, but – here’s the killer – the first book’s not even out yet.

Part of me’s thinking, no, hang on, you’ve got to give your all to promoting the first one, you can’t be talking about writing the next one already. And part of me’s thinking well, no, people want to know that there is a next one, they want to know that there’s not going to be a thing at the end of Masthead that says…. To Be Continued. Not a matter of loose ends, but people – readers – are fond of the Russell household. I suspect I am not the only person who would be more heartbroken at the death of some of my characters than at the death of Little Nell.

(Not your sister Nell, Thomazine. I have her marked down for one of Drew Venning’s boys, eventually, but I think she will have a pretty comfortable life with the heir to the Diss salt-fish empire, and do little of bookworthy note.)

So readers, how do you feel, at the end of a book? Onwards and upwards – or, in the case of the Uncivil Wars books, on with the body count? Or – phew, I can relax, now, I know what’s happened?

I’d love to see some of your thoughts!

 

Getting Ahead Of Yourself

So it’s like this.

There is now a third book in the series. You know how it is….

I do actually have a timeline of my characters. It’s not a helpful one – could I tell you Thomazine’s actual birthday? no, no more than I could tell you her father’s – except that she was born in the early spring of 1644, while the aforementioned Colonel Babbitt was up to the backsides (as he would put it) in mud and arsy troopers at Nantwich. That particular revelation’s in “The Smoke Of Her Burning”.
And Russell had just turned twenty-one when he was blinded at Naseby, in June 1645 – and so the summer of 1645 is the first time he and Thomazine meet.

Yes, mathematicians, he is nineteen years older than his wife, and yes, she has been fairly consistently attached to him since she was all of eighteen months old. Give or take a wobbly patch after the Burford Leveller mutiny, when he disappeared without trace into the interior of Scotland and came back promoted, with an ADC with a suspiciously Lowlands accent, and a tertian fever. That’s beside the point. Hapless was born in mid-June 1624. Somehow I think the idea that he was a summer baby makes his early life that much the sadder…

But knowing birthdays makes it easier. I now know that Charles II created a Board of Customs in 1671, which would make our Hapless forty-seven at the time of its creation.
(“What? Me? Gerroff!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m a bloody sheep-farmer, tibber! The hell has wool-smuggling got to do with me?”
“Think you just answered your own question, bright-eyes…”)

Makes Thomazine twenty-eight, too.
And means they’ve been married for six years.
(“No, Thomazine. Just. No. No. More. Babies. Three is a sufficiency. No.”
“Going to sleep on the floor, are you?”
“No! But – no! You are not a brood mare, to be put to – no!”
“I like babies, Russell.” There’s a pause, in which the author is going to discreetly look the other way, having known Thomazine’s ability to wind her stern, dignified husband round her fingers since – well, since around 1645. “I like your babies, Russell.”)

And now I know where I’m headed, in 1671, with the Board of Customs.

Essex. Mersea Island, to be specific.

 

 

A BROOM AT THE MASTHEAD TRAILER

Well really, how much fun is this?!

Source: A BROOM AT THE MASTHEAD TRAILER

Help! There’s An Ironside In My Bath!

he hero of my current WIP is a disfigured English Civil War veteran who’s now an Admiralty intelligencer under Charles II. (He sounds spectacularly dull and worthy, but he’s not. He’s a sweetie. Anyway.

The thing is, when I started writing the Drowned Books, I didn’t know very much about the Restoration Navy. Other than Samuel Pepys. Everyone knows Pepys. I knew a lot about the English Civil War, but the events of twenty years later were a bit of a blank.

And that blank made it quite hard for me to delineate the development of my characters.

You see, I know Major Thankful-for-his-Deliverance Russell (ret’d). – or rather, I knew him as a scatty lieutenant in the Civil War, and I know him in the first Drowned Book. But married, with a son, and up to the elbows in smugglers off the coast of Kent, and trying to solve the mystery of a missing person?

Tricky. We’re on unknown territory, here.

So I’ve taken to asking him out.

This evening, we shared a bath. Last week, we had pizza.

Now you’re probably thinking – what? Playdates with a fictional character? Eh?

But it works.

With Russell in 1665, on Romney Marsh poking smugglers, I’m easily distracted. What’s going on politically in Europe at the same time? How does it affect my plot? What does a smuggler’s boat look like? Would everyone be wearing those appalling wigs? – and it’s hard to think any further than those things, getting bogged down in the minutiae of historical accuracy. The characters can only develop, in my head, in response to the stimulus of the plot.

And that’s a one-way ticket to stilted dialogue, cardboard people. It’s precisely the opposite, in real life. We respond to situations, we shape circumstances, as our characters dictate, not vice versa; shy people suddenly discover inner resources when their families are threatened, or strong people have a fatal weakness. Sometimes it’s the drama that brings out those characteristics, but if we were no more than “… The stars’ tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them” we would be no more than the sum of our pasts. And this is how we develop those fascinating characters – the odd quirks, the kick in the gallop that makes them memorable. The unpredictable something that the reader doesn’t expect, can’t work out, isn’t logical – but makes your characters somewhat more than a vehicle to carry a plot from Point A to Point B.

I give you Matthew Shardlake, C.J. Sansom’s crook-backed Tudor lawyer. Within the confines of the books, of the plot, he’s a magnificently drawn character, full of power and pathos. But all his development is within the confines of the plot: he has no surprises, no inner life other than a malcontent bound by his disability. You ever heard Shardlake laugh? Know his mother’s name, or his favourite food? Me neither, because those things are not relevant to the narrative.

But he has a mother, presumably, and he does laugh, and he does eat – and so they are relevant. Because if it’s at the back of C.J. Sansom’s mind that Matthew Shardlake laughs at bottom jokes, then he knows all that worthy dourness is a front for a man with a low sense of humour, who maybe likes to hang around inns and stableyards to have his funnybone tickled. Who maybe one day is going to slip up in polite company and chortle “he said bum!” – and maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s going to stay worthy and dour in company forever. And maybe it’s going to be a delicious little hinted private joke between author and reader, a tiny intimate strand so slight that most people won’t even realise there’s a joke to be in on. It just feels real.

Which leaves me with the Ironside in the bath. Does he sing? What does he sing? Is he a soaker, or a scrubber – will he use all the hot water, and leave the wet towels in a heap? Is he going to leap on the possibility of hot running water with zeal, or will he cower behind the washbasin suspectjng devilry?

Because he’s on my turf, now. I’m not worrying about periwigs or plague fleas. I know what a bath is, how it works. He doesn’t.So, presented with a situation I see every day, and he’s never seen before in his life, how’s my boy going to react? You write best what you know. Me, I had a bath this morning, but what about my 1665 hero? Does he even like baths, or is he a little bit stinky? Is he going to fight shy of bubble bath, and claim he had a stand-up wash last week – is he going to be frightened by the novelty of indoor plumbing, or is he going to jump in with abandon, or is he going to poke everything to find out how it works first? Is he maybe going to turn sneakily sensual, and languish in the tub till the water’s cold, or is he strictly practical – will he suddenly develop a streak of ruthless cleanliness?  Or is he an opportunist: scrub, shave, hair wash, the whole nine yards, while he’s got the chance? He may be a good and godly man of staid and sensible years, but if he thinks no one’s listening is he going to break out into dodgy drinking songs?

Does he, in fact, sprawl in the bath sloshing water over the sides, and stick one of his toes up the tap just to see what would happen? – well, we’ve all been there.

And if he does any of those things, I know what manner of man he is. And it doesn’t matter what century he’s in, or what circumstances. They’re the set-dressing. The sort of chap who’d unscrew the taps to see how they work, is the same pantser sort of guy who might try and sail a fishing-boat across the English Channel, working out the practicalities of it on the fly. And a guy who can’t get the taps back together after he”s done it, is the same kind of guy who’d sail blithely into the sunset and rediscover America…

The current thing for writers seems to be character interviews, and they’re fascinating,  but they can feel artificial, sometimes. They don’t always stretch the author. “James Alexander Malcolm Fraser. Favourite food: porridge. Likes: travel, bagpipes. Dislikes: Redcoats.” A little bit teenage magazine. An author can just pick such out of the air: it’s not grown, it doesn’t develop, it doesn’t necessarily contribute anything to the character – other than a bit of free publicity. (I have no idea what Russell’s favourite food is!) Put him – or her – into a situation you know well and they are strange to, give them free rein, and I can promise you the results will be rewarding. A 1640s cavalry commander loose in the supermarket on Christmas Eve. Now that was fun to imagine.

Go on, take your characters out of their comfort zone and into yours. They won’t thank you for it – but your writing will.

The author would like to be very clear that at no point has she ever watched Thankful Russell in the bath. Nope. Not ever. Certainly not within his wife’s hearing.