Shop Talk: Juggling

The year is not yet a month old, but very nearly. As my New Year’s resolution regarding social media is to post here more and visit Twitter less I’d planned to post to my blog at least once a month. Some posts, such as this, will be chatty accounts of what I’ve been reading, writing, thinking of late. FYI, I took the photo above on my afternoon walk yesterday. A long walk along the lake is one of my favorite means of getting out of the way of my imagination.

Writing-wise I am busier than usual, juggling two books at once. I’ve friends who are often finishing one book while beginning another but I’ve never found that doable—until the past few weeks. I didn’t intend to jump into another book, it just happened, and I’m always curious to give free rein to such creative impulses. I’d begun to play with ideas for the Owen Archer that’s due under contract in March 2024, and started jotting notes on one of the white boards in my office, gathering reading material next to the reading chair in here about what’s going on in 1376-77, and then Tom Merchet started popping into my head at odd times and I realized it’s high time I became better acquainted with him. I never really explained why he’s the brewer rather than Bess, women typically doing the brewing at this time in England, and he’s decided to fill me in on how it came about. So books about ale and brewing are also accumulating next to my reading chair.

AND I’m almost finished with a major rewriting of the middle third of an experiment, writing in the genre I abandoned for historical fiction–i.e., fantasy, or, more appropriately in my case, the otherworldly ideas that existed in the medieval period I write about, greatly inspired by Richard Firth Green’s study Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Penn Press 2016). I’ve incorporated this aspect of medieval culture in small doses in almost all of my books, especially in the character Magda Digby but also Christiana in the Margaret Kerr trilogy, Efa in A Triple Knot, and Petra in the Kate Clifford series, and I wanted to see whether I could sustain it throughout an entire book. I’m using a character from the Owen Archer series who I have long wanted to bring front and center—with my agent’s enthusiastic encouragement. It’s much, much more challenging than I’d imagined. I’ve learned a great deal, especially through copious, wide-scale rewrites. I always revise and rewrite as I go, my first draft being what others might consider their 10^th or 15^th, but this book has morphed and changed as I’ve discovered what I want to say and how I want to shape it. That’s all I’m ready to reveal about it at present, as I don’t know whether I’ll ever deem it ready for publication. But you can see why I’ve been eager to dive into the next Owen Archer—a return to the familiar!

At least I’ve stayed within the century I often feel I know better than the two in which I’ve lived, so both books are historical, set in late 14^th century Yorkshire.  

*****

Some reading notes:

I am enjoying Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, An Investigation by Ronald Hutton (Yale University Press 2022), learning about yet another arena of historical research in which the Victorians made it up as they went along, a “pagan survival” to suit their own pet theories about folklore, mythology, legends, and archeological sites. He covers Mother Earth, The Fairy Queen, The Lady of the Night, The Cailleach, and, in an epilogue, The Green Man. It’s a delight.

I’ve been rereading The Beguines of Medieval Paris by Tanya Stabler Miller (Penn Press 2014) as background while reading the ARC of a novel based on her research, coming out in April from Pushkin Press. The Mirror of Simple Souls by Aline Kiner. More about that in a future post because I’m not quite finished with the novel, but it is so engaging. It’s reminded me how much I enjoyed Tanya’s study of the Beguines (you’ll remember them from the Kate Clifford series) and her contribution to this blog when it was published. I’ll repost that soon.