Location, Location, Location

Research for a new book can take a lot of forms and involve a lot of time. In the case of MAKE DO AND MEND the ideas for the plot and characters have been coalescing slowly for something like two or three years, but it was only last year that I started to do anything serious about the settings - or, as I like to think of them, the locations.

MAKE DO AND MEND is essentially a two-centred book. Most of the action takes place in a small Welsh valley, whose inhabitants we come to know in some detail. Finding the valley itself actually wasn't difficult, although of course it's heavily fictionalised in the book. However I needed a model to work from, and it had to have certain characteristics - to be more or less accessible by rail, for example, but completely rural, and to have some ancient buildings and some roads that led absolutely nowhere. I found such a valley simply by poring over maps and road atlases, and I found a house in the valley that was on exactly the site I wanted for Hendra, the family home of the main characters. Google Earth showed me a picture of the house, and when it turned out that the present owners ran it as a B&B and had their own website it was easy to work out that this was precisely the place I wanted, even though the house itself was not the right one. This farmhouse (see below) is on the site of the fictional Hendra.

Another important location is the pub in Liverpool where our hero, Harry, is lodging in the latter part of the story. On a location scouting trip to Liverpool in company with Morgan Cheshire I discovered this pub, the 'Pig and Whistle' in Chapel Street, which was in the perfect location and looked almost exactly right:

However, when I came to write about it, I realised that it had merged in my mind with this former pub a couple of hundred miles to the south of it:

These things happen with fiction, I suppose; recollections of places blend together to create something new which has never existed in any form of objective reality but is nonetheless perfectly clear and vivid in the writer's imagination.

I always do far more research for a book than I ever need - the file for MAKE DO AND MEND, for example, includes pages and pages of information about 'mother of vinegar', the Dornier Do 17, Rupert Lonsdale, Jack o'Kent, and all the words to 'The Skillet Pot' and 'The Last Time I Saw Paris', none of which will feature in the story; I feel that too much research is better than too little! However I do totally approve of the old military saying that 'time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted', and if there is a chance of 'walking the ground' of the places where a book is set then that's precisely what I would always want to do.

I'm still alive!

I haven't posted here for a long time, because frankly there hasn't been anything much to say. I was quite unwell over the winter and was unable to make any progress on my new novel for a whole six months, which naturally I found intensely frustrating. Now that I'm back working on it again, I'm up against an intractable deadline since it's due to be published on 1 November. Fortunately so far I am managing to meet my targets, and will have reached the two-thirds mark within the next week or so, but the schedule is now rather tighter than I'm used to. The good news, however, is that the next book is likely to be very much shorter and not to take anything like as long to complete; books that require a whole year to write have a nasty tendency to take over one's life, and probably end up longer than the general taste prefers, but unfortunately there's very little that can be done about that!

STAGE WHISPERS gets an 'Honourable Mention'

To my astonishment STAGE WHISPERS has been awarded an Honourable Mention in the 'One Perfect Rate' category of the Rainbow Awards, which as far as I can see means that one person thought it was pretty darned special! I kind of thought it had dropped off the world's radar a bit, although apparently it's still selling steadily enough. Since the next book, MAKE DO AND MEND, will have a lot of similarities to STAGE WHISPERS, it's really encouraging to think that there is someone out there who is prepared to invest a bit of time into reading something with a slow and leisurely plot development - and probably not a lot of sex!

GHOST STATION - comments at GoodReads

Not really a review as such, but a reader called Tracey has left the following comments:

This book was well written with engaging characters set in British Intelligence in the 70s. The Ghost Station refers to an abandoned underground station and the agents all have alias names taken from Jane Austen novels which amused me no end. She's not the first person I'd associate with spies! The agents in Ghost Station have to be flexible in their sexual orientation but becoming too attached to fellow agents is frowned upon. As you would expect, there's a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on but it was all rather too mild for my taste. I really didn't form any kind of attachment to the characters, although they were pleasant enough. There are quite a few cultural references that may go over the heads of international readers depending on how familiar they are with Britain.

Not one I'm likely to read again.

I'm sorry about the last sentence, but can quite understand that it didn't exactly hit the spot where this reader was concerned. It's certainly not James Bond, it's far more about the personal cost of being an agent; in fact, 'the conflicting demands of love and duty' like it says in my bio. It all depends on what you're looking for in a book, I suppose; balancing the relationship-plot with the plot-plot is always a very tricky business!

Interviewed by Chris Quinton

This was fun, since Chris and I have been friends for a very large number of years. In fact, if it hadn't been for Chris I would never have got involved in writing for MANIFOLD PRESS in the first place. I'm not great at being interviewed - it doesn't come naturally - but mercifully Chris made the whole process completely painless. Also, any interview that features tea and shortbread biscuits is one to be enjoyed; Chris certainly worked out a long time ago that bribery and (preferably) corruption are usually successful in my case!

Another review of 'Stage Whispers'

I must confess that after a couple of lukewarm reviews I really thought this one had sunk without trace and that it would be better to just get on and concentrate on future projects, but it seems that good things, after all, come to those who wait!

Elisa Rolle has posted a delightful review in which, among other things, she picks up on 'the small town feeling of the theatre world, where everyone knows everyone else'. This comment has pleased me more than a little, since that was exactly what I was going for - the notion that British theatre is really just one great big extended family in which triumphs and disasters are shared by the entire community.

Thank you, Elisa, you have made a rather grey day very much brighter and given me back my faith in a book I was afraid had completely failed to find its market!

Taking my name in vain

Readers of this will be in for a surprise if they Google the name of the hero. It's something the author should probably have done, in my opinion, at an earlier stage - always a very necessary first step when preparing a narrative. But then I suppose Callum Henley - a junior competitive swimmer from Derbyshire - would probably agree with me!