Alison Stuart's Blog, page 36

The Soundtrack to my Writing Life

Being a creature of habit (in other words a typical Capricorn) from an early age I developed a routine around the way I worked, of which music played a significant part. Back in the days of LPs (remember those large shiney black things?) I would never start a study session without Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture or Handel's Water music. It would have been as unthinkable as not playing a couple of rounds of solitaire (with REAL cards) while I ate my lunch. 
More recently when I needed to concentrate at work drafting agreements or finalising complex meeting minutes, I would put my iPod on and listen to an eclectic selection of music in a playlist called "Music to Work To". This included Celtic and Opera.
You may be rolling your eyes and  thinking "OCD" here, which I am not at all but when I have a goal to achieve I find music and routine helps to soothe the savage beast. Putting the music on (and occasionally lighting the oil burner)  seems to provide a clue to my scatty brain that we are here to WORK.

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that my published novels were both written to music. THE KING'S MAN with its dark undertones had behind it the music of Purcell. The music of Loreena McKennit  features strongly in my writing world, and her eastern influence is providing background to one of my current "WIPS" (work in progress) which is partially set in the Arab world of North Africa in the seventeenth century.
At the moment I am deep into rewrites of my post World War One novel and you would think that maybe something 1920s or a selection of the war poetry of  Wilfred Owen might be the kick start, but oddly it is a simple little ballad by a young singer called Christina Perri.  Her song "Arms" seems to perfectly capture the fear on the part of both my hero and heroine to allow themselves to fall in love. I am probably singlehandedly responsible for the number of You Tube hits Christina's video is experiencing as  neither the CD nor the digital download seems to be available in Australia yet, but here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Do you have a musical soundtrack to your writing, reading or working life?

The next best seller is coming along nicely...

I have had a few readers ask me lately when my next book will be coming out. The truth is I don't know!

For the last eight years I have been occupied with the thing called "career" as I rose to being a senior executive. While I liked to think it didn't interfere with my writing, the truth is it did. I will be the first to admit I am not superwoman. After a day at the executive grindstone, I would crawl home from work too tired to do much more than throw some food on the table, watch an hour of mindless TV and go to bed. Weekends were then spent catching up on cooking, shopping, cleaning and life. So those spare five minutes on a Saturday afternoon were not terribly productive. I could feel all my creativity just disappearing. I couldn't write and I couldn't sew - my two creative outlets. All I had was work.

In November last year I quite suddenly found myself "differently employed". The circumstances don't matter...it is one of the realities of corporate life and the higher up the ladder you are, the shakier it becomes. If anyone has ever found themselves in the same position you will know that it is a horrible experience and despite all the silver linings (and there are plenty!), it shatters your sense of self.

I suppose I am more fortunate than most. I didn't feel defined by my career. I realised that I had one solid rock to cling to and that was my writing. While I don't think my "career" is completely over, I have consciously taken the time out to consider where it was going and, more importantly what it was doing to me (I think that is the subject for another blog).  In the meantime I have thrown myself into my alternate career - writing.

The reality is that By the Sword and The King's Man were mostly written during my time in Singapore where once again I had found myself "differently employed" (as an expat wife). What this means is that I have a cyber sock drawer stuffed with ideas and half started novels but nothing close to submission quality so I have set myself this year to finish some of those "UFOs" (Unfinished Objects).

I believe the best tool of writing is "time" and by that I mean setting your work aside to "set" for a while (months is good) and then coming back to it with fresh eyes. My writing style is to complete a rough draft (and I mean ROUGH) - the plot may change from the beginning to the end, it will have missing chunks with "put more stuff here" annotated into the manuscript but what it will be is the skeleton of the story. I will then put it away and pull out the ugly object some months later and begin my favourite part, the rewrite. This is like putting flesh on the bones, or for an artist starting to apply the paint to a rough sketch. This process will need to be repeated several times as you deepen the layers of paint, add complexity to the characters and depth to the plot. It is like any craft, it needs to be done with care and love and above all, time.

Time is not a commodity that many professional writers enjoy. There are nasty things called "deadlines" so the honing of their work needs to be tailored to meet that deadline. I suspect this is why so many writers first couple of books are infinitely better than their subsequent books (until they get into a rhythm of writing).

So where am I at? I currently have four pieces of work on the various burners of my literary stove.

A ghost story set in 1922  encompassing a Regency mystery and the shadows of the first world war. A big departure from my usual period of history and quite a complex story. The long awaited sequel to By the Sword and The King's Man. Set in 1680 it brings the strands of both stories together with the "next generation" plus Barbary Pirates. A Regency-set romance. I am venturing into very well covered territory here so I am not hopeful this will get much of a run but it has been interesting playing in another period of history.A time travel novella...English Civil War to modern times. It's been fun to write!There we are...that is what is simmering at the moment, in various stages of production. I am shuffling them around and my hope is by the end of this year, they will all be to submission standard. It is one thing to write them, the next thing will be to find a publisher and in this rapidly changing world of books, I have no idea how hard that is going to be!
So thank you for asking, I would love to say my next best seller will be coming out soon, but I would be lying!
However what I am doing is putting together a collection of my short stories which I will self publish so watch this space.
Alison

The Colours of Lake Eyre

The early settlers in Australia clung to the fragile coast line of this great country and could only dream of what lay beyond there own existence. They watched the sea birds flying inland and explorers began to venture into the interior in search of the great inland sea that drew the birds. Charles Sturt carried a whaling boat with him into the dry interior in the hope of finding this mythical sea. Other explorers found the great sea but it was an illusion...a great salty sink in the centre of Australia, named Lake Eyre.

We have watched in horror as massive floods raged through Queensland earlier this year. Some of the water went out to sea but a great deal of it filled the inland waterways of the Cooper Creek and Diamantina River systems and after 10 years of drought the rivers flowed at last, spilling out into Lake Eyre. The filling of Lake Eyre is said to occur only once a lifetime but it seems that this phenomena may become more common as the climate adjusts. As it fills, life comes back to it, filling it with fish and water birds. It is no coincidence that the pelicans have gone from my own waterfront in Melbourne. Some primeval urge draws them to the waterways of Lake Eyre.

Just as it draws the birds, so too it draws people and my husband and I headed off on a 4000 km round trip to see Lake Eyre for ourselves. Our own explorations have already taken us to Innaminkca, Longreach and Birdsville and we have seen the "channel country" as it is called in drought and flood. Lake Eyre was the final pilgrimage.

The human ability to settle in what seems utterly inhospitable country never ceases to amaze me and on those dry, barren desert plains of northern South Australia, you come across the ruins of old homesteads and railway settlements from the days of the great Ghan rail link between Adelaide and the north. Lake Eyre itself is very hard to approach from land as the country around it is privately owned - the great Anna Creek Station, the size of Belgium, being one such landholding.

From William Creek, a one pub town that once used to be a siding for the Ghan, we took a flight in a small pain over the great Lake which is the only way to get a real appreciation of the size of this inland sea.  Pictures speak volumes so here are some of the colours of Lake Eyre

Steeleye Span and the Countess of Derby

What do a 1970s folk rock group and Charlotte de Trémoile, the Countess of Derby have in common? 

I am showing my age when I say that I was a great fan of Steeleye Span in my youth and by dint of the wonders of the internet, I was drawn back to them recently by this song, BABYLON, which narrates the story of gallant defence of the Lathom House by the indominatable Countess.

James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby was a King's man.  The seat of the Earl was divided between the Isle of Man and Lathom House in Lancashire and in the early days of the war, Lancashire was predominantly royalist. While the Fairfaxs battled for the Parliament in Yorkshire, Derby maintained a firm hold in his home county until late in 1643 when he  left Lancashire to put down a rebellion on the Isle of Man. In his absence Parliamentary forces gained an upper hand in Lancashire and Lady Charlotte found herself compelled to make concessions to Parliament, giving up the entire estate for Parliament's use.

She and her two daughters were allowed to remain in the house and were careful not to provoke the enemy forces. Early in 1644, she received secret word that a parliamentary force was marching against the house. Local feeling rose against the occupants of Lathom House with a preacher at Wigan taking as his text  Jeremiah 50:14 "…(she) much wondered that Sir Thomas Fairfax would require her to give up her Lord's house without any offence on her part done to the Parliament…" The honourable Sir Thomas negotiated with the Lady for some time before she openly rejected all his terms and the Parliamentarians began to move on the house.

 Nearly three thousand parliamentarians sat down before Lathom House but the capture of the old fortress was no easy proposition.  Behind its thick walls the indomitable Countess and her 300 strong garrison had ample supplies to last a long siege.  For two months, the parliamentarians suffered harrying raids engineered by the wily Captain Farmer and the predations of the Lady's accurate sharp shooters. Artillery brought to bear on the house had some impact but not sufficient to breach its defences. Throughout the siege, Lady Charlotte asserted herself as the Commander of her garrison, personally supervising every detail. Not surprisingly contemporaty commentators remarked she had proved herself a better soldier than her husband.

By the end of March, Fairfax had been recalled to Yorkshire leaving a frustrated Colonel Rigby in command. Rigby's efforts at cajoling the Lady into surrender received the following response. "…Tell that insolent rebel, hee shall neither have persons, goods, nor house: when our strength and provision is spent, we shall find a fire more mercyfull than Rigby…"

At the end of May, word reached the defenders that Prince Rupert was on the march to the relief of Lathom and on 27th May, Rigby took his men to interecept the royalists and the siege of Lathom House was over.  Amazingly only 6 of the defenders had been killed over the length of the siege.

 At the end of the siege, Lady Charlotte took her daughters and retired to her husband's estates on the Isle of Man. Unfortunately in June 1644 the northern royalists were comprehensively defeated at Marston Moor and by the end of December, Lathom House eventually fell to the parliamentarians and was completely destroyed.

 The Earl of Derby was captured after the Battle of Worcester in September 1651 and Lady Charlotte died in 1664 at the age of 65. 

The Gallant She Souldiers

Women have always followed armies and their lives and stories are inextricably woven with those of the men.  For the whores, it provided a guaranteed source of clientele and until Florence Nightingale and the establishment of professional medical and nursing corps, the wives and mistresses of soldiers and officers followed the drums and between bringing up their children, performed the duties of laundry maid and nurse.  And then there were those like "Jo" in Kim's book who joined up to fight.

Why did they do it? For some it became an economic necessity, a way of ensuring a semi-regular form of income and even a pension for their families should they be killed rather than remain at home in poverty to become a charge on the parish and eke out their lives in a workhouse.  Then there were those who were simply following their heart either accompanying or searching for their husbands or lovers. There are those like a certain Joan of Arc who had a higher purpose!

The English Civil war was no exception.  Women played an enormous role in the defence of their homes and their towns and in the ranks of both royalist and roundhead there are cases of women standing shoulder to shoulder with men in the ranks. Unfortunately actual details of these women is hard to come by and one has to rely on contemporary ballads such as "The Gallant She –Souldier" of 1655 or "The Valiant Vergin" to gain some insight into the lives of these women. Disguise in the bulky clothes of the period would not have been hard and the sanitary conditions of the day would not have invited much speculation about the sex of their fellow soldier.

Some of the recorded cases of these "she soldiers" include a newspaper report of July 1642 (before the real fighting of the war began) of a young girl disguising herself to be near her lover and in November 1645 Major-General Poyntz of the New Model Army reports capturing a female corporal among the royalist prisoners. One of the best records concerns Anne Dymocke, who came from yeoman stock in Lincolnshire. In 1655, she disguised herself as a man in order to remain with her lover, John Evison. The match had been disallowed by her family so they ran off together and she and John posed as brothers for the next 2 years, travelling the countryside. Following John's death in 1657, she enlisted as a soldier in the Army using John's name and her disguise was only uncovered in Ayr in Scotland. Contemporary reports have only the highest regard for her "modesty".

Although she doesn't belong to the period of the English Civil War, perhaps the best known seventeenth century "she soldier" is Mrs. Christian Davies, known as Kit Cavanagh  or Mother Ross  . She was the subject of a biography by Daniel Defoe "The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, commonly called Mother Ross…Taken from her own mouth when a Pensioner of Chelsea Hospital".   

Born in Ireland 1667, Kit was, by her own account, something of a tomboy.  However she married Richard Walsh and the two ran a pub together until, in 1691, Richard suddenly disappeared, apparently by force or choice, into the army. Kit left her pub and her children, disguised herself as a man by cutting her hair, wearing her husband's clothes and padding her Waistcoat "to preserve my Breasts from hurt" and joined the English Army. There she served as an infantryman and fought at the battle of Landen. Despite being wounded and captured by the French, she maintained her disguise and was exchanged without either side knowing her true gender. Following a duel (over a woman!) in which she killed her protagonist, "Mr. Welsh" was discharged from the Army but promptly re-enlisted as a dragoon and continued a sterling military career. Despite being wounded and having a prostitute claim that "he" was the father of her child, her gender went undetected.  Her guile at concealing her disguise, even extended to a novel way of urinating standing up! After thirteen years she finally found her husband – with another woman! He agreed to keep her secret and she went back to soldiering.  At the battle of Ramillies in 1706 she was wounded again and this time her sex was discovered. So highly was she regarded that the Army continued to pay her and she took on the role as a "sutler".  After the death of her husband (she spent two days turning over the bodies of the fallen at the battle of Malplaquet in order to bury him) she married two more times and saw out her life as a Chelsea Pensioner. She was buried with full military honours.

I suppose I feel some affinity with these gallant warrior women as I served in the military forces for nearly twenty years, admittedly in a peace time army.  It could not have been an easy life for them, but in some ways, compared to the hardships they faced if they remained at hearth and home, at least dressed as men, they were independent mistresses of their own destiny.

On Books and Printing

The original 17th century print machines
To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.  ~John Aikin
On a recent trip to Belgium, I came across a small gem - an intact insight into the world of books and printing in the seventeenth century. The Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. 
This little treasure is a museum of books and printing (ah yes I can see a few eyes rolling) but far from being a dry museum of glass boxes, it is a world heritage site because the museum is in fact the actual home and printing works of the Plantin-Moretus family and is exactly as it was in the late sixteenth/seventeenth century.
The printing house was founded in 1555 by a Frenchman, Christoffel Plantin, who by 1575 was running a thriving business employee 70 people and 15 printing presses (two of the oldest printing presses in the world are still extant in the museum).  The business was inherited by his son-in-law Jan Moretus and the business continued in the family for the next three centuries. The house  printed not only in Latin but also in Greek, Hebrew and other languages, producing itself a bible in three languages (Greek, Hebrew and Latin).
As a home, it is a fine example of a seventeenth century wealthy businessman's home. Many of the rooms are lined with leather, with the design gilded – a sort of seventeenth century wall paper, only affordable by the most wealthy. By far the most impressive part was the library – particularly for the seventeenth century, it is a phenomenal collection.
But the real interest is in the process (the craft) of producing a book. The original letter dies (and the business actually made its own dies) still in their wooden racks are to be seen. The wide range of letters and fonts (many still used today such as Garamond)  in languages such as Ancient Greek and Arabic – in sizes from almost microscopic to full size makes you realise the skill of the typesetters who had to set the forms for the printing press.  The illustrations were generally done by copper plating (a process very well demonstrated at another museum we visited – the Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam). Many of the illustrations were done by Balthasar Moretus' great friend and fellow resident of Antwerp – John Paul Rubens (whose paintings hang on the walls of the house).
To print a page, the form had to be individually inked and then put in the press, one sheet at a time. In another part of the house at two huge desks, the editors sat, red pens in hand. These men were not just editing. To do their job well they were language scholars and academics.  The editing marks are the same as those used today by modern editors. Once the pages had been edited, the book could be printed, page after individual page. These were then wrapped and taken down to the shop to be sold in loose leaf form. If you wanted your book bound then you went to a book binder, a different trade all together.
When seen as an entire process, I came to realise why even after the invention of printing, books were so expensive and so valued. To possess a library even approaching the size of the one owned by the Moretus family, required enormous wealth.
And the reason for the quote at the beginning of this piece? In a corner of the museum there is the Inquisitors list of banned books which included several printed by the Plantin-Moretus press. They nearly came undone, had it not been for some very quick work by Jan Moretus in securing the Catholic Church's contracts!
If you find yourself in Antwerp with nothing to do in the afternoon, don't miss this wonderful museum and tribute to the art of creating a book!

Thank you and Read an EBook week

Thank you to everyone who entered my website contest and congratulations to June and Dana on being the lucky winners.

March 6-12 is "Read and EBook week" and to celebrate you will find my ebooks on sale HERE at 50% off the normal price. 

Welcome to my world and a contest

Thank you for visiting my "new look" website.

If you would like to leave a comment below, on 6 March, I will draw names and two lucky recipients will each receive a copy of one of my ebooks (of their choice). Don't forget to leave an email address where I can contact you!

Look forward to hearing from you,

Alison xxx

The English Civil Wars and Alison Stuart's Books

The English Civil Wars marked a watershed in English history. It is the only time that England became a republic, for a period of 11 years from 1649-1660. 

The complex politics that gave rise to this situation had their roots back in Tudor times. When Elizabeth I died childless, James VI of Scotland, son of "Mary Queen of Scots" became James I of England. He had two sons, the older, Henry died while young leaving the younger son, a timorous, stammering young man to succeed him as King Charles I of England. The character of Charles I has been much debated and discussed but I think one can say that like a lot of insecure men, he had a strong stubborn streak and a heavy dependence on his advisors, at least 2 of whom died horribly; Buckingham by assassination and Stafford on the block. He further raised the ire of the protestant population of England by marrying a Catholic, Henrietta Maria, sister to the King of France.

Above all, Charles had a fundamental belief in the divine right of the king to rule, and when he found himself thwarted by his Parliament, he dissolved Parliament and ruled alone, imposing taxes on an increasingly unwilling and unhappy population.  Forced to recall Parliament in the early 1640s, he found himself increasingly at loggerheads with the country's elected representatives and fled London. In August 1642 he raised his royal standard at Nottingham and England found itself plunged into a long and bitter civil war.


The first part of the civil wars lasted from 1642 until 1646 and ended with the defeat and imprisonment of the King. For the first two years the fortunes of both sides wavered. The battle of Marston Moor in July 1644 funamentally altered the balance, with the King losing the North. His forces were finally crushed at the Battle of Naseby in June 1644 when faced with the revamped Parliamentarian forces ("The New Model Army") under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax. 
At the King's instigation a second civil war flared in 1648 and the King's refusal to negotiate with his captors led eventually and tragically to his execution in January 1649. 

In 1650 his exiled son, Charles II landed in Scotland and tried unsuccessfully to regain his throne by force. The Battle of Worcester in September 1651, which provides the background to BY THE SWORD,  resulted in his defeat and after a six week adventure, Charles II managed to make good his escape to France but many of his supporters were captured, killed or transported to the West Indies where they were used as slave labour on the plantations.

The void left by the execution of the King was filled by the appointment of Oliver Cromwell, the victorious commander of the Parliament's forces, as Lord Protector. The clichéd view of Cromwell's reign is of a dark, cheerless time when puritans banned music, dancing and Christmas celebrations and the "Major-Generals" imposed a martial rule over England.  This is not entirely just. Religious toleration, for example, enjoyed a much freer time under Cromwell then at any time in the previous reigns. 

Cromwell died in 1658 and was succeeded by his son, Richard. "Tumbledown Dick" was not the man his father had been and in 1660 at the behest of the Army, Charles II returned to the throne of England and England's brief experiment with republicanism was over.

The year 1654, when The King's Man is set, was marked by a number of plots against his life. Beginning with the unsettling brick bat, hurled by Miss Granville, "Gerard's Plot" and "The Ship Inn Plot", both of which form the background to THE KING'S MAN, took place exactly as described, but lacked the support of the King himself.  Charles was not willing to lend his support easily to every half baked plan to restore him to the throne. The experience at Worcester was seared deeply into his soul. 

Only one group of plotters actually held the King's Commission and that was "The Sealed Knot" who rose to a brief prominence with a failed uprising the year after this story is set.Through the work of his Secretary of State, John Thurloe, Cromwell had the advantage of a most efficient spy network. In the words of Richard Cromwell, Thurloe had the "key to wicked men's hearts". He knew exactly how to exploit the weaknesses in the men who surrounded Charles II and Charles probably never knew quite who he could trust. To be honest I'm not sure if I am entirely fair to him in The King's Man or in By The Sword, but for the sake of the stories, the coercive methods he employes to get what he wants, seem consistent with the times.

The King's supporters suffered terribly in the years following the end of the fighting. Those who did not flee to France, endured back breaking fines if not the complete sequestration of their estates. If they wished to return to France they had to swear oaths of loyalty against their beloved King.  Like Jonathan Thornton in BY THE SWORD, Kit Lovell, the King's man of the title is, as he says himself, typical of the  "…the flotsam of war, one of the survivors. We're what are left when our friends and our family have nobly sacrificed their fortunes and their lives for a lost cause." 

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