Well, I’ve been slogging away at Paradigm for quite some time now and it seems like this might be an opportune moment to give you a sneak peek at this doorstop of a book. As you know, it’s a departure for me, in that it’s aimed at teens rather than middle-grade readers. So if you’re expecting Spellbinder, this isn’t it. I should also warn that there is some profanity in it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is set in a future in which everything has happened. Everything that earlier generations were warned about, yet chose to ignore. Continents are isolated, global communication non-existent, poverty and disease rampant. America has become a country of powerful city states, separated by the barren Wilds, where people struggle to survive.

Sam Cooper’s parents took him to the Wilds when he was five, now he’s seventeen and alone, driving the empty roads, scraping by. But something has been watching and waiting. Waiting for the moment when Sam would leave the Wilds and visit a city state. Sam will need everything he learned in the Wilds if he hopes to survive, and he’ll need something else too: the beautiful, scary Maori warrior, Alma.

Let me know your thoughts!

BTW, I’ve been told that publishers don’t like YA books with male leads because “boys don’t read after the age of 12.” Seriously. I’m not making this up. I did get a little of that right at the beginning with Spellbinder, when I asked why Steve wasn’t on the cover. I thought just putting Belladonna on the cover would put boys off. My UK publisher told me, “Boys won’t read it anyway.” Of course, this ignored the character of Steve and basically dismissed an entire gender. Whattheheck? When I go into schools and read sections to the kids, the boys are all over it. What’s not to like? Steve has a plastic ruler that turns into whatever weapon he needs to fight whatever magical creature they’ve encountered. Plus he has a seriously smart mouth.

Well, this seems to be more of the same. Yes, the story is told from the POV of Sam, but then there’s Alma — a young girl already experienced in the arts of war. She’s the last Maori warrior, fearsome, magnificent and mysterious. The idea that boys will only read books written from a male POV and girls books from a female POV is just silly. “Boys don’t read” –well, they won’t if you don’t publish anything for them. Sheesh!

So…rant over. Here it is: Paradigm.

I finished the teaser trailer for Paradigm yesterday and it is now available to view on Vimeo here. There are still a few things I want to fix, but it does give an idea of the story as well as the general tone of the book.

“And what is the story?” I hear you ask.

Well, it’s a departure for me in that it is speculative fiction aimed at the older reader, and takes place in America instead of the north west of England.

The story begins one hundred years from now in a future in which nearly all today’s dire warnings have become reality, the America of Paradigm has been reduced to a few powerful city states and the vast Wilds where local strongmen battle for power over a scattered, impoverished people.

Sam Cooper was taken to the Wilds by his parents when he was five. He’s now seventeen and has been alone for six years, getting by through a combination of wit, gambling and barter. When his erstwhile friend, Nathan, suggests they try their luck in one of the city states, Sam is reluctant – his parents had warned him about such places. However, he eventually agrees to travel to Century City, setting into motion a chain of events in which he discovers who is really in control of this not so brave new world as well as the reason his parents tried to hide him as far away as they could. On the way he meets the mysterious Alma, a Maori warrior who repeatedly saves his life, but who has secrets of her own; Rob, a would-be revolutionary leading a small group of followers plotting global change from a small house among the rubble of San Francisco; and the deliciously psychotic Carolyn Bast.

Oh, and there’s a ’68 GTO as well.

Whenever there is a tragedy on the scale of Friday’s shooting at Newtown, you can rely on two things. First, a discussion of gun control, something which is seldom addressed in this armed-to-the-teeth country, and which is generally quickly forgotten as the news cycle moves on and the grieving is left to the survivors. The other thing is the characterization of the perpetrator as “evil.”

The first time I recall it being used in the aftermath of an appalling tragedy was after 9/11 when George W. Bush used it to characterize the attackers. It struck me then as a strange word to use, and has continued to do so.

Before that time, “evil” was not a word generally used by adults. It was a word restricted to religious concepts and to children’s stories. Cinderella’s stepmother was evil, as was Snow White’s. Bluebeard was evil, Captain Hook was evil. Why were they evil?

They just were.      Read the rest of this entry »

Honestly, I thought you had all abandoned me! Then Lyndsey sent me a message today saying that she’d also posted her Amazon review of The Blood Binding to the blog, but review was there none.

Hmmm…I thought…something is wrong here. Yep. Almost every comment was being categorized as spam by the rubbish spam filter. Including my replies, once I identified you all as not spam! Anyway, many apologies for the technical glitch, I really wasn’t ignoring you!

The new Belladonna novella, The Blood Binding, is available NOW! You can find it here.  There was a slight delay getting it out, caused by the cover design (basically, me being picky), so it’s a week later than promised. As I said in my earlier post, it’s just a short adventure involving Roman ruins, a two thousand year old girl who is stuck at the edge of a parking lot, a famous landscape gardener, a stoic philosopher, a variation of the Nine Herbs Charm, ancient spirits and very Old Magic.

If you haven’t read Spellbinder or The Midnight Gate, you probably should do so before reading the new one, as there are quite a lot of references to Belladonna and Steve’s earlier adventures. If you have read them, but can’t quite recall what the Allu was, where Belladonna’s aunt, Dierdre Nightshade, went, or why the Cumean Sibyl is (a) in the basement of Dullworth’s; and (b) invisible, you might want to read them again.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Midnight Gate, there are massive spoilers in Blood Binding, so don’t say I didn’t warn you!

And now…back to work on the next full-length adventure, The Lost Lands.

I really was going to be so much better at posting regularly, but I’m afraid fate had to prove that it had the upper hand, which took the form of my father getting quite ill. He was in hospital for over a week, so that is where all my attention has been. Yesterday evening he was moved to a convalescence facility (a wonderful place – so much better than the hospital) and things are looking brighter.

See, I’d had this plan that I’d write a short story about Belladonna and Steve and Halloween, with the intention of making it available on Amazon in plenty of time for the actual day. I failed miserably, in part because of the family health crisis, but mostly because the idea of me writing a short story is…well…ridiculous. So it’s not a short story, it’s a novella, or, to be more accurate, a novellette. Yes, there are differences. A novellete is shorter than a novella, but longer than a short story.

The story is called The Blood Binding and will be available next week. It features Belladonna, Steve, and Elsie taking on some very Old Magic indeed, in the form of a girl who has been trapped between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead for nearly two thousand years. It features another school trip (Roman ruins), the Sibyl, Grandma Johnson, Mr. Johnson, charnel sprites (I love the charnel sprites!), my first real-life dead character (apart from Cicero in Midnight Gate, but that was just a walk-on, really), and more ghosts than you can shake a stick at.

My new book about the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 is now available on Amazon! It’s called No Better Thing Under The Sun: Making The First Thanksgiving and considers what the settlers might have actually eaten, based on the kind of kitchen equipment they had with them, the foods that were available, and the dishes they were accustomed to eating. We know they had at least one cookbook with them — Gervase Markham’s 1615 work, The English Hus-Wife, and we know that the Wampanoag contributed five deer to the festivities. But most of the rest is guesswork as there are only two brief accounts of the three-day feast written by people who were there, and one of those was penned twenty years later.  Read the rest of this entry »

Yep, you read that right. I performed a public service for the greater good, thereby saving anyone who reads this from actually losing an entire hour from their lives, which they will never, ever get back. You’re welcome.

Much has been written about Elementary being a blatant rip-off of Sherlock, mostly because it is well known that CBS asked the BBC for permission to remake it for the US market and were turned down. No problem – Conan Doyle’s stories are public domain, as commenters on the many sites discussing the issue confidently assert, so CBS has as much right to make their own version as anyone else.

Except they don’t. Because although the Sherlock stories, along with the rest of Conan Doyle’s work, are indeed public domain in the UK, the US is a different story. Thanks to the 1976 Copyright Protection Act, rights to the stories and characters returned to the control of Conan Doyle’s heirs in 1981. For how long? A long time. Until 2023, in fact. (Click here for an interesting account of all the legal wrangling.) Read the rest of this entry »

Lots! Almost all of it on Saturday at a Bridge To Books event in Pasadena. It was held in the library of the McKinley School, which is a really lovely space – an old fashioned building with a mural at one end that looks like it dates to the 1930s (correct me if I’m wrong, please!). It made me think of old movies. You know, the kind that generally starred Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and involved a lot of singing and dancing.

The panel was made up of Margaret Peterson Haddix, Lisa McMann, first time author Shannon Messenger and me. It was a bit daunting, because Margaret and Lisa have written heaps of books, but they were both very friendly and outgoing, as was Shannon, who had only just received her first box of books and was very excited (her novel is called Keeper of the Lost Cities and is available for pre-order now). I remember that feeling! Read the rest of this entry »

You know those studies that confirm what is always glaringly obvious to anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together?  Well, they’ve just published the results of another one. According to Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M University (as published in the Journal of Communication), it’s not the sex and/or violence on TV that inform people’s attitudes towards women, it’s weak female characters.

The controlled study of 150 students found that sex and violence alone did not make men think negatively of women, however the combination of sex, violence and female characters who were submissive and weak, did provoke those attitudes. The study looked at television programming, rather than books, but it doesn’t take a huge leap to see parallels. The series they looked at were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, The Tudors, Masters of Horror, 7^th Heaven (huh?),  and Law and Order: SVU. A somewhat random sampling, particularly as 7^th Heaven and Gilmore Girls have both been off the air for years. Read the rest of this entry »