Kathy Martin's Blog, page 2
October 9, 2013
My critic, the dog
In preparation for the official Welsh launch of The Woodville Connection in Fishguard this coming Saturday, I have been practising reading out loud selected extracts from the book.
In all honesty my first attempts were pretty feeble but I do think I’m making progress. Not that Tova, our elderly dog, is doing much for my self-esteem. When I first started declaiming to an otherwise empty room she reacted with little more than a quizzical stare but repeated readings have brought out her inner critic. Now, the moment I start to read she lurches arthritically to her feet and exits through the patio doors into the garden.
What bother me is that Tova has no problem with my enthusiastic but truly dreadful rendering of musical theatre classics. I say with no false modesty that while I adore singing, I really can’t hold a tune and so I save my musical outbursts for when I am alone in the house (alone, that is, except for the dog). I can warble away to my heart’s content, mangling notes and generally committing GBH of the eardrums, and Tova moves nary a muscle. Yet the minute I stand up, open the book and prepare to read, off she trots.
I’m not entirely sure what this means with regard to the event at Fishguard. I’m hoping that Tova is simply a poor judge of prose readings but in case it turns out she’s spot on in her critical assessment, perhaps I’d better be ready to launch into a song!
In all honesty my first attempts were pretty feeble but I do think I’m making progress. Not that Tova, our elderly dog, is doing much for my self-esteem. When I first started declaiming to an otherwise empty room she reacted with little more than a quizzical stare but repeated readings have brought out her inner critic. Now, the moment I start to read she lurches arthritically to her feet and exits through the patio doors into the garden.
What bother me is that Tova has no problem with my enthusiastic but truly dreadful rendering of musical theatre classics. I say with no false modesty that while I adore singing, I really can’t hold a tune and so I save my musical outbursts for when I am alone in the house (alone, that is, except for the dog). I can warble away to my heart’s content, mangling notes and generally committing GBH of the eardrums, and Tova moves nary a muscle. Yet the minute I stand up, open the book and prepare to read, off she trots.
I’m not entirely sure what this means with regard to the event at Fishguard. I’m hoping that Tova is simply a poor judge of prose readings but in case it turns out she’s spot on in her critical assessment, perhaps I’d better be ready to launch into a song!
October 4, 2013
Musings on jacket design
, jacketHaving just taken delivery of my personal copies of The Woodville Connection, now seems like a good time to pay tribute to Dominic Allen, the brilliant individual who took my rather wishy-washy brief for a jacket design and came up with precisely what I wanted.
I’d asked for something with a late medieval feel that hinted at transience and a mystery with multiple layers. I believe this is exactly the effect Dominic has created with a flickering candle set within the framework of a repeated gothic archway.
The icing on the cake is the knowledge that the archway image used on the cover came from Minster Lovell, the 15th century Oxfordshire ruin which was once the home of Francis Lovell. As many will know, Lovell was one of Richard III’s most loyal adherents and he is name-checked in the book. It is pure coincidence but for some reason it makes me very happy. This leads me on to another aspect of the jacket design that makes me happy – but first I must digress a little.
About 25 years ago I stopped off in the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury en route to somewhere else. As I recall, Tewkesbury wasn’t exactly on the way to the place I was visiting but I knew it wouldn’t take me too far out of my way and I have always had a soft spot for the town due to its important connection with the Wars of the Roses.
As I remember telling my travelling companion over a pub lunch, in 1471 a major battle was fought at Tewkesbury and many lives were lost, among them the young Lancastrian heir. The upshot of this battle (and Barnet, the one immediately preceding it) was that Edward IV was able regain his grip on the English crown. Young Richard of Gloucester commanded Edward’s vanguard at Tewkesbury and the Yorkist victory was due in no small part to his leadership and courage.
Lunch over, we mooched about the town until we found an antiques shop to investigate and that’s when I saw it – a large needlework picture depicting a medieval man on horseback hunting a wild boar. After that, there was never any question that I would be leaving the shop without the picture. It’s true that the boar is grey, unlike Richard’s emblem which is white, but I wasn’t going to let a minor detail like that spoil my joy in finding this gem in Tewkesbury.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this needlework picture is one of my most cherished possessions; my husband is less keen on it but I feel an emotional connection to it that I cannot begin to explain. Now it appears (in a bleached out version) on the back of The Woodville Connection. That makes me very happy indeed.
I’d asked for something with a late medieval feel that hinted at transience and a mystery with multiple layers. I believe this is exactly the effect Dominic has created with a flickering candle set within the framework of a repeated gothic archway.
The icing on the cake is the knowledge that the archway image used on the cover came from Minster Lovell, the 15th century Oxfordshire ruin which was once the home of Francis Lovell. As many will know, Lovell was one of Richard III’s most loyal adherents and he is name-checked in the book. It is pure coincidence but for some reason it makes me very happy. This leads me on to another aspect of the jacket design that makes me happy – but first I must digress a little.
About 25 years ago I stopped off in the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury en route to somewhere else. As I recall, Tewkesbury wasn’t exactly on the way to the place I was visiting but I knew it wouldn’t take me too far out of my way and I have always had a soft spot for the town due to its important connection with the Wars of the Roses.
As I remember telling my travelling companion over a pub lunch, in 1471 a major battle was fought at Tewkesbury and many lives were lost, among them the young Lancastrian heir. The upshot of this battle (and Barnet, the one immediately preceding it) was that Edward IV was able regain his grip on the English crown. Young Richard of Gloucester commanded Edward’s vanguard at Tewkesbury and the Yorkist victory was due in no small part to his leadership and courage.
Lunch over, we mooched about the town until we found an antiques shop to investigate and that’s when I saw it – a large needlework picture depicting a medieval man on horseback hunting a wild boar. After that, there was never any question that I would be leaving the shop without the picture. It’s true that the boar is grey, unlike Richard’s emblem which is white, but I wasn’t going to let a minor detail like that spoil my joy in finding this gem in Tewkesbury.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this needlework picture is one of my most cherished possessions; my husband is less keen on it but I feel an emotional connection to it that I cannot begin to explain. Now it appears (in a bleached out version) on the back of The Woodville Connection. That makes me very happy indeed.
October 2, 2013
Happy Birthday, Richard of Gloucester!
Today is the 561st anniversary of the birth of the man remembered by history as Richard III, although he actually held that title for barely more than two years (from June 1483 to August 1485). For a much greater part of his short life he was known as the Duke of Gloucester, having been given his dukedom at the tender age of eight. It is as Richard, Duke of Gloucester that he appears in my first historical novel, The Woodville Connection, a murder mystery set in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in 1472.
I became an ardent supporter of Richard III when I was 13 and read We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley-Jarman’s magnificent novel-based paean to Richard. Having fallen in love with this fictional version of the young Richard, a few years later I determined to seek out more information about him and thus bought myself a copy of Paul Murray Kendall’s admirable biography, Richard The Third. I found this book so fascinating and readable that I returned to it time and time again, to the extent that the jacket is now in tatters and some of the pages are marred by tea stains, a reminder that I was just as clumsy as a teenager as I am today. It remains one of my favourite books of all time, even though I am now able to see that Murray Kendall might not have been quite as impartial as I once thought him.
I realise that by rambling on about Richard of Gloucester/Richard III, I might have created the impression that he is the central character in my novel. This is very much not the case; that honour falls to Francis Cranley, my totally fictitious, illegitimate hero who has been raised alongside Richard and counts him his dearest friend.
Personable, keen-witted and handy in a scrap, Francis is the man Richard looks to when he has a tricky situation that needs attention. That’s how he comes to be riding off to Lincolnshire one cold December morning, tasked with finding out if the Duke’s old friend Will Fielding is truly innocent, as he claims, of murder.
I became an ardent supporter of Richard III when I was 13 and read We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley-Jarman’s magnificent novel-based paean to Richard. Having fallen in love with this fictional version of the young Richard, a few years later I determined to seek out more information about him and thus bought myself a copy of Paul Murray Kendall’s admirable biography, Richard The Third. I found this book so fascinating and readable that I returned to it time and time again, to the extent that the jacket is now in tatters and some of the pages are marred by tea stains, a reminder that I was just as clumsy as a teenager as I am today. It remains one of my favourite books of all time, even though I am now able to see that Murray Kendall might not have been quite as impartial as I once thought him.
I realise that by rambling on about Richard of Gloucester/Richard III, I might have created the impression that he is the central character in my novel. This is very much not the case; that honour falls to Francis Cranley, my totally fictitious, illegitimate hero who has been raised alongside Richard and counts him his dearest friend.
Personable, keen-witted and handy in a scrap, Francis is the man Richard looks to when he has a tricky situation that needs attention. That’s how he comes to be riding off to Lincolnshire one cold December morning, tasked with finding out if the Duke’s old friend Will Fielding is truly innocent, as he claims, of murder.
