After a few weeks milling over a possible new novel in my mind, today I reached the moment when I started the first chapter. This is helping me to see and meet three of my main characters who will start telling me how to develop their story. I cannot work out a detailed outline and work from that; I would find it restrictive and destroy the spontaneity. My method of working would not suit everyone but it works for me, as 21 historical sagas, under the name of Jessica Blair, proves. I will however have to get an outline, sufficient to show my publisher, worked out. Hopefully they will like the idea and give me a contract and I can then get going. I must say however it is great to be getting started on another novel, even at this early stage
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Dress and Fashion
A writer must be sure of facts no matter what the genre, none more so than the novelist. Accurate descriptions of dress and fashion, help to set the scene, help to create the characters so that they a plausible and memorable in the reader’s mind. They help to bring life to the novel. So a good set of fashion books ready at hand on the author’s bookshelf is helpful, I might say essential. Of course today, in the technological age, it is easy to get information on the internet. I have done this but I am still glad that I built up a library and have books close at hand. Other writers might find some from my list useful:
R.Turner Wilcox: THE DICTIONARY OF COSTUME (Batsford)
John Styles: THE DRESS OF THE PEOPLE (Yale University Press)
Doreen Yarwood: ENGLISH COSTUME (Batsford)
Margot Lister: COSTUMES OF EVERYDAY LIFE (Barrie & Jenkins)
David Bond: THE GUINESS GUIDE TO 20th CENTURY FASHION
Regine & Peter W. Engelmeier: FASHION IN FILM (Prestel)
Enjoy. Happy writing.
Titanic : ‘The Captain’s Daughter’
I have just finished reading THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER by Leah Fleming published by Simon & Schuster. Leah places fictitious characters into a true background. This is not the easiest thing to do but she handles it so well that you can believe that this really happened. First class passenger Celeste is heading home to an unstable marriage after visiting her family in England. May with her husband and baby are escaping a harsh life in Bolton for what they hope will be a better life in America. Disaster strikes. May loses her husband and baby, but when another is thrust into her arms by the Captain of the Titanic, before he gives himself up to the sea, she implies that it is her own, a secret she keeps for her life-time but secrets must out. May and Celeste become firm friends and we follow their lives and those of others who were on the ship or waiting in vain on the shore as Leah Fleming spins an intriguing story and skilfully brings all the threads together to tie a satisfactoty knot at the end.
Starting To Write Another Book.
My 21st novel by Jessica Blair was published yesterday, the 2nd of February. They have all been published by Piatkus with whom I have always had a pleasant and cordial relationship. The next one is already in their hands and likely to be published early in 2013. I took a few days off after sending them the book by email. I relaxed and refreshed my mind, something I do a couple of times during writing a book. I find I come back to it with renewed vigour and new thoughts as to where I will go with the story, or rather with a new and interesting conversations with my characters in which they tell me the direction they think the story should go. That may not make sense to you but it does to me – it has worked through 21 books! Now I am thinking of the one waiting to be written and today I started to bring together my thoughts on what that one might be and getting ready to listen to my characters.
Jessica Blair
Yesterday, 2nd February, was publishing day for two of my books by Jessica Blair both published by Piatkus, an imprint of the Little Brown Book Group
THE ROAD BENEATH ME (hardback) is set in the nineteenth century with a background of Whitby, Shetland and Nova Scotia. In Whitby Kate Swan is cast out by her overbearing father. In Shetland Malcolm McFadden walks away from his inheritance after a dispute with his father over the expulsion of crofters. Leaving the girl he loves, he finds employment in Whitbyand there marries Kate. Fate steps in to take him back to Shetland and to an unsought life in Nova Scotia. But Kate has other ideas that takes her on a search for the truth.
SECRETS OF A WHITBY GIRL (paperback) was published in hardback last year. Eighty-five year old Miss Sarah Brook has kept a diary which holds family secrets. At this time of her life should she destroy it or capitulate to her niece’s desire to know her family’s history? The story is set in Whitby, and the nineteenth century whaling trade that takes its sailors into the terrible hazards of the Arctic.