K.J. Charles's Blog

In a new low for literacy, the Chicago Sun-Times decided to print a Chat-GPT generated article recommending for ‘Summer Reading’ a whole bunch of books that literally don’t exist. Oh, and also Atonement because Ian McEwan is always a great beach read.

I don’t need to rehearse everything wrong with a newspaper uncritically putting out the regurgitron’s unconsidered slop, or the environmental cost of this fuckery, so instead here are some actual recommendations for books that you might actually enjoy on holiday.

Herewith the last ten books I read that had me crowing about how fun they were. All are available wide in ebook (or were when I got them anyway).

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Premise a la the cinematic masterpiece Red starring Helen Mirren with a machine gun: four teen girls are recruited to become a squad of super-assassins for a shadowy bureau (the Museum) that hunts Nazis and other bad people. Cut to now, they’re sixty, they’re all retiring, and the Museum is trying to kill them. Our awesome foursome go on the run and take the fight back to the Museum, while also bickering about hot flashes and menopause, dealing with bereavement, and complaining about their dodgy knees.

It’s terrific fun, with globetrotting and sneakery and some proper graphic on page violence. There is absolutely no messing about with questions such as “it is really okay to murder people even if they’re bad?”: we get straight in to murdering and keep at it, with an impressive bodies-to-page ratio and some lovely gory deaths. Our heroines are fed up of being old, of being underestimated, and definitely of bloody men in the workplace, and solve the latter problem at least with, again, lots of murder. I am here for it.

Pagans by James Alistair Henry

The concept is pure genius. No Norman Conquest, massively alt history. Europe is mostly an Islamic caliphate, but Pan-Africa is the global power. No British colonising, so no USA. Pathetic rainy basket/charity case backwater Britain is divided into Norse Scotland, Saxon Central/East, and Tribal (Celtic) Wales/South west. And although it’s set in a contemporary now with computers and drones, society is heavily Old English / Celtic still. with knives, ritual tattooing, blood feuds etc.

This is bloody great if you know anything at all about Old English. The police officer calls her car Roadfucker, and there are some fabulous lines along the lines of ‘are we all reciting from the same saga here, boys?’ and lots of delightful little tweaks and flourishes in the language. The mystery is super rooted in the imagined world, with its racial and cultural issues. The relationship between Mercian Aedith and Tribal Drustan is fantastic, as is the sense of immanent gods (very much plural). Basically it manages to be both a great alt-history and a really good mystery thriller and the two are inextricably linked. Enormously enjoyable, written with great verve and nicely paced. I really hope there will be more!

Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah

What an absolutely lovely book. I adored this. It’s the story of Harley, a young gay black Brit in Kent struggling with anxiety and depression and a homophobic father and an awful hookup situation, and a summer that changes things after he drops out of university, with friendships and a burgeoning super slow burn romance with Muddy, a Mancunian lad (deeply kind hearted, very open and generous). It’s more bildungsroman than romance but no romance reader will be disappointed; it’s also the best depiction of a certain kind of masculinity I’ve ever read, in Finlay, Muddy’s friend, a loud rugby-playing heavy-drinking Archbishop of Banterbury.

It’s got a lot to say about dealing with depression and anxiety, cultural restrictions (both Ghanaian and working class British), the relentless wearing of casual racism and queerphobia on self esteem. It’s very much a book about communication, about the need to give of yourself to people who love you–not sacrificially, but trusting them with your truth. Not perfect, I found the two women in the friend group perhaps not as strong characters, but overall this is spectacular character work, and a really great portrayal of kinds of friendship, kinds of people, kinds of love. Actually uplifting. Highly recommended.

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Immensely enjoyable cosmic horror. Lots of dreadful things happen, but it’s told with a thoroughly breezy style, making it a fun ride rather than a plunge into the abyss. At the same time, there’s enough real feeling that you care for the characters and commit to what’s going on. And it’s also completely bananas, so just my sort of horror, basically, and I’m sad the author doesn’t seem to have written more.

Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow

Antifascist queer Western pulp horror romp, and what a delightful string of words that is. This is massive fun, in an extremely gory way. Think Mad Max but in post-collapse fascist USA, where a war is raging between the fash and the, you know, non-shit people. There are also shifters, including Coyote, who makes the fun over the border to trade weapons and kill fascists. Most of Coyote’s personality is violent resistance. Some books debate whether violence is the answer; consider this one to start with the word YES in 150 point type.

The world is complex, but you can go with the flow very easily, the characters are lightly drawn in classic Western pulp manner, the violence is extreme, and the message is very clearly that the resistance will always regroup and regenerate and fight back, and eventually win, and that this is done all the quicker by not worrying about ‘civility’. The escapist book I needed right now, and what a staggeringly good cover.

A Bloomy Head by J. Winifred Butterworth

Family, romance, skulduggery and murder, set in rural Regency England. There’s a lot of hard stuff here – the book deals with domestic abuse, infertility, the traumas of survival in post-Revolution France, living as a trans men, reproductive coercion, and the destructive effects of power, misogny, homophobia and uncomprehended neurodivergence. There are also two heftily mutilated corpses.

With all that, it’s a surprising amout of fun. Kate and Thomas have a great deal of pain and trauma between them, but the other Governor siblings are all frankly bananas, and the unadulterated chaos that results is gleefully recounted. It’s going all out for T Kingfisher territory (cheesemaking and decapitation), and while it doesn’t reach quite those heights (it needed a stronger edit imo) it’s an enjoyable combination of cartoon violence and comeuppances with real pain and trauma that gets soothed with real kindness and consideration. I also appreciated the smart use of POV shifts. A very fun oddball of a book, though you might want to check the content warnings.

But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo

A sapphic Gothic romance, where the monstrous mistress of the isolated house is in fact an eldritch spider god. as you do. It’s immensely creepy and warped with lots of murder and amorality and body weirdness. Lush writing and thoroughly entertaining, with a delightful line at the end. I don’t know if I was convinced by the romance per se but the weirdness carried me along very effectively.

Helle’s Hound by Oskar Jensen

Very entertaining murder mystery with Danish art historian Torben Helle on his second outing. Notably stronger than the first, to my mind. It’s entertainingly nuts, with ridiculous leads and secondaries, a crazed plot, lots of fun references, a spot of fourth-wall-breaking that approaches Edgar Cantero levels, and the most spectacularly gratuitous final line I can remember. Props. But for all that the murder mystery is both clever and fair, and that’s a tricky thing to pull off. The author also pulls off a bait and switch as to What’s Going On that absolutely had me breathless in a OH YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY way. I really hope we get more of this series, it’s a hell (oh dear) of a lot of fun.

The Fast and the Dead by Anuja Chauhan

The title is a piece of genius and things do not disappoint thereafter. Absolutely cracking tale of murders in a Bangalore street, with immensely lively depictions of the setting and characters, infused with social observation and some cracking dialogue. Plus a very nice romance and a genuinely unexpected but fair solution to the murder.

It’s written with huge brio. I read this at the tail end of a ten hour flight and it kept me awake, entertained, and hooked, which is some sort of miracle. A massively enjoyable read: I must get the first one with this tec.

What Will People Think? by Vedashree Khambete-Sharma

An absolute blinder. I loved this. Which is all the more extraordinary because it’s a Pride and Prejudice retelling, and I absolutely hate Pride and Prejudice retellings. The difference here is that the setting makes perfect sense. It’s set in 1970s Mahathastra, where dowry is still expected and four daughters is a disaster, marriage is a necessity and a misbehaving daughter can ruin a family. In other words, when the Darcy-figure gets his friend to ghost the Jane-figure, he’s not just doing something hurtful, he’s potentially torpedoing her entire family’s future. The Austen plot machinery has serious weight here, in a way it simply does not in a 21st century New York version.

It works brilliantly. There’s a searing sense of injustice, from the author in the footnotes as well as from the main character, who can see a world of independence and work and *not* being dependent of marriage almost within her grasp. We really care about the two older sisters, and Darcy’s ineptitude with women is much more understandable, making him very likeable. The writing is clever and extremely funny, with a lot of sarcasm, but the story is told with real heart, and the tweaks to the mother and the Lydia character make a powerful difference. This is what a retold classic should be: it uses the original but brings something entirely new to the table. Fantastic. Unreserved recommend even if you hate Austen.

If you still need another book, may I recommend my own Copper Script, out on 29 May!

For everyone who ever asked “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How do you come up with a plot?”

I have written on various occasions about weird things that sparked book ideas. (A common phrase that sounded like a good title. A toddler’s question. A random assortment of fridge magnets in the sequence ‘feximal’. A bizarrely phrased line in an Amazon review.)

The idea, however, is nothing. Ideas are ten a penny: turning them into a plot with characters is the tricky part. (See this blog post for how a long-forgotten list of weird names gave me an idea that became a character that suggested a plot.) That’s only a fraction of the amount of work that a complete book takes, as you build out your characters and weave in your subplots and make it all hang together. Books don’t just turn up in your head fully formed.

Usually.

Except.

So look, this is what happened.

I have been brewing an idea for ages. It’s a great idea, a premise with a really unusual period setting and a ton of potential, but I can’t find a way to make it a book. (See above: ten a penny.) However, back in October I was due to start the next book so I thought it was time to make this one happen. I watched a really bad movie with the setting, read a couple of relevant old thrillers, got technical books hoping for the factoid that would give me the ‘but what if?’ moment, and set to work one Monday morning. I tried out a couple of premises, a couple of different decades to set it in, spent a couple of hours noodling. Didn’t get anywhere.

Fine, I thought. I’ll go to the shops. A bit of a walk usually shakes something loose, and anyway we’re out of halloumi. (I live in North London and have a vegetarian daughter, don’t @ me.)

For what then happened, I will quote my Bluesky posts.

10.13am Been working on an idea for ages. Did a ton of research, watched a relevant and absolutely terrible movie just for the backdrop, you name it. Can’t quite nail the plot. Went to the shops while I thought about it. Came back with halloumi, limes, and a full plot… FOR A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BOOK.

2.32pm I am sorry to report that I’ve just written a one-page synopsis laying out the whole premise, with character sketches and the first two thirds of the plot in detail. In four fricking hours. (I will probably need to get more halloumi to finish the last bit.)

4.00pm …I’ve written the first scene. JFC.

[four days later] look not being funny but I got hit round the head with this new idea on Monday lunchtime, and it’s now Friday afternoon and I have 16,000 words of what we are now calling the Halloumi Book.

The characters evolved as I wrote, of course, and became rounded, and acquired more trauma because me. I tinkered with the plot mechanics, adapted it and filled it in. But the opening scene is still exactly as I wrote it on Halloumi Day, the characters who appeared in outline then are the same people they are now, the villain and the premise and the mystery and the resolution are all what came to me somewhere between “For God’s sake, we can’t be out of halloumi again” and standing in the Broadway Food Centre staring slack-jawed at the squeaky cheese shelf.

So, KJ, I hear you say, how the bobbins did that happen and how can I get some?

Mate. If I knew how to repeat that, I wouldn’t be putting the secret in a free blog: I’d sell it for five grand a pop and retire by Christmas. However, since I don’t, here are my thoughts

1) Have ideas to hand

The premise of the Halloumi Book is of Joel, a bizarrely talented graphologist who can read character and emotion from people’s handwriting. As it happens, my grandmother was, in addition to being a nationally recognised artist and a bestselling children’s author, a bizarrely talented graphologist. My mother, a scientist and sharp thinker, would routinely get her to read hands of difficult colleagues, and she always provided useful info; one of Joel’s more startling graphological insights in the book is taken directly from a real incident.

This may sound weird. (OK, it does sound weird.) I can only assure you that it was a bog-standard family fact: Granny lives down the road, puts nettles and speedwell flowers in her salads, reads handwriting, and will make you sit for a painting if you stay still for more than thirty seconds so watch out. Granny reading handwriting was a given of my life, not an exciting idea I was actively considering—though I do recall my mum telling friends about it in, ooh, August. Did that put it into my mind to pop up two months later, even as I was finishing another book and actively planning a third? Seems unlikely, but here we are.

Obviously you can’t bet the farm on Granny. But the more you read, the more you let people tell you stuff and listen and open yourself to people’s stories and the whole wonderful variety and weirdness of the world, the more material you have for your subconscious to ferment.

2) Practice makes plot

I reiterate again: ideas are ten a penny. Anyone can think “bizarrely talented graphologist”: the trick is to make connections from there. To spin off If this, then that, to ask yourself what is the most difficult, dramatic or otherwise fun thing you could do to your unfortunate character or with that interesting premise.

If I’d been thinking it out consciously, it would probably have gone like this:

Joel is a bizarrely talented graphologist > He can read character in handwritingSuppose he read the handwriting of a highly regarded man and saw he was a murderer?If there’s a murderer we need a detective. And the detective must surely be a sceptic, for conflict.So a sceptical policeman and a graphologist join forces to track down a murderer when they have no evidence of the crime, and fall in love…

And this was the very much the basic shape that my subconscious delivered me (along with a lot more stuff I’m not sharing because spoilers). But all of it extrapolated neatly from ‘bizarrely talented graphologist’ much as I’d have done if I’d been thinking ‘bizarrely talented graphologist’–which I cannot sufficiently reiterate that I was not.

I still can’t tell you what triggered that idea to become a plot. But it was in my head somewhere and I think my subconscious could plot it without conscious intervention because I’ve written 35 or so novels and I’ve simply got used to the process of spinning out ideas. Ever driven home on a familiar route and realised you’ve got no memory whatsoever of the preceding ten minutes in which you repeatedly changed gears, took junctions, and negotiated your way around other road users? Like that.

Not magic, not muses, just practice. Sorry.

3) Buy more halloumi

IDK, it worked for me.

The Halloumi Book is called Copper Script, and I’m self publishing it on 29th May. The gorgeous cover is by James Egan of Bookfly Design, and it will be available in print and e initially; audio rights have been sold so watch this space.

Preorder here.

Goodreads here for early reviews.

Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler of the Metropolitan Police doesn’t count himself a gullible man. When he encounters a graphologist who deduces people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting with impossible accuracy, he needs to find out how the trick is done. Even if that involves spending more time with the intriguing, flirtatious Joel Wildsmith than feels quite safe.

Joel’s not an admirer of the police, but DS Fowler has the most irresistible handwriting he’s ever seen. If the policeman’s tests let him spend time unnerving the handsome copper, why not play along?

But when Joel looks at a powerful man’s handwriting and sees a murderer, the policeman and the graphologist are plunged into deadly danger. Their enemy will protect himself at any cost–unless the sparring pair can come together to prove his guilt and save each other.

Azarias from my Discord asked me about writing

believable baddies, who often aren’t sympathetic but who do read as real people

and that chimed with some other stuff I’ve been thinking about recently, so here we go.

I recently read the absolutely incredible Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, from which the following quotes come. It’s a terrific book about the psychology of self-justification and how we very often double down on mistakes or bad behaviour rather than confront the psychological blow of realising we’re not as clever or good as we thought. This includes, horribly, the psychology of victim-blaming.

the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

“He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”

Take any complex human situation and you’ll find people on both sides trying to recast it to a simple narrative whereby they’re the unoffending victim and someone else the cruel or callous perpetrator. Obviously there are plenty of situations where a victim is a victim, end of. But we all also can think of situations where we cast ourselves as sole victim—in the divorce, the falling out, the job loss—and it was honestly a bit more complicated than that. It is, basically, pleasanter to feel wronged than to accept we did wrong.

Of all the stories that people construct to justify their lives, loves, and losses, the ones they weave to account for being the instigator or recipient of injustice or harm are the most compelling, and have the most far-reaching consequences.

It’s a brilliant book which will cause you to take a long hard look at yourself, and especially the number of times you start thinking, “Okay, yes I did that, but I had a good reason…” It’s also a terrific place to start with a villain.

Because, let us recall, people don’t tend to think they’re villains. The world is full of torturers and abusers who believe that their behaviour is justified by their victim, and the proof of that justification is ultimately the lengths to which the perpetrator was simply forced to go. There’s a reason You made me do it! is an abuser cliché.

The money was just resting in my account. I’ve got to feed my family. I felt he was threatening me. You can’t con an honest man. They didn’t deserve that job, that partner, that nice car. Come on, would I have done that if I didn’t have to? Those people are all criminals. He started it. She asked for it. They had it coming. The end justifies the means. Make America great again!

If you want to make your villain believable, think about how they justify their behaviour to themselves. It probably won’t be much fun, because we really, really do not like confronting profound cognitive dissonance, and it’s a lot more comfortable to say “He’s an evil misogynist!” rather than trying to dig into whatever sense of entitlement and wounded pride and resentment and fragility that makes his behaviour reasonable, justified, even necessary in his own head. Mistakes were Made has some really extreme examples of the contortions people perpetrate. Or you could just look at the news.

You don’t necessarily have to put this stuff on the page. It often looks pretty thin when it’s written down because, you know, it is pretty thin. But you do need to think about it, because it’s not always satisfactory to simply decide your villain is an Iago, doing bad things out of motiveless malignancy just because he’s a baddie. (I am totally here for purely malevolent villains where useful–Dark Lords, serial killers, etc–but that’s not what we’re talking about now.)

If you want a deeply plausible baddie, ask yourself not “How is this villain trying to hurt my characters?” but “How is this person trying to protect themself?” Are they defending their self-image as a good parent/person, their identity as a rich, powerful, good, successful person? What unacknowledged truths are they trying to keep unacknowledged because the cognitive dissonance is too painful? In a word, what’s their inner justification?

Technical tip

A side note but useful: If you’re doing a book where the villain has machinations, especially off page, it is a super good idea to write down the events of each chapter and then track what’s going on with the villain that the reader isn’t seeing—literally what the plot would be showing if the villain was the protagonist. That way you can make sure the villain’s actions make a coherent sequence from their perspective, and avoid having a villain whose life revolves around the MCs, like Joker around Batman or the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Outside superhero narratives, it’s a lot more plausible if the villain is a person trying to get on with their own shit.

When We’re Not Villains

Your hero/ines are likely to be just as prone to squirmy self justification as the rest of us. On the plus side, you can really use this for conflict! I did a post on arguments that touches on this. If you go into an argument aware that your characters are (probably unconsciously) looking to justify themselves and place the wrongdoing firmly on the other’s shoulders, that can create an absolutely massive row. And if you then show them coming to realise that wasn’t fair, making themselves confront a more objective truth, and apologising sincerely—well, that’s the grovel nailed, with some proper personal growth along the way. Happy ending assured.

I can’t overstate how unpleasant self-justification can be to confront. It makes us uncomfortable to accept we did bad things, and it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge we justify them. It’s not a likeable quality. Interestingly, people with low self-esteem are far less prone to pathetic attempts to avoid cognitive dissonance: they already have a poor self-image so they aren’t surprised by their own failings in the same way as someone who considers themself superior.

It doesn’t make your hero/ine a bad person if they indulge in self-justification, and it doesn’t make your villain a good person if you give them plausible motives. It just makes them more like actual people, such as you or me.

New book next month! Copper Script publishes 29th May and the advance reviews are coming in strong. Goodreads here. Buy links go up shortly, watch this space.

I asked in my funky new Discord group for blog post ideas and got this beauty from Railla:

How do you decide where to start your story? Both overall in terms of where in a character’s life should the story plot begin, but also in terms of technical “what should the actual first sentence on the first page be?” I always get stuck on whether to just jump into dialogue, or start with some kind of description and hope to make it engaging enough.

An excellent question, particularly since it seems equally hard every time I start a book.

To address the easier question first:

At what point in the characters’ lives does the story start?

I have already written about the difficulties of knowing where a romance novel ends, but where you start is equally up in the air. It can be several chapters before the characters meet; in the middle of them having sex for the first or fiftieth time; years after they met, loved, and broke up. If you’re a Victorian novelist or a clogs and shawls saga writer, you have the option of starting with your character’s birth or, in extreme cases, your character’s ancestors’ birth. You might start in the middle of the war, or from a vantage point in orbit outside the planet 20,000 years ago.

You can start anywhere as long as you have a reason. However, if you’re super stucko and looking to this blog for actual answers, why not look for the specific inciting incident/change point that puts one character in motion? A change point/inciting incident is one that forces a character out of their accustomed ways and makes them need something (in a romance, probably the other MC).  You can start in the middle of that point (“You’re sacked!” my boss shouted) or a little before it to set the scene (a chapter of how much the heroine loves her job and is looking forward to boasting about it to her horrible cousin at the big party) or even a little after it, as the character staggers under the weight of the new circumstances that we’re about to learn.

My book The Duke at Hazard kicks off when the Duke has an illicit assignation and is robbed of his heirloom ring. His need to get it back pushes him into an incognito trip in the company of down-at-heel gentleman Daizell, and the romance follows from there. Starting with the assignation/robbery introduces the reader to the Duke, his world, and his problem; the reader is thus fully clued in and ready to go by the point we meet the love interest, plus the Duke has a reason to drag him into the quest.The Magpie Lord starts with a magically induced suicide attempt on the part of the main character. This is a fairly dramatic introduction to his immediate problem, and explains why he needs to hire a magician (who, needless to say, becomes the love interest.) The process of hiring the magician also allows a lot of the backstory to be conveyed in expository dialogue, which is easier to make zippy than straight-up exposition.In The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, we start with Joss and Gareth having anonymous sex in London. They have an argument and break up; only then do we get the change point, as Gareth unexpectedly inherits a baronetcy and a house on Romney Marsh. We then spend several chapters establishing his new situation before Joss and Gareth are reunited in an Oh Shit We Had Sex scene (classic romance trope thank you). I could have started with Gareth’s arrival on the Marsh, as his inciting incident. Or I could have started with the dramatic OSWHS scene and done a flashback. I chose to start with the sex scene because there was quite a lot of background to establish for this one, and I wanted to throw a bone (as it were) to the romance reader to keep them hooked in.  

It’s not a law; it’s not even a guideline. But if you really don’t know where to start, consider what *immediate* event kicks off the plot and try somewhere round there.

What should the first sentence be?

The one thing everyone tells you is never to open with the weather. “It was a dark and stormy night” is frequently mocked as a terrible opening for a book, to the point where a contest for terrible first lines was named after its author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I would submit this is a bit of a Jack Sparrow (“That’s the worst opening line I’ve ever heard of” / “Yes, but you have heard of it.”) Also, Bleak House. Also, 1984.

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. (1984, George Orwell)

This would not be more effective as “The clocks were striking thirteen as Winston Smith went to work.” It’s the banality of talking about the weather, plus the subtle transposed-epithet faintly unnerving effect of “bright cold”  that primes us to be fully unnerved by the not-here-ness of “thirteen”.

Also, just for the record:

Elmore Leonard said it’s bad style to open a novel with the weather. Well, fuck him—it was a blazing red-hot August morning.  (This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both Of Us, Edgar Cantero)

There are various things you can do with a first line, amongst them establishing mood, establishing character, establishing the setting, indicating the kind of book it’s going to be (see above the wonderful Cantero line), or simply hooking the reader. Many great first lines do a lot of things at once.

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. (All Systems Red, Martha Wells)

A masterpiece of compact scene setting, telling us what the narrator is, what sort of world we’re in, and more. What are the two most important words here?

No, not ‘mass murderer’. The two important words are ‘but then’. It’s an extraordinary conjunction. ‘But’ alone wouldn’t do it; ‘but then’ suggests there was a time between the killer construct hacking its governor module and becoming a soap addict in which everything could have gone very differently. Is that purely Murderbot sarcasm, or a dark truth? We don’t know, because the Murderbot speaking to us now is the result of a bot/human construct that has consumed this incredible amount of soap operas and developed its own morality—and everything in the multi book series to come is about this delicate, teetering balance between killing machine and person. It’s a brilliant bit of detail work in a wonderful establishing opening.

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. (Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess)

There’s such a thing as trying too hard.

For the sake of laziness, I’m now going to grab a bunch of my own opening lines and explain my thinking. Fee free to critique.

Vernon Fortescue Cassian George de Vere Crosse, the fourth Duke of Severn, the Earl of Harmsford, Baron Crosse of Wotton, and Baron Vere walked into an inn. They were all the same man. (The Duke at Hazard)

This is a book about grotesque privilege, and that’s where we start. It’s also a book about choosing who you are and what defines you. The Duke is called by a lot of different names in the course of the book, by himself, others, and the narrative voice. Settling on the right one is a crucial part of his journey, so we start with the full array. Also, it’s got both the obvious gag and a vibe of a ‘a duck and a rabbi walked into a bar’ type joke, which sets the vibe for romcom.

How ought one dress to hire a thief? (Any Old Diamonds)

Pure character work, presenting us with several facets of our viewpoint character Alec. He’s posh (‘how ought one dress,’ which also sets the historical vibe), he’s doing something highly inappropriate for a posh person (hiring a thief), and he’s deeply uncertain about it (the entirely weird question).

Will Darling was outnumbered by books. (Slippery Creatures)

Plain and declarative, much as Will turns out to be. This puts us in a bookshop atmosphere with a hint of being at war and a sense of Will having a lot on his plate, all promises that are amply fulfilled. Take a moment to consider how the vibe would be different with some pretty close alternatives:

Will Darling was overwhelmed by books.

Will Darling had an abundance of books.

Will Darling had too many books.

Not necessarily bad, but definitely different.

“It was a terrible day even before Crispin blew up the study.” (Rag and Bone)

Shameless attention-grabbing in media res opening. Nothing wrong with that.

“It was a lovely day for an outing.” (Spectred Isle)

This is the literal opposite of attention-grabbing, very deliberately, since we’re about to witness our outing-having hero being plunged from normality into any amount of supernatural chaos. Effectively this is the narrative voice going LA LA TOTALLY NORMAL  EVERYTHING’S FINE so the knowing reader can say, “Yeah, right.”

It was a bleak, cold, miserable November day when they buried Matthew Lawes. (Unfit to Print)

I know authors who don’t open books with the weather and they’re all cowards.

These are all fairly snappy but there’s nothing wrong with a lengthier intro, including description. Just remember that description can do more than telling us what’s there: it can give us a sense of how the character (or we) feel (or should feel) about it. (More on that in this post.)  

The gates were beautifully wrought iron, elegantly monogrammed with interlocking Ws. The motor-car’s headlights illuminated the black paint, the curlicues and details gleaming gold. It was an elegant, sophisticated gate. It was also twelve feet high if you counted the spikes, and it stood in a very solid brick wall that matched its height. (All Of Us Murderers, coming Oct 25)

Do we think the hero should go inside? Answers on a postcard.

Of course you don’t actually need a single/snappy first line at all. You don’t have to put all your goods in the shop window. By all means make the reader wait, or work, or take your time to build to an effect over a paragraph or a page.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, gleefully analysed by Benjamin Dreyer here.)

The opening of your book might reflect its tone or diametrically oppose it for effect. It might hook, intrigue, tempt, appal, confuse. It might establish character, setting, or both. It might be lengthy or abrupt. But whatever it is, it’s the invitation to the reader to step inside, and it’s worth giving your doorstep that bit of extra polish accordingly.

Next book is Copper Script, coming 29th May this year! More on that shortly.

My annual reading round-up post. This year’s Random Classification System is that everything comes in threes.

Romance

House of the Red Balconies by AJ Demas

Lovely wistful slow burn m/m romance in immersively created ancient alt-Mediterranean world. AJ Demas is one of my favourite romancers and this is a lovely minor key book.

Dulhaniyaa by Talia Bhatt

Indian f/f romance with a woman going into an arranged marriage, and her trans woman dance teacher. The first two thirds are a truly delightful, delicate slow burn of pining and longing, and then we switch gears into full Bollywood madness. Gleeful.

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

Absolutely terrific. Ezra is trans, queer, Jewish, anxious, a chronic middle child of a dysfunctional family, and sees ghosts. A glorious story of loss, love, kindness, and grounding yourself. Hugely recommended. Run do not walk.

Fantasy series (I hope)

The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan

Book 1 of The Mirror Realm, 2 is out now and I’m saving it for my holiday. Wonderfully immersive, engaging Middle Eastern/Persian/Jewish fantasy, with politics, pain, family, and queer love. Hugely readable and wildly imaginative.

The Bone Ship’s Wake by RJ Barker

Book 3 of The Tide Child, do not start here you oaf. Nautical fantasy that often teeters on the edge of too grimdark for me, but pulls it back. I was a bit alarmed starting this last part, but courage: it’s full of hope, defiance against all odds, courage, and solidarity, and the ending is absolutely worth it. Big rec for the series.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

I’m living in hope this is a series because book 2 is still ‘untitled’ on Goodreads. Incredible take on Sinbad the Sailor, with a middle-aged lady pirate having wildly exuberant adventures on a fantasy Indian Ocean. Just fabulous entertainment.

Fantasy standalone

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T Kingfisher

I described this book as an ongoing anxiety attack. It’s basically about coercive control in a fantasy setting. It’s terrifically done, with a wonderful alliance of women and a stand-up and cheer ending, but wow you work for it: the tension makes it hard to breathe.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

Marvellous Western fantasy about a Black woman homesteader in Montana at the turn of the century. Family secrets, racism, isolation: the message is absolutely ‘here be monsters’. Great writing and a heart-pounding story.

Dazzling by Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ

Nigerian fantasy with the apparently separate but slowly intertwining stories of two girls mistreated after their fathers’ losses. Wonderful description, powerful emotion, and the way the stories come together is fabulous. A compelling read.

Murder Mystery

This Body’s Not Big Enough for the Both Of Us by Edgar Cantero

Completely hatstand noir novel with the private eyes AZ Kimrean, a pair of extremely conjoined twins (ie two personalities sharing a single brain and body, not chummily). It’s mad as a spoon, the author bulldozes the fourth wall at every opportunity, and somehow the mystery is both fair and thoughtful. Amazing.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell

I glommed the first three of these delightful, absurd, weirdly timeless legal murder mysteries (the fourth, written just before the author’s death, is hard to get hold of and not so enjoyable). Fiercely clever, genuinely funny, insouciant about gender, and hugely recommended. I wish there could have been more.

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

Murder on Jupiter, with a f/f Holmes and Watson. Highly entertaining novellas in a series I’m delighted to see continuing, with a wonderfully drawn world and crackling dialogue.

Non Fiction

The Lion House by Christopher de Bellaigue

Fabulous novel-like account of palace politics in the era of Suleyman the Magnificent. Wildly readable and absolutely fascinating.

Some Men in London by Peter Parker

Fantastic and comprehensive account of queer male life in London from 1945 to 1967 (in two volumes) told in extracts from newspapers, letters, diaries, legal documents, literature, censors etc. A lot of the content is hideously homophobic, obv, but the anthologist and his annotations make this a defiant, humane, and often very funny read.

Super-Infinite: the Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

The best biography I’ve ever read. Tons of cultural and historical context woven through the analysis of the poems. Incredibly readable and engaging, often funny. Makes Donne’s character, his work, his whole era feel accessible. A triumph.

Books by me this year: The Duke at Hazard, Regency m/m romance with an incognito duke and the disgraced gentleman who accompanies him on a road trip, and Death in the Spires, an Edwardian murder mystery set in Oxford.

I was soliciting for blog post ideas and azteclady on Bluesky asked:

I wonder how you know whether a story is part of a series/trilogy, and another is a standalone.

I was poised to make a glib answer, as I so often do. Then I started thinking about it. And I realised that the question here is, How do you know how much of a story to tell?

Our story starts before we’re born and may not wind down for years after we die.

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”–Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

And our story may centre on ourselves, but we are also all characters in other people’s stories, whether heroes, villains, or bit parts.  Sometimes we’re barely a vestige in those stories.

Even the most sprawling novel only covers a fraction of the story that could be told, which is why there’s such vast volumes of fanfic spinoff novels, homages, rewrites, and new versions out there. And why, to return to the question, you have to decide where the story you’re telling starts and ends.

There is a particular urgency to that decision when you’re a romance novelist. A romance can end with a HFN (Happy For Now) where the characters are in a good place, or a HEA (Happy Ever After), which looks self explanatory. If it’s a HFN, there could be another book. If it’s a HEA, there isn’t another book to come because, you know, they lived happily ever after.

Which leaves only one question: Happily ever after what?

A detective novel is over when the murderer is found and justice has been served in whatever way. A thriller is over when the situation has been resolved, which may well mean everyone except Jack Reacher is dead.  A romance, by its nature, needs to leave the characters to live a happy life together, but how do you decide that they lived happily ever after this particular point? Especially since, well, they won’t. They’re going to die eventually (unless they’re vampires I guess). There is no moment in a human relationship (or indeed life) where you can say: That’s it, there are no more problems, it’s all good from here. Certainly not a wedding, as anyone married can tell you.

My first book was The Magpie Lord (which you can download free, I’m nice). It ends with a satisfactory HFN: the main characters (MCs) are smitten and their immediate problems have been resolved. I could have left them here and it would not have been wrong to do so. However, there was a lot of hinterland in the book (family issues, work issues, plenty of extant worldbuilding, and lots of potential for future problems and indeed growth in the relationship). It ended up as a trilogy because I decided to address all those things.

I wrote Think of England part way through writing the third Magpie book. It ends in almost exactly the same position as The Magpie Lord: the MCs have fallen for one another in the middle of a non-stop dramatic situation, the bad guys are dead, they are definitely in love, but there’s lots of scope for future adventures.

I never wrote a Think of England sequel, despite a lot of people asking me to. I did try, but it didn’t work. And the reason why it didn’t work (I have come to understand) is that the MCs of Think of England have reached their HEA at the end of that book. The characters have decided, yes, they want to be together. It’s not going to be smooth sailing, but they’ve explicitly made that decision, in a way the lovers in The Magpie Lord have not. That’s the HEA moment, no matter future ups and downs. And for me, to write another romance novel starring them feels like it would break the compact with the reader that the HEA is forever.

Think of it like the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: a freeze frame, telling the viewer We’re not looking any further.  We know what happens after the freeze frame: Butch and Sundance die. Well, so will the heroes of my historical novel. Not immediately, but it’s set in 1904, we’re reading in 2024, you work it out. But the point of the freeze frame is to say, We’re leaving the story here. Hang on to this. Other things may happen after, but this is the shining moment, the bit you should remember.

(I loved reading the Roger Lancelyn Green retelling of Robin Hood as a child, but I always skipped the last chapter. I don’t need to see Robin die; I want him in the eternal present of Sherwood Forest. Don’t end that for me.)

It has to be said, I’ve got this badly wrong in the planning before now. Band Sinister was going to be the first of a mixed-MC trilogy, but in fact, the resolution of book 1 turned out to be enough of a HEA for the whole lot (thus making it a one-book series. Well done me). Spectred Isle was also conceived as the first of a mixed MC series when in fact (I now realise), it could/should have been a trilogy about those two MCs. It’s published now, with a sufficient HEA moment that I can’t continue the story. Which is a bugger, but I would rather lose out on those stories than undermine readers’ faith that when I do an HEA, I mean it.

Because here’s the thing. At the end of A Gentleman’s Position, set 1821 IIRC, Lord Richard Vane and his faithful valet get their unequivocal HEA and we stop there. Two linked trilogies later, in 1894 or so, Richard’s great-nephew James Vane is reminiscing about his beloved great-uncle (and his faithful valet), and we learn that Richard is dead. Does his death detract from the HEA of A Gentleman’s Position?

To my mind, no. Part of the pleasure of having multiple books in a shared universe is that we see or hear of the characters we loved before, and if you’re moving around in time, well, people don’t live forever. We know Richard got his HEA, whatever else happened in his next fifty-odd years. His story is freeze framed, even if he got old and died afterwards, like people do. In some ways, having him and his lover fondly remembered is part of their story, the after of their HEA.

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”–Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

However, if I’d indicated that his lover had died young/tragically, or they’d broken up/been unhappy, that would have undermined the original HEA. It has been done, and it is to my mind a shitty move to pull on romance readers, given the genre promise of the HEA. Save that sort of malarkey for a genre that wants it. I believe they love dead spouses in detective fiction.

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My books sorted into series or standalone here. Don’t say I never do anything for you.  

Before we start:

This blog post will contain reflections about my body and how it works. I’m not suggesting anything about your body or what you should do with it. Mine is the only one on which I have the right, the qualifications, or the willingness to comment.In the same vein, I am not a doctor; this post does not contain medical advice; nothing in this constitutes a recommendation for anyone; why are you even listening to me; fly you fools fly.EXTREMELY EXTENDED METAPHOR KLAXON. The writing stuff comes later.

I have weak ankles. Runs in the family. I’ve twisted my ankle more times than I can remember; I have literally fallen off flip flops because my ankle went sideways. Stupid bendy ankles.

I started running in my late 20s. After a few iterations of going over on my ankle and landing on my face, I went to a running shop. They analysed my gait and sold me expensive shoes with built up interiors and bulky heels. My ankles got no better. My knees hurt a lot. The running people said I was heel striking (landing on my heels rather than the balls of my feet) and sold me shoes with extra padding to absorb the impact. My knees still hurt. I stopped running.

So then about seven years ago I started wearing minimalist shoes. No heel drop, no internal structure, no ankle support, nothing but a very thin sole to keep out the rain, dog poo, and broken glass. I loved the feel of the ground under my feet, the way my feet moved. Over the next few years I transitioned to wearing exclusively barefoot shoes.

And a bit ago, my husband said, “Do you realise you haven’t twisted your ankle in years?”

I noticed how my ankles flexed confidently over rough ground these days, and how secure I felt with no thick sole or heel drop. I tried running again, this time in barefoot shoes.

It hurt like hell, because I was still thumping down on my heels, which sent pain shooting up my knees and spine. I adapted my gait to land on the ball of my foot (easier to do without an inch and a half of padding on my heel), and as I got used to that, I realised it felt far more natural for me, at my pace and stride length. My knees don’t hurt any more. Yesterday, running on rough ground, my foot landed sideways, and my ankle flexed in a way that previously would have had me folding up like screaming origami. And then it straightened effortlessly … because my ankles have got stronger.

What was wrong was not that I had weak ankles, although I did, or that I heel struck, although I did. What was wrong was that, instead of tackling my specific problem, I went for an artificial solution to avoid tackling it, which caused me to develop and maintain a damagingly poor technique.

The Writing Metaphor Klaxon should be deafening you by now.

I was chatting idly on Bluesky the other day and a writer suggested to me that surely it was legitimate to use AI for query letters and synopses. They’re time-sucking tedious tasks, why not automate them?

And the answer to that is: my weak ankles.

Writing synopses can be a slog. Blog post here on how to do it. But it can also be an incredible way to get a bird’s eye view of your not-quite-right MS and identify what’s not working. Write a concise summary of your main character arcs and plot action, and watch in horror as it demonstrates that you forgot to include the romance in your romance novel, that the villain is actually the sole focus of the action, that it’s all plot and no character or vice versa, that you have to distort the actual events of the book for the synopsis to make sense (yes, I have done this), or that nothing actually bloody happens.

Here is a blog post on me identifying that in my own work by doing a summary (scroll down to the big screengrab); here is a post that uses a summary to demonstrate the fatal flaw in a Heyer novel.

If you tackle writing a synopsis as a structural analysis exercise, you’ve got a genuinely useful tool in your arsenal that can save you a book doctor’s fees, or an editorial rejection. If you ask Chat GPT to do it (feeding your book into the sausage machine to do it, you idiot), you’ve just bought my expensive running shoes. It might fix your immediate need for a synopsis, but it won’t help you with your actual problem.

Same with query letters. People make a huge fuss about these but there’s only two elements that matter:

a) writing a snappy two line summary of your book,
b) offering comps (titles to which your book can be compared).

Well, a) if you genuinely can’t write two snappy lines, I’m worried about the other 100,000 words of your book. You haven’t got a single concise line in the whole thing? Really? Either you’re wrong and you’re perfectly capable of crafting a snappy line, or you’re right and you need to do some serious work on your technique.

And b) if you are writing in a field in which you are so poorly read that you can’t think of two relevant comparative titles, then…those are some weak ankles you’ve got there, mate.

The plagiarism engine is not a substitute for pinning your plot to the page and forcing yourself to break it down and take a hard look at the structure. It will not help you learn to analyse your own work. It won’t give you experience in polishing a sentence till it sparkles. It cannot substitute for reading in your field.

Granted, it is hard work to strengthen your writing muscles and learn proper technique. It’s easier to use Chat GPT to spit out its weirdly soulless garble. But then, it would be easier to get Chat GPT to generate the whole damn book, and most of us don’t actually want to produce the easiest book possible. We’d like to make it the best, and we do that by improving our techniques and building up our natural abilities. Not by using artificial support to avoid confronting our problems.

Obviously, physical bodies have a wide varieties of failings, most of which can’t be fixed as easily as my ankles, and I am not speaking to those issues at all. But as a writer? Baby, you were born to run.   

One of my favourite things to do when I’m writing is work out what my characters are reading.

This is one of those areas where you can do a lot in a small way: set scenes, hint at moods, illuminate character. And from my perspective as a historical novelist, knowing what old-timey classic was once the most up-to-date bestseller is one more brick in the edifice of historical vibes.

I’m going to pick out a few examples from my work to illustrate the different ways your MCs’ bedside book might help build your world and characters. Many quotations follow.

It is important to bear in mind that your reader (actual) may not have read the book your reader (fictional) is devouring, so if you want it to shed light on characters, you might have to explain.

Establishing character

There are some fairly obvious things you can do with books here. Your heroine reads erotica: okay, she’s sex positive. Or she’s a nanny who reads only horror novels: that’s clearly flagging something for later. Or the hero is collapsed on a bed reading Murderbot for the sixth time: we’ve all been there. Or she’s a lawyer who reads romances but she’s shy of anyone knowing, and then she sits next to a grumpy billionaire on a plane and he’s reading The Art of War and he looks over at her Kindle and sneers at her reading matter so they get into an argument… Etc.

But if we get a bit more specific, we can do some more fun stuff, I think. 

My Will Darling Adventures trilogy stars an ex-WW1 soldier (not from the London/Home Counties posh part of the country, common as muck) who now owns a second hand bookshop. His love interest is an upper class spy and bibliophile. It is safe to say they don’t share many tastes.

Books play a huge part in this as plot elements, set dressing, and occasionally weapons. But they can also be used to enhance character work. Take this exchange from book 2, The Sugared Game.  Here, Kim and Will have woken together at Kim’s flat.

By the time Kim returned with a tray, Will was sitting up in bed flicking through a book and feeling civilised.

“Tea,” Kim said, handing him a cup. Will took a sip. It was horrifyingly weak. “Are you reading The Waste Land?”

“No, you are.” It had been the only thing on Kim’s bedside table. Will didn’t consider Modernist poetry much of a bedtime story. “I’ve read it already. I had a copy in the shop a couple of months ago.”

“Thoughts?”

“It doesn’t rhyme.”

This is a tiny, insignificant interlude, just them making conversation while facing up to the real difficult conversations they need to have. But even so…

Kim is the kind of person who has The Waste Land (a hugely controversial, difficult and intellectual Modernist poem) on his bedside table, and is open to discussions of poetry.Will is not that kind of person, but he’s intellectually curious. When the book came his way he read it.Will has absolutely nothing to say about it, so he doesn’t try. He doesn’t apologise for it, he doesn’t try to be clever or bullshit his way through it, and he also doesn’t go on a rant about it not being proper poetry. It’s an entirely pragmatic, phlegmatic response from a man who isn’t trying to prove anything.

I think in this case you do need to know a bit about The Waste Land’s cultural impact in order to get the full value of the exchange; I chose not to explain it all because it’s such a small scene that explanation would have overloaded the significance. Some readers will skim past, no harm done. Others will rack this up as an example of the gulf between these two—and also the way they can accept one another’s differences.

That’s a small example. Here’s a big one.

A Seditious Affair is a Regency-set romance. It opens extremely abruptly with a fairly brutal BDSM sex scene between two anonymous men. That segues into them relaxing with a glass of wine and talking about a book one has lent the other:

“I finished the book,” the Tory said.

“Oh, aye? What’d you think?”

“Good. Terrifying. Strange. I can’t understand why you like it.”

“Why would I not?”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d agree with it.” The Tory gave him a wry smile. “After all, its burden is the need for man to keep in his place—”

“What?” said Silas incredulously.

“The overreaching man dares to play God and pays a terrible price. Abuses the natural order and creates a monstrous thing.”

“Bollocks,” Silas said. “That ain’t what it’s about.”

“It’s what happens.”

“No. What happens is he creates, he’s responsible for, something that should be”—Silas waved his hand—“great and strong, something that he owes a duty to. And he says to it, The hell with you. Go die in a ditch. I’ll have my big house and pretty wife. And it says, You don’t get to live in a grand house and ignore me. Do your duty or I’ll tear you down. Treat me like I’m as good as you, or I’ll show you—”

“That I’m not,” the Tory interrupted. “The creature murders—”

“Because he ain’t given a chance to live decent,” Silas interrupted right back. “You treat men like brutes; you make ’em brutes. That’s what it says.”

“No, you create brutes when you distort the rules of nature and the order of things,” the Tory retorted. “That’s what the book’s about. It’s obvious.”

“It’s not.” Silas snorted. “You think its author meant that?”

“Oh, do you know the author?” The Tory looked intrigued. “Who is he?”

“She.”

“A woman? A woman wrote Frankenstein?”

The love of books is a major connector between these two (a Tory government official and a radical seditionist; this was not the easiest romance I’ve ever written). I could have had them agreeing how wonderful Persuasion is, or similar, and used that to show them bonding or being in agreement. But it’s far too early in the book for that, so instead, I’m using Frankenstein as a way to demonstrate their wildly opposed views and experiences in action. They literally haven’t read the same book: Silas sees a condemnation of selfish rulers/patriarchs, where Dominic the Tory sees a parable about the dangers of overreaching ambition.  Even if the reader doesn’t know the basic Frankenstein story, it will be clear these two people are coming from incredibly different places, and have a long way to go before they reach common ground. 

What Oft Was Thought But Ne’er So Well Expressed

The best poetry is a simple yet perfect summation of the human condition in a few words. As such, it’s very useful if you can steal it.

I have a few books in which poetry becomes a touchstone for people who can’t necessarily express their own feelings. In An Unseen Attraction the romance is between an autistic-dyspraxic man who struggles to fit in a society that doesn’t understand, and a short, plain, bespectacled taxidermist.

Clem kissed his neck. “I love you too.”

“You said so before,” Rowley whispered. “And I didn’t know what to do. I can’t—why would you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“There’s so much about you to love. Your heart, and your kindness, and your eyes. And I’m just . . . I’m nothing special. I’ve tried to be nothing special for my whole life—”

“You failed,” Clem said. “And I’ve been falling in love with you for at least as long as you have with me, because you’re wonderful and quiet and clever and kind, but I don’t need any more reason to love you than that you’re Rowley Green. Do you know ‘My Star’ by Robert Browning?”

“I don’t know why you even ask.”

“The poet says he watches one star. All his friends are stargazing and doing astronomy and studying planets, and he just pays attention to one single star in the whole firmament, one star that’s marvellous to him, and he says, ‘What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.’”

Rowley mouthed the last words to himself. “Uh . . . I see. I think. Really?”

“My star,” Clem said, and bent to kiss him.

‘My star’ becomes their special private endearment, and it encapsulates what this book is about: the love of a person in all their uniqueness, because they are exactly who they are, and be damned to anyone who can’t see what’s so special about them. (Read the whole poem here, it’s gorgeous.)

I’m also going to quote the heavily book-bound A Seditious Affair again. Silas has introduced his Tory lover, Dominic, to the works of radical visionary poet William Blake. Blake’s hand-produced books appear as rare and valued objects, gifts, and even an alibi throughout the book. But the key, pivotal scene uses Blake’s writing to encapsulate the lovers’ emotions and provide a turning point. Bear in mind Dominic is an upright religious gentleman who is secretly a gay submissive masochist with a humiliation kink, racked with guilt and shame at his non-conformist desires. I had to quote the whole poem for that reason, because it gives voice to the things Dominic has not previously allowed himself to think or believe.

Dominic stopped at random on an illustration of a severe, kneeling monk, and read aloud.

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not, writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds
And—

His voice cracked. Silas finished the poem, with unusual gentleness:

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

“That,” Dominic said. “That is . . .”

“Aye.”

“Have you met him? Blake?”

“Few times. Bit odd.” Silas coughed. “He, uh, reckons he talks to angels.”

Dominic could well imagine it. If he could write like this, draw like this, think like this, he would probably believe he had been touched by God too. He turned a few more pages, needing to keep handling this lovely, wild thing, to be sure he owned it. “Anything he’s written, any of these illustrated books, I’ll take them. Can you get them for me?”

“Dare say. They get odder.”

“I’m sure they do.” He had read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell over and over again since Silas had given him a copy. Half of it made no sense, and what he did follow he mostly disagreed with, and the whole thing made him quiver with a sense of terrible possibility. A whirling cloud of madman’s words, ringing with half-understood notes of something that resonated within.

The enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity.

“Thank you for this,” he said quietly. “For the books. For Blake. For the ways you have changed me.”

Historical…ness

Books in books don’t always have to have big metaphorical impact. Sometimes they’re part of worldbuilding, and this really helps in historical novels especially. In the 1890s-set Any Old Diamonds, Alec is reading on a train.

“Are you enjoying that?”

“I wouldn’t say enjoying, precisely.”

“Your face has suggested as much. What on earth are you reading?”

“It’s a new thing. The King In Yellow. Good in its way, but I don’t know if I like its way. Weird and macabre and feels rather like an opium dream. It’s about a play that induces madness in anyone who reads it.”

Jerry slanted a brow. “Sounds like the author’s been at the St. James’s Theatre recently.”

One of the businessmen guffawed, and added, “I beg your pardon.” Jerry waved a graceful hand.

Alec hid behind his book again, feeling rather self-conscious. Jerry’s remark had been an allusion to The Importance of Being Earnest, a smash hit earlier in the year, until the author had been arrested for gross indecency. Taking his name off the programme and advertising hadn’t saved the box office from the taint of scandal, and the play had closed. Wilde had only been in prison two months, the scandal had yet to fully subside, and Alec was rather conscious that The King in Yellow had a similar sort of atmosphere to Wilde’s work. Perhaps he should have broughtsomething less decadent. Perhaps Jerry was angry he’d given them away.

This is here to serves as a reminder of a few features of the era—the brutally homophobic atmosphere, the shock of Wilde’s fall and the vulnerability of queer men, but also the fin-de-siecle mood of decadence of which Wilde had been a part and which now feels more dangerous. It’s an added reminder of Alec’s precarious situation, personally and within his era.

Less grimly, in The Duke at Hazard (out in July!) our heroes are both fans of “the Waverley author”, ie Sir Walter Scott, who was still publishing anonymously at this time. Scott was a very popular historical novelist, and wrote a book, Kenilworth, set in the time of Elizabeth I. On the face of it, this is in here because reading Kenilworth causes the Duke to visit Kenilworth, thus putting some plot in motion. But it’s also part of a larger atmosphere, in that this is a road trip book in which we see that the UK’s historical tourism industry was already an established thing. (Stratford upon Avon has been shamelessly milking Shakespeare for at least 250 years and they are not planning to stop.) I find this delightful, in the same way it pleases me to point up to my reader in 2024 that they’re reading about people in 1821 who are reading about people in 1575.

Another useful historical element: literacy. In Jackdaw, Jonah is profoundly dyslexic, so his lover Ben reads Dickens aloud. This is part of their romance arc, but it was also entirely standard: a literate person would read the latest number to any amount of people who couldn’t access it, and families sitting together at their own occupations while one person read was a very common entertainment. In The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, baronet Gareth wants to give the working class Joss a book as a gift but is unsure if he’s able to read well enough. That was a fact of life for a lot of people, whether they lacked education or had learning difficulties of whatever kind, which would of course go unsupported. It’s worth acknowledging.

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You can use what your characters are reading to illustrate all kinds of things about them, or their era, to show their similarities or differences, to make them relatable or otherwise to the reader. In this spirit, it is not unknown for contemporary romancers to have their heroines reading actual contemporary romance novels. I think this is a fourth-wall-breaking mistake, personally. And I have never got over the book where the author had her heroine not only reading one of her own books, but also commenting approvingly on how good it was. Like. Madam.

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The Duke at Hazard is out 18th July.

Thanks to Lola Pecciarini for the inspiration!

A quickie blog post today, inspired by Benjamin Dreyer’s entertaining rant on the distinction between eponymous and titular (it’s in footnote 1 for a clearer explanation than I am inclined/able to provide), and also by the fact that one of these sneaky little bastards nearly got me in a recent book.

So. An eponym is simply a word taken from a person’s name. Obamacare is an eponym, so is Reaganomics. If you hoover your carpets, the verb comes from the eponymous brand of vacuum cleaner. (We do not use the capital letter, no matter what the Hoover corporation may think: that ship has sailed, as demonstrated by the fact that I hoover with a Dyson.)

If you write historical novels, eponyms are one of those damn things. They tend to be extremely and usefully specific in meaning, but they are also extremely specific in dates, meaning you can’t rely on the old “well it was probably around for decades before it made it into the dictionary” line.

Here for your advisory is an incomplete list of eponyms that may trip you up, depending on period.

Boycott

The name comes from 1880 (Ireland, Charles Boycott, a shitty land agent who was socially and economically ostracised). The practice is older: there was a widespread boycott in the UK of slavery-produced sugar starting in 1791, during which sales plummeted by something like 40%. It is totally historically plausible to have a consumer or personal boycott in your Georgian or Regency novel, but you can’t call it a boycott for several decades more

Chauvinist

Named for a French vaudeville character. Meaning ‘blinkered nationalist’ it dates from 1840; you can’t use it for a male pig until 1960.

Fedora                                                                                                         

The hat beloved of men who spend too long on the internet getting angry about Star Wars sequels actually used to be a symbol of female liberation and cross dressing. Comes from the 1887 play Fédora starring Sarah Bernhardt.

Fuchsia

You will be able to spell this if you remember it’s an eponym for Mr Fuchs. The flowers are so named in the UK in the 1750s, the colour not till the 1920s. Do not put your Regency heroine in fuchsia, is what I mean.

Maverick

Supposedly from a US cattle owner, Samuel Maverick, who let his calves run wild. 1880s US at the very earliest, more probably 1930s. Yes, that is irritating.

Mesmeric

He may have compelling eyes but they ain’t mesmeric before the 1860s. The hypnotist Mesmer flourished in the late 1700s, giving us mesmerism (hypnosis); mesmerise wasn’t a verb till the end of the Regency, and even then it still meant ‘to put into a hypnotic trance’.

Sadistic

Marquis de Sade, as you already know, but NB that sadist/sadistic aren’t in general use till the 1890s or so when sexology got going, along with masochism (also an eponym).

Sandwich

1762 since you ask.

Silhouette

The outline picture is named for French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette. Used in France from 1760. However, despite there being a craze for silhouettes in England, the actual word didn’t come here till the mid 1820s, which is sodding annoying if your novel about a silhouette cutter happens to be set in 1819 I’M JUST SAYING.

Sweet Fanny Adams

This UK usage originally referring to something no good, now often used as an alternative to ‘sweet FA/fuck all’, came in from 1869 and cannot be used before 1867. You really don’t want to know where it comes from but here if you must (be warned, it’s genuinely grim).

Thug

Originally from India. Used to describe the Thuggee (as Brits then called it) sect from 1810. Didn’t become generalised to all violent lowlifes till 1839. You can’t be assaulted by thugs in a Regency unless they are actually Thugs.

Trilby

Another hat your Regency gentleman can’t wear. Comes from George du Maurier’s mega hit Trilby published 1894, which also gave us svengali (the name of the baddie in the book).

Feel free to add to this in the comments, there’s always something!

Death in the Spires, my Oxford-set historical murder mystery, is out now. The silhouette book, The Duke at Hazard, publishes in July: more later!

Today is the official publication date of my very first murder mystery. Obviously I have written many (many) murders, some of them mysterious, but this is my first genre murder. Which is to say, it’s not a romance novel. Do not go in expecting a HEA, okay?

Death in the Spires is very much a book of my heart. It is, in fact, the book I was discussing with Mr KJC one summer afternoon in the pub about eight years ago, just before I told him that I would rather eat out of bins than keep doing my then job till Christmas as planned, and he said, “Put in your notice tomorrow.” So I did, and moved to being a freelance writer/editor, and then a full time writer, and you can thank/blame Mr KJC for the thirty-odd novels I now have under my belt.

If you’re wondering about ‘eight years ago’: I wrote it, and it didn’t quite work. Couldn’t put my finger on it, so I shoved the MS to one side for five minutes because I was building my career in romance, and then Brexit, Trump, pandemic, before you know it six years have elapsed. But then last year I sent it to exciting new publisher Storm, and they liked it. A terrifically brutal/brutally terrific edit by Kathryn Taussig and Natasha Hodgson later, it did work, and here we are.

It’s a mystery starring an intense group of friends whose glittering Oxford and future careers are abruptly cut short when one of them is murdered…by one of them. Ten years on, scholarship boy turned drab clerk Jem sets out to discover who did it.

It’s running at an average five stars on NetGalley, which is nice. A few review quotes:

One of the best books I have read so far this year. The people and places all feel so real. Even though the setting is historical so many of the issues are ones that are completely relevant now just with a slightly different slant.

This is a mystery story but it is also a beautiful love story. I loved the character of Jem and was with him every painful step of the way

This is, in my humble opinion, the absolute best book K.J. Charles has written so far

A great, satisfying mystery. I read the whole thing in a day

KJ pivots toward a more classic murder mystery, but still gives us strong, nuanced characters in whose emotional lives we can’t help but be invested. As always, her eye for detail and twisty plotting result in a brilliant story that will keep readers breathlessly barreling toward the satisfying conclusion.

Why yes, I do have my usual K.J. Charles book hangover. Thanks for asking.

Clicky for content warnings. Again: not a romance. Available in print and e, and audio read by Tom Lawrence.

Buy links here!