It started when a friend asked me to write one for a Regency romance anthology. It was so much fun that I ended up starting a new pen name (Elizabeth Leydin) and just kept writing them. (I was going to give up, but then I won a Romance Writers of Australia Ruby Award for The Generous Heart, and I thought it might be a sign from the universe.)

Turns out, I love writing all kinds of novellas, not just romances (although, do I ever write a story without some romance, somewhere? Well, some of my children’s books are romance free, but that’s about it).

So, inevitably, I started thinking about a Poppy McGowan novella.

The result, Fatal Crossing, takes place in between An A-List for Death and the upcoming Murder on the Mosaic, and I was pushed into publishing it by my cousin-in-law, who said, ‘But what am I going to read on my holidays if there’s no new Poppy book?’ So you can thank Jacki!

It comes out today, and it’s exciting to me because it’s my first foray into self-publishing as Pamela Hart. Who knows if it will sell more than a few copies?

I hope it does, because it has the scene in it: the one where Poppy and Tol finally talk about how they feel about each other. Although, as with much of Poppy’s life, that doesn’t go quite to plan…

As a douceur for those readers who haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, if you buy Fatal Crossing and click on the link at the back to join my mailing list, you will get Tol’s version of that scene, written by the inspiration for Tol, my husband Stephen. As some of you may know, Stephen is an archaeologist, and a pianist, and a writer, and wonderful human being, and a few other things as well – in fact, I had to tone Tol down because no one would believe a character like Stephen!

I have to confess, I had a little weep when I read Stephen’s version of the Poppy/Tol scene…

ps Murder on the Mosaic is the book where Poppy joins Tol on a dig in Jordan – Stephen got me invited to a dig there so I could do the research, and I’ll be posting about that closer to its release date.

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But right now, you can download the opening either as a pdf or as an audiobook. (Or both!)

I hope you enjoy it!

Song and dance prologueDownload

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I don’t have a cover to show you yet, but I’m delighted to say that The Charleston Scandal will be available on 24th November in Australia (and worldwide as an ebook)! So it will be in your local or online bookstore in time for Christmas!

London, 1923

Kit Linton, a privileged young Australian aiming to become a star, arrives in the city to find the Jazz Age in full swing. Cast in a West End play opposite another young hopeful, Canadian Zeke Gardiner, she dances blithely into the heady lifestyle of English high society and the London theatre set, from Noel Coward to Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, and Talullah Bankhead.

When Kit is photographed dancing the Charleston alongside the Prince of Wales, she finds herself at the centre of a major scandal, sending the Palace into damage control and Kit to her aristocratic English relatives – and into the arms of the hedonistic Lord Henry Carleton. Amid the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, both Zeke and Kit are faced with temptations – and make choices that will alter the course of their lives forever.

And here is a gorgeous sketch of the main character, Kit Linton!

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Or, should I say a reimagining of A Christmas Carol, with Barbie telling the story to her younger sister – but in this version, it is about a vain, selfish singer in Victorian London who is causing hardship to those she employs (she runs a theatre as well as being a singing star). Mostly particularly, to her best friend the costume designer.

Now, I have to admit, I was not keen to watch this film. I have never been a Barbie girl, nor lived in a Barbie world. And, as an author, my blood chilled to think of one of my books being remade over in Barbie’s image.

And yet… as I watched it, I found myself noticing something unusual. All the big speaking roles in this movie are female. All of them. There’s a notional love interest for the best friend. There’s a few lines said by the juggler at the theatre, and another couple of lines from the director of an orphanage. Every other word spoken (including by the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future) were said by women or girls. Try to remember the last time you watched a movie like that. It was probably Steel Magnolias (1989).

Female-driven movies are vanishingly rare, and even in those women rarely speak more than 60% of the dialogue, according to a large analysis of Hollywood movies. A film with 95% of the dialogue by women? Not happening in Hollywood, but alive and well in Barbieland.

And who are the main characters in this film? Two women with successful careers, running their own businesses (in Christmas Future, when the singer is abandoned and in poverty due to her hardheartedness, the best friend has become an acclaimed designer).

The singer, of course, has been brought up to believe ‘in a selfish world, only the selfish succeed’, by her aunt (the replacement for Jacob Morley), and repudiating this certainly plays into a ‘be a good girl’ script. But then, so does Scrooge’s redemption.
The centrality of female friendship to a happy life was the subsidiary theme.

Barbie movies are very popular.

It makes me wonder about this coming generation of girls. The ones who grew up on Elsa’s defiant acceptance of her power in Frozen. Talk to an average five-to-ten year old – they want to be Elsa, not Anna, the bumbling, endearing ‘main character’. They want to be the one with power.

And the overt messages of Frozen? Don’t reject loving advances from your sister (as in Do you want to build a snowman?). Things go badly when you try to please other people by not being yourself. Don’t be afraid of your own power – as long as it’s wielded with love, it’s great!

These girls, pushed into being pinker than any generation before, are also being served up with role models I would have killed for as a child.

So, would Dickens have liked the Barbie version of A Christmas Carol? I doubt it. But I suspect his three daughters would have loved it!

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Hmmm.  If you knew the flower we call a rose was called a ‘skunk blossom’, would you really perceive its scent as piercingly sweet, as redolent and seductive, as achingly nostalgic?

Frankly, I doubt it. It’s why companies spend millions of dollars on getting names of brands right. It’s why people who are about to have a baby spend hours – no, days! – online, looking at the baby name sites.

The people who have the most trouble with this are teachers and ex-teachers – no matter what name they think of, they can remember some horrible child they taught. (I know this because all of my siblings are teachers, and I can remember the agonies they went through trying to name their children).

And this is the problem which faces novelists every day: what do we call our characters?

Not only do we have to have a name which we and our readers will feel comfortable reading (too long names are out, outlandish names are out unless they have some part to play in the plot, anems of famous people are out), but we need a name which fits our character.

Sometimes, it’s easy. I knew from the very beginning of even thinking about The War Bride that my main character’s name was Margaret. Why? Because what happens to her was based on a real person, and her name was Margaret. Easy-peasy.

And the last name for my main character in A Letter from Italy was easy, because I knew she was the daughter-in-law of a character from The War Bride, Valentine Quinn.  So she was Mrs Quinn (Senora Quinn, in Italy).

In contrast, her first name went through several changes.  Originally she was ‘Edwina’, but that didn’t quite work – the character had a very modern outlook, thanks to a suffragette mother, and Edwina seemed a bit too old-fashioned for her mother to have chosen.

Then I tried Alexis, which was a nod to my sister, Janet Alexis. But that seemed too modern. The book, after all, was set in 1917.  The name needed to be timeless.

When you want timeless names, you can’t beat the Bible.

So I looked at Biblical names.  Elizabeth (my niece Liz thought not), Anne (very common at the time, in both senses: Annie was a lower-class name, and my girl was definitely upper-class),  Susan (not used much at the time) and, finally, Rebecca.

At this point I thought I’d found my name, but I stopped and wondered. My publisher is Rebecca Saunders. Would she object to me snaffling her name for my character’s use? Fortunately, she was delighted, and so there my character was: Rebecca Quinn, a blonde, intelligent journalist who thought she had a happy marriage.

Then I had to go through the same process for my main male character, only in Italian!

Right now, I’m trying to tie down the surname of my main male character in my next book, The Desert Nurse. He has always been William in my thoughts, but his last name has varied widely, and I couldn’t make up my mind. Not having millions of dollars for a focus group-led research study, I asked my Facebook friends to give me suggestions…. They came through wonderfully, but so many choices! Have a look below.

At this point of the process, William’s last name is Brent. But I can’t promise you that if you read The Desert Nurse when it comes out next year that it will still be Brent.  He’s gone through Boyd, Hunt, Clarke and Barton already!

And I’m happy to take any of your suggestions – there’s still time to get in before the name is set firm!

ps  The keen-eyed among you will note that my name in these posts is Pamela Freeman, which is the name I write under for children’s books. You’re welcome to be my Facebook friend (as Pamela Freeman) or like my author page (as Pamela Hart).

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Although most of the action in A Letter from Italy is set in Brindisi in 1917, the last section is set in Venice.

All cities changes over time, even historical centres like Venice, and I wanted to be very sure of my descriptions. Fortunately, I stumbled over (well, all right, I rigorously researched until I found) the Visualizing Venice project.

This is a collaboration between Duke University, the University of Venice and the University of Padua, and is a digital recreation of some parts of Venice, showing the changes to the city over time.

Fortunately for me, one of the main sites of my story, the piazza outside the church of SS Giovanni e Paulo (Saints John and Paul), was one of the their first projects, and 1911 was one of the years they picked to focus on. Perfect!

You can see the changes over time to this important part of Venice (which not only has the church, but also the hospital where the wounded were taken in WWI).

I love historians, especially when they make their work so easy to search for and understand!

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Elaine says:

While I’d be the first person to tell you that most people in my period of interest, the later Middle Ages, were illiterate, one of the cool things I discovered during the research for my  Dark Apostle series, is the wealth of medical knowledge being shared through texts.  (I wrote a blog entry entitled “Books Must be Banned” railing against the vast number of books that appear in pseudo-medieval fantasies, but I digress. . .)

In the earlier Middle Ages, when the first universities devoted to medicine arose at Paris and Salerno, study depended largely on texts from the Roman era, most notably those of Galen.  Galen brought us the theory of the four humors, and based his anatomies on pig dissections.  So he’s perhaps not the most reliable of sources.  Still, the educated practitioners of the day, the Physicians who ruled at the universities, thought so highly of Galen that, if a patient on the operating table had anatomical deviations from Galen’s observations, it was the patient who was presumed to be deficient (perhaps because the patient was human, rather than porcine).

In the Muslim world, medical practice progressed far beyond Galen, with frequent improvements in technique, like moving from cauterization of wounds to the use of ligature to control bleeding.  The prophet Mohammed has great respect for physicians, which carried through into a wider societal interest in teaching medicine and sharing medical knowledge. This tradition began to influence European practice during and after the Crusades, when European nobles first exposed themselves to Islamic culture of the time, and translations of Classical texts began to return to Europe.

Prior to the fourteenth century, most medical texts appeared in Latin, but after this time a variety of works appeared in the vernacular, including illustrations to aid the reader in reproducing complex operations.   For this explosion of knowledge, and its dispersal, we must thank not the lofty physicians, but the surgeons. Regarded as mere craftsmen for their more hands-on approach and real-world knowledge, surgeons often kept records of their operations and corresponded with their counterparts about the practice of their art.

Many established surgeons wrote treatises about particular treatments and injuries, as well as manuals of general surgery, in particular to offer access to medical education for those who could not afford the services of a higher class of surgical professional. These works reveal a variety of practices and operations, including intimate examinations, probing of injuries, and multiple treatment approaches. Henri de Mondeville (1260-1320), surgeon to Phillip the Fair and later a professor of anatomy at Montpellier, even addresses cosmetic surgery of the breast and face.

Contrary to the image of the medieval surgeon as eager to cut or burn, these medical texts reveal a humanitarian and often minimalist approach to surgery and wound care. De Mondeville advocated cleanliness and the avoidance of pus (claimed by some physicians to be a sign of healing–“a laudable pus”) in accordance with the practice of Hippocrates. Arnold of Villanova listed four considerations before performing any operation, most notably, what good reasons require the surgery, and whether it is both necessary and feasible. Guy de Chauliac, surgeon to Pope Clement VI, maintained both himself and his noble patron through the plague years of 1347-50, by use of a practical approach to hygiene and limiting interactions with others. The texts were widely distributed and often quoted one another, revealing a lively network of surgeons across Europe building upon one another’s work.

Treatises on specialized operations and common conditions—like cataracts—proved especially popular and passed from hand to hand (or hand to scribe) across Europe.

My series, The Dark Apostle, which continues this month with volume 4, Elisha Mancer, owes a debt in particular to the works of Ambroise Pare (from whom I also take my name), a 16^th century French barber-surgeon who wrote treatises with medical and surgical advice, as well as a memoir of his experiences in battle.  I honor this medieval tradition of sharing medical knowledge and hope it enhances the adventure and intrigue of my fantasy novels.

Want to know more?  For sample chapters, historical research and some nifty extras, like a scroll-over image describing the medical tools on the cover of Elisha Barber, visit www.TheDarkApostle.com/books
E. C. Ambrose blogs about the intersections between fantasy and history at http://ecambrose.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/ecambrose

You can buy volume one, Elisha Barber here:
Indiebound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

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That’s so far away from the era of my own books that I was fascinated by the kind of research Wendy has had to do for the book – I know it’s taken her a very long time to get to the point where she felt she could write it.  Very kindly, she’s written about that process for this blog.

I asked her: What are the pleasures and pitfalls of researching such a long-ago era?

Wendy:

Although this is a very different era to the one you’ve specialised in, there’s the same joy of discovering not just new facts, but new questions – and of course questions are always the start of a story. I think the main difference is that the farther back you go, the fewer answers there are – at least, fewer firm, factual answers. That makes fiction both easier, and harder.

Dragonfly Song is set in the Minoan Bronze Age world, a decade or so before its final destruction in 1450 BCE. This was a fascinating civilisation, extraordinarily advanced – a favourite example is that they had flushing toilets – that left no written records of its history or culture. The only writing that has been found and deciphered is stocklists or tax accounts. Though I loved knowing that someone had a cow named Blackie! Funny little details like that instantly bring even a list of livestock to life.

But, with nothing to base theories on except material remains, interpretations vary widely. I heard one archaeologist say that her impression of the Minoans was that they were all very beautiful. Hmm. So is everyone from the 20^th and 21st centuries, if our impression is based purely on red carpet photos. I’m equally doubtful that goddess figurines mean that women held all the power.

Still, I have to confess that I first became fascinated with the Minoans after a dream about a white-robed priestess leading a torchlight procession up a mountain. I don’t believe there was any sort of message or accuracy in the dream, but it was the impetus to my reading everything that interlibrary loans could give me on Bronze Age mythology, and the Minoans and Mycenaeans. This reading itself was back in the distant pre-internet period of history.  Of course I wrote about it too, a melodramatic romance that was very nearly, but luckily not, published.

When I returned to the subject twenty-five years later, there was not only a huge amount of new material and revised theories – through the magic of Google, I had access to much of it. An overwhelming amount, much more than I needed. And so, as with any research for any fiction, the difficulty became knowing when to stop. It’s easy to become obsessional and decide that you can’t finish the book until you know exactly how goats were herded in the 15thC BCE. Or exactly how the bulls got from wherever they were to the bull-game court in Knossos. Or which court it was.

The only thing to do is to draw a deep breath and remember that I’m writing fiction. If no one knows the answer for sure, all I can do is to choose the theory that makes sense to me, and if there’s no theory, then work out my own as logically as I can. And sometimes, when I’ve done all that, I still have to choose to change it for the sake of simplicity and story line. So although the Minoans sometimes saluted with a fist to the forehead, and sometimes with a hand on the heart, I chose the hand on the heart. It worked better for my story, and is easier to picture. Did that stop me feeling anxious when I visited the Archaeological Museum and saw the fist-to-forehead statuettes for myself? Of course not. But will readers be happier with one clear thing to picture in such a different world to their own? I hope so. Because in the end, the research is only the start of the story. It builds the world, but characters are formed with our hearts.

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