Category: On Writing
If You Give a Writer a Book Contract, She’s Going to Want…Everything!
Eighteen months ago, I vowed that all I wanted was for any decent traditional publisher to offer me a book contract. I swore I’d be happy no matter how tiny the advance, how miniscule the press run, how scant the publicity, how few reviews, how many bookstore shelves it might not land upon. I’d be […]
Should You Rely On Memory?
When you’ve known a secret family story for four decades and you decide to transform the narrative into a historical novel, the big question is how much should you rely on memory and how much on documented research? In my case, the story my father told me was about our family’s original home in Nesvicz, […]
How The Italian Language Has Influenced My Writing
I have always considered myself a creative person, an artist and a designer. I have expressed myself through a variety of mediums — oil and acrylic and computer graphics — but I hadn’t defined myself as a writer per se. But that image of myself changed when I began to learn the Italian language fifteen years […]
The Joys of Editing
The first time I ever remember showing my dad something I’d written—I was in middle school, I think—he peered at the pages through his tortoise-shell specs, and then, when he got to the end, said, “Great job. Now go back and take out half the words.” He wasn’t exaggerating for comic effect. He literally wanted […]
From ‘The Foolish Wise Ones’ to Shingle Beaches – Inspirations for a Crime Novel
The Temptation, published in May 2018 by Accent Press, returns to the characters in my first crime book, Some Particular Evil, and to the stretch of Suffolk coast running from Dunwich, south to Orford. Aldeburgh, a small town between those two locations, is the focal point of The Temptation. Since my early twenties I’ve […]
The Inspiration Behind Cora Baxter
I always loved writing in English class at school, but after that it didn’t really figure in my life until I was well into my thirties. By then I was working as a TV news reporter, always travelling, permanently exhausted and not enjoying any of it anymore, and I found myself looking for an […]
Penguin European Writers: Mercè Rodoreda
Penguin European Writers is a new series of forgotten classics by European writers, with introductions by acclaimed contemporary authors. As a former student of French and Italian, I felt compelled by the current political climate to begin a new initiative to promote European literature to British readers. Translated fiction offers a unique insight into another […]
Taking The Restricted View
Outwardly, Spain wears its complex history with disarming simplicity: in a village cemetery, a human thigh bone stands propped against the wall; a fading pencilled statement, apparently equally forgotten, records the arrival of Nationalist troops on the 20th day of September 1938; on the rubbish heap above the village, among the old tiles and bricks […]
A Sense of Place
“By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, […]
Shared History
At 7:30 a.m. on a summer morning, the northern Wisconsin air did not yet hint at the promise of another typically beautiful day. Our twelve-year-old selves, denied the future pleasures of hot coffee, had stoked ourselves with pancakes and bacon. Dressed in the camp uniform of blue shorts and white blouses, some of us with […]
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