Guest Post: Confessions of a Mystery Addict by Kate Ellis, Author of 'The Shroud Maker'

A grisly find . . . and a faceless enemy . . .

Could there be a link between two women? One missing, one brutally murdered? Is there a connection to a fantasy website called Shipworld which features a supernatural hero with a sinister, faceless nemesis called 

The Shroud Maker?

Will history repeat itself once again?

Now in Paperback on Amazon UK and Amazon US 

Looking back I guess I’ve always been a writer, scribbling away in secret; poems, short stories; even a couple of very bad and rapidly abandoned novels in my student years.  I always had a vague dream of being published but it wasn’t until my youngest child went to nursery and I had empty hours to fill that I realised that it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Ever since childhood I’ve been addicted to mysteries, starting with Enid Blyton’s mystery stories then graduating to Agatha Christie and all the other greats of crime fiction’s golden age.  I always had my nose in some tale of murder and mayhem so when the time came for me to begin writing seriously, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d turn to crime.

Writing became something I felt I had to do; a compulsion if you like.  I needed to get words down on that page and I needed to tell a story that would intrigue people and keep them guessing to the end.  I loved creating suspense and laying false trails.  In short, when I began to write crime fiction I felt as if I was coming home.

The Lure of the Past

I wanted to write about contemporary crime and examine present day preoccupations and people. But I also had a passion for history and a deep interest in archaeology (I’m often to be found in some muddy trench or other) so I couldn’t decide whether to give my first book a purely historical setting or go for a modern day police procedural. 

However, my dilemma was soon solved when I hit of the idea of combining a modern day mystery with one from the past.  This worked so well that in each of my Wesley Peterson books since, a parallel historical mystery runs alongside the present day investigation.  I make life hard for myself by choosing a different historical period in each book but I confess that research is one of my favourite parts of writing.  The only problem is that once I become engrossed in a period, it takes a lot of discipline to put those history books down and start writing.

Waiting for Inspiration

Every book is different.  Sometimes it’s the historical story that comes to me first and sometimes the modern day narrative.  There’s usually something that triggers the idea for a story, such as a chance remark, a newspaper story or the discovery of an intriguing event in history. 

In my latest book The Shroud Maker my trigger was the sight of a young woman walking down a wooden jetty and clambering aboard a sleek white yacht moored on the River Dart in Devon.  An unremarkable event you might think, apart from the fact that she was wearing a long flowing skirt and carrying a violin case.  I began to wonder what she was doing there.  And then my mind wove a whole story around her fictional counterpart and the result was a disturbing tale of murder and obsession.  Add to this Devon’s medieval past, a festival celebrating a privateer from the middle ages (with connections to Chaucer) and a sinister fantasy website and The Shroud Maker came into being.

That’s it really.  Inspiration can be anywhere.  It’s just a case of being ready when it appears!

Kate Ellis

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About the Author

Kate Ellis was born and raised in Liverpool and now lives in north Cheshire. Keenly interested in history and archaeology, she is the author of a crime series featuring DI Wesley Peterson, the latest of which is The Shroud Maker. Her novel, The Plague Maiden was nominated for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year in 2005 and she has twice been shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger and for a Barry Award in the USA. To learn more about Kate and her books visit Kate's website www.kateellis.co.uk and find her on Twitter @kateellisauthor

Every Little Thing by Ash Omurah

New on Amazon US and Amazon UK

Every Little Thing is a collection of interrelated short stories that begins with a young boy who walks into an insect shop and decides to buy a stag beetle missing a leg, rather than a “normal” six-legged beetle as the shopkeeper recommends. When the boy divulges his reason, the shopkeeper is initially surprised, but gains a new outlook on life and is inspired to do something he would not have considered before.“defected” stag beetle, an incident that serves as a springboard for various other interconnections that ripple through the lives of the book’s characters.

They include a junior high school girl who is secretly ashamed that she lives a much less privileged life than her best friend; a pair of shy high school students trying to improve their image in the eyes of their classmates; a college student who works nights as a bartender and finds herself at a crossroads in life; and a career-driven woman who is beginning to question the professional choices she has made.

In this life-affirming book, there are no characters with unfortunate lives, only characters with unfortunate outlooks. Personal handicaps—such as relative poverty, cripplingly introverted personalities, and physical disabilities—are not obstacles that need to be overcome, but qualities that give each character their unique identity. As each character grows through the pages of this book, you will realize that their stories are interwoven with each other and find yourself delving more deeply into the world of Every Little Thing.

Every Little Thing was first published in May 2007 in Japan. Since then, the book has sold over 400,000 copies. The first story in the book, “The Boy and the Beetles,” was featured in official textbooks for ethics classes in schools, and some college entrance exams featured questions related to Every Little Thing.

As a result, the book was translated into Korean and Chinese and published in South Korea, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and was turned into a stage play that ran in both 2008 and 2009. Both versions starred two of Japan’s top actresses in the lead role. 

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About the Author

Ash Omurah is a best-selling fiction writer in Asia and lives in Fuji-City, Shizuoka, Japan. He has published more than 40 books on IT-related topics. In 2004 alone, he managed to place nine books among the top 14 VBA books on Amazon.co.jp, and was introduced on a TV show as “Japan’s top IT writer.” After publishing a business management book and a self-help book (which was also a bestseller), Ash debuted as a fiction writer with Every Little Thing. He has been referred to as “a magician of the unexpected” thanks to his intricately woven plots. You can find Ash on Facebook and on Twitter @ash_omurah  

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien in 1968
(BBC Archive)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, English writer, poet  and Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

It is hard to be certain of the exact figures, due to the proliferation of ebook versions, but The Lord of the Rings is the biggest-selling single genre novel of all time and possibly the best-selling single novel of all time.

Surviving the horrors of the Somme as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers , when his battalion was almost completely wiped out, Tolkien began writing to help his recovery from trench fever. His first work, The Book of Lost Tales, was a collection of short stories, where he developed the ideas for his later work, with the subtitle ‘The History of Middle Earth’.

One hot summer day he was bored marking endless examination papers and found that one candidate had left an entire page of an answer-book blank. On this page, Tolkien wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit“. (See interview below.) It took Tolkien seven years to turn that sentence into The Hobbit and he struggled to get the manuscript finished because of his teaching commitments at Oxford College.

Writing habits

Tolkien once said his typical response on reading a medieval work was not to make a critical study of it, but instead to write a modern work in the same tradition. A prolific letter-writer, Tolkien suffered from severe rheumatism and would apologise for not handwriting his correspondence. “I usually type,” he wrote in one letter, “since my ‘hand’ tends to start fair and rapidly fall into picturesque inscrutability.”

Tolkien's favourite typewriter was an expensive American Hammond Varitype, made in 1927.  Insead of conventional typebars, it had a replaceable C-shaped curved rubber type-plate (which anticipated the IBM "golf ball" by fifty years). Tolkien could therefore change the typewriter "font" which included italics, which he used a great deal, as well as the small font he called ‘midget type’.  The Hammond Varitype was the most advanced ‘word processor’ of its day and produced such fine work that they were used as "cold typesetting" devices, to prepare camera-ready copy for printing.

Later in life, Tolkien found the Hammond too heavy and turned to more portable typewriters. Despite the pain it caused, he often wrote detailed notes about Middle Earth in longhand with a pen, before switching to his typewriter. He typed the entire manuscript of The Lord of the Rings twice in his favourite writing space - on his bed in an attic. In a letter written in 1964, he wrote to a friend: “I like typewriters; and my dream is of suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my specifications, to type the Fëanorian script.”

The manuscripts, typescripts and proofs for The Hobbit survive in the Memorial Library Archives at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and give a useful insight into Tolkien’s writing methods.  The collection includes a working draft of the first twelve pages, typed on Tolkien's Hammond typewriter. The rest of the pages are handwritten and numbered consecutively from 13 to 167, and Tolkien changes the type of paper and uses a different pen near the beginning of Chapter 5.

The next stage of development is a full typescript done on the Hammond typewriter, with the songs typed in italics and the only changes being to the names of characters. (Interestingly, to modern writers with the benefit of word processing, there is also a second full typescript, which seems to have been abandoned due to the significant number of typographical mistakes). 

Tolkien later recalled, “I wrote the first chapter first, then forgot about it, then I wrote another part. I myself can still see the gaps. There is a very big gap after they reach the eyrie of the Eagles. After that I really didn't know how to go on. I just spun a yarn out of any elements in my head. I don't remember organizing the thing at all."

Always modest about his work, Tolkien wrote in a letter about The Lord of the Rings in July 1947, “I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing revised and in final form, for the world to throw into the waste-paper basket.  All books come there in the end, in this world, anyway.”  He was surprised by the success of his first book and also of the others, and felt his best-selling success was a complete accident.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Book Launch: Atonement for Emily Adams by Susan Lawrence

New on Amazon US and Amazon UK

When Emily Adams hits and kills ten-year-old Isaiah Nelson with her car, she is overwhelmed with remorse. Knowing she cannot undo this tragedy, Emily hopes to atone for Isaiah’s death with good deeds and community service. 

However, the more she does, the more her life falls apart. With her job on the line, her volunteer efforts fruitless, and her marriage in jeopardy, the final blow comes when Isaiah’s grieving parents file a wrongful death suit. For them, this will be justice and closure, but for Emily this is final proof she will never be forgiven. Not by Isaiah’s parents—not by God. Where do you turn when “I’m sorry” isn’t enough? 

All author's proceeds go to Pour International, a non-profit agency, for the building of an abandoned baby home in Swaziland.  For more information about Pour International go to www.pourinternational.org.

This story will wring your heart, but the satisfying resolution will leave you smiling. ~ Yvonne Anderson, Author of The Story in the Stars, 2012 ACFW Carol Award Finalist

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About the Author

Susan Lawrence taught elementary school for 26 years before hanging up her chalkboard to write and speak. Atonement for Emily Adams is her first novel. Susan lives in the woods of Iowa with her husband and yellow Lab, Annie E.  Susan has 3 children and 7 grandchildren who love to hear her stories. You can find out more on her website at http://www.susanrlawrence.com/ and on Twitter @susanrlawrence

Book Review: The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Available on Amazon US and Amazon UK

What book would you take on a holiday to a remote cottage in the English Lake District?  I chose The Time Traveller’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger for several reasons. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of time travel since reading H. G. Wells’ TheTime Machine as a child. I have also been avoiding seeing the film version of The Time Traveller’s wife, as I wanted to approach the book without knowing how it ends. I was also interested to see a first novel that became an international best seller.

It turned out to be perfect holiday reading, with short, episodic chapters that could easily be read between walks in the hills. It is also one of those great books that keep you wondering about the small details, skilfully dropped into the story, that you just know are going to be hugely significant later on. I used the idea of switching point of view from husband to wife in my second novel, The Shell, without realising this was what Audrey did to such good effect. It is a great plot device, as you get two stories for the price of one and keeps up the pace, as you want to see the other person’s take on events.

I’ll not spoil the book for anyone by giving away the ending but there was a point when it could have ended quite happily. I could see there was still a way to go and correctly guessed that it would descend into the darker novel hinted at in the opening chapters. Original, and engaging, this is really a story of the power of unconditional love. Highly recommended even for people who don’t usually go for time travel books. Now I’m going to look for the film on DVD!

New Book Launch: Black Dragon by Richard Turner

New Thriller on Amazon UK and Amazon US

1945 – with the Soviets preparing to invade Japan’s northern islands, a top-secret military installation rushes to erase any sign that it ever existed. Only they aren’t through enough and a secret from the past returns to threaten the present.

Present day, a routine close protection assignment for former special operations soldier Ryan Mitchell and his team suddenly turns deadly. Drawn into a lethal game in which the balance of power in the world hangs by a thread, Mitchel races to stop shadowy forces and their murderous agenda before all is lost. From war-torn Japan, to Mongolia, to Texas the fight for survival is on.

About The Author

Richard Turner proudly served in the Canadian Army for more than thirty years. Starting his career as a private and finishing it off as a senior officer, he considers himself fortunate to have lived and worked all across Canada. He had numerous overseas deployments that took him to many varied locations throughout the world, including: Germany, Cyprus, Croatia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Egypt, Israel and finally two tours of Afghanistan. Wanting to try something new, he now spends his time writing.

Visit Richard's blog and follow him on Twitter @RichardTurner_1

Discovering Literature - the British Library’s literary treasures, online

Discovering Literature brings together, for the first time, a wealth of the British Library’s greatest literary treasures, including numerous original manuscripts, first editions and rare illustrations. A wealth of original sources span the Romantic and Victorian periods, alongside historical material such as newspapers, diaries, letters, photographs, and maps.

William Blake’s notebook, childhood writings of the Brontë sisters, the manuscript of the Preface to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and an early draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest are just some of the unique collections available on the site.

Discovering Literature features over 8000 pages of collection items and explores more than 20 authors through 165 newly-commissioned articles, 25 short documentary films, and 30 lesson plans. More than 60 experts have contributed interpretation, enriching the website with contemporary research. Works from the Romantic and Victorian periods form the first phase of a wider project to digitise other literary eras, including the 20th century.  Visit http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians to find out more.