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Friday Fiction
Friday Fiction: Iseult Gonne and Lucien Millevoye Take Tea
Maud and Iseult Gonne are living in Normandy, taking refuge from the war in Paris, when they hear that John MacBride, Maud’s husband, has been executed. This leaves Maud frantic to get back to Ireland. She dispatches Iseult to London, to fetch their friend, the poet Willie Yeats.
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If you read this speech at the start of a novel, would you read on?
It’s Friday Fiction here on the blog, so I’ll be blogging Dancing in the Wind, Book Two in the Yeats-Gonne Trilogy here with weekly extracts in the Friday Fiction slot.
I’m thinking of opening Dancing With The Wind with one of Maud Gonne’s fiery political speeches.
Question: Would you read on if this was what you found in the first pages of a book?
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Blogging Dancing in the Wind, Book Two in the Yeats-Gonne Trilogy
I have done some shuffling on the fiction front and I’ll be blogging Dancing in the Wind, Book Two in the Yeats-Gonne Trilogy here weekly in the Friday Fiction slot.
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Friday Fiction. In The Hour First Chapter
Friday is Fiction day on the blog. Here is the prologue to In The Hour: The Third Book in the Irish Trilogy.
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Friday Fiction: Fiction Newsletter September 2019
I just dispatched my Life in Fiction Newsletter September 2019. Are you signed up to receive it? For a long time I defined myself as a novelist but for the past couple of years, I’ve been concentrating on nonfiction and poetry. It feels good to be back in the land of story. I write family murder mysteries mainly, books that are full of buried secrets and lies of the past that corrode the present. They are what’s known as #timeslip novels, with two alternating timelines. In my books, the protagonists have to go back, and understand what happened, so they…
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Friday Fiction: Interview About The Irish Trilogy with Regina Joyce Clarke
I thought you might enjoy this selection from an in-depth interview I’ve just done with author Regina Joyce Clarke. The full article, which also discusses background, influences, poetry, creative advice and self-publishing can be found on Medium.com. The extract below is the part of the interview about the Irish trilogy. Interview about the Irish Trilogy: Writing Did you plan a trilogy from the start? No. It was all one book but it was too long and had to be split. And then a third and final part of the story presented itself… Did you know what each book was to have in it…
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Friday Fiction: A Historical Literary Dinner with Ezra and Dorothy Pound, WB Yeats, Iseult Gonne and Georgie Hyde Lees
This is an extract from Dancing In The Wind, the second book in my WB Yeats trilogy. It is narrated by a working-class Irish Parisienne, Rosie. Iseult Gonne has been dispatched to London by her mother, Maud Gonne, to get her longtime friend and one-time suitor, WB Yeats, to come to France and escort her and her family to Ireland. There the 1916 freedom fight has resulted in the execution of the revolution’s leaders, and further suppression of the Irish people, by the British government. As somebody who laid the groundwork for this revolution, Maud is anxious to be there at this important…
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Friday Fiction: How To Self-Edit Book 1 of A Trilogy While Planning Book 2
Writing a trilogy is a massive undertaking and I’m at work on Book 2 of my Yeats trilogy, Dancing in the Wind (while continuing the incubation work on the final novel of my Irish trilogy, In the Hour.) That’s the fiction fun around here at the moment. So how do you self-edit the first book of a trilogy in a way that helps to plan out the second and third? Here’s how I handle it. A. Tell yourself what happens as a three-part story, using two sentences for each book. In the case of my Yeats trilogy it’s as follows:…
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Friday Fiction: Work Has Started on In The Hour
I get a lot of emails asking about In The Hour, the final book in my Irish Trilogy. I’m pleased to say that work has started. It’s in the earliest stage and I haven’t put down a delivery date yet. I’ve learned through painful experience not to do that while I’m still only in incubation: the second stage in writing a book. There’s something about this stage, perhaps because it’s the most imaginative stage of the process, that is completely removed from reality. On the hand, we underestimate the amount of work it will take to complete the work, to…
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WB Yeats Was An Indie Author: The Publishing History of The Secret Rose
Independent (“indie”) authors, as defined by the Alliance of Independent Authors, are writers who also publish. An indie takes on the role of creative director, not just for their books but also for their writing career. By any of these measures, WB Yeats was an indie author. He was very hands-on in the publication of his work from the start, working closely with his friend and sister occultist, Althea Gyles, on the design for the his books All of these have a crucified rose on the cover, the “rosy cross” of Rosicrucianism, reflecting the extensive rose symbolism in the poetry. Later, he helped his sister found Dun Emer press, later…
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