Steven J. Pemberton's Blog, page 5
May 31, 2022
May's Writing Progress / Greatcroft is on sale
My mother's novel Greatcroft is now on sale in ebook and paperback from Amazon.
Here's the blurb:
England, 1805. Sir Edward Warstone is ill-prepared to become the squire of Greatcroft after the death of his father. He has sisters to marry off, brothers to set up in professions, a big house to keep from falling down, and not enough money to make all of that happen.
Henry Warstone hopes to gain recognition for his work as a naturalist. George Warstone hopes to finish his studies at Oxford and become a partner in his cousin's law firm.
Eleanor Warstone hopes for a legacy large enough to let her marry her sweetheart. Charlotte Warstone hopes for a legacy large enough to allow her not to marry.
But none of those things will be possible if they don't find out who forged their father's will and declared Edward illegitimate.
Set against the backdrop of the English countryside, and with a cast of memorable characters, Greatcroft is a sweeping tale of love, duty, honour, and most of all, family.
Amazon USA link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1XRRZZH
Amazon UK link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B1XRRZZH
Or search for Greatcroft or her name, J M Pemberton, on your local Amazon store.
All profits from the book will be donated to Alzheimer's Research UK.
Apart from that, I finally resumed writing Command Authority last week. I've written about 3,500 words of it since then, so it now stands at just under 90,000 words.
Here's the blurb:
England, 1805. Sir Edward Warstone is ill-prepared to become the squire of Greatcroft after the death of his father. He has sisters to marry off, brothers to set up in professions, a big house to keep from falling down, and not enough money to make all of that happen.
Henry Warstone hopes to gain recognition for his work as a naturalist. George Warstone hopes to finish his studies at Oxford and become a partner in his cousin's law firm.
Eleanor Warstone hopes for a legacy large enough to let her marry her sweetheart. Charlotte Warstone hopes for a legacy large enough to allow her not to marry.
But none of those things will be possible if they don't find out who forged their father's will and declared Edward illegitimate.
Set against the backdrop of the English countryside, and with a cast of memorable characters, Greatcroft is a sweeping tale of love, duty, honour, and most of all, family.
Amazon USA link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1XRRZZH
Amazon UK link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B1XRRZZH
Or search for Greatcroft or her name, J M Pemberton, on your local Amazon store.
All profits from the book will be donated to Alzheimer's Research UK.
Apart from that, I finally resumed writing Command Authority last week. I've written about 3,500 words of it since then, so it now stands at just under 90,000 words.
May 1, 2022
April's Writing Progress
I've done nothing with Command Authority this month, as I've been working on the other project I mentioned last month, which is almost ready now.
As long-term readers will know, my late mother was, among many other talents, a writer. (This was one of the inspirations for my own writing.) She had various poems, short stories and articles published during her lifetime, but she also left behind a novel. It's called Greatcroft, after the house where most of it takes place, and I've been revising it for publication. It's set in the early 19th century and follows the lives of an English gentry family as a new generation try to make their way in the world after the death of their father. That would be hard enough without his will declaring the oldest son illegitimate and therefore ineligible to inherit the title and the estate...
Watch this space for the release announcement!
As long-term readers will know, my late mother was, among many other talents, a writer. (This was one of the inspirations for my own writing.) She had various poems, short stories and articles published during her lifetime, but she also left behind a novel. It's called Greatcroft, after the house where most of it takes place, and I've been revising it for publication. It's set in the early 19th century and follows the lives of an English gentry family as a new generation try to make their way in the world after the death of their father. That would be hard enough without his will declaring the oldest son illegitimate and therefore ineligible to inherit the title and the estate...
Watch this space for the release announcement!
March 31, 2022
March's writing progress
I haven't written much of Command Authority this month, but have started tracking the number of notes that I haven't addressed yet. A note could be anything from "think of a name for this minor character or location" to "fix this massive plot hole", but it averages out. I had 244 of them at the start of the month, and now have 161.
I also started another project that I hope to be able to tell you about in a month or two, but regular visitors should know better than to expect me to stick to that kind of schedule...
I also started another project that I hope to be able to tell you about in a month or two, but regular visitors should know better than to expect me to stick to that kind of schedule...
February 28, 2022
The World of Stonehenge
After more than two years, we return to our occasional series, "Exhibitions Steven has enjoyed."
The World of Stonehenge opened recently at the British Museum in London. As the name suggests, it sets Stonehenge in a wider historical and archaeological context.
Stonehenge was constructed in several phases over a period of a thousand years or more, and is one of many similar sites all over Europe. The people who built it had no form of writing (that we know of), and their art was mostly non-representational. Any interpretation of what they left behind has to be more provisional and speculative than, say, ancient Egypt, but modern technology and methods are helping to reveal more about them than anyone would have dared to hope even a few decades ago.
The presentation is mostly chronological, and consists mainly of artefacts from Stonehenge and similar sites, along with a few skeletons (and some parts of skeletons, many of whose owners appear to have met violent ends). Many people were buried at or near Stonehenge, and isotope analysis of their bones indicates that they came from all over Europe. (That's just one example of something we couldn't have known until recently. We know from the types of artefacts that a lot of trade happened in this period, but we didn't know whether the people who brought them were "travelling salespeople" or whether they came to stay.)
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that were important to them in life, or that are supposed to help or protect them in the afterlife. The more important the person, the more and better the objects they usually have. But many of the burials near Stonehenge have few or no objects. Instead, caches of objects are buried separately from any grave. Does this mean that burial at Stonehenge was reserved for a certain class of people who followed a monk-like lifestyle? Or that the objects were too special or sacred to be allowed to be regarded as the property of one person?
One of the highlights is a selection of timbers from Seahenge, a circle of oak on the Norfolk coast, erected in about 2000 BC. There were many wooden circles put up around this time, but most of them are gone, leaving only the post holes, because of course timber rots fairly quickly in our climate. Seahenge, though, was flooded not long after it was built, which preserved it. As with Stonehenge, nobody really knows what it was for, although it must have been important. Dendrochronology tells us that all the timber was felled at the same time, and careful analysis of a 3D scan of the trunks shows that at least 50 different axes were used to cut them. So a lot of people must have worked together to make the monument.
Overall, presentation is good. Light levels are low, to protect delicate artefacts, but the labels are easy to read. There were a lot of visitors, but they kept moving, so I didn't get impatient waiting to look at something. (Though to be fair, we went on a Monday, in the hope that it wouldn't be too crowded.)
Allow 75 to 90 minutes to go around, or maybe a bit more than that if you're not going on a Monday. "The World of Stonehenge" runs until 17 July 2022.
The World of Stonehenge opened recently at the British Museum in London. As the name suggests, it sets Stonehenge in a wider historical and archaeological context.
Stonehenge was constructed in several phases over a period of a thousand years or more, and is one of many similar sites all over Europe. The people who built it had no form of writing (that we know of), and their art was mostly non-representational. Any interpretation of what they left behind has to be more provisional and speculative than, say, ancient Egypt, but modern technology and methods are helping to reveal more about them than anyone would have dared to hope even a few decades ago.
The presentation is mostly chronological, and consists mainly of artefacts from Stonehenge and similar sites, along with a few skeletons (and some parts of skeletons, many of whose owners appear to have met violent ends). Many people were buried at or near Stonehenge, and isotope analysis of their bones indicates that they came from all over Europe. (That's just one example of something we couldn't have known until recently. We know from the types of artefacts that a lot of trade happened in this period, but we didn't know whether the people who brought them were "travelling salespeople" or whether they came to stay.)
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that were important to them in life, or that are supposed to help or protect them in the afterlife. The more important the person, the more and better the objects they usually have. But many of the burials near Stonehenge have few or no objects. Instead, caches of objects are buried separately from any grave. Does this mean that burial at Stonehenge was reserved for a certain class of people who followed a monk-like lifestyle? Or that the objects were too special or sacred to be allowed to be regarded as the property of one person?
One of the highlights is a selection of timbers from Seahenge, a circle of oak on the Norfolk coast, erected in about 2000 BC. There were many wooden circles put up around this time, but most of them are gone, leaving only the post holes, because of course timber rots fairly quickly in our climate. Seahenge, though, was flooded not long after it was built, which preserved it. As with Stonehenge, nobody really knows what it was for, although it must have been important. Dendrochronology tells us that all the timber was felled at the same time, and careful analysis of a 3D scan of the trunks shows that at least 50 different axes were used to cut them. So a lot of people must have worked together to make the monument.
Overall, presentation is good. Light levels are low, to protect delicate artefacts, but the labels are easy to read. There were a lot of visitors, but they kept moving, so I didn't get impatient waiting to look at something. (Though to be fair, we went on a Monday, in the hope that it wouldn't be too crowded.)
Allow 75 to 90 minutes to go around, or maybe a bit more than that if you're not going on a Monday. "The World of Stonehenge" runs until 17 July 2022.
February's Writing Progress
Now that the audiobook of
Racing the Storm and Other Stories
is out of the way, I'm back to Command Authority. I've done a lot of planning that I should've done earlier (I've changed my mind at least three times as to who the main villain is, and what they want), and I added about 7,000 words. The book now stands at 86,000 words.
February 4, 2022
January's writing progress
I'd normally start this post with some witty excuse for why it's four days late, but instead I get to announce that my audio version of
Racing the Storm and Other Stories
is finished (as of Sunday) and on sale (as of this morning). It's available from Amazon and Audible right now, and should show up at Apple Books (iTunes) fairly soon.
You can listen to a sample of it here: http://www.pembers.net/rs/sample.mp3 (the start of More Than Just A Job, four and a half minutes, spoiler-free). There's also a video of me performing The Conspiracy Goes Lower Than You Think. That isn't the recording that's in the book, but is close enough for most purposes.
I found that in the two-and-a-bit years since I last produced an audiobook, I'd forgotten some of the steps, so I did what I should've done about six books ago and wrote down the workflow.
All that excitement meant I wrote only about 2,000 words of Command Authority, which now stands at about 79,000 words.
You can listen to a sample of it here: http://www.pembers.net/rs/sample.mp3 (the start of More Than Just A Job, four and a half minutes, spoiler-free). There's also a video of me performing The Conspiracy Goes Lower Than You Think. That isn't the recording that's in the book, but is close enough for most purposes.
I found that in the two-and-a-bit years since I last produced an audiobook, I'd forgotten some of the steps, so I did what I should've done about six books ago and wrote down the workflow.
All that excitement meant I wrote only about 2,000 words of Command Authority, which now stands at about 79,000 words.
January 1, 2022
Goals for 2022
Some of these carry over from 2021, but hey...
- Finish Command Authority. It was originally supposed to be a short story, but is now about 77,000 words.
- Start a new novel, probably a third Dragonrider book.
- Write another Doctor Fung story, preferably one on the main timeline (early 1942). You can read the existing stories for free on Wattpad.
- Publish an audiobook of Racing the Storm and Other Stories. I've done all the recording for this, so it's "just" a matter of editing it and re-recording any parts where I made a mistake that I didn't notice when I was recording.
- Publish an audiobook of The Mirrors of Elangir. I started recording this a few days ago, and have the first nine chapters (about a sixth of the way through).
Come back in just under twelve months to see how well I did!
- Finish Command Authority. It was originally supposed to be a short story, but is now about 77,000 words.
- Start a new novel, probably a third Dragonrider book.
- Write another Doctor Fung story, preferably one on the main timeline (early 1942). You can read the existing stories for free on Wattpad.
- Publish an audiobook of Racing the Storm and Other Stories. I've done all the recording for this, so it's "just" a matter of editing it and re-recording any parts where I made a mistake that I didn't notice when I was recording.
- Publish an audiobook of The Mirrors of Elangir. I started recording this a few days ago, and have the first nine chapters (about a sixth of the way through).
Come back in just under twelve months to see how well I did!
December 27, 2021
2021 Retrospective
It's that time of year when people traditionally look back over what they did in the past twelve months, and this blog is no exception. This is what I said I wanted to achieve back in January -
- Publish Racing the Storm and Other Stories. I did this in November. I thought it was almost finished back in January, and then ended up writing five more stories (there are thirteen in total).
- Publish Command Authority. I thought it was going to be a novella, which was nearly finished, but when I wrote "The End", I realised the ending was too open. So I carried on, and now it's more than twice as long as it was, and it's still not finished.
- Publish a new episode of my Doctor Fung serial. I didn't publish anything in the main storyline, but published a couple of short stories outside it. These are The Case of the Missing Submariners and The Case of the Missing Schedule. You can read them (and the two previous Doctor Fung stories) for free on Wattpad.
- Start a new novel. I didn't do this, partly because Command Authority has been going on much longer than I expected. (It was originally meant to be a short story!) All I did here was write a couple of pages of high-level notes.
The main reason I didn't do as much writing as I would've liked, apart from the pandemic dragging on through its second year, is that my mother died in February. I'm gradually adjusting to not hearing her voice when I phone home, but I know the grief will never fade completely.
As usual, I did a few things that weren't on the list -
- I was one of the guest presenters on an episode of The Weekend Write-In podcast, reading extracts from Doctor Fung and other Earth-F stories.
- Our town council organised a virtual literary festival. I was one of the guests on this, talking about how I beat writer's block and reading from Command Authority.
- In-person events resumed in our town on a small scale, and our writers' group took part in some of them, including a quiz, which we won. (I wouldn't normally mention these in a year-end roundup, but after a year like this, I'll take whatever small victories I can find.)
I think I can take some pride in what I've achieved, but overall, 2021 has been another year I'll be glad to see the back of. Come back in a few days for a dose of optimism about what I'll do in the next twelve months!
- Publish Racing the Storm and Other Stories. I did this in November. I thought it was almost finished back in January, and then ended up writing five more stories (there are thirteen in total).
- Publish Command Authority. I thought it was going to be a novella, which was nearly finished, but when I wrote "The End", I realised the ending was too open. So I carried on, and now it's more than twice as long as it was, and it's still not finished.
- Publish a new episode of my Doctor Fung serial. I didn't publish anything in the main storyline, but published a couple of short stories outside it. These are The Case of the Missing Submariners and The Case of the Missing Schedule. You can read them (and the two previous Doctor Fung stories) for free on Wattpad.
- Start a new novel. I didn't do this, partly because Command Authority has been going on much longer than I expected. (It was originally meant to be a short story!) All I did here was write a couple of pages of high-level notes.
The main reason I didn't do as much writing as I would've liked, apart from the pandemic dragging on through its second year, is that my mother died in February. I'm gradually adjusting to not hearing her voice when I phone home, but I know the grief will never fade completely.
As usual, I did a few things that weren't on the list -
- I was one of the guest presenters on an episode of The Weekend Write-In podcast, reading extracts from Doctor Fung and other Earth-F stories.
- Our town council organised a virtual literary festival. I was one of the guests on this, talking about how I beat writer's block and reading from Command Authority.
- In-person events resumed in our town on a small scale, and our writers' group took part in some of them, including a quiz, which we won. (I wouldn't normally mention these in a year-end roundup, but after a year like this, I'll take whatever small victories I can find.)
I think I can take some pride in what I've achieved, but overall, 2021 has been another year I'll be glad to see the back of. Come back in a few days for a dose of optimism about what I'll do in the next twelve months!
November 30, 2021
November's Writing Progress and a new release
The big news this month is that I finally published my science fiction short story collection, Racing the Storm and Other Stories. It contains 13 tales, some thought-provoking, some poignant, some just plain weird. Go to your local Amazon store to get your copy in ebook or paperback.
Two of the stories in it, History Lesson and Provisional Report on Laniakea Alpha, have previously been offered as bonuses for subscribers to my newsletter. To coincide with the release, I gave subscribers another story from the book, Delivery Driver. If you'd like to read any of these stories before you read the book, you can subscribe to the newsletter. Go to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX and follow the instructions. The welcome email will have a link to where you can read the stories.
The other news is that I wrote another 9,000 words of Command Authority, which now stands at about 70,000 words. As usually happens around this stage in my books, I think I can see my way to the end, though I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there. But I've done it often enough to be confident that I will get there.
Two of the stories in it, History Lesson and Provisional Report on Laniakea Alpha, have previously been offered as bonuses for subscribers to my newsletter. To coincide with the release, I gave subscribers another story from the book, Delivery Driver. If you'd like to read any of these stories before you read the book, you can subscribe to the newsletter. Go to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX and follow the instructions. The welcome email will have a link to where you can read the stories.
The other news is that I wrote another 9,000 words of Command Authority, which now stands at about 70,000 words. As usually happens around this stage in my books, I think I can see my way to the end, though I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there. But I've done it often enough to be confident that I will get there.
October 31, 2021
October's writing progress
Continuing with Command Authority this month. I realised I needed to do some more planning for it (this often happens in the middle of my novels), so I didn't write quite as much as last month. It now stands at 61,000 words.
This weekend, our writers' group took part in a festival that celebrated the diversity of our community. It featured, among other things, an African drumming workshop, laughter therapy, a bring-and-share buffet, and a concert by Soul Jump, an animated band. (A bit like Gorillaz, but more poppy and more family-friendly.) Some video of yours truly at this event might show up online, so watch this space.
This weekend, our writers' group took part in a festival that celebrated the diversity of our community. It featured, among other things, an African drumming workshop, laughter therapy, a bring-and-share buffet, and a concert by Soul Jump, an animated band. (A bit like Gorillaz, but more poppy and more family-friendly.) Some video of yours truly at this event might show up online, so watch this space.
