Thursday, November 14, 2013

Last book in the Witchstruck series

Yesterday I hit Send and emailed the third book in my Tudor Witch Trilogy for young Adults to my editor at Random House Children's Books.

Today I am starting a new book.

That's the way I'm writing at the moment. One in, one out. It's high pressure fiction, but there's a rhythm to it which I rather enjoy. Certainly no time to stop and worry about a book's reception. Which can be pleasant or frightening, depending on your perspective.

The manuscript I sent is called WITCHRISE. It concludes the story of Meg Lytton, teen Tudor witch, and her battle against the evil witchfinder. (Are there ever fictional witchfinders who are NOT evil, I wonder?)

Here's WITCHSTRUCK, book one in the series, which is out NOW in the States and the UK. To stick it in a genre box, it's Tudor paranormal romance for all ages.

WITCHSTRUCK at Amazon US.


Monday, November 04, 2013

Extract from ON WARWICK CASTLE

Warwick Castle, Warwickshire, England
Today, another short extract from my long poem ON WARWICK CASTLE, originally published by Nine Arches Press in whenever-it-was, now out of print but still available on Kindle as an ebook.

This poem was written during my year-long stint as Warwick Poet Laureate and is about the past and present Warwick Castle.

It was described by David Morley, poet and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Warwick University, as 'a Modernist piece de resistance' - he also wrote the Foreword - and by David Floyd, writing in Sphinx, as 'one of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship.'

So you have been warned ...


The old man sits behind them
on the grass, clay pipe stuck to his lip:

         ‘It was a day like this
         we rode against the King. Fifty years back.
         I was a boy then.’

A black mist, first thing,
and out of that mist,
the hiss of an arrow-storm, burning.
Those that survived
were sent down into the dark for it.
So, with the concealed blade
from a pocket knife, Master John Smith
etches out his name, and date
of his imprisonment:

Master John Smythe, Guner to his Majestye Highness
was a prisner in this place and lay here
from 1642 - tell the

Here, he's interrupted by the blade breaking
or a tour guide, descending.
There are rules even in darkness.
For a really serious breach,
the guide book tells him,
such as plagiarism or pastiche,
a man might be hung alive in chains
near the scene of his crime.
'Tell them,' he was to have finished,
         'I am a traveller in time,
         a master smith
         forged here in the shadows. I fall.
         I stop. My flesh decays.
         Yet here my name remains until
         the very end of days
         when there may be time
         for the courtyard gift shop, after all.
         Follow the signs.'

Up here in the light, every movement
                  is blinding.


         Stone light, grey
as a pigeon’s feather, cold on the rise
to Blacklow Hill
where Piers Gaveston fell: a moment’s struggle
in wet grass,
then the surprised head of the king’s lover
         rolls free, his lips drawn back,
still twitching.

Down in the village, a boy
armed with a spade
washes his face; trudges to work.

This rough mound, the sign says, was fortified
on the orders of William the Conqueror.
So, while Mercians dug, Normans sat,
pining for the wheat fields of France.
         Hony soyt quy mal pence.
1066 and All That.

         'No matter the right or wrong of it,
         we had to follow Warwick.
         Sheer black mist, first thing,
         and out of that mist,
         the hiss of an arrow-storm, burning.
         My father fell there in the confusion,
         a few miles shy of London.
         He died at Waterloo.
         Took a bullet in the Crimean.
         Fell at Ypres. Was listed
         among the missing.'

The boy stopped speaking ...

Read the rest of ON WARWICK CASTLE as a Kindle ebook. Currently only 77p!