It is with a great amount of pleasure that I welcome novelist and friend, Emma Darwin, to my blog.

So, here's what she's had to say about, amongst other things, her new novel, A Secret Alchemy, Shakespeare, writing historical fiction, and not being derailed.





So Emma, A Secret Alchemy, who’s it for and what’s it about?

It’s about the people who brought up the Princes in the Tower – their mother and her brother – and the Wars of the Roses world they lived and died in. I suppose it has a core audience in everyone who’s ever seen Shakespeare’s Richard III on film or on the stage, or read Josephine Tey’s detective story The Daughter of Time. But it’s really for anyone who likes fiction rooted in real, ‘big’ history, or liked my first novel The Mathematics of Love.



Why did you write it?

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Blogs are a bit like pets. You think it would be nice to have a dog, then once you discover they’re easy to look after, you think it might be nice to get a rabbit too, and the species start to accumulate. This is what is happening to me.

I’m very excited to announce two new blogs today.


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Once more, it’s time to take stock of the past twelve months and work out how to make the next year count – in terms of being more productive, more happy or, like me, by finally understanding that five-a-day doesn’t apply to mini Twix bars or units of Chardonnay. It’s that time of year when we writers resolve once again to… Simply improve? To network on the, er, Net? To get to grips with the position of the apostrophe after a name ending in S?
Well that’s all well and good and bravo to anyone who hopes to achieve the above. What you don’t want to do is make the resolution I have written down every year, since embarking on my quest for literary success:

THIS YEAR I SHALL GET PUBLISHED.

I suspect at this point some of you are cringing – but don’t. It’s an obvious goal for a writer, just like a forty-year chain-smoker resolving to give up the fags. Only a stash of rejection letters will make you realize such grand declarations are pointless and a bit like me resolving to be the next Bond girl à la Ursula Andress. Even if I spent the next six months in the gym, got the obligatory boob job and pumped my face full of Botox, I would still need to kidnap Barbara Broccoli, hold her to ransom and only then might I be in line for an audition (failing a prison sentence)...

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Crawled out of bed at sunset on day one of JaNoWriMo. Come on. It was New Years Day and I was very ill (OK - yes, it was self-inflicted). Consoled myself thinking - ah an evening to think it all through. Broached this notion to friend who said no, just write. Regard her as ‘wise woman’ (and published writer) so open new blank document, format said document, name it and save it. Phew ... [more]

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This time to a piece by Bruce Holland Rogers on Expressionism, Surrealism, Magical Realism, and Fantasy for Flash Fiction Online, which I thought interesting.

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And no sooner had I proclaimed I'd sent off my first submission of the year when - can you guess what happened? - I received my first rejection of the year. Which made the link I posted below even more useful, especially this line:

"Just because that market doesn’t like my style doesn’t cancel out all those that do".

Because it's true.

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At one end of a huge lake a fountain still played and ducks swam about in the dusk. The Palm House, bulked like a grey whale against the darker sky, was closed.

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In 1911 tradesmen arrived in Kent Street near Sydney's Town Hall. They had instructions from the church leaders to dismantle St Andrew's Scots Presbyterian Church which included the removal of several memorial plaques, stained glass windows, a stone font, the timber rafters and cedar pews. One of the memorial plaques commemorated the life of Allan Cunningham a botanist and explorer. The plaque had been on the walls of the Kent Street church since Allan's life ended in 1839, at the early age of 48, when his body succumbed to the privations he had endured over many years of exploring Australia's wilderness.

Everything was transported to Rose Bay and installed in the new Scots church a few kilometres from Sydney Harbour's southern headland. This is where The Allan Cunningham Research Team found Allan's plaque in 2008.

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At the end of the first full year for both my blog and my website, a quick review of the visitor statistics reveals some rather interesting facts.

The website has been host to visitors from 45 different countries, including Azerbaijan, South Korea and Ukraine! They have been lead there by a wide variety of search terms. The most common of these have all included some variation on my own name or Uncle Alonzo's, but prizes for the most bizarre must surely go to "chocolate fireworks", "Paul Cookson poetry about furniture" and "once again many thanks for the lovely afternoon evenning endeed" (sic)! You can decide for yourself which one deserves first place!


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A few weeks ago, in the piece I did for the Independent's My Book of a Lifetime slot, I found myself saying, "Both my first novel, The Mathematics of Love, and now A Secret Alchemy are about love, war, and the life of the spirit. At the most fundamental level, I sometimes think, what else is there to write about?" The rhetorical question was designed to get readers disagreeing, and of course it's only partly true of my own work, let alone anyone else's. There are a million other things to write about, from being conceived, to hunting a great white whale, to chasing a nose which grows legs and joins the Russian civil service.

But both Kindred and Affinity and the little squeaks of a new story, maybe novel-sized, which I can hear in the gaps, are probably also encompassed in that definition (prescription?) of 'love, war and the life of the spirit'. This evening - maybe it's the New Year's Day blues - I'm wondering if it's a bad thing to stick with these same basic preoccupations; or is it simply a bad thing that I've become aware that I do?

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Last night was tedious. Stuck indoors with my sick boyfriend having had to cancel our night out and hoping that our irritating housemate and his even more irritating girlfriend would have broken a habit of a lifetime and gone out. But no, the lock in the front door goes and in they come at about 6 o'clock. All of us looking equally disappointed to see each other there. She makes the effort at least by offering us food and asking what we would like to watch on the box tonight. I cringe at the thought of spending the evening with them - we have nothing, absolutely nothing in common with each other (apart from the flat)and wonder what the hell we are supposed to chat about and then I start to visualise the dreaded midnight hour where we awkwardly wish each other happy new year. It was too much for me and I hissed in my boyfriend's ear telling him,'you better get well in the next half an hour, or I dont know what I'll do.' He perked up considerably and we staggered to the local pub for an hour or so. Returning, we cooked our meal and managed to watch some tedious programme with the housemates, but come half ten, neither us could face anymore and we sloped off quietly to bed. I am thankful the night is over. Very thankful. And equally glad that for the first time, I am experiencing the first day of the New Year without a hangover. Happy New Year!