Historical novels Archives - Page 16 of 20 - Lynn Bryant’s Writing with Labradors

5th July 20174th July 2018

Tynwald Day- the Manx national day

Tynwald Day, the Manx national day, is held each year on July 5^th and is a celebration of Manx independence and Manx culture. I wrote this post last year and am re-sharing it along with a free promotion of my most recent book, An Unwilling Alliance, which is set on the Isle of Man and in Denmark in 1806-7 and features a Manx hero and heroine.

Tynwald is the Parliament of the Isle of Man and no other parliament in the world has such a long unbroken record. It has been going since Viking times, more than 1000 years and governs a tiny island in the Irish sea. I had never heard the word Tynwald until I moved to the island fifteen years ago and I’m not sure I had really grasped the fact that the Isle of Man is an independent country with it’s own laws and its own Parliament. The island is not part of the United Kingdom, but a Crown Dependency with the Queen acknowledged as Lord of Mann.

The ceremony held at St John’s on Tynwald Day has changed in the details but has basically been going on for more than 1000 years. Back then the island was a collection of Viking settlements and an annual sitting of their Parliament was held around midsummer where people gathered to hear their laws proclaimed aloud, to seek justice and to air their grievances.

The Vikings or Norsemen first came to Mann around the year 800AD, and ruled the Island for four-and-a-half centuries before finally ceding it to the King of Scotland in 1266. By then they had firmly imposed their own administrative system, which continued even while the Island’s ownership passed between Scotland and England, to the Stanley family of Lancashire (Lords of Mann from 1405-1736), and to their kin the Dukes of Atholl, who held it until it was re-vested in the British Crown in 1765. The custom of Tynwald Day has continued throughout all these changes.

On Tynwald Day, Tynwald meets at St John’s instead of the usual parliament building in Douglas, partly in the Royal Chapel of St John the Baptist and partly in the open air on Tynwald Hill, a small artificial hill nearby. The meeting is known as Midsummer Court and is attended by both branches of Tynwald, the House of Keys and the Legislative Council. The Lieutenant Governor presides as the representative of the Lord of Mann, unless the Queen or another member of the Royal Family is present.

All bills which have received the Royal Assent are promulgated on Tynwald day and if this does not happen within 18 months of passing the bill it ceases to have effect. Other proceedings can include the presentation of petitions and the swearing in of public officials. There is a formal procession which includes the Lieutenant Governor, Members of the House of Keys and of the Legislative Council, the Deemsters who are the highest judicial officers, any guests of honour from other nations, clergymen, leaders of local governments and any other state officials of the Isle of Man. Members of the general public attend the ceremony as do local constabulary and military. It is a highly formal affair.

Before Tynwald sits, the individual presiding inspects the guard of honour and lays a wreath at the National War Memorial. There is a religious service in the chapel at 11am and then Tynwald proceeds to the adjacent Tynwald Hill. The path is strewn with rushes following the celtic custom of pleasing the sea god Mannanan with bundles of rushes on Midsummer’s Eve. The path is lined with flagpoles, which fly the national flag and the parliamentary flag. The laws are proclaimed from Tynwald Hill which has existed from at least the end of the 14^th century. Once this is done, Tynwald reconvenes in the Chapel and quill pens are used to sign certificates documenting the promulgation of the laws.

Once the captioning of the acts has concluded, the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Council withdraw, leaving members of the House of Keys for a session of their house. Once Tynwald Day is over there are three more sittings of Tynwald before the government adjourns for the summer until October.

Traditionally, Tynwald Day was marked by a fair and market; these customs still continue with stalls, demonstrations, music and dance throughout the day and on into the evening. The village of St John’s is packed with people and the following week, known as Manx National Week, usually hosts a series of concerts, displays and other events related to Manx culture.

For the first few years we were on the island it was an annual event to go to Tynwald Day. I admit I was fascinated by the history, the idea that this ceremony, in some form or another, has been going for so long. It is very different to the British opening of Parliament and Queen’s speech which is very much a Parliamentary event. This is an event for the people, and the tradition of people bringing their grievances before Tynwald on this day really happens, I know people who have done it. This year, as an example, several Manx women staged a silent protest dressed in Handmaid’s Tale type red cloaks and bonnets to show their support for reform of the island’s highly outdated abortion laws. Democracy moves slowly at times, but it does move and Tynwald Day is a traditional forum for protests like this.

The actual reading of the laws is long and boring and I’m not sure how many people really listen. But it’s an important part of the day. The officials are in full robes and wigs and there’s a real sense of ceremony and national pride.

I’ve not been to Tynwald Day for years now. It’s the day after my daughter’s birthday so it’s often difficult. But I think I’d like to do it again at some point. In the past, when the children were younger it was all about the fair and the activities and the market stalls. But I think I’d like to attend from the point of view of a historian, to read about the ceremonies of the past and feel the sense of continuity which shines through the day. The island is a small nation but has a deep sense of pride and community which I’ve a suspicion we could all learn something from.

Many thanks to Heather Paisley for use of her photographs.

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18th June 20176th October 2017

The Battle of Waterloo – the battle that changed the face of Europe – Part 2

Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington

The Battle of Waterloo – the battle that changed the face of Europe – was fought in what is now Belgium on July 18th in 1815. It started to rain on the afternoon of 17 June and this continued into the night but the morning of the 18th was sunny and bright.

On the plateaus to the south of the village of Waterloo, near Mont St. Jean, the two armies were camped some 1500 yards apart, the French with 72000 men and the Anglo-Dutch with 68000 men. Although the ridge was not high there were hollows and ravines where forces could be hidden until an enemy drew close and troops could rise up completely unexpectedly. This was land which Wellington knew how to exploit.

Wellington located his reserves and some of his main force behind the slopes of the plateau he had chosen to make his stand on; they would be concealed from view and largely protected from artillery. To the west, forward of his right flank, he sent troops to Hougemont, which was a brick-and-stone redoubt, fully enclosed and further protected by ditches, an orchard and hedges. Directly to his front he sent another force to a similar mini-fortress, La Haye Sainte. No similar fortifications existed on his left, or eastern flank, though there were smaller strongholds scattered about. This was the direction from which he hoped the Prussians would be arriving to reinforce him so he was less concerned about it.

Bonaparte’s favourite tactic was envelopment, swinging around his enemy’s flanks, but the heavy rains had left the low ground muddy between the plateau where his forces waited and the plateau where the Anglo-Dutch had their line. The mud would slow his cavalry and artillery in any envelopment attempt. He chose, therefore, to make a direct attack on Wellington’s centre. The poor weather also caused him to delay his main attack from 9:00 a.m. to noon, to allow the ground more time to dry.

Defending Hougemont at the Battle of Waterloo — The fight for Hougemont at the Battle of Waterloo

Bonaparte ordered General Reille to make an attack in the direction of Hougemont. It was intended to be a diversionary attack launched a half-hour before the main effort, but the commander of Reille’s lead division, after driving the enemy from some woods around the chateau, decided to attack the chateau itself. Both sides reinforced, and the fight drew in nearly half of Reille’s corps in a battle for a position of doubtful value to the French.

South of where the fighting was taking place, Grouchy had been ordered to seize Wavre and block the Prussians, but he moved slowly, and two corps had already passed through the town by the time his Frenchmen arrived. However, the same mud that had caused Napoleon to favor a direct assault over an enveloping maneuver also slowed the Prussian march to reinforce the Anglo-Dutch at Waterloo. Blucher pushed his men on, desperate to reinforce Wellington.

Knowing that the two forces would soon unite, Napoleon either had to withdraw to fight another day on better ground, or commit the rest of his force and hope to break Wellington’s line before Blücher’s full force arrived. Weighing against a retreat was the knowledge that an army of 250,000 Austrians were advancing toward Paris, and Napoleon was concerned that retreating would cost him support of the French people. He chose to decide the issue there and then.

For a half an hour he bombarded his enemy with 80 guns, but because Wellington had positioned much of his force on the downside of slopes away from the French artillery, the bombardment was not very effective.

Wellington reinforced La Haye Sainte and at around 4:00 p.m. both sides began heavy artillery bombardments. By now, Wellington’s centre began to disintegrate under the repeated French attacks and started to fall back. Marshal Ney, believing the Anglo-Dutch line was faltering, ordered a cavalry attack unsupported by infantry or artillery. The horsemen thundered forward, the ground shaking beneath the hooves of their mounts, crested a hill, and were greeted by British infantry formed in a patchwork of squares, the most effective defensive formation against cavalry. The French swept around the squares, trying to find a way to penetrate them, but momentum was broken. A counterattack by British cavalry drove the Frenchmen back, but reinforced, they came on again. Four times they charged, and four times they were repulsed.

By 6pm La Haye Sainte had fallen at last; Reille’s men had Hougomont surrounded, and a powerful attack against Wellington’s centre might have broken through, but the Prussians had begun arriving around 4pm and threatened the French rear by assaulting Plancenoit, a sizeable village with a stone church and stone-walled cemetery that could serve as strongpoints for either side. Napoleon directed a counterattack that gradually forced the Prussians back, but it took 10,000 French away from the central battle area, where they could have been used to break through Wellington’s weakened centre.

While Napoleon’s attention was focused on the Prussian threat to his rear, Ney took command of the rest of the Guard—some of the finest infantry in the world at the time—and led them in a futile attack against the strongest point of Wellington’s line. Finally, the French right flank caved, taking any remaining hope that Napoleon could avoid defeat. Napoleon ordered what was left of the Old Guard to form squares across the road south of La Haye Sainte while he withdrew his battered army.

Wellington and Blucher’s meeting at the Battle of Waterloo — Wellington and Blucher meet on the field at the Battle of Waterloo

Wellington and Blucher met on the battlefield with little sense of triumph. The allies had lost about 23,000 men killed and wounded while the French had lost 25,000 with an additional 9,000 captured. Napoleon retreated to Paris, pursued first by the Prussians and then by the British, and on the 22 June abdicated for the second time. He had hoped to escape to America but realising that he could not evade the Royal Navy, surrendered to them and was sent into exile on St Helena.

Whatever the significance of the actual battle, Waterloo is a watershed in the history of Europe. After many years of war, the nations were to enjoy an extended period of peace which gave time for the development of trade and industry and the fast changes of the industrial revolution. Had Napoleon been able to see the Europe of 1860 he would have found it very different.

The Battle of Waterloo changes everything for the characters of my books. It was the Duke of Wellington’s last major battle although he remained in France for the next three years in command of the Army of Occupation. After that he returned to England and moved into the political arena and for Paul van Daan the close relationship with his commanding officer which had begun on a hillside in India slightly more than fifteen years earlier is going to change forever. Whatever his future relations with Wellington he will no longer be serving under his command.

For now, that day in 1815 is a long way off and the men of the 110th have a long war ahead of them. But since I know it is coming, the date of the Battle of Waterloo still feels like a landmark.

11th June 201710th October 2017

An Uncommon Campaign – Book Three of the Peninsular War Saga

An Uncommon Campaign is now published on Amazon Kindle and will shortly be available in paperback.

An Uncommon Campaign, 110th at the Battle of Fuentes d'Onoro — An Uncommon Campaign, 110th at the Battle of Fuentes d’Onoro

It is April 1811. Lord Wellington has led his army to the Spanish border where the French occupy their last stronghold in Portugal at Almeida. As the two armies face each other in the village of Fuentes de Onoro, Colonel Paul van Daan is trying to become accustomed to his new responsibilities in command of a brigade and is learning to manage the resentment of other officers at his early promotion. His young wife is carrying her first child and showing no signs of allowing her delicate situation to get in the way of her normal activities much to the horror of the rest of the army. And if that is not enough, Paul encounters a French colonel during battle who seems to have taken their rivalry personally with potentially lethal consequences for the Third Brigade of the Light Division.

The third book in the Peninsular War Saga will be published at the end of July 2017.

An Irregular Regiment, Book Two will be published on 4 July 2017

In the run up to the publication of An Irregular Regiment, there will be a free promotion of An Unconventional Officer from 16 – 18 June 2017.

7th June 201714th September 2018

A Matter of Intelligence – Wellington on Twitter

Wellington’s HQ in Pere Negro, the Lines of Torres Vedras

I first wrote A Matter of Intelligence – Wellington on Twitter last year and as today is the anniversary of the great man’s death I thought I would share it again.

Military Intelligence in the early nineteenth century was a little haphazard to say the least. Wellington made use of local Portuguese and Spanish guerrillas who provided him with information about French troop movements. He also had a Corps of Guides which performed a wide variety of duties of which intelligence and map-making was one.

Initially the Corps only had a sergeant, a corporal and 18 troopers. It was commanded from 1808 to 1814 by Major (later LtCol) George Scovell, seconded from the Portuguese Quartermaster-General’s Department. Wellington expanded and transformed the Corps into a military intelligence corps. Around 15 officers, English and Portuguese, were appointed to the corps between 25 April and 3 June 1809; many more enlisted men were also added and, in 1813, the corps had 12 officers and 193 men. In 1808-1810 the corps was mostly Portuguese, its officers being generally students of the University of Coimbra. All were to speak both English and Portuguese. Later recruits were often foreign deserters or Spaniards, recruited to gather information for the Anglo-Portuguese Army in Spain and southern France.

The Corps employed a number of ‘exploring officers’, chosen for three distinct skills: they were expert horsemen, skilled linguists, and able to express themselves in writing or sketching in the briefest and most concise terms. One of the first duties in the winter of 1810 when there was little fighting, was for the exploring officers to map every bit of the Portuguese countryside four miles to the inch. They accomplished this with the help of local inhabitants who often knew their own immediate area never travelled beyond the sight of their villages or farms.

With the countryside mapped, the exploring officers were sent out on
reconnaissance, moving behind enemy lines, learning troop movements and strategic information and then bringing the information back to Wellington. They led lonely and often dangerous lives and received little reward or recognition for it. Some were even shunned by their former regiments who took the view that they had avoided the dangers of the battlefield but Wellington had enormous respect for them.

These days, so much intelligence is online, and there is a good deal of debate about personal privacy on the internet and how it can be balanced against national security. Wellington’s needs were much simpler. He needed men to gather the information, he needed Portuguese and Spanish partisans to capture French messengers and bring him their despatches. And he needed a code breaker to make sense of them. He found that in Major George Scovell, an unassuming officer of the quartermaster-general’s department who became a crucial player in Wellington’s winning the war.

I find myself speculating, between my writing, my research and reading news reports, on how different things were for Wellington and his army. Messages were sent by semaphore or carried by riders and there was nothing instant about them. News or orders from London took weeks to arrive and the officers of Wellington’s army were often ignorant of the latest news and of their general’s plans which they found very frustrating. Not that modern methods of communication would have helped them. Lord Wellington was notorious for failing to consult or inform his officers, with the exception of a privileged few. He was a private man and it would not have occurred to him to share his thoughts or opinions with the majority of the army. Twitter would not have been for him. But I’ve been amusing myself today, reading some of Donald Trump’s latest efforts, trying to imagine what it would have been like if he had…

Wellington on twitter

@Craufurdlightdivision: Camped at Almeida outside fort

@Wellingtonhq: When you say outside fort do you by any remote chance mean outside the actual fortress? What are you doing on that side of the river General? Did you not understand my very

@Craufurdlightdivision: Sir only 140 characters, remember?

@Wellingtonhq: 140 characters? How can I be expected to give orders in 140 characters? This is completely absurd, where are you? Where are the French? Have you made contact with Picton? You

@Craufurdlightdivision: You need to keep it shorter, Picton an arsehole, think French approaching, might need to go, brb

@Wellingtonhq: What do you mean Picton an arsehole, dear God if the enemy is approaching and you have no support you need to get them out of there! Why are you on that side of the river? Retr

@Craufurdlightdivision: Busy here, sir, retreating over the river, very outnumbered, BFN

@Wellingtonhq: BFN what in God’s name does that mean? What numbers? How are they formed? Do you have cover? How can I give orders without any information, General, this is serious! Get th

@Craufurdlightdivision: Shit the bridge is blocked need to go BFN

@Wellingtonhq: Craufurd listen to me! Are you there? Speak to me! How dare you pi me in the middle of my orders! You forget yourself, sir! You are too rash, too ready to throw your men into bat

@Wellingtonhq: God damn it why will this thing never let me finish a sentence? Craufurd answer me!

@Craufurdlightdivision: #ohshit #thatwasclose #nearlylostlightdivision

Wellington (to his ADC): Freemantle, would you be a good fellow and check those bushes for my phone? No not those ones, Captain, those over there. I threw it quite hard. And send a message to General Craufurd by semaphore, would you?

For regular updates on this site including history, travel, book reviews and plenty of labradors (and a few freebies thrown in) please join the e-mail list here.

3rd June 201710th October 2017

The Peninsular War Saga:The Joy of a Series…why one book sometimes isn’t enough…

Many thanks to all of you downloading An Unconventional Officer, the first book in the Peninsular War saga. I really hope you enjoy it. It’s a long book and it’s the first in a series so I am hoping that you make a connection with the characters and want to read on. Discovering a new series of books is something of a commitment. You can read one book, put it to one side with a smile or a shrug, and not worry about it any further. But to read a series, the story and the characters have to matter.

All of my characters matter to me but I probably have more invested at the moment in Paul and Anne in An Unconventional Officer because I know a lot more about them. I’ve worked out where they are going and what happens to them and I know what they have to face along the way. I know about their friends and their family and their children.

I love reading a series. There’s a real sense of anticipation about the next book. In terms of historical novels, these are my favourites, in no particular order:

Sir Robert Carey and the James Enys series by P F Chisholm (Patricia Finney)

Falco and Flavia Alba novels by Lindsey Davis

Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters

Lymond and Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett

Amelia Peabody novels by Elizabeth Peters

The Barforth family saga by Brenda Jagger

There are a lot of others but these are definitely my favourites. I quite enjoy some other series as well. I like thrillers, and I enjoy Val McDermid, Jeffrey Deaver, Tony Hillerman, Jonathan Kellerman, Colin Dexter, P D James, Tess Gerritson and Elizabeth George.

Sometimes a series starts well and then tails off so that I lose interest. That definitely happened with the Alex Cross series by James Patterson. I enjoyed the early ones enormously but then for me, the stories became too similar or sometimes too bizarre, in an effort to keep the series going. Sometimes I suspect it is time just to find an ending and move on.

Sometimes a series just wears me out. I’m a big fan of Game of Thrones and have followed both the novels and the TV series with considerable enthusiasm. But the last book was a struggle and although I’m still enjoying the series, I’m not sure I’ll read the next book when it arrives. It had become unremittingly depressing and hard to follow even for me, and I’ve waited too long for it. I think he’s an amazing writer, but I’m just done with them now.

Writing a series brings both opportunities and challenges for an author. There are challenges of continuity, of making sure no glaring errors occur with events and characters and history. List making, chronologies and obsessive detail is essential here. There is the challenge of keeping your readers interest. No matter how much your readers love your main characters, if all the books are about them and nothing else they are going to get bored.

I think historical novelists have an unfair advantage here, because unless we want to rewrite history, we can’t cheat. The events of the day are going to happen to our characters whether we like it or not so it forces us to think about how they might genuinely affect our protagonists. A good example of this is the growing friendship between Colonel Paul van Daan, my fictional hero of the Peninsular Wars saga and General Robert Craufurd, the irascible, brilliant commander of the light division. There are no spoilers here. Both Anne and Paul are very attached to Craufurd but anybody can check Wikipedia and realise that at some point they are going to get very upset. Craufurd died in the breaches of Ciudad Rodrigo and his friends were devastated. I can’t rewrite that to make my characters feel better…

Those are the challenges. The opportunities are equally important. A series means you get to find out what happens next. You don’t have to tie up all the loose ends in one book. You can start and end each chapter when it makes sense. You can explore other characters alongside your leads. And you can develop people in the way that happens in real life, gradually, in a series of conversations and events not in a three paragraph summary which is all you have time for.

The established wisdom of publishing now seems to be, that with very few exceptions, long novels don’t work. It is assumed that modern readers simply can’t cope. In my opinion this has more to do with publishing costs than public opinion and I do understand why a publisher who is struggling with the advent of the internet and self publishing might not be willing to take on a new author. But for me, because I’m a realist, the phrase “you’re not marketable” actually means “you’re new and therefore too much of a risk”. And that’s fine. I’ve accepted it and moved on. But since I can’t stop writing, I’ve decided to put my books out there and see. And the good news is, they’re selling. And getting good reviews and ratings. Not thousands of sales yet, but hundreds. Not dozens of reviews yet but a few and very good.

“An Unconventional Officer” was a difficult novel to publish. It’s long. Less that the Harry Potter book “Deathly Hallows” which was for children. Less than War and Peace or Catch-22. About the same as Fellowship of the Ring. I thought about splitting it into two books when I was trying to find a traditional publisher. They would either have told me to cut it or to split it into two books.

In the end I’ve published it as it is. For those of you who give it a try I hope you enjoy it. I loved writing it and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, most of which will be shorter books covering a shorter time period.

1st June 201711th October 2017

Creating a book – an interview with Sarah Hendy on Manx radio

Manx Radio on Douglas Head (Photo by Nigel Williams)

I had a lovely time today recording a radio interview for Manx radio with the fabulous Sarah Hendy whom I used to work with at the Sayle Gallery in Douglas. Sarah now presents Spotlight, the stations weekly arts programme and asked me to come for a chat about my books and in particular the latest

An Unconventional Officer - love and war in Wellington’s army — Book 1 in the Peninsular War Saga

release, An Unconventional Officer.

It took me right back to my first ever post when I wrote about how difficult it was for me to ‘come out’ and admit that I write historical novels and consider myself to be an author. I was writing when I was working with Sarah but we didn’t talk about it because at that stage only my closest friends and family knew that I wrote at all. I’m not sure why, looking back on it, except that it is a slightly unusual hobby. A lot of people put reading or hiking or cycling at a hobby on their CV but writing tends to raise eyebrows.

I enjoyed the interview. It helps a lot to know the person interviewing you and Sarah and I know each other very well. But I also enjoyed some of the questions, in particular the one about the process of creating the story.

I don’t know how other authors put together their novels. Do they start by typing chapter one and then write through in a logical order until the end? I’ve never been very good at doing that. I tend to write a selection of scenes involving my characters and then string them together. Once I’ve got a fair chunk of the book, I can go back and fill in the gaps, and a lot of rewriting is done then.

It sounds like a slightly mad way of doing things, but my books are very character driven. One of the comments made by Sarah today was that it sounds at times as if my characters get away from me. It’s really hard to explain it, but they do. Sometimes they seem to behave in ways that I find very difficult to understand. Heroes behave like idiots, heroines lose their marbles at an unexpected moment and a villain who up until now has been completely dislikable will step up and do something good which I then have to deal with.

That’s why writing individual scenes often works well for me. I can throw a collection of people together in a situation and see how they behave. Sometimes it works really well and I will incorporate the scene into the book and at other times I decide I don’t want to use it. But even the unused scenes have developed relationships between my characters and I think that makes the scenes I do use a lot stronger.

The exception to this slightly off beat way of writing has been the Peninsular War Saga. Initially I began with the same approach but once I got to grips with the research, it was obvious I needed to focus a bit better or the whole thing was going nowhere. Lord Wellington did not hang about during the war and my poor characters are constantly on the move, constantly busy. Scenes I particularly wanted to include needed to be ruthlessly adapted to fit in with what the commander in chief wanted.

I didn’t mind. Wellington was giving the orders here, it’s our job just to get on with it. In many ways it makes the whole situation more realistic. The number of times one of my characters needs to march out to battle just as a crisis occurs at home is numerous but completely real. It must have happened in real life, which is probably why Wellington didn’t really like his officers and men to be married at all, and if they were, preferred their families to be left at home. He needed his army to focus and became annoyed very quickly at requests for leave to deal with family crises, romantic interludes or personal bereavement.

Wellington remained in the field for the whole of the war apart from the one occasion right at the start when he was recalled with the other commanders to answer for the fiasco of the Convention of Sintra. While he was away Sir John Moore marched into Spain, a disastrous campaign which ended with his death at Corunna. I rather suspect that didn’t help with Wellington’s conviction that everything tended to go wrong if he wasn’t there to personally take charge.

With the Peninsular books I now have my characters, and a fairly fixed timeline, and all I need to do is work out what happens to them during that time period. It’s fairly obvious where Paul needs to be. Battle follows battle and he’s going to be involved in them. Occasionally there’s a short break during winter quarters, but I tend to find him a job elsewhere during those periods. He doesn’t like to be bored.

I’d like to thank Sarah and Manx Radio for letting me ramble on about my books. It’s something I love to do. The programme is aired on Wednesday 7th June at 5.30pm.

31st May 201711th October 2017

Writing with Labradors… An Unconventional Officer, The Reluctant Debutante and Hilary Mantel

Lynn Bryant and Writing with Labradors — Local news story on Writing with Labradors

Writing with Labradors, and Blogging with Labradors came about as something of a joke when I was first setting up my website. It’s proved popular and I’ve stayed with it…hence the presence of Toby and Joey in our local newspaper this week.

Anybody looking at this post is going to work out from the title that I’ve a few things on my mind this morning. One of them is recovering from my birthday yesterday. Not, as you might think, a wild night out on the town, but a rather lovely meal at home (main course courtesy of my son and his girlfriend, cake courtesy of my daughter) followed by Prosecco and Trivial Pursuits. You can tell that I know how to live…

I spent some time thinking about publicity yesterday now that An Unconventional Officer has been published. There was a nice article in our local paper the Isle of Man Examiner about the release and I’ve been asked to do Manx Radio as well.

I can remember one of the first posts I wrote on this blog talked about my concerns regarding publicity. I’ve never been much of a self-publicist and I honestly thought I’d struggle more than I have, but I’ve made myself do it because once I had taken the plunge and published the books it seemed pointless just to let them sit there and take their chances. And I’ve actually quite enjoyed it. For anybody interested in psychology, marketing and reaching the right audience is a nice little challenge. I’m still learning but I think I’m getting better.

It helps that the books are selling – not in their thousands, but steadily. It also helps that I’ve had one or two nice reviews and some four and five star ratings on places like Goodreads and Amazon. There’s something very encouraging about knowing that people are reading and enjoying the books enough to review them. All my reviews are from complete strangers, I hope they have some idea how much it makes me smile.

One of the interesting things I’m learning is what people like. I grew up with Regency novels and loved them, and I’ve read a few more recent ones. The Reluctant Debutante was my tribute to those and I’ve been astonished at how popular it’s been. I had already thought I would write another Regency just because they’re so much fun, but I’m already planning it.

An Unconventional Officer is also set in Regency times and although it’s a far cry from the London Season of Cordelia and Giles, it is about the war which affected everything during those years. It’s a longer book than any of the others and is the first in a series which follows the men and women of a fictional regiment through the years of the Peninsular War. I loved working on this book; it’s a bigger canvas with a large cast of characters and the best part is that I don’t have to say goodbye to them at the end of the book.

I’ve done a lot of research for these books. Earlier I saw an article in the Guardian which caught my attention about the relationship between academic historians and historical novelists which I found really interesting. I’m sure there are a lot of academics who dislike historical novels, particularly where they take very obvious liberties with history. Equally there are non-academics who don’t like them much either. And there are people who like science fiction and chick lit and thrillers and even, so I’m told, those who love Fifty Shades of Grey. It takes all sorts.

I think I can understand the frustration of an academic historian. After publishing a book which took years of painstaking research, gained excellent academic reviews and sold very few copies it must be infuriating to see a novelist selling thousands of books which claim to be based on history but which to a serious historian could seem poorly researched, wildly inaccurate and full of mistakes.

I do have a history degree so I’ve a little understanding of both sides of this argument. The truth is that some historical novelists are not trying to be accurate, they’re just trying to entertain, putting characters in old fashioned clothing but not caring about period detail or anachronisms or accurate timelines. It doesn’t mean people don’t or shouldn’t enjoy their books. It just means that they’re not intended to teach people anything about history.

I’ve read some of these and personally they drive me up the wall. I can cope with honest mistakes but in some cases I think writers might do better to turn to fantasy where anything goes. Still, I refuse to be a snob about it. There are also some very well respected historical novelists whose work is clearly painstakingly researched but I just don’t enjoy their style. Many people do, it’s a matter of personal taste.

I’ve recently come across an author called Jacqueline Reiter, who has written both a biography and a historical novel about the life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, the elder brother of the Younger Pitt who spent much of his life in the shade of his more famous father and sibling. I’ve now read both, and it’s confirmed what I’ve always suspected that it’s very possible to be both and excellent historian and an entertaining historical novelist. I would defy anybody on either side of this debate to be snobbish about Earl of Shadows which is the novel or to complain that the biography the Late Lord is anything other than a well-written and very scholarly work. Both historians and novelists could learn a lot from this writer and I hope she goes on to write a lot more.

The books I’ve written so far are period specific and most of them include some real historical characters alongside my fictional ones. I try to research as well as I can. For A Respectable Woman I used a lot of primary sources and for “An Unconventional Officer” I read endless accounts of the war written by the men who fought it. The problem with these is that they are frequently contradictory in themselves; they were written years after the war and people forget.

Wellington’s letters and despatches are a goldmine of information for the Peninsular War books although they’ve obviously been edited for publication. Even so, given the immense stress Wellington must have been under during those years, did even he remember everything?

In the end, it only matters if you want it to matter. I love reading history, both novels and non-fiction, as long as it’s well written and enjoyable to read. I can sift through either and find what I want and the very obvious disagreements between academics over the interpretation of events means that I don’t feel guilty about putting forward my own interpretation in a novel. My characters might well have their own views about why something happened which contradict modern historians’ thinking, but then they’re not modern historians, sifting the evidence, they’re supposed to be ordinary people living their lives in a different time and like us they’re entitled to their opinions.

I think I’ve done enough musing about marketing and the meaning of life for a while. Now it’s back to the writing, which in the end is what I love doing most and the reason that all this is happening.

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29th May 201711th October 2017

Love and Marriage – an anniversary

Twenty three years ago today I got married and the anniversary has made me think about love and marriage, an important issue in all of my books.

Inevitably it was in a castle. Dalhousie Castle on the Scottish Borders is a beautiful place, converted into a hotel with a small chapel which as far as I know still does weddings. Ours was a small affair with only close family and two or three friends. We went on honeymoon afterwards and then came back and had a huge party with all our friends to celebrate.

I write historical fiction with a strong element of romance so relationships and how they develop are of interest to me. I also spent years working as a relationship counsellor which meant I saw the ups and downs of more couples than I can remember. And I’ve been in a relationship now for around twenty seven years. Believe me, I’ve thought about love and marriage during all this.

It’s the aim of a writer of romance, even if the romance is only part of the theme of the book, to try to make it realistic while still retaining the magical element of falling in love. A lot of romantic novels end with wedding bells, or at least with the couple falling into each others arms and admitting that after all their trials and tribulations, they want to be together. There’s something very satisfying about reading the last page, closing the book, and knowing that the couple that you have become attached to (hopefully) have worked it out.

Of course they haven’t. They’ve just worked out the first bit. There’s a whole lot of work still to come which a lot of the time we don’t see. But because I do get attached to the characters I write about, I do wonder what happened to them next.

In historical fiction, the drama of divorce would have been less common. Certainly before the Victorian era when divorce became slightly more realistic, although still very difficult, only the very wealthy could afford divorce which had to be confirmed by an act of Parliament. And it was only available to men.

This didn’t mean that couples didn’t separate. For many it was a quiet affair, simply drifting apart and living separate lives. There was not always the same pressure for couples to spend all their time together as we have now. These days, if one partner takes a job which keeps them away for weeks, months or even years at a time, there is often an expectation that the marriage is going to fail. In the early nineteenth century, married officers and men in the British army might not see their wives or families for years. Some marriages did end during that time but a surprising number succeeded, helped along by endless letter writing and a determination to keep the relationship alive.

There was probably a different attitude to adultery in some quarters, for men at least. It was not considered so shocking for a man to have relations with a mistress as long as he was discreet. In an age where many marriages, particularly among the middle and upper classes, were arranged for reasons other than love, one wonders how often both partners were unfaithful at times. Some of these marriages worked very well. Others did not. There are examples of both of these in the books I’ve written.

I do wonder, though, if some couples pushed through their difficulties and came out stronger when divorce and separation were more difficult. Some, we know, lived in misery, and I wouldn’t go back to the days when divorce was seen as shocking. But relationships are tough at times and there’s a feeling of satisfaction in coming out the other side of a difficult patch and feeling close again.

A Marcher Lord - a story of the Anglo-Scottish borders — A Marcher Lord – a story of the Anglo-Scottish borders

I’ve been thinking about the couples in my books so far and wondering how they’d do. Jenny and Will from A Marcher Lord will do well, I suspect. Both had parents who made successes of their marriages; Will’s had an arranged marriage and Jenny’s was a runaway love match but both worked. Jenny and Will would have led a busy and active life keeping castle and estates running successfully and they have already proved they make a good working team. They’ll argue, but they have shared values and interests and I think they’ll be fine. I’m planning a second book featuring this couple some time next year and I’m looking forward to catching up with them.

Cordelia and Giles from The Reluctant Debutante come from different social backgrounds, but she’s already proved that she can make the shift into the Ton very well. I think both of them enjoy country life. They might argue about social obligations; she’s probably always going to be more social than he is, have better manners and be nicer to people. But they share a sense of humour and a love of the ridiculous and I think for Giles there will always be an enormous sense of gratitude to her. He was in bits after Waterloo and she’s a big part of his rehabilitation. There is a planned series of books set around the lives and loves of some of the men and women of the third brigade of the Light Division after the war, of which this is the second, so I think we will meet Cordelia and Giles again.

Kit and Philippa from A Respectable Woman are the most interesting in some ways. Somebody who has just finished the book and loved it asked about a sequel and it has made me think how this marriage is likely to work. Of all of them the gap between these two is the widest. Philippa has a lot to learn about how to be a Countess and for all his protestations that she can do as she likes, Kit is going to need to learn to let her be herself. I think the key to this one is going to be for both of them to find something to do outside of the marriage so that neither of them feel smothered. They’re both used to being busy and having a job to do. The big advantage that they have is Kit’s mother, a very wise and understanding woman who is going to be a big help to Philippa. I think they’ll be all right but I suspect there might be a few fireworks along the way.

Then we have Paul and Anne who began their journey in An Unconventional Officer. There is a lot about relationships in this and the subsequent novels in the Peninsular War saga. There’s no point in speculating about Paul and Anne because their story doesn’t end with the book, it continues through the series. We’re going to see how Paul and Anne and the other characters cope with trying to be together in the middle of a war and it’s not always likely to be easy.

I’ve been lucky enough to see an example of a very happy marriage with my parents. They’d been married for over fifty years when my Dad died and there were definitely ups and downs. But they stayed devoted to one another. Theirs is a story I’d like to write one day

In the meantime, Happy Anniversary to the man I married. 23 years and we’re still here. It feels like something to celebrate…

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26th May 201731st May 2018

The Isle of Man TT 2018

The e vents of this week reminded me of this blog post I wrote about the TT this time last year. I wanted to share it, as it gives a bit of a flavour of what it’s like to be living in the middle of this madness.

Yesterday, in practice, we lost Dan Kneen, a local rider from Onchan who looked very much on the verge of a breakthrough this year in terms of podium places. Steve Mercer, another favourite, has been taken to Liverpool in critical condition. I feel unbelievably sad about it, but it doesn’t stop me going out to watch the racing, which is difficult for many people to understand. I wondered about sharing this again, but I decided I would, because I still feel the same way about this event. It is part of the island, part of my home and over the past sixteen years has become part of who I am.

Dan Kneen’s father issued a statement after his son’s death, and this quote says it all for a lot of the riders and their families.

“Dan would want us to be strong and for the Tyco team to crack on, they have my full backing. Let’s think of the happy times with Dan and smile when you think of him. Thanks to the marshals and medics and everyone involved. Thinking of Steve Mercer as well. Best wishes for all the other TT competitors. The TT show will go on.”

I’m really hoping the rest of TT 2018 is a safe one. In the meantime, this is my post from last year.

With the excitement of launching my books onto an unsuspecting world, having pneumonia and surviving GCSEs and AS levels with two teenagers, the arrival of the Isle of Man TT 2017 has rather crept up on me this year. It wasn’t until I spoke to somebody in a government office yesterday and heard the familiar cautious words “well it might be ready, but you know it’s TT” that I remembered that for the next two weeks normal life is going to stop. Welcome to the Isle of Man TT 2017 – a spectacle like no other but a bit of a distraction when you’re trying to live a normal life.

The Isle of Man TT 2017 has nothing to do with writing historical novels but living where we do it will certainly impact on my ability to concentrate. Sitting at my desk looking out of the window I can actually see the TT course through the trees and when practice and racing are on it gets noisy. When we first moved into this house Toby the Labrador took exception to the bikes and kicked off every time they came past but fortunately he’s got very deaf now. This is difficult when calling him for any reason, but it does make race days easier.

In addition to the actual racing, we’re very close to the historic grandstand which means that every single biker who comes over for TT will, at some point, be clogging up the traffic at the end of our road. During road closures we can’t get out at all so we park one of the cars around a back road since there is a pathway which we can walk through.

Traffic during the TT festival is hideous, and gives us locals something new to moan about although to a woman who grew up in London, I was baffled when I first arrived here. I’ve absorbed a bit of Manxness in the past fifteen years and now find the heavier traffic just as horrendous as everybody else since we’re not used to it.

Despite all this, I actually like the TT. We used to entertain every year with a houseful of enthusiastic bike fans and every night was party night. These days we’re very sedate. House guests don’t work with two exam stressed teenagers, and because the exam timetable is set in the UK where this half term is different to ours, the kids are actually doing exams during TT week which would be tough with visitors. It’s tough anyway, their school is on the course so they are sometimes sitting there trying to do simultaneous equations with the deafening sounds of bikes screaming past.

I still like to go out to watch the racing. There’s a social feel to watching the TT. Given that Richard is a brilliant photographer and particularly good at motor sport shots, we like to go to a variety of places, some easier to get to than others. Personally I love the popular spots like Braddan Bridge and Union Mills church where you get get a cup of tea and there are proper toilets. Must be a sign of age. Richard is far more intrepid and I’ve climbed fences, scrambled up hills and sat on a mountain in freezing fog waiting for it to lift so that the racing can start. Last year I ended up half crippled after pulling a muscle climbing over a fence, a reminder that I’m fifty four not twenty four and I really need to think about what I’m doing a bit more.

We’ve met some great people watching the racing, both local and from the rest of the world. Everybody chats, everybody is friendly and it’s the best atmosphere ever.

And sometimes people die.

Every now and then, I come up against that fact and it shocks me. It doesn’t shock me because it happens. It shocks me that after fifteen years of doing this, I’m not shocked by it. I’m saddened. On one or two occasions it’s been someone I’ve met personally. It’s often people I know a lot about. People come to the TT year after year. It’s like an addiction for the riders, passed down through the generations, and a death in the family doesn’t stop them. The Dunlops have lost two family members to road racing, but Michael and William Dunlop will be out there again next week. They risk their lives for a passion and we watch them do it.

Every year, magazines and news articles talk about the death toll and speculate on whether something so dangerous should be allowed to continue. I can understand why they say it. For people with no love of the sport, and there are many even on the island, it must seem completely incomprehensible, in these days of enforced safety in so many areas, that every year a group of people go out and race around country roads, within centimetres of stone walls and lamp posts at speeds well in excess of a hundred miles per hour. Even being a spectator in these conditions is potentially dangerous.

For all that, I love the TT. The men, and a few women, who come here to race aren’t usually the superstars of sport. They’re ordinary people, mostly amateurs, who work all year for the chance to compete on these roads. They know the risks and they know the possible consequences, but like a mountaineer always looking for a higher peak and a bigger challenge, they keep pushing themselves to ride faster, to break lap records and reach that next elusive goal. It’s an amazing spectacle and I wouldn’t change it.

Despite exams and recovering from pneumonia, I’ll be out there watching again this year. We’re missing John McGuinness who recently came off at the North-West 200 and is injured. We should have Guy Martin back this year, definitely one of the characters of the sport. And there will be the newcomers, learning the course with their eyes on future glory.

I hope it’s a good year, which means that the weather is good, the races on time and everybody stays safe. There’s nothing like the TT and no place like the Isle of Man and for anybody who likes motorbikes you should come here and see it at least once.

Although it might slow my writing down for a week or two…

For those of you interested in TT photography, have a look at Richard’s flickr site, there are some amazing shots.

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24th May 201711th October 2017

Scrivener – the writing software that changed my life…

I thought I would surprise everybody with a review of scrivener for novel writing today. I love Scrivener, which I now use to write all my books.

I am a technology cave woman.

I was going to call myself a technology dinosaur. For one thing, I really like dinosaurs and aspire to be one. My occasional thermonuclear explosions at home when the mess in the house reaches a critical mass or I can’t get any peace and quiet to finish my chapter have led my family to compare me to a pterodactyl, a sub-species apparently known as the Mumadactyl.

But I’m not really a dinosaur with technology, because eventually, after a lot of swearing and moaning and kicking off, and after more tutorials, online instruction and lessons from the man I married who has the patience of a saint at times, I do get it and I can use it. That’s why the dinosaurs became extinct and I probably won’t.

I don’t love technology. I get no pleasure from a new gadget. Every upgrade to whatever I’m using at the time is greeted not by excited cries as I go through to find out what new and useful features have been added, but by a muttered grumbling sound as I go through to painstakingly relearn a familiar task now that some complete and utter moron has changed the way it looks and works. When my husband tells me that something is intuitive, I usually snarl at him. Walking is intuitive. Using any form of technology whatsoever, including a microwave, is not. I have to learn it and if I don’t use it very regularly, I have to learn it all over again when I’ve forgotten it.

This shocks many people since I’m clearly bright. “How can you not remember that?” they say. “It’s like remembering a phone number.” Well I don’t remember those either, although ask me to talk you through the causes of the Boer War which I last studied back in 1982 at University and I can do it in a heartbeat.

Just occasionally though I come across a piece of technology which looks as though it might be so useful that it inspires me to fight my way past my instinctive resistance to making my life more complicated. I learned, eventually, how to use an iPhone, an induction hob and wordpress to design this website and all of those have been well worth while. And finally, after about six months of cursing, I want to announce that I officially love using Scrivener.

Scrivener is an eBook creator. With it I can write my novels, format them, muck about with them, easily move between various versions of them and once I’m ready to publish them I can compile and upload them with remarkable ease. The interface is clear and once you’ve worked out what things actually mean, it’s well organised and makes a surprising amount of sense.

You can do an awful lot with Scrivener, not just novels but non-fiction books or even photo-albums. I will freely admit I don’t use half of these various functions, but if I should ever need to in the future, they exist.

Scrivener supports almost all of the main files eBook writers use including HTML, MOBI and PDF. You can upload sounds, graphics and videos onto your projects and it seems to be relatively easy. But the thing I love about it is the file structure which enables you to put your book together but also to store research notes and other material in a way that is quick and easy to access. I’ve really only just got to grips with this aspect of it, but as a writer of historical fiction it’s crucial to be able to keep good research notes and character lists and now I have everything I need to hand in each binder instead of searching through endless word or excel files for a list or a reference.

I won’t pretend it was all plain sailing learning a new tool. I’ve been using Word for so many years that I was genuinely terrified that trying to adapt to something new would slow me down. But now that I’m getting the hang of it I love how easy it is to organise things.

A cave woman, you see, not a dinosaur. Eventually, after a lot of whinging, cavemen and women learned how to use tools. I’m not convinced that the dinosaurs ever did…

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