Sarah Ash's Blog, page 7

In Her Defence : Bunch Courtney Investigation #2 – Jan Edwards

In Her Defence : Bunch Courtney Investigation #2 takes place in the depths of the Sussex countryside during May of 1940. Rose ‘Bunch’ Courtney is once again a thorn in the side of Detective Chief Inspector William Wright in his duties with the Sussex Constabulary as they investigate a series of apparently random deaths.

Many writers will say that they know their main characters as well as any real person and I do have a huge affection for Rose ‘Bunch’ Courtney and Detective Chief Inspector William Wright. Knowing them as well as I do, one of the hardest things has been knowing how much of their background to retell in books one and two. You want new readers to be aware of how Bunch came to be involved in solving crimes but I am always aware of the risk of boring those who are already acquainted with her.

I will own up to being a bit of a research nerd, so tracking down background facts that may seem obvious at first glance is more pleasure than chore. I know that I spend far more time on it than I should and only ever use a tiny fraction of the facts that I dig up. Often half a sentence of background detail has taken me three hours to dig up and verify. The things that need to be checked can be quite basic but you just know people will pick up on if you get it wrong.

Take the humble cup of tea, for example, the staple of British life. I went to check that, in the time span between Winter Downs and In Her Defence, tea had indeed gone on ration at 2 ounces per head per week. In the process of that fact checking, I came across a snippet of tea-related fact that I had never heard of before. In 1942, with Britain under siege from the German war machine and Japan invading large sections of Asia, our government made the decision to buy up every available pound of tea from every country in the world (except for Japan, obviously). One estimate shows government purchases in 1942, in order of weight, to be bullets, tea, artillery shells, bombs and explosives. Now Bunch is currently still set in 1940 so it will be a while before she reaches ’42, but it’s a fabulous snippet to squirrel away for future use.

Research has also made me shelve a particular story line that involved ‘trekkers’. In 1940s Britain they were not fans of the TV show but the hordes of people who left major cities every evening to seek the relative safety of the countryside. A few slept in B&Bs, some went to friends or relations, but many more slept in cars and barns and woodlands, anywhere that they saw as safer than city shelters. And every morning they returned to put in their usual day’s work. The trekkers did not exist in huge numbers until the height of the bombings and as that did not occur with any ferocity until later in 1940, it was wrong for either book one or two. I had written some 30,000 words of the novel before I realised the timing was all wrong for other logistical reasons. It may be an idea I can resurrect for a future book, but for now it remains one of those Routemaster moments that will sit in the research pile, along with a dozen more that will need some rethinking. They may see light of day in a future Bunch Courtney investigation or they may simply remain an interesting fact.

Writing the “Bunch Courtney Investigations” has changed the way that I write. I have always been a seat-of-the-pants writer. I had an idea and ran with it. But writing golden age crime has made that far harder. Yes, there is the research to consider, but being ‘investigations’ has meant that there needs to be a trail for the reader to follow and to lay that trail I have had to (horror of horrors) be more organised in how I go about it. There is a need for keeping meticulous records of bit players and places that wander in and out, such as the local chemist, or the name of the village pub. There is also a need to be logical in how I plot the story line. There need to be clues and markers left along the way that allow a reader the chance to get to the conclusion at the same time that I do.

It has been a fun series to write and I am really hoping to be able to stay with Bunch right up until D-Day and maybe even beyond that if the readers call for it.

The series began with Winter Downs and continues with the release of In Her Defence on 4th April 2019. Book 3: All the Things You Were should be following later in the year.

Winter Downs is available from all of the usual sources (Amazon, Kindle, iTunes, Kobo etc). In Her Defence is available for pre-order here and will be available in all of the usual digital platforms, and paperback at all of the usual retailers outlets from 4th April 2019.

You can read learn more about Jan Edwards at:

Blog page: https://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Janedwardsbooks

Twitter: @jancoledwards and/or @bunchcourtney00

In Her Defence 

Jan Edwards

Winner of the Arnold Bennett Book Prize

In Her Defence: Bunch Courtney Investigation #2       

“Bunch Courtney’s hopes for a quiet market-day lunch with her sister are shattered when a Dutch refugee dies a horribly painful death before their eyes. A few days later Bunch receives a letter from her old friend Cecile saying that her father, Professor Benoir, has been murdered in an eerily similar fashion.

Two deaths by poisoning in a single week. Is this a coincidence? Bunch does not believe that any more than Chief Inspector William Wright.

Set against a backdrop of escalating war and the massed internments of 1940, the pair are drawn together in a race to prevent the murderer from striking again.”         

ISBN : 978 0993000898  Penkhull Press

Paperback £9.99  | ebook £2.95

 

Praise for Winter Downs: Bunch Courtney Investigation #1    

“This winning book felt Hardy-esque in places, with a strong sense of well-researched history.”

Lisa Blower; Author and Arnold Bennett Book Prize judge 

“A satisfying mystery, puzzling and unpredictable with – like the times – an edgy sense of urgency and danger.” John Bainbridge; The Gaslight Crime Page

“Brilliantly written characters and beautifully descriptive language.” Kerry Parsons; Chat About Books

Other books by Jan Edwards:  Winter Downs: Bunch Courtney Investigation #1; Sussex Tales; Fables & Fabrications; Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties;  Olive Hawthorne: Daemons of Devils End (book and script team for Dr Who DVD)

Jan was born in Sussex, currently living in North Staffordshire. In addition to being a writer she is also a Reiki Master Teacher and Meditational Healer. Jan is available for interviews and appearances.

 

For further information contact:

Penkhull Press at: https://thepenkhullpress.wordpress.com/

Jan’s blog page: https://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com/

email: jan@rowangrove.co.uk

Please Feel Free to Share:

Jan Edwards Returns to the Guest Blog

If you’re a fan of Bunch Courtney, the resourceful protagonist of Jan Edwards’s award-winning Winter Downs: A Bunch Courtney Investigation,  then you’ll be looking forward (as I am) to the release of the second novel in the series: In Her Defence which will be published by the Penkhull Press on April 4th 2019.

Please join us on Monday February 18th as I welcome Jan back to the Guest Blog to tell us more about the second novel in the series!

Please Feel Free to Share:

The Flood Dragon’s Sacrifice on Speculative Fiction Showcase

You can read more about the new paperback of The Flood Dragons’ Sacrifice on the Speculative Fiction Showcase ! My thanks to Cora Buhlert and Jessica Rydill for this: both authors have been guests on the Guest Blog here in the past and will, hopefully, feature again before too long…

Please Feel Free to Share:

A New Short Story in Rainbow Bouquet from Manifold Press

With February 14th just a short while away, I’m thrilled to be able to share that Manifold Press have accepted my short story Duet for Piano, Four Hands to be included in their new anthology Rainbow Bouquet (to be published on Valentine’s Day)!

I’m delighted to be in such excellent company:

Stories of love in the past, present and future…

The Man of My Dreams by Harry Roberts

Proof of Evil by Ed Ahern

A Hatred of Wednesdays by Victoria-Melita Zammit

Ubytok — umu pribytok by Erin Horáková

The Poet’s Daughter by Cheryl Morgan

Duet for Piano, Four Hands by Sarah Ash

Stronger Than Death by Kathleen Jowitt

More than Starlight, More than Rain by Sean R. Robinson

O’Canada by Garrick Jones

Firebrand by MJ Logue

 

Please Feel Free to Share:

The Flood Dragon’s Sacrifice Now Available in Paperback!

It’s here! The Flood Dragon’s Sacrifice, Book 1 of Tide Dragons, is now available in paperback from Amazon.

Please Feel Free to Share:

BristolCon 2018

I’m heading to Bristol this weekend (October 27th) for the 10th BristolCon!

I’m looking forward to taking part in a talk/chat about anime and manga with Zoe Burgess-Foreman with a Halloween theme at midday in the Art Room. Then at 15.00 I’ll be taking part in a panel in Programme Room 2 entitled Here Be Dragons. And Yokai. And Tokoloshe. And Kupua… with Jessica Rydill, Zoe Burgess-Foreman, Steve McHugh and Nick Hembery. 

Please Feel Free to Share:

Victoria Osborne-Broad

Victoria Osborne-Broad, author of Chalice of the Rainbow, looks back over the long road to publishing her first fantasy novel.

 

I grew up in the last century with no internet, smartphones or tablets (except the ones the doctor gave you). We didn’t even have a TV at home because my father didn’t approve. And I didn’t have any friends.  What I did have was books. I learned to read before I started school and joined the local library at an early age, as well as having books at home. And along with the classics – What Katy Did, Little Women, and The Secret Garden among many others – I read all the E. Nesbit books. Not just The Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children, but the magic ones: The Enchanted Castle, The Magic City and especially The Story of the Amulet. Which involves time travel. It was to be decades before I realised where my unquestioning assumptions about time travel had come from. Among the quantities of books I read in my teens were many of Daphne du Maurier’s, and one of the ones which influenced me, again without  me realising, was The House on the Strand which also involves time travel.

I was 27 and had started my first library job when one of my colleagues lent me Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and I was hooked. I read all the rest of the series over the years, and soon added Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books. 80s gender politics embraced sci-fi/fantasy as a way of exploring alternative lifestyles by setting them on another planet: Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed are good examples.

I started writing my first book two years after first reading Dragonflight. I remember the excitement of scribbling down my ideas in the waiting room at Finchley Road station on my way home. And typing it up on a small manual bash-the-keys typewriter. That one was never taken further, but other ideas floated around in my head. Some became short stories but none were published. Then in the early 80s I began working on a  novel called Transformer, which was set on an island cut off from the world by a magic barrier that only one ship could cross.

At that time I couldn’t drive and knew nothing about cars, so the island was rural pre-industrial and people got around on horseback – though in fact I knew as little about horses as I did about cars. Creating the setting and names was fun, but I ran into problems when someone was murdered and I realised I didn’t have any judicial or legal system in my invented land.

By the mid-80s I finally finished Transformer. By then I had an electronic typewriter where individual letters could be corrected, but there was no way to, for example, change the name of a character except by laborious re-typing. I sent it off to some publishers of fantasy paperbacks and discovered:

i) some publishers only accept submissions from agents

ii) some publishers will only take a book guaranteed to sell in 1,000s

iii) some publishers don’t get back to you.

I’ve long since got used to all that but it was a shock at the time. I then tried the Women’s Press, who said, though nicely, that they were currently publishing sci-fi, not fantasy. Finally I sent it to a smaller women’s publication house, and they said no thank you but gave about three A4 pages of feedback. At the time I didn’t realise that this was in fact a massive compliment. I just assumed they thought it was useless. Fortunately I kept the feedback.

I didn’t write for a while, till in the early 90s a Mills & Boon author gave a talk at my library. Impressed by how much she said she earned, I decided to try my hand. After reading several M & B books, and a couple of library books about writing, I wrote my first and joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association. You had to submit one book a year and they critiqued it. I did this for two years and the verdicts were that I had everything right in the books except the relationship between the two main characters. And as that is the whole point of romance, I accepted that this wasn’t my genre. However, I kept the manuscripts. By now I had, not yet a computer but at least a word processor which made a huge difference.

In the 00s, by which time I was living in Cornwall, two things happened. I sent a short story to a competition. It was based on an idea which I’d had in the 80s but never developed. They wrote back to say it hadn’t been short-listed but they’d been impressed. A paragraph of useful feedback was included, and it finished by saying that I shouldn’t end it there, that the way was open for a lot more action. I kept this too.

Meanwhile I’d dusted off Transformer, the book about the island, and revised it, helped by some very useful advice from a friend’s partner who’d published some Young Adult fantasy books. I sent it to some agencies but again there were no takers.

Then ten years ago, by which time I was using a laptop, at last, I went back to the short story mentioned above, and started working on it. At the time I first wrote it, the central character lived in north west London, worked at Swiss Cottage library, and had a strange experience on Hampstead Heath. After writing the first chapters, I decided that part of the way through she’d better come down to Cornwall, and finally I moved the entire story, lock, stock and barrel, to west Penwith. Swiss Cottage library became Penzance library, and Hampstead Heath was replaced by Chapel Carn Brea. Other scenes were adjusted likewise. By 2009 I was getting it into shape, and printed out a couple of pages at a time to take in to a colleague who encouraged me by asking each time for the next pages. I carried on with it until the breakthrough came in 2011 when I gave up the day job to work part time from home.

And discovered a new world. I went to a workshop at the Penzance Literary Festival and met the woman who did my first professional critiques. I joined writers groups, made new friends who I could talk to about writing. I went to workshops and author talks and kept writing. I finished the novel I’d been working on, which at the time was called ‘Guardian of the Stones’, and felt very empty for weeks, until one day I was driving along the front at Penzance and the thought floated into my head: ‘I wonder what they’d all be doing a few months later’. That was it, and I started the second book in what was to become a trilogy, though I didn’t know it at the time. The title of this second book became ‘Chalice of the Rainbow’.

Three years ago, while I was still working on Book 2, a helpful friend from one of the writers groups sent me details of some Open Submissions. When you send your work to an agent or publisher, they may not even look at it, still less reply, but with Open Submissions the publishers guarantee to read all that is sent in during a set period, specifying 100 pages, three chapters or the whole work. There were six of these during that year, all in the fantasy genre: three were specialist publishers, three the sci-fi/fantasy arm of a larger corporation e.g. Hodderscape from Hodder. Of these six, three said no thank you, one gave it a second read then said no thanks. Then I got a ‘no thank you’ but with a paragraph explaining why not, which given what a quantity of submissions they’d had I knew by now was a big compliment. And that was from Harper Voyager who publish – yes, Game of Thrones. Which everyone who’s never read a word of fantasy has heard of. I was amazed. The sixth, a small American company, actually offered me a contract and sent me the sort of enthusiastic emails every new writer dreams of. Sadly, for practical reasons, I couldn’t take up the offer.

Meanwhile I’d been going to a writing class which ran from September to April. Some of us started going for coffee afterwards, and when the classes ended, five of us sat round a table in the Dog and Rabbit café in St Just and decided we didn’t want to wait four months to talk about writing. So we agreed to meet in each other’s houses and read out what we’d been writing. Over time the numbers reduced: one woman moved to Devon, one had twins and was rather occupied, one changed her working hours and couldn’t always come. But a core of us, all working on novels, continued to meet. The support and feedback turned out to be perhaps the best thing that had happened in my writing journey.

By this time I’d reached the end of Book 2, had it critiqued and revised it as best I could. Wondering where to go next, I went back to Transformer again: the book about the island, written in the 80s and revised in the mid-00s. I felt that it wasn’t good enough as it stood, but there was a lot in it that seemed too good to waste. Then one day I had the light bulb moment, the road to Damascus moment or whatever. Brainwave. How to combine Transformer with my two Cornwall books. Now it had become a trilogy which I named the ‘Jewels of the Rainbow’ trilogy.

I kept the Penwith setting and some of my main characters but introduced two new protagonists, one based on a character I’d introduced then dropped in Book 2. I’m not saying any more here, as I don’t want spoilers and it will be some time before that one gets to print. But the months I spent working on it were so happy. Writing it was exciting, but knowing that I’d be taking each chapter to read to the others made it even more so. And there’s one sentence in the final chapter which I like so much that it would have been worth writing all three books just to get to that point. I can’t say what it is without giving everything away!

Meanwhile I’d approached some agents about Book 1, but none of them took it up though I got a couple of positive comments. Perhaps I should have continued doing this for longer, but I’d been to presentations by two self-publishing, or ‘assisted publishing’ firms, one from Padstow and the other from Bristol. Each had been recommended personally, one by a Truro author, the other by someone in Devon. After much inner wrangling I settled on the Padstow firm: they’re in Cornwall, and have been very helpful. I’m sure no one can ever have badgered them with as many questions as I have. My biggest worry was the cover, but I am lucky enough to have a friend who’s an artist and she turned a few lines of pencil into my dream cover.

At that point, as the cover showed the chalice and the rainbow, I realised it would make sense to swap the titles and call this book Chalice of the Rainbow and its sequel Guardian of the Stones. In both these books, the Chalice and the Guardian are central to the plot. I rang the publishers, at what could be called the eleventh hour, and although taken aback, they agreed to make the change.

What came next was, to quote the title of a book I’ve been reading, “One damn thing after another”. Every step of the way there were things I hadn’t expected. But finally the book was In Print, and I could hold a copy in my hand. I hadn’t foreseen how weird it would feel to see the words that I knew by heart – and if I hadn’t before, I certainly would after about eight lots of proof reading including the eBook – to actually see those words on the printed page.

I’m a writer, not a salesman/woman, but I’d learned a lot from going to talks at the Penzance Litfest, speakers at writing groups, things I’d read and so on. So a couple of years ago I set up a blog, and an Author page on Facebook, and began to list people and places to approach when the big day came.

Now it’s come. I’ve never been so busy in my life. Between all of the rest, I’m revising Book 2. Because Book 1 ends with the arrival of a letter, and Book 2 begins with the postman coming down the drive. I’ve already been asked when the next one is coming out. Which is perhaps the best thing a writer can be asked.

Chalice of the Rainbow is currently available from Amazon

Please Feel Free to Share:

Victoria Osborne-Broad on the Guest Blog

I’m very pleased to be welcoming Victoria Osborne-Broad to the Guest Blog as the next guest writer. Victoria is giving a talk about her first fantasy novel (set in Cornwall)  on August 23rd at the St Just library at 7.00 for 7.30 p.m.

Look out for her fascinating account of her journey to publishing Chalice of the Rainbow here on Nobody Knew She Was There from August 21st onward.

 

Please Feel Free to Share:

Tide Dragons #1 & #2 are now available on Amazon again

I’m very happy and relieved to report that The Flood Dragon’s Sacrifice and Emperor of the Fireflies are available on Amazon Kindle again.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Tide Dragons #1 and #2 currently unavailable on Amazon

I’ve learned today from e-Book Partnership who publish the two e-books ofTide Dragons that Amazon KDP have – for reasons that are not yet clear – all the e-book titles from Kindle.

I – and I imagine all the other authors concerned – are very unhappy about this. However, these titles are still available on Kobo and Barnes & Noble (Nook)!

And they are very much still available on iTunes!

I hope to be able to post more about the Amazon situation very soon.

Please Feel Free to Share: