Where are you from, and where do you call home?
I was born in Southend, in Essex, England. Today my home is in another coastal town Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England. It’s just south of Bristol.
What inspired you to start writing?
I wrote a novel and some short stories when I was a student, a long time ago now. I wrote a lot of non-fiction in my middle years, mostly researches into history and places I’d visited. These provided me with material and inspiration to start writing fiction more seriously, which I began in 2008.
I’d always loved history, I’ve always read widely, with an eclectic taste in literature, philosophy, history, drama, even anthropology, biology, heraldry and geography with a passion for the esoteric and the supernatural. Combining these disparate threads into a novel was a lure I couldn’t ignore.
What advice would you give a new writer just starting out?
There are two kinds of writers. Those who give up and those who don’t.
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?
Writer’s block is generally considered to be caused by not having anything going on, resulting in not having anything to say. But that’s not right, and the clue is in the name writer’s BLOCK. A blockage is something substantial, suggesting that there’s too much going on, not too little. So, the way round writer’s block is to empty out, to make space for what you want to write next to get into you. That emptying out can be anything from going to a party to going for a long walk to writing down the first thing that comes into your head.
If I do get stuck on a plot or character arc, then a good way I have found that works for me is to develop the back story. That seems to loosen the bindings of the plot or character arc, and then allows you a way forward.
What comes first, the plot or characters?
For me, mostly the plot. I work up an idea, introduce what themes I want to explore, and then fill out the story with the characters and setting.
Are you working on anything at the present you would like to tell us about?
It’s a two-book series set in Elizabethan England. It’s an epic story and secret history of the coming-of-age of the Island of Angels, from which the series takes its name.
It features a Flemish emigree, Nelan Michaels, who is forced by religious persecution to flee his home and settles in Mortlake on the River Thames, near the houses of Dr John Dee, Elizabeth’s court astrologer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster.
The first book, The Mark of the Salamander, covers Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world ending in 1581. I hope to publish this in the summer of 2023.
The second book The Midnight of Eights culminates in the repulse of the Spanish Armada in 1588. I hope to publish this later this year.
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