Welcome to my website!

I write historical fiction. I earn my living as a writer, which I now realise is something which fascinates and is envied by a great many people who wish they could do it too. Since it has been my life for nearly 40 years, I confess I have become blasé about it - this is what I do and it is all I can do. I have no aptitude for plumbing, or fixing cars, or working with figures. (I did spend the first six months in an insurance office when I was 16 – the worst 20 years of my life, it seemed to me.)

Some people think what I do is somehow glamorous and aspirational. Good luck to you if you take it up – this is lonely, frustrating and financially knife-edged work.

The question I am most asked is: how do you go about getting a book published?

I don’t have a clue how to answer that. Get an agent. Get lucky. Get determined … in fact, get grimly determined, for you must never give up once you have started on this road. Get writing. Get a realisation that there is no Harry Potter wand for this, no self-help book (though there is a strange irony in having a book to tell you how to write books - it worked for the author, clearly) and no creative writing course that will tell you how to both write and be creative.

Nor is the process the same for everyone. Iain Banks (or Iain M. Banks, depending on what genre you prefer) confesses that he works for eight hours, though sometimes that starts at 4am. Other authors I have spoken to insist on writing x-thousand words a day. Joanna Trollope works longhand, with pen and paper.

My own method is simple: I use a PC or a laptop. I am happy to have written one paragraph I like in a day, yet sometimes get five thousand class words. I seldom know where the story is going when it starts, but half-way through – the Soufflé Moment, when matters start to sag – I have to recap and plan it, chapter by chapter. I revise constantly. I get new ideas which take the story in a different direction. I would be disappointed if the first draft of a full novel (about 100-150,000 words) took more than three months. Thereafter it might take me all the rest of the year to make it into something I am happy with.

People, especially publishers and marketing departments, love to pigeonhole, so I find myself in the genre of historical fiction. I don’t mind that because no-one is quite sure what historical fiction is. Romance writers get sweaty and Valentine in period costume. Crime writers have Roman detectives, monkish sleuths and forensic scientist nuns in eras as diverse as 1st century Rome, 10th century Ireland and Aztec Mexico. The fantasy SF world plunders history unashamedly.

There are no literary prizes for historical fiction (unlike the aforesaid Romance and Crime and SF) and no shelf on bookstore or library is devoted exclusively to it. So what the bloody hell IS it then?

According to Sir Walter Scott, the historical novel "should be set at least two generations in the past". Ernest Leisy, who defined the American historical novel back in the 1930s, reduced that by half when he claimed it to be "a novel, the action of which is laid in an earlier time".

Whose time? Is Huck Finn a historical novel because I am reading it? It wasn’t to Mark Twain when he wrote it. We have historical fiction about Pearl Harbour (or Harbor). We have historical fiction about Vietnam. Will we get one about the war in Iraq. Why not now?

Personally, I think historical fiction is any fiction set one minute in the past and which enables you to suspend reality and live in that moment. I am with Mario Llosa Vargas all the way in this when he said:

" When you write a novel you do not have the obligation to be true and exact; the only obligation you have is to be persuasive.  And to be persuasive as a novelist, in most cases, you are obliged to transform, to distort reality, to lie, to invent something that is not true - that is the only way fiction can be persuasive."

Yo Mario!

My first three books – hopefully not the last on the theme - are about the Norse, the Vikings, of which much is written, not all of it accurate. For more on that and how I try to get it right, check out the Norse Glossary.