We had another day in London yesterday. It was genuinely lovely, the sky was blue and the capital didn't look as busy as usual - maybe Londoners and tourists had decided to make the most of the sunshine outside of the metropolis on this Bank holiday weekend... First a visit to the Charing Cross market stamp fair on Northumberland Avenue (you can also find coins, currency and postcards). This is held in an underground car park underneath Charing X station every Saturday. My personal finds were an envelope used by a firm of solicitors complete with broken red wax seal (I was really happy about this one as I have a scene with an old-fashioned letter sporting a red wax seal in my second novel, The Book of Thoth, and I have never seen a real one before, funnily enough!). What was sent in it, I wonder? I really regret now not getting that 25 billion dollars Zimbabwean banknote... I could have gotten 3 for £1!!! That's what I call a good change rate. Then I got my hands on quite a moving item... A "postcard" sent by a French soldier, Lucien Legouge, to his godmother - whom he has never met - from one of the German prisoner of war camps (Stalag VII-B, which was located in Memmingen in Bavaria) . The godmother lives in the French occupied territory. I have done a bit of research, and I have found a video of the liberation of that very same camp on YouTube! Amazing footage! Then we were off to The National Portrait Gallery to see The Great War Portraits exhibition. My favourite items in the exhibition are Jacob Epstein's futuristic The Rock Drill, La Mitrailleuse by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, William Orpen's self-portrait, Selbstbildnis als Soldat by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and an elegant portrait of the great war poet Siegfried Sassoon by Glyn Warren Philpot. A very sobering and poignant exhibition. You can listen to a tour of the exhibition with curator Paul Moorhouse HERE. Back on the Central line then to go back to East London. We went to one of our favourite places, Old Spitalfields market, where So Vintage London were having their monthly vintage market. We were there on a special mission but we cannot say more at the moment...
We love walking around all the markets in the area, it is so incredibly vibrant! We love the Brick Lane Tearooms and all the other Truman markets, which is packed full of marvellous antiques! I couldn't resist those two fabulous Edwardian ladies in Swallow and Pips! I wouldn't cross them if I were you! There is a small review of the Shorelines literary festival written by yours truly in issue 16 of Southend's cultural magazine, Level 4 (my long report from the festival can be found HERE).
This should have been a printed magazine, but unfortunately the editor didn't receive enough advertising revenue to pay for the printing. The magazine is available to read online HERE. There are quite a few interesting articles in there so make sure you go and have a read! 29/4/2014 In the post today!Arrived in the post today: the "Crone" EP, which is the first release of Jordan Reyne's new project, the Maiden, Mother, [CRONE] trilogy, complete with personalised messages and signed too! Always nice!
I have raved about Jordan's music before on here (you can read a review of her latest album, The Annihilation Sequence HERE) and therefore I am thrilled that she is working on yet another new project. Jordan is also a writer and I hope to be able to post an author interview with her soon on this very website, which will be gaining a new section in the forthcoming weeks. This has been delayed a bit, but I really want to build up a series of author/publisher interviews on my website over the forthcoming months... 23/4/2014 Book number five ...I know, I know...
I am still working on the editing of Book number two, I have written only one chapter of Book number three and I haven't really done any work at all on Book number four... And then up pops the idea for Book number five! After an animated conversation in the car with Matt ArtPix - those pesky creative couples, always bouncing ideas off each other all the time! - whilst on our way back from Devon, here's what I have come up with: a Hound of The Baskervilles-inspired vintage mystery set on moody Exmoor, with a rural detective named Barton Stacey - it is the name of a parish in Hampshire. When my partner saw it on the map, he decided here and there that it was the perfect name for a detective! I have no idea whatsoever whether I can pull it off or not. I want it to be a bit outrageous, a bit humorous (can I do humour?) and we'll have a cover inspired by vintage classic detective novels... I have my work schedule sorted for the next ten years, I think! 16/4/2014 The Arcane Publishing online shop is up!I have set up an Arcane Publishing online shop - very basic at the moment and only selling copies of I Am a Muse.
I still need to work on it and I hope to upgrade to a better version in a few months' time in order to sell my second-hand and vintage books on there soon. Watch this space! 11/4/2014 Some great new finds!I came back from Devon two days ago with three new books - they will not be for sale via Arcane Publishing as they are for my own private collection, but I am so excited about them that I wanted to share them with you! The first one is "The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries" by Odhams Press, 1936 edition. The cover has a lovely embossed bat on it, there are great black and white illustrations and mini author biographies for each featured writer. It's a real treat, featuring people such as Joseph Conrad, Guy de Maupassant, M.R. James, D.H Lawrence, H.G Wells, J.B Priestley and many other very famous and less famous writers. I cannot wait to start reading these stories! Then I got my hands on a wonderful School Girl's Annual from 1930, full of exciting adventures and lovely illustrations of bob-haired girls that I will use to illustrate some blog posts in the future. And now, my favourite find of them all... A very rare copy of a fabulous book called Dorothy and Lillian Gish, written by Lillian Gish herself and published in 1973 (Lillian Gish still had two full decades ahead of her when she wrote the book!), and absolutely packed-full of incredible pictures - family, movies, theatre sets, etc. most of them from the sisters's personal collection. I am a great admirer of Lillian Gish - she inspired my pen name! - she was an incredible person, actress, scholar, cinema expert. She had a fabulously luminous, ethereal beauty, and you can perceive her incredible intelligence in those determined eyes... A real star and captivating individual. The sisters's lives and careers together spanned seven decades! I am absolutely thrilled to bits to own a copy of this amazing book; it is a true treasure! I love it when I find a newspaper cutting in a second-hand or vintage book. This one contained a cutting of Lillian Gish's obituary in The Daily Mail... A few examples of the incredible pages of the book...
I have just uploaded a new extract of The Book of Thoth to the BOOK'S PAGE. It is not the same one as the previous extract; I have chosen the section in which Adam and Dimitri discover Vangelis Chronos's secret laboratory... Enjoy!
1/4/2014 The dreaded synopsisI have been spending the past week or so working on various documents, writing, editing, and formatting a presentation email, a one-page author biography and a two-page full synopsis. The synopsis has taken me two whole days.
Anyone who tells me that it is super easy to write a two-page synopsis for a Gothic Novel with a word count of 138,800 is a liar! I have spent the past three years writing the book, then the past four months editing it pretty much non-stop, and I am on draft 3. I thought I knew it by heart... I don't! |
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March 2024
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