Alison Stuart - Writer
  • Home Page
  • Alison's Books
    • Gather the Bones
    • Australian Historical Romance >
      • The Postmistress
      • The Gold Miner's Sister
      • The Homecoming
    • English Civil War Books >
      • By the Sword (GOTC 1)
      • The King's Man (GOTC 2)
      • Exile's Return (GOTC 3)
      • And Then Mine Enemy
      • Her Rebel Heart
      • Secrets in Time
      • The Guardians of the Crown
      • Feathers in the Wind Collection
    • Regency Romance >
      • About Lord Somerton's Heir
      • A Christmas Love Redeemed
      • Sebastian's Waterloo
    • AUDIO BOOKS
    • Alli Stewart (Contemporary Romance)
    • Free and Short Reads
    • Anthologies
  • A.M. Stuart Books (Historical Mystery)
  • BOOK STORE
  • About Alison
    • Media and Press
    • The English Civil War
    • Gallery
  • Alison's News
    • Moments in History (Blog) >
      • Alison Stuart Blog Archive
      • Hoydens and Firebrands (Archive)
      • Historical Hearts Blog (Archive)
  • Workshops and Talks
  • Readers List Page (password protected)
  • Privacy Policy

Moments in History...

Welcome to Alison's archive blog page.
To find out more about Alison and for a chance for free reads and contests click the link below.

Click Here for a free book

The long and winding road...

10/11/2017

 
I am not sure if I am writing this as a testament to my own dogged, and often blind, stubborness ... or to inspire a fellow writer out there who is despairing of ever climbing the slippery pole of publication.  (And before I begin I warn you this is a longish post!)

In my last post I wrote about my experience at the HNS Conference and the RWA conference in America and how I had felt that, in some ways, the sessions had been directed at me and my self awareness that something in my writing life had to change.

I could not have predicted how fast that change occurred!
PictureBack where it all began... The scribblings of a 15 year old
​But first the journey... 

It has been years... years and years and years, since I dislocated that shoulder skiing and decided to write a story that had been bugging me since I was a teenager. (That story is now the award winning BY THE SWORD, if you haven't read it).

Amazingly that little story got a bit of notice, it finalled or was long listed in contests, it even got me an agent. I was on the road to publishing success - or so I thought.  The agent did nothing for me, the contests only brought more rejections. It was 14 years (yes, really!) before that story found a publisher and even then it was a small US epublisher in a time before epublishing was even really a thing (they hadn't invented ebook readers!). 

Unsurprisingly the story went nowhere and in 2010 I got the rights back and, risking the wrath of the conventionally published world (VANITY... ALL IS VANITY), I self published it with a little known company called Smashwords.  There were no such services as cover designers  or formatters, but it was out in the world. You can trace the evolution of the book by its covers... see below

And all the time I kept writing - the stories I liked to read - while juggling family and career (and I did have a professional career in the law).

I had another ill judged relationship with a US epublisher that ended acrimoniously so those two books GATHER THE BONES (which had huge contest success) and SECRETS IN TIME, joined the two already self published. I was the accidental indie author. 

OK, I thought... I shall write to market and wrote my first (and only) regency romance and to cut a long story short, it did the usual rounds of contest success but submission failure until it was picked up by the wonderful Kate Cuthbert at Escape Publishing (Harlequin Australia). Not only did Kate publish LORD SOMERTON'S HEIR but she encouraged me to turn my two English Civil War books, BY THE SWORD and THE KING'S MAN, into a trilogy with the addition of EXILE'S RETURN.


Meanwhile... a wise woman once asked me what I liked to read and when I 'fessed up that I mostly read mystery she encouraged me to turn my hand to writing mystery. Easier said than done... but I had an idea up my sleeve from the years we lived in Singapore and over the 2011 NaNoWriMo, I wrote the bones of the first Harriet Gordon story. But writing mystery is VERY different from writing romance so Harriet has had many, many incarnations. More about Harriet later... 
​

The evolution of a book... 

Picture
2007
Picture
2010
Picture
2012
Picture
2013
​Fast forward to July 2017.
With 8 published novels (4 indie and 4 with Escape) I felt I had stagnated. I could go on doing the same thing (and I acknowledge the support of my loyal band of readers!)  but I was losing heart. I either had to take this writing game seriously or get out. So I took a huge leap of faith. With the support of my long suffering spouse I walked away from the day job, leaving behing 30+ years of being a lawyer/company secretary.


And then something extraordinary happened... as if the great god Karma had rolled out of bed and decided it was time I was due a bit of good fortune. I was asked by a senior editor at Harlequin MIRA (Aus) to put in  a proposal for an Australian set historical romance series. (How I arrived at the idea for an Australian series is a whole other story). I managed to get the synopses for 2 books I hadn't written (remember I am a PANTSER!) and sample chapters to the editor before I left for the USA.

The purpose of my trip to the USA was to attend the Historical Novel Society conference in Portland and the RWAm conference in Orlando (with 5 weeks of filling in time - my husband's words not mine!). Karma continued to dog my path.
1. In Portland I had the opportunity to pitch my Singapore stories to the agent of my dreams. I've done hundreds of pitches which have always come to nought so all I could do was cross my toes and fingers and hope for the best.
2. In Orlando it was as if every session I attended was addressing me. Wonderful, experienced writers talked about how a writer needs to reinvent themselves over the course of the career. Reinventing... yes, that was what I was proposing to do.

On my return from America, the long awaited email from Harlequin arrived, accepting my proposal and offering me a print contract for my 2 "Maiden's Creek" books and as if that wasn't enough, within a few weeks of me submitting to her, the US agent I had pitched Harriet to, rang me offering to take me on and work with me to find my Singapore stories an American publisher. Much champagne has been drunk at the Stuart house! 

Now the HARD work begins, and you will find me very quiet for a long time. The first Maiden's Creek book won't hit the shelves until the middle of 2019 (and the second in 2020). And then there are the Harriet stories. Book 1 is done but it is a series so Book 2 needs to be worked on in the hope it finds a home. 
​
Picture
Welcome to Maiden's Creek...
​The point of this article is not to skite... I have worked hard but I KNOW  that nothing in this business is certain. 

My point is that it has taken 25 years but if I have never been more certain of anything in my life, it is this... I have always wanted to be a writer, a teller of stories and nothing has deterred me from that dream. There have been dark moments, times when my life outside writing threatened to overwhelm me, but not once did I lose sight of my dream.

​It's still got to happen but the first time I see my book in an airport bookshop (or ANY bookshop) will be  a red letter day, the validation that dreams can come true..
Picture

Writing a Great War story...

11/12/2015

 
Writers are often asked where they get their idea for a story. Inspiration can strike in the most unexpected ways and sometimes there is no one trigger point for a story. 

GATHER THE BONES is a story that came from a number of different sources but it is perhaps a little brown book published in 1920 that I found at the back of my parents bookshelves that sowed the seeds of my hero, Paul’s war. “Ypres and the Battle for Ypres 1914-1918, An illustrated history and guide”.


 It seems extraordinary that less than two years after the end of the war there was already a tourist industry around the battlefields, but the clue comes from a little insert on the town of Ypres which describes it as the “Centre for English, French and American Pilgrims”. In this little leaflet are advertisements for “Touring Cars” (wreaths by arrangement “placed on graves and photographed”), Hotels bearing the names “The Splendid” and “Hotel Britannique”. A good cup of tea in three minutes can be obtained from the Patisserie and Tea Rooms of Me Ve Vandaele on the Grand Place.


The Michelin Guides are ubiquitous today and I have a small collection of the narrow green guides for parts of France I have visited. It began in 1900 just as the first automobiles were appearing on the roads of  France. Two enterprising brothers, André and Edouard Michelin decided to produce a small guide, given free to motorists, listing petrol stations across France and information on where to get your vehicle repaired as well as crucial information on accommodation and meals.  In 1904 the Guide went international, with the publication of the Michelin Guide Belgium. 

The company must have seen the opportunity that existed and even while the war still raged it started to produce a produced a series of guides to the battlefields. According to a page in the guide, during the war itself, Michelin converted a warehouse into a hospital for the wounded, all funded by the company. It opened on September 22 1914 and the first wounded arrived that night. In all nearly 3000 soldiers were treated at the Michelin Hospital. (An illustrated booklet on how Michelin "did his bit" will be sent "free on application")



We are informed that during the Great War, Ypres was bombarded continuously for four years and 250,000 British fell defending the city. “Today Ypres is being quickly reconstructed,out of 5,000 Houses destroyed, 3,000 will have been rebuild by the end of 1923; thanks to the tenacity of the Population and financial help from the Belgium Government.”
“A number of quite up to date Hotels, providing every comfort: Central Heating, Electricity, Baths etc are already in full swing. ..The country around is agricultural, with villages and farms being rebuilt once more...Every convenience and comfort for Pilgrims and Tourists is to be had in Ypres...”


So we have hired our touring car (with a British Driver), fortified ourself with a 3 minute cup of tea and off we go. The most extraordinary thing about this little book are the illustrations: Before and After shots of little towns, chateau, woods and churches. Our touring car is pictured driving down a road lined by the broken stumps of trees and this is another taken at an intersection in what would have once been the thriving little town of Messines. 




My husband and I visited modern Ypres in 2005. Like the little towns of the Ypres salient it has been rebuilt, reconstructed to look as it did before 1914, but in the flat, green fields of the Ypres salient are the many, many cemeteries and memorials and in places it is still possible to see the craters and trenches that once criss crossed the area. 

Even ninety years after the last gun was silenced, the bodies of the missing were being discovered and a reinternment was occurring while we were there. I tried to imagine what it was like for the families of those young men who had no graveside to mourn and slowly the idea for Gather the Bones took shape.

I had Paul’s war there on my desk. In that non descript little book I had the images of the battlefields, the trenches, the concrete machine gun posts but more importantly I had the pilgrimage. Evelyn, Charlie’s mother, has to see where her son died, to really believe he is dead. It was the Evelyns who bought the 1920 Michelin Guide, booked the Hotel Splendid, bought their wreath and in their hired touring car, laid their ghosts to rest.

About GATHER THE BONES

Picture
England 1922: In the shadow of the Great War, grieving widow, Helen Morrow and her husband’s cousin, the wounded and reclusive Paul, are haunted not only by the horrors of the trenches but ghosts from another time and another conflict.

The desperate voice of a young woman reaches out to them from the pages of a coded diary and Paul and Helen are bound together in their search for answers, not only to the old mystery but also the circumstances surrounding the death of Helen’s husband at Passchandaele in  1917.


As the two stories become entwined, Paul and Helen will not find peace until the mysteries are solved.

Halloween - The Ghosts of Gwydir Castle

11/2/2015

 
Some years ago I took my sons, then aged 12 and 8 on their first visit to England. For reasons I won’t go into, my husband was supposed to accompany us but didn’t make the trip so it was just me and the two boys circumnavigating England in a Fiat Punto… and we did castles. I mean we really DID castles! Starting in the Tower of London on our first day through Warwick Castle, Ashby de La Zouch, York and down into Wales.
If you want to see castles then Wales is the place to go. The great castles built by Edward I as a symbol of his power and authority over the rebellious Welsh ring the Welsh border down through the Marches and across the coastline. However by the late middle ages, the need for these great stone edifices had diminished and the wealthy landowners were building elegant houses with minimal fortifications and “all mod cons”.
Our adventure was in the days before GPS and Navman and I was driving a car with an 8 year old and a 12 year old who, for all his badges in Scouts, appeared incapable of reading a map. So every evening, in consultation with the road atlas, I would painstakingly write out our route for the day for him to read out loud to me.
Gwydir Castle - exterior
This system worked well until we got to Wales where all the road signs are in Welsh. The inevitable happened and we got lost… spectacularly lost somewhere in northern Wales and on a back road I saw a sign that said “Gwydir Castle”. If nothing else it was a chance for a break and to consult the road map and ask a friendly native where we were. 
As it turned out Gwydir Castle was not so much a castle as a late medieval/Tudor fortified manor house. Probably owing to its strategic position in a narrow valley, the site of Gwydir had been in continual occupation for centuries before Meredith ap Ieuan ap Robert, the founder of the Wynn dynasty, built the present Gwydir Castle, using material from the dissolved Abbey of Maenan. Of particular interest to me, as a student of the English Civil War, the house was reputed to have been visited in 1645 by Charles I, as the guest of Sir Richard Wynn, 2nd Baronet, Treasurer to Queen Henrietta Maria, and Groom of the Royal Bed Chamber.
It had recently been purchased and opened up to the public by the owners to raise the money to restore it (I believe it is now a B&B). At the time I happened upon it in 1996, these works were very much in their early stages and it was dark, gloomy and overgrown. Everything you would imagine a thoroughly haunted house to be! In preparing for this article I found wonderful images on the internet which bear no resemblance to the half derelict building it had been!
Gwydir Castle - gates
I have an interest in ghost stories and the paranormal and while I have not ‘seen’ a ghost I have visited places where I have felt decidedly uncomfortable and Gwydir was one of those places. From the moment I stepped through the heavy front gate, it felt as if my heckles went up and I am not surprised to see it described (more recently) on its website as “One of the most haunted houses in Wales”. 
Needless to say we were the only visitors so I got talking to the caretaker, asking her about the spectral inhabitants of the house. The most frequent ‘visitor’ is a grey (or white) lady thought to be the ghost of a servant girl who was murdered after becoming pregnant during a romance with one of the lords of the manor and her body  hidden in a wall space beside a chimney breast (a priest hole). The presence of this apparition is said to be accompanied by the stench of decaying flesh. It is said that the 5th Baronet confessed on his death bed to a murder in his youth. The other suspect is the first Baronet, Sir John Wynn (whose ghost is also seen) who was reputedly something of a local tyrant.
Also seen is a monk (said to have died when trapped in a tunnel from a secret room) and the sound of crying children is also heard.
Gwydir Castle - interior
Thankfully our visit was uneventful and free of nauseating smells of decay. However the chatty caretaker did tell us about the ghost dog. She owned a dog which came with her to work at the Castle. Hearing barking she looked out of the window and saw her dog joyfully gambling in the garden with a strange dog (she described as “a tall, grey dog”) she had never seen before. She went out to call her animal in and at the sound of her voice the second dog just vanished. FOR MORE ON THE GHOSTS, CLICK HERE
Some years later, the owner of the house found some bones in the cellar during the restoration and had them sent away for analysis. The result came back saying they were the bones of a dog. Conscious that the bodies of animals were often used in the foundations of houses to ward off evil spirits, she restored the bones to where they had been found and the spectral dog has not been seen since.
We went on to visit Conwy Castle (where I nearly lost the boys to a harrassed school teacher in charge of a large school group), Ruthin Castle (complete with hokey medieval banquet), Harlech Castle (Men of…) and my favourite castle, Denbigh Castle but if I look back at that trip, it is the quiet, brooding menace of Gwydir Castle that stays with me more than any of the others!
Picture
FOR A GHOSTLY TALE, READ ALISON STUART'S GATHER THE BONES... 

In the shadow of the Great War, grieving widow, Helen Morrow and her husband’s cousin, the wounded and reclusive Paul, are haunted not only by the horrors of the trenches but ghosts from another time and another conflict.

The desperate voice of a young woman reaches out to them from the pages of a coded diary and Paul and Helen are bound together in their search for answers, not only to the old mystery but also the circumstances surrounding the death of Helen’s husband at Passchandaele in  1917.

As the two stories become entwined, Paul and Helen will not find peace until the mysteries are solved.




    FREE BOOKS and READS

    Click the Button below for more details  

    FREE READ

    Archives

    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015

    Categories

    All
    Alison Stuart
    Amy Rose Bennet
    And Then Mine Enemy
    Anzac Day
    A Person Of No Consequence
    Archer
    Aubrey Wynne
    Author Spotlight
    Battle Of Worcester
    Belinda Williams
    Beverley Eikli
    Blue Stocking Belles
    Book Giveaway
    Book Sale
    Book Sweeps
    Box Set]
    Brugel
    Bunyip
    By The Sword
    Charity Anthology
    Clean Read
    Contemporary Romance
    Convict Ancestor
    Cover Reveal
    Dante's Gift
    Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
    Ebony McKenna
    Edward Gibbons
    English Civil War
    English Civil War Fiction
    Escape Publishing
    Etienne DeMestre
    Eurovision
    Exile's Return
    Family History
    First World War Fiction
    Flying Into The Mist
    Free Kindle Book
    Friday Fun Facts
    Gather The Bones
    Ghost Stories
    Gift Card Giveaway
    Guardians Of The Crown Series
    Gwydir Castle
    Halloween
    Halloween Ghosts
    Historical Fiction Giveaway
    Historical Novel Society
    Historical Romance
    HNS Conference 2017
    If I Kissed You
    Jo Beverly
    John Black
    Louise Reynolds
    Mary Hyde
    Matthew Hopkins
    Melbourne Cup
    Mistletoe Marriage And Mayhem
    MJ Logue
    Modern Heart
    New Release
    Ondine Series
    Organic Writing
    Plotting Or Pantsing
    Pozieres
    Prosper DeMestre
    Rafflecopter Giveaway
    Regency Christmas
    Regency Christmas Novellas
    Richard Conway Lowe
    #RWA17
    Sasha Cottman
    Simeon Lord
    Spencer Percival
    St. Luke's Hospice Plymouth
    Tales From The Sergeant's Pack
    Tea Cooper
    The Commandery
    The King's Man
    Traveller Weddings
    Virginia Taylor
    Walhalla
    Warwick Assizes
    Williamstown Literary Festival
    Witches
    World War One
    World War Two Fiction
    Writing And Publishing
    Writing Career
    Wrtiing Craft
    Wtichfinder General

    RSS Feed

    Email Alison