April 30, 2020
April 30, 2020
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On the 12th July 2018, at five o’clock in the evening, I wrote in my journal: “I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a […]
April 28, 2020
April 28, 2020
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‘May Day Celebration’ An extract from Dragonclaw, Kate’s first published book (The Witches of Eileanan: Book 1) One night they cantered up a steep incline […]
February 25, 2020
February 25, 2020
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Once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in a small kingdom in the middle of a crazy patchwork of other small kingdoms, each […]
February 25, 2020
February 25, 2020
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One of the problems of writing historical fiction which draws on the lives of real people is that, well, they’re real people. And if you are […]
February 23, 2020
February 23, 2020
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Writing Lessons I Learned From Charles Dickens Research deeply, and read only ‘books (that have) the air of the time in them.’ Plan slowly & carefully […]
February 16, 2020
February 16, 2020
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A Tale of Two Cities was Charles Dickens’s twelfth novel, and was written and published at a tumultuous time of his life. He was at that time in his mid-40s, unhappily married with ten children aged between 20 and 5. He was already famous, having written such great classics [...]
February 9, 2020
February 9, 2020
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I was recently contacted by a group of college students in the US who are studying my books as part of a module on fairy tale […]
December 1, 2019
December 1, 2019
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Here is the Q & A article on Vasalisa The Wise published in Good Reading Magazine Dec/Jan 17-18 1)The original Russian tale of Vasilisa seems […]
November 24, 2019
November 24, 2019
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To celebrate I thought I would explore the history of the titular tale, which is one of the best-known and best-loved Russian fairy-tales. An old oral tale, it was transcribed by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev between 1855-67 and first published in his collection, Russian Fairy Tales. There are many different versions of the story [...]