🇺🇸-born, 🇬🇧-based, novelist. Writing, travel, and more. New novel, "Tomorrow The Grace," out now.
I had spent years in academia. One of the things that attracted me to writing fiction was I had become tired of merely analyzing and tearing apart what OTHERS had created, which is basically what academics do. I did not want just to research and critique (criticize?) someone else’s work, I wanted to do something myself.
It is difficult to know "what" is "really happening" over in the U.S.
Over these same six and some years, I have myself almost given up on writing three times... and could have similarly disappeared from here too.
In my most recent two novels, and continuing in my next, I have chosen to have a go at a group and period not much fictionalized: Americans in Europe starting about a decade after US independence and into the early 1800s.
"It's okay. Take a breath. I don't need to know all about Aunt Esther in Amsterdam just yet. We have all evening and a second date too perhaps, and maybe a lifetime even."
"Manhood" to some men is a Serengeti. They think they must battle other men because in the end the man who wins the affections of the "real" woman partner(s) must be, such men believe, the most "manly" of men: "the King of the Pride."
I had over the decades read far more non-fiction and historical fiction than “fantasy”... and I know that has made its mark on me.
Now there is public Twitter, which often resembles a school playground with those kids who look to stick it to others behind the others’ backs...
During the day I found my mind drifting to thinking about several of my family who served in uniform.
No human being *is* ever, and no group *are* ever, a virus.
Any man who wants to write novels had better remember who will likely constitute the bulk of his readers...
While some "advanced" teens may like them, I agree that over-18s may best identify with and "get" lots more that is in my novels; that some "life experience" probably helps...
I open Twitter regularly to find brave retweets about not messin' with Texas, and Jefferson quoters telling us this is all invented. It's just a bit of flu, they declare. We all gotta die of "sumthin", they add...
In lockdown, and knowing my youngest nephew - he is recently age 18 - is a fan, and realizing it will give us something new to talk about with him by Facetime, Saturday night we decided to watch the first episode of the latest apparent "craze" on Netflix...
"1776" belongs to ALL Americans. With all its faults our America is not exclusively the property of a bunch of mouthy reactionary-right-wingers who insist only they are the "real" Americans and that they have the corner on patriotism and the understanding of freedom.
