00:13 Theo Brun:Well, hello and welcome to the History Quill Podcast. My name is Theodore Brun, historical fiction writer, and I’m here with my wonderful co-host Julia Kelly. Julia, how are you today?

00:26 Julia Kelly: I am doing very well. I’m in that wonderful place as an author where I’ve got a new project that I’m excited about. I haven’t hit the speed bumps yet. Everything seems to be flowing and I’m really enjoying writing it. So this is the second, I’m sorry, the third, my goodness. This is the third of my Evelyn Redfern mysteries, which has yet to have a title. And I’m just really enjoying this case that I’ve sent Evelyn and David on too. So it’s been really fun and really satisfying to start something new. I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve worked on a first draft. How about yourself?

01:03 Theo Brun: That’s really good. Well, it sounds like we’re in quite similar places because I’ve been feeling good about writing in the last couple of weeks. I’ve started something new. It’s not historical fiction, alas, but it is a new novel and I’m doing my best to crank out. You know, when you get in that, okay, I’m actually writing this thing now and you’re trying to crank out word count each day. So that’s the stage that I’m at. So that’s been good. And then I’ve got this other slightly unusual beast of a ghost writing partial manuscript which is basically a third of a novel that’s in the little team of agents and the actual author or the named author coming together. We’re trying to sort of put together a pitch that then is going to go out to a publisher. So I’ve done my bit. I think it’s a great story. It’s a good kind of half a manuscript or third of a manuscript.

We’ll see whether I get the opportunity to write the rest of it as well. But that’s been fun. And yeah, just generally, I don’t know, like the spring is here and feeling positive about life, which is good.

02:09 Julia Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, we’re recording this. We’re recording this on what’s turned out to be a nice spring day, although here, you know, it could rain the next moment and then be brilliantly sunny again. So I think that definitely adds to an air of optimism. Yes. Yes, I’m still adjusting to that. It’s been seven years, but I’ll get there.

02:21 Theo Brun: Yeah, this is England after all.

So this morning we are very lucky to have with us a slightly different guest today because it’s Karen Inglis and she is a very successful children’s author and she does a number of different genres but also historical fiction and particularly time travel fiction for children and she’s also very accomplished what she describes an author publisher, so which the rest of us might call self-publishing, but and I remember another of our guests called independent publishing and as we speak to her you’ll see that it’s really just another way of tackling a very successful career in writing. So without further ado, let’s get Karen into the conversation.

03:30 Julia Kelly: We’re very happy to welcome Karen Inglis today to speak to us on the History Quill podcast. Karen, you have an incredibly extensive backlist of titles. So perhaps you could give us a little overview and then maybe tell us specifically about the Secret Lake series, because I think that will be of particular interest to our listeners.

03:48 Karen Inglis: Okay, all right, well listen, thank you very much for having me by the way. Yes, so I write across a range of age groups, which is quite unusual. I sort of do picture books, chapter books, and also middle grade novels. And that’s actually by accident rather than design. It’s really because stories come to me. All of the stories that I’ve written have come from what I tell children at school visits and my tingly moments, which is when I see or I hear something or a bit of emotion, I get some inspiration.

and it won’t leave me alone and then that turns into a story. And so the very first sort of tingly moment I got was when I saw a beautiful fox trotting past me one November evening in the mist under the lamplight. And he was so beautiful compared with, you know, a lot of the urban foxes we find around London. And I couldn’t get him out of my mind. And I kept thinking, who is he? Where is he going? And I started to make up a name for him, Ferdinand Fox, and he was a kind and wise fox. And then people started telling me about foxes. So I started writing more Ferdinand Fox rhyming stories.

So I wrote six of those and it was sometime during that period and this is going back a long time actually, we’re talking I’m just trying to think, 1990 that sort of time. No, no a little bit later mid 90s, I walked into the gardens the communal gardens of Notting Hill where some friends of mine It just moved to an apartment in one of the lower parts of one of those great big sort of Victorian houses and I saw all the children playing out there and

I just got this tingly moment where I just thought, gosh, isn’t this magical? And I was listening to the sort of crack of woods echoing off the large houses and thinking of the people who’d lived there over 100 years earlier. And I just had this moment where I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the children living here today could meet the children who lived and played here 100 years ago? And that was, again, a moment that wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about it. And then there was a connection of I saw some children running into a bush. And I thought. I wonder where they’re going.

As a child, I always loved Alice in Wonderland and also, you know, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, those sorts of things. And I suddenly thought, oh, you know, they could go back in time and sort of connected with that in terms of where the story ended up going. We used to take our children and we still go ourselves now to a place in Richmond Park called Isabella Plantation which in this time of year is just coming into bloom.

And within that, it’s a sort of, I think it’s about four acres enclosed garden within Richmond Park, which is absolutely stunning. And within there, there are three ponds, one of which is called Still Pond. And I suddenly sort of had this idea, well, perhaps the children could go down in time. And when they land down in time, they will see this incredible lake. And when they row across the lake, they’ll realise they’ve gone back in time. So that was sort of how that story came to me.

And then the one sort of in between, in between the picture books and the secret lake, a game were influenced by things like, you know, Eek could run away alien. You can see him there behind me there. And my two sons used to play football. And I was, my husband was the manager and I was sort of one of the, he was a coach rather. And I was one of the managers. We had to get the orange pieces ready, you know, the Saturday morning football.

And I got a lot of inspiration for that story just through the scenes of the dads on the sidelines and the kids and what have you. And I wrote it really because my older son wouldn’t read and I thought, well, he loves sport, why don’t I try something to do with sport and aliens and that might get him reading, that sort of thing. So that’s how it is that I’ve written across a range of age groups and it’s all to do with stories coming to me when I see things. I don’t know if that answers it.

07:32 Theo Brun: That answers, well, it goes a long way to answering a lot of what you’ve done. I think you had the, there’s one more, isn’t there, that I thought was interesting, the telltale tree or Tell Me Tree. That was it. And that is that the most recent one as well. Do you want to just add that one onto your list as it were?

07:41 Karen Inglis: Oh, The Tell Me Tree. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that. Yes, yes, it is. Yes, yes, I mean, the very most recent one is obviously Beyond the Secret Lake. It’s just come out the third in that series. No, but The Tell Me Tree. Astonishingly, I live in Barnes and there are plane trees all around the pond there. And one evening, I was walking back with my husband from somewhere and in the dark and the way one of these particular trees was lit up and if you go on my website you’ll see a photo of it, it looked like a sort of hair and this incredible face and again a wise face and I kept thinking oh my goodness, got my tingly moment, couldn’t really think, I kept thinking what can I do with this story and it literally went around in my head for about two years, I couldn’t think of what the story would be to do with this tree.

And then one day I was on, I’m in a lot of writers groups on Facebook, or I dip into writers groups, children’s writing groups, and there was one particularly large one in America. And I saw a conversation, a Facebook conversation going on between some authors. I didn’t know them, I don’t know if they knew each other, perhaps they half did. And one of them was saying, oh, you know, my daughter came home from school today and she drew a picture that made us realise that she’s really unhappy at school.

And in that moment, I just thought, oh my goodness, that kind of, it really kind of made me feel, I could feel how she must’ve felt. And then I just suddenly thought of the tree and I thought this is going to be the tell me tree, what the tell me tree will be a safe place where children can gather and talk about their feelings, whether they’re happy, sad, or anywhere in between. And I was driving to the gym literally the next morning or later that day. And as I was driving, I started saying, hello, I am the tell me tree. Why don’t you come and sit by me? Tell me your troubles. Tell me your your cares, scare, tell me your cares, share your best dreams or your scary nightmares.

You know, and literally it was coming out and that has never happened before. And I got to the car park and parked and had to say it into my phone because I thought I’m going to forget this. So I know and that has got on to, you know, it has been used a lot in schools and I have an incredible, I do occasionally run Facebook or very, very rarely in fact run Facebook ads on children’s books but the only one that’s ever worked is that one and the feedback on it’s been absolutely incredible. Particularly in England actually funny enough in the states not so much and I wonder whether that’s to do with the drawings whether they like to have a more Disney type drawing whereas I have much more traditional sort of pen and ink type drawings in that but yeah. I do tell children when I go to schools that look all around you there’s always magic you know it’s a Roald Dahl quote if you know.

Those who don’t look for magic will never find it, but if you look around there’s stories all around you.

10:38 Theo Brun: That’s fantastic. Thank you for describing all these different genres. I think just for the purposes of our listeners, if we can kind of zero in on the more the historical fiction element, although it’s quite, you can’t really kind of narrow it down onto this one genre because as you’ve just described so well for the for children, you sort of have this crossover between something a little bit historical, something a little bit fantastical with the time travel, but at the same time also the contemporary sort of timeline as well. Do you think that’s, or maybe you could just unpack a little bit more, like if you’re thinking about historical fiction for children, do you think that there’s a sort of expectation from that age of readership in order to kind of be bring that relatability in, that you need a contemporary character who’s sort of looking at the past through contemporary eyes and that helps the narrative.

11:41 Karen Inglis: The answer to that is I don’t know. I think there’s probably plenty of children’s historical fiction set in that time that ought to do as good a job. I probably haven’t read enough of them to be able to tell you, but I mean certainly things like Emma Carroll, Hilary McKay, they have historical fiction set in that time without the magical time travel bit. So I think the answer is probably you don’t need to.

And people do very well without doing that. It’s possible, I suppose, that because I have contemporary children going into the past, that it might draw in some readers that otherwise might not be attracted to the story, because they can perhaps identify with the modern characters and they think they wouldn’t be able to if it was just set in the past, although if they did get around to reading those books they’d realise that that isn’t the case.

So, does that answer the question? I think both can work. But I might, yeah,

12:39 Theo Brun: I think it just adds a lot of layers to it, doesn’t it?

12:41 Karen Inglis: It does. And I think it might mean there is a wider audience for my books. I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I suppose, and also there’s probably a category of child reader that loves the idea of time travel in and of itself, whether that’s to historical or to…you know, the future or whatever that might be. So, so, you know, by accident, it may be that that’s helped my book.

13:07 Theo Brun: Well it’s very successfully but you know it’s done extremely well hasn’t it? The Secret Lake. I was looking at still number one in the time travel children’s fiction thing on Amazon I noticed this morning even this morning.

13:19 Karen Inglis: Yeah and in fact that that’s good because it hasn’t had an orange badge for a while You know, they changed how all the categories go so it goes up and down but it has tended to stay in the top Thousand or so and and it’s also sells hugely in America as well. In fact, 70% of my sales are over there So it’s it is fantastic. And in fact, I don’t know I thought I should have got it out here Oh, hold on a moment or have I oh, yes so it’s just come out in Italian.

13:51 Julia Kelly: Oh, wonderful. You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that 70% of your sales for this particular, this book or this series of books are in the United States. Obviously I have the American accent. I have always loved those stories where somebody goes tumbling through time, tumbling through a wardrobe, tumbling through something and develop, you know, comes into this land that they’ve never discovered before. I was wondering if you could time slip or time travel as a narrative device and what some of the challenges or some of the benefits of writing for children are when approaching something like that. Because I think you might be the first person that we’ve spoken to who has done this on our podcast. So I think this will be some new insight for people.

14:38 Karen Inglis: I think sort of on a sort of technical level as a writer what one always has to do whether or not it’s writing historical fiction is You don’t want to preach to children You don’t want to be appear to be teaching them anything and I would say you know And I’m sure this is the case for grown-up historical fiction as well You don’t want to be trying to show off what you know about history So, you know you want to show don’t tell but don’t show off and tell, and I’d say with children, with children in particular, I was very conscious of wanting to weave in the historical context as they’ve gone back in time, as the children meet them, but without trying to give them a history lesson, if you see what I mean. And I think that that is a challenge. It’s something that I found and it may be, and I was thinking a little bit about this earlier, about it’s worked well for me possibly because I’m not a historian. I don’t have a, I was forced to get, I’m that old that I did O level history and I had to give it up because I had to do chemistry. You know, you couldn’t, you had to make certain choices at certain ages and you know, I think chemistry was the only O level I ever failed. I had no idea what was going on. I would much rather have done history. And as a result, whereas my husband knows everything about history, I’m pretty useless to be honest. But as I’m doing the research, you know, if I’m sort of steeping myself in that period doing the research.

It was as fascinating to me as it probably is to a child who doesn’t particularly know that era. It maybe made it easier somehow for me to just weave in things that I felt I was thrilled to discover in the same way that a child might, but without sort of labouring the point. It was just a passing thing. For example, in Beyond the Secret Lake, the one that’s just come out, I discovered that when you went to the beach, there were these things called, and now I’m trying to remember what they were called, they were called bathing stations.

And they were sort of like, they were like a sort of horse and cart on the beach. And you would go and get changed and get into your swimming costume in them. And then the horse would actually draw this out to water. And then you would go down the steps, go in the water, and the horse would go back onto the beach. And then when you were ready to come, the horse would come and drag you back out again. And that’s a sort of passing bit in one of the scenes in Beyond the Secret Lake when they take a trip out. I don’t make a big thing of it, but kids kind of, you know, one of them has written, because I have a few advanced readers, and I love learning about the bathing machines, you know, that sort of thing. And, you know, so the fascination of me discovering these things, I wasn’t just sort of history buff and knew all about it before I wrote about it.

That was great, it was a benefit for me because I learnt a lot going along the way. Another example, which I don’t talk about in the book, but was fascinating and it was good to be able to include it, was when I was doing the research for Return to the Secret Lake, I ended up doing all sorts of things, including reading some Hansards from 1911. And somewhere in there I discovered there was an exchange, or rather I’d done some other research and I…

I found a piece talking about roller skating. So in the Edwardian period, the rich people, there was a big phase sort of between, I think it was about 1908 up to about 1911 where indoor roller skating became a real fashion. But the wealthy people could afford it, but the poorer families couldn’t. And so the younger kids used to get some roller skates, presumably inferior ones and just skate around on the streets. And I was listening to this.

talk about it was a lecture I think it was online and the professor talking about it was talking about it then one day a young boy hit an old lady went smacking at an old lady who fell over and died she was in the 90s and so they tried in parliament to get it banned and I can’t remember how but I ended up looking at the hand-slapping about this and so Winston Churchill was a young MP at the time and there was a lot of pressure to say we’re going to have to ban outdoor roller skating for young kids.

And he interjected and said, no way. He said, you know, these kids need exercise. It’s a way of them getting exercise. We’re not going to put a blanket ban on it. This anyway, I was so fascinated by this. I didn’t talk about that in the book, but there is a scene where there is a roller skating incident and it has quite, it’s sort of relevant to the plot. And the young boy ends up knocking over, not killing, knocking over an elderly lady.

So I’ve probably gone slightly off tangent from your question, but doing it enables you to give children an authentic view of writing, you know, in this way of what history was like without lecturing them, I suppose. And for yourself, you find all this interesting stuff out along the way.

19:38 Theo Brun: I’m sure you do. And it sounds I mean, it sounds like you’re very immersed in the Edwardian period, obviously, for the secret lake series. Is there other other periods that sort of appeal to you that you would like to explore? I mean, you say you’re not your history is not your absolute specialty. But do you do you have sort of other ideas brewing for the same kind of thing of a time travel thing, but a different period maybe?

20:04 Karen Inglis: I don’t necessarily for a different thing. It may be that I explore a little later in the period and a little bit before the period, what happened before the secret lake, because there’s always Jack’s father, Jacob, who saw the magical moles to start with when the building started. So there might be a story in there. There’s certainly a story to be told for a bit later, for the ending. I mean, anybody who reads the end of book three,

that there’s a reason I won’t say why because it sort of would act as a spoiler, but there’s a reason to visit later in the period. It’s interesting actually talking being American. I’ve just been listening to and I bought the box set because they just look so beautiful. In fact, I must do a screenshot. I’ve just been listening to Anne of Green Gables, which I’d never read. I don’t know whether you’ve read it or you know it.

20:52 Julia Kelly: Yes. I grew up reading those, yeah.

20:54 Karen Inglis: Oh, did you see? I absolutely adore that. It’s so sugary and wonderful, but I just absolutely love it.

And of course, they’re kind of moving in a parallel timeline, roughly, to where I was. And now it’s going older, sort of towards the, it’ll be going towards 1918 and what have you. And that is an obvious period that I may or may not be looking at for the secret lake. But there’s nothing specific, I would say, history-wise. I just love the Victorian period. So Charles Dickens, all that lot. So a little bit before the time of my book. But no, in answer to your question, not specifically, and it’s what that might come down to the fact that I haven’t had my tingly moment that would lead me to another historical period yet.

21:46 Julia Kelly: I love that as a sort of basis to weigh ideas and, you know, see if that inspiration is strong enough to really grow into something. And I know you mentioned that with the Tell Me Tree, it took a couple of years to figure out what that sensation and that moment would actually lead to, but it’s such a wonderful reminder, I think, to people who are writing that, you know, sometimes you do need to wait for that idea that’s really that thing that you can latch onto and just explore.

22:18 Karen Inglis: Yeah, no, absolutely. And actually something similar happened with The Christmas Tree Wish, which is another of my picture books. And I’ve never sort of told the story in any great depth at school visits until this round of World Book Day visits. And everyone was, they were all, even the older children, you know, I mean, I can quickly tell it to you now if you’d like, or you can cut it out. Would you like me to tell you?

22:39 Julia Kelly: Yeah, love to.

22:41 Karen Inglis: We were driving past, it was one of those December nights as it is in England. You know, in all the films in America, it’s snowing and beautiful and white, and here it’s raining and cold and grey and horrible just before Christmas. And we were driving past a garden centre, and I think it was actually sort of almost next to a petrol station. It was very unromantic. And there were the last few Christmas trees sitting there looking very bedraggled, including this tiny baby tree with broken branches. And I looked out the car window in the dark.

I felt really sorry for that tree, no one’s going to buy it. And it wouldn’t go away, I kept thinking. And literally that again, for two years, three years, even four years, I kept thinking, what’s the story going to be? I cannot think. And I kept on thinking about all sorts of things, a tree being brought over from Norway. And the thing that kept bugging me was that the story would end up with the tree, A, it’s been chopped down, B, it’s going to die. How do I sort of deal with all that side of things? And then just suddenly, and I’m trying to remember.

I think one day I sat down because I got a moment, a bit like when I did the sequel to The Secret Lake after 10 years, where I just thought, I’ve got to figure this out, I’ve got to write a story. And I forced myself to think it through. And then I ended up with this little tree whose, you know, it’s smirks, lovely, it’s snowing and all, and he’s fast asleep dreaming of Christmas Day and his three friends Penelope Pine, Cedric Cypress, and Douglas Fir, they’re all snowing and then the last ones left and they’re saying, right, we have to, then the snow stops, the sun’s coming up and they’re saying, wake up, Bruce Bruce, we’ve got to all get ready, today’s the last day to be chosen for Christmas day. And they’re all getting really excited and dusting the snow off and putting out their lovely green needles for everyone to say, little Bruce is snoring away, dreaming, you see this dream bubble of him with all the children around him. And they’re saying, wake up, wake up, he eventually wakes up. And he’s all excited. And he’s trying to blow the snow off his branches, but he’s too weak, because it’s snowed a lot. So they all help him. And then they blow it off and then they all take a look at him. They go, Oh, no. And it’s like, Oh, no, says separate site. Oh, says Penelope Pine. Oh, dear. And it is like, what? And he looks down and he’s got these broke two broken branches and his little faces and he’s saying, Oh, no, nobody’s going to want me. Who’s going to want to treat the broken branches? And then they then then this is where this sort of story comes in. Then they say then it’s all about friendship and caring. And so Penelope Pine says

Oh, don’t worry, nobody’s perfect. And she opens up her branches and says, just look at this bump in the middle of my trunk, you know. And then Cedric, then Douglas first says, yes, yeah, look at my silly bendy top. And I said, you know, we’ve all had those trees, you know, where the top goes like this. And then Cedric Cypress says, he says, look, and look, if I turn round, my bottom sticks out. And you know, again, we’ve all had that tree, you get it home and then you turn it round and it’s not even. And they said, look, don’t worry, you are perfect. Someone will find you. And then the day goes on. Families are all coming, they’re all taking the trees away and they’re waving to Frederick saying, don’t worry, you’ll be fine, I’ll put it in my branches. And of course, we get to the end of the story, and he’s the only one left. And he’s all alone. And there’s the little squirrel and the robin who’ve been there looking very sad at him. And he thinks that no one’s going to buy him. And so he closes his eyes and decides to have his dream, sort of to imagine his daydream from the beginning of the book. And the sooner he does this, he suddenly hears a little boy saying he’s beautiful and you know this little family standing around him and the little boy says oh he’s just like me and there’s a little boy with a broken arm and he’s got his hand and they think and they just say oh he’s so beautiful and they take him home and of course he gets all decorated and the end of the story is him all happily sort of actually in real life living his dream. That was all I said to the children that was just from seeing a tree out of my car window and it but it took several years to come up with the story.

You can’t rush these things.

26:36 Julia Kelly: No, no, and it’s a wonderful reminder that, as you say, sometimes it just needs time.

26:41 Karen Inglis: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So.

26:46 Theo Brun: That’s brilliant. I mean, it’s like Jackanory all over again, listening to you tell the story. Julia, I don’t know if you know what that means. That’s an English program when I was a kid and we’d sit there and we kind of it was on TV and you’d have like a little five minute story. Very sweet.

Well, actually talking of time, I know time is pushing on, we haven’t got you for forever, but I wanted to maybe pivot a little bit towards the fact that you are a self-publisher, I think you describe it an author-publisher, and obviously you’ve had tremendous success with the books that I’ve seen anyway on Amazon, you’ve got multiple languages, you’re doing your own marketing basically, and I think on your website, you also published in a sense, the story of how you did that. Do you want just for our listeners tuned in now, just to kind of give some of the key markers along that journey as well of how you’ve led to create a career for yourself, basically out of nothing?

27:51 Karen Inglis: Yeah, so basically I like everybody way way back in the day when I first wrote The Secret Lake and some of my other books I sent them out to publishers and got the usual rejection letters And that was a long long time ago in the day when we didn’t have internet that they came in a brown envelope Six weeks later, and then I went back to my day job. I was a consultant to government I have a professional business writing background

I just thought, oh, what a shame. I used to look at the box in my office and think, oh, what a pity. No one’s ever going to read that story about the secret lake. And then I had a sabbatical in 2010, which I decided to take a year out, as did a colleague of mine I’ve been working with. And I thought, I’m going to pull out those stories, have a look at them. And when I did and started rereading the secret lake, I thought, no, this is good. It needs a little bit of tweaking here and there. And I started to look for online for the writers and artists yearbook, because, of course, we were online by then, and discovered all this stuff about self-publishing. Now, nobody was self-publishing children’s books at the time, and most of the self-publishing was happening in the States. But because I had that background, I’d just been working on web transformation with the government. I wasn’t scared of, I thought, oh, I might have a go-go at this rather than what have you. And so I did my edits and Bridget, my colleague, who was a first in English, incredibly well-read, acted as my editor, and she had previously worked as an editor in another life.

And I just decided to go for it. And in those days, it was much harder. These days, you’ve got many more tools that can help you with, you know, creating artwork, not creating artwork that you would do yourself, but briefing a designer. It’s a lot easier these days than it used to be. For formatting the books, it is a lot easier for what have you. And I just decided to go for it. And I remember when I went into Waterstones in Notting Hill, which is after I got my first delivery of my Secret Lake. And I remember her looking at it and saying to me, gosh, this doesn’t look self-published. And that’s the point. If you’re going to do it, you have to do it professionally, professional editors, professional artists. And I think everybody knows that now, but back in the day, a lot of people thought it was a quick win, as it were. And so I, but in terms of my growth from that, and I’ll tell you a story in them about traditional publishing in a second.

I virtually hand sold my first 7,000 copies of The Secret Lake, not realising actually that was a very good number to have sold. Because I couldn’t, it was on Amazon, but people didn’t know it was there because they didn’t know who I was, because you couldn’t advertise. If you were an independent author, you could not advertise on Amazon. So I did school visits and Waterstones signings and word of mouth and even Waterstones rang me to it from Ely once saying, will you come and sign? Or other branches have said how successful you’d be. So it was that sort of thing.

And when I did the signings, I didn’t have people queuing out the door, but when they came in and I talked to them, they obviously liked the book enough to buy it, you know, and so on. And then what happened was in 2018, Amazon finally decided that anybody, any author could advertise, could place those spots called sponsored product ads on Amazon. So when you probably know when you go on to buy a book, it’ll say people who like this book also like this book. And then under that, it will say sponsored products related to this item.

And those sponsored products are what are called keyword ads, which you can set up and you can say, I’ll spend five pounds a day or I’ll put 10 pounds a day. You can say what you want. So, you know, it’s a bidding auction. And so at the moment, the moment I was able to do that, the sales took off as I thought they would. It took time and it was gradual and then gradually eventually the states picked up on it because as you say, I think the states do love historical, they do love a historical children’s book.

I call it sort of Downton Abbey for kids with a bit of time travel thrown in actually. That’s how I would say it in a few lines.

31:44 Julia Kelly: There’s a lot of enchantment with English children’s literature as well, I think. There’s a great tradition there in the United States.

31:48 Karen Inglis: Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. Well, and so that’s what led to that growth of it. But one thing I would say is, and I am in a closed Facebook group with a few kind of very well-selling children’s authors, most of them actually in America and Canada, and one of them made quite an astute comment, because I think one of them said, oh, Karen, how do you manage to do so well? I said, well, I don’t know, I’m not doing anything particularly special.

And then one of them said, I think it’s the story. And I really do. I honestly think it’s the story. I’ve never ever made, like there’s, you know, a lot of people have ebooks, we have ebooks of all of my books, but The Secret Lake has never been free. I’ve never, it was too hard work to write that book. It’s never been free. And I just think that it’s word of mouth, actually, with the advertising, which has made it work so well. And that has translated into children around the world enjoying it as well. So it is a story. So again, I always say to people if you’re going to self-publish, don’t think of it as a quick win. It’s hard work, but you do need to have the good story first. And I have written a book called How to Self-Publish and Market a Children’s Book. Remember, I have a business writing background and I never advertise that book. I ought to. It gets very good reviews because of, you know, it is very well put together and it’s very evergreen, even though I have probably.

I’ll probably update it next year, but the only thing that’s really changed is TikTok and direct selling, you know, and children’s books don’t really sell on TikTok, it’s for older anyway. But so, you know, that it’s hard work. And I did actually, I was offered sort of, I’ve had offered three traditional publishing deals in the last few years, including from one of the major publishers a couple of years ago. And I was, I was really flattered.

But by then it’s almost like I’ve gone too far now, you know, and I’m used to having control, creative control. I mean, the great thing about self-publishing is that you can put your book out when it’s ready. Whereas if you’re traditionally published, you know, you might get the deal, but the book might not come out for a couple of years. And I didn’t want to be under the pressure of writing. They wanted me to write more books in The Secret Lake series, because at that time only the first one was there. But funnily enough, exactly the time they contacted me was when I had…

I’d suddenly finished with the big non-fiction book and I thought, gosh, people keep asking, are you going to do a sequel to The Secret Lake? Now’s the time. And I said to them, well, funny enough, you’ve contacted me at a time when I’m about to start looking at that, and I’ll definitely keep in touch with you, but I’m not actively looking. And they did subsequently send me a two-book offer. But in the end, I said very kindly, thank you, but no thank you. Not just, not only for monetary reasons, although that could have been negotiated, but really for the control. You do have a lot of control over what you’re doing, but hard work and the marketing is, you know, it is hard work because you’re not selling directly to your reader. So if you’re a lot of successful millionaire type self-published authors, you know, they can put an ebook on Amazon and people will buy on impulse.

That doesn’t happen with children’s books. You know, they have to have a child nagging them to buy it, or teachers need to have read it and find it’s good to use in schools. But you know, if you can make it work, if you’ve got a great story, it can be great, you know. But there’s no wrong or right way is what I would say. Yeah.

35:12 Julia Kelly: What do you think personality wise, you, how, let me see if how, how am I, how am I phrasing this very bungled question? Um, personality wise, what do you think it is that self published authors usually have that makes them particularly well suited to self publishing? I think that’s what I’m trying to say.

35:30 Karen Inglis: Right, yes, you have to have determination. There are probably a lot of them a bit like me, a kind of control freaks, the idea of being in charge of wanting to be able to see your figures, know what’s going on with your sales. Yeah, you know, I’d say that determination, six skin up to a point, determination, I’d say hard work and determination is what we all have in common and a lot of us talk about the fact that we’re slight control freaks. Some work a good working in a big team. I’m not very good at that time. I’m better at just doing a lot of my own things and I quite like the variety from spending time doing the writing to doing the marketing to even doing I have an accountant, but I do keep track of it. I do sort of the sort of basic bookkeeping side of it at the moment. Now that is getting to a point now I’ve got so many foreign things that I’m keeping track of. I might.

I might have to get someone to help, but my slight fear is having to then you get somebody, you train them up and then the next minute they’re leaving and then you go back to square one. So I think, you know, my husband’s retiring next year, so perhaps I’ll get him to do that instead. But yeah,

36:40 Theo Brun: He comes ready ready trained

36:42 Karen Inglis: Yeah, I mean, not exactly. He’s really good with Excel. He’s an engineer, he’s an engineer, you know, and he’s very well read as well, actually. So that’s all very useful.

One other thing I was going to say, we’re talking about the success abroad, which is interesting, is that we’re in the self-publishing world. That most of my overseas deals are traditional deals. In other words, a traditional publisher has approached me from abroad. I have an advance, they pay royalties, all that sort of thing. That’s most of them. But a couple of them, the German and now the Italian, I have project managed that myself, as in I have hired highly, highly skilled, whatever, qualified, traditionally published children’s book translators. I haven’t used, you know, there are sort of agencies that do this, but I wouldn’t trust it. I need to know. This is the control freak in me. I need to know that the person writing the language is experienced in children’s book writing. So I reverse engineer, go onto Amazon, found who’d written what, kind of reverse engineer to contact the author. In the case of the German one.

And then the Italian one, I was incredibly lucky. I was contacted in October by somebody who’d read the secret later. She said, look, I’ve written for, I’ve translated for the traditional publishing world, but I’m segueing into doing, I’m looking to do some work with some independent authors, particularly because I’ve got, she’s got a condition that means she can’t write incredibly fast. And she was getting sort of, she doesn’t want to be under so much pressure. So she said,

I probably couldn’t do anything. It would take me until next October, until February. And I said, that’s fine. And, you know, I checked her credentials and she’s absolutely brilliant. And I said, and of course, when you do this, you then have to have an editor and a proofreader, which I have for both. And they usually come with that. And so the only bit that I do is the upload, is the formatting once it’s all ready to go to be uploaded. So you can self-publish also that way. So a bit of a mix going on there. But yeah, do it professionally and be ready for hard work. And the marketing is really quite difficult. One last parting shot. I will say it that might always do say for self-published children’s authors is start local. Don’t try and go big. Establish your brand locally, which is what I did. And I’d say that every single time and I would say it for all of my new books now, you know, talk to your local press, your local magazines, your local bookshop, visit your local schools, because you can slowly get the word out and build up your confidence and your brand that way and have a website, you know, yeah.

39:29 Julia Kelly: Karen, this has just been wonderful. And I feel like we could talk to you for hours and hours, but we should let you go and get back to your writing and your marketing and your whole world of children’s literature. Before we do go though, I wanna make sure that people know where they can find you and where they can find your books online.

39:47 Karen Inglis: Okay, yes. So for my fiction, it’s Karen Inglis, spelt, oh, I say it’s pronounced, we had the conversation before we started. My surname is Scottish and it’s pronounced Ingles, but it is written as Inglis, I-N-G-L for Lima, I for India, S for Sierra, Inglis. And my website is kareninglisauthor.com and you can find out all of my fiction there. If you are thinking you’re interested in self-publishing,

I have a website called selfpublishingadventures.com. I don’t keep that very much up to date, but if you go there, you will be able to link to my nonfiction book, How to Self Publish and Market a Children’s Book on Amazon. And as I said earlier, that is very evergreen. I mean, the thing that won’t be evergreen is how many books I’ve sold, because I think I’m now up to about three quarters of a million. And in that, it might be two hundred and fifty thousand. I can’t remember. But the actual principles of the way of self-publishing are all covered in that.

40:53 Theo Brun: That’s great. Well, it does all sound like an adventure, doesn’t it? Right. You don’t know quite quite where it’s going to lead, but it seems to have taken you to some pretty amazing places. So thank you so much, Karen. You know, thanks for everything that you’ve shared. And we wish you the best of luck in the near future and the years to come.

41:12 Karen Inglis: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

41:21 Theo Brun: Very different, I think, or the content anyway, quite different to what we’ve seen before, but so many great points from Karen Inglis to dissect here.

41:31 Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Before we start chatting though, I wanted to let you, our listeners, know about a special bonus episode of the podcast available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode is about how to succeed in historical fiction and we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors, Gill Paul and David Penny, who share with us the ingredients of their success and how you can succeed in the genre as well. That is difficult to say. My apologies. To get the bonus episode, go to thehistoryquill.com/bonus. Follow the link in the description or enter it into your browser.

42:04 Theo Brun: That’s right, Julia. And there’s so much great advice and insight in that bonus episode. So definitely seek it out. And right, so we’ll turning back to Karen, where should we start? I think for me anyway, there’s an obvious place to start which you probably agree with is the tingly moment.

42:22 Julia Kelly: Yes, I love the tingling moment. It was wonderful hearing her tell those stories.

42:27 Theo Brun: Yes, I know. I mean, it’s just another sort of great encapsulation of, you know, something I suppose we’re all familiar with. But she really put that, it’s almost like she wasn’t going to go anywhere that didn’t have that tingly moment.

42:43 Julia Kelly: I think in some ways that really resonated with me because I’ve just gone through the process of pitching two different books, one a mystery, one a sort of the historical fiction I’ve been doing for a while. And I always find that the pitching process is kind of working through ideas of the past, things that have been lingering. And the best situation is when you sit down and you have an idea and you start to sort of write a pitch or expand on that idea and suddenly things just start coming together. And I think for me, that’s the sort of tingly moment. It’s the moment where I know that there’s actually something here because I can kind of, it’s almost like my brain is going faster than my hands when I’m trying to type out what it is that I’m thinking about. And I’ve had that with these two books, which is great because I’ve also had the situation where I’ve written something where I didn’t start with that kind of level of confidence in an idea and sort of engagement with an idea. And it was a much, much harder process to write the book. And so I loved hearing her story, especially about the Christmas tree, that this sort of one image in this one little moment sparked, you know, years later, this whole story that she was, of course, able to turn into a book. And I think that’s a really great lesson in going with your instincts, but also trusting that it may take some time to figure out, you know, if you have the initial spark of inspiration, it may take some time to figure out what it is that that actually means for you as an author. I think that’s that sometimes it’s.

We have an instinct to rush things or we have an instinct to sort of backburner things for a very long time because it’s not quite the full thing. It’s not quite the full idea, but she’s obviously continually, uh, continuously thinking about things and engaging with an idea and figuring out, you know, is there anything there, where can I go with this? How does this potentially, you know, what I’ve learned now and all the other ideas I’ve had, is this potentially something, something that’s more full-fledged. So anyway, I just, I loved the reminder that inspiration is, can be that spark and then also can take some time.

44:51 Theo Brun: Yeah, it’s interesting the way you unpack it there, because there’s elements of sort of proactivity, of like digging and digging. You’ve had the moment of inspiration. Is there anything beyond it? And there’s that sort of passive moment of like, it doesn’t have to happen right this second if it’s not there, if you can’t think of it right yet, it may come to you. And I don’t know, maybe there’s a balance between those two things. I always think of these ideas, maybe it’s my archeological past of kind of stumbling over something as you’re walking along and then sometimes you pick it up and it’s just a pebble. But sometimes if you dig around it, you realise it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and maybe it’s like, you know, I mean, to push the analogy, some sort of piece of a sunken building or actually there’s something of substance below the surface, as it were. And that tends to be my experience, but maybe in a slightly less formal sort of setting that you’ve described of like, right, I’m going to do this pitch. I’m now going to apply myself to kind of expanding the thing and I look, it’s all coming together. It’s more just, yeah, if I tend to get these kind of flash flashes of moments along the plot line, which well, what proves to be the plot line. And when you start having enough of those and you realise, you’ve kind of got something of the beginning, something of the middle, something of where this thing lands.

That’s when I think anyway there’s something here and something’s coming together.

46:25 Julia Kelly: Yeah. Do you, do you keep track of those ideas? Do you have like an ideas file or, you know, is it more just that it’s percolating in the back of your brain?

46:32 Theo Brun: Yes. The notes app on my phone tends to serve that. And sometimes I get quite far down in terms of the development and then often another idea comes along and supersedes it. So I start notebooks, so if I had what I think is a good idea or a substantial idea, then I’ll buy an actual separate notebook because often I’ll have, I mean it’s all a bit analog, but you know,

a section for characters, a section for setting, a section for, you know, what kind of research you’re going to have to dig into in order to flesh out this world, things like that. And those so tends to start at the scribbling level before I would then translate it into, you know, working on a computer and maybe starting to write it. I mean, that’s that’s certainly been my experience.

The thing I’m working on at the moment is a contemporary one. I feel like a bit of a traitor to the cause here

47:33 Julia Kelly: No, no, it’s just bringing in new tools.

47:34 Theo Brun: Because I’m writing like a contemporary… well, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about crime, haven’t we? And murder mysteries and our mutual love of Agatha Christie and those kind of stories. So we’ve got something like that going on. And for that I have just kind of launched into it. And it’s fun because, you know, she described the little Christmas tree or was it not the tell me tree just talking to her in her head I found these voices the voices in my head it’s just very very clear and distinctly not my not me and but just someone and something so so that’s been fun and just kind of going with it and having a lot of fun doing that with with very little research I mean because it’s just a world that I know it’s essentially a world of where I grew up so yeah, there’s different ways of coming to the same point, I think.

48:32 Julia Kelly: Yeah, I think for me, it’s a, I use a program called Notion. It’s like a souped up version of my notes app. And I have a file that’s literally called idea file and it lets me sort of create sub files within that. So I have actually gone into, I’m so proud of myself. I’ve gone into that file and pulled something from like three years ago where I was thinking about it and I just sort of dropped some articles and links. And, um, every time I see something that potentially sparks my interest, you know, in the news or somebody tells me a story about something I jotted in it. So it looks mad in there. It’s just scattered and all over the place. But to me, it sort of makes sense. So I have found that to be really, really useful. And I’ve gone back and thought, you know, well, that idea actually is a good one, but it needs to be married with this other thing that’s in this file. And it was really interesting putting this historical pitch together because it was pulling from a few of those different places, that again, you know, it was an idea from three years ago and then six months ago and kind of things from all over the place. So I actually was surprised by how much I enjoyed that and how useful it’s been.

49:43 Theo Brun: It’s a very personal thing. Because it reveals your personality, doesn’t it? So much like what if I was to go into your ideas file and go, I know Julia a lot better now after reading, seeing all these mad ideas that she’s come out with, or like off the wall ideas and like what’s going on in her imagination. That would be great.

50:04 Julia Kelly: Oh, but my favourite thing is when like I’ve just left myself somebody’s name, the name of a historical figure, no idea why, no idea what it’s doing in there. But one day, hopefully I will look at it and I’ll go, oh, that was that really great idea I had, and that’s why this name is in this file. So we’ll just see. Sometimes I leave better notes for myself than others.

50:25 Theo Brun: Excellent, excellent. Well, you must confess if that idea does grow into an actual novel. I’d want to know.

50:32 Julia Kelly: I will. I will, definitely.

50:33 Theo Brun: So what else from our conversation with Karen? I mean, there’s things I suppose about the craft and the substance of the books that she’s writing, and then there’s more the kind of industry and the self-publishing aspect of her.

50:50 Julia Kelly: You know, I’ve always been fascinated by timeslip. I read a lot of it as a kid, as I mentioned. I’ve read a lot of it as an adult. I think it’s one of those genres where I sort of, I love the idea of being a contemporary person, being thrown back into one of these worlds that, you know, I’ve studied or I’ve read a lot about, and then of course the actual experience of what that would be like, as opposed to just the academic sort of time in my head reading these histories. So I loved what she had to say about how in some ways, you know, being somebody who is less familiar with history and writing for children who may have even less familiarity, she can sort of present things through their eyes because she’s discovering these subjects in the same way that her readers might be.

51:37 Theo Brun: I think like you, I love all those, you know, the classic novels that I remember from my childhood of, I mean, the one that’s coming to mind is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that those sort of portal and the magician’s nephew, I think there’s more portals in there, aren’t there? But that’s sort of, and yeah, once you have that in a story, you can go anywhere, can’t you? And that’s the, that’s the fun of children is like, you’re not trying to give a plausibility to this. It’s just there’s magic and it happens. So let’s go with it. But it’s quite different, isn’t it? I wonder if you or I did that, I would be, or someone who is more focused on like, oh, I love this period, I want to get this period in.

You know, there is that balance of if I wonder if we got we got another author in who felt they were much more historical fiction author rather than a children’s writer, whether they would want to go down that contemporary, sort of purely contemporary point of view. I mean I’m thinking what are the classics I read when I was a child? The Silver Sword, did you ever read that?

52:47 Julia Kelly:

I’ve heard of it. I haven’t read it.

52:48 Theo Brun: Yeah it was about I think the children’s crusade and then there was the Henry Treece books which were all Vikings which probably you didn’t read. But they were just like, you know, for kids, but set in history. And it’s a very different beast, isn’t it? I like the slippery nature in a way of the time travel and the contemporary viewpoint, and the relatability of that. And then obviously, the new world is a historical world as opposed to a magical world or whatever. Yeah.

53:23 Julia Kelly: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. And then of course, I think we can’t, we can’t finish up this conversation without talking about just the sheer determination and hard work and everything that she’s put into building her, um, her self publishing platform. It’s really incredible listening to her talk about, you know, hand selling 7,000 books and, you know, there are authors who never see 7,000 books for, you know, for one of their releases and just the amount of time and effort and work that’s gone into that. But obviously how satisfying she finds it as well and obviously how she’s reaching out to help other authors do that too.

54:05 Theo Brun: Yeah, I think it can be, it’s easy to look at the scope of what she’s achieved and go, wow, how could I ever do that at the starting position? Let’s say from, well, certainly from my perspective, but, but from our listeners as well. But I thought it was interesting that she calls her self publishing website, self publishing adventures.com. And you think, yeah, to sell, as you said, 7,000 hand copies, but there was a time where she’d sold zero and she’s selling her first one. And I suppose with that in mind it seems like the distance is as an author starting out or whatever stage you’ve got to and what she has clearly achieved. And she’s branching out and exploring and nothing is necessarily a given. And as she said, a lot of what she was experimenting with now seems to become, if there is such things industry standard, you know, certainly standard practice in terms of what you might do as a self publishing author.

Yeah, certainly it is impressive, though. I mean, Karen seems like an incredibly organised and determined lady. And I’m very impressed by that. I found her very impressive.

55:42 Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation and I think she’s given us a lot to think about and maybe bring into our own writing practice and hopefully that of our listeners too.

55:54 Theo Brun: Yeah, 100%. And actually, one thing I’ll just add is, I think, you know, the point she made was that the substance of that story, particularly The Secret Lake, which seems to be her runaway success, it was just a really great story. And that in itself creates its own momentum word of mouth. And, and just people want to read it. If it’s a good story. It may take some time, but hopefully it will find its way into the hands of many, many readers.

56:28 Julia Kelly: It all starts with a great story.

56:30 Theo Brun: Absolutely. And a good note to end our season on that. Things start and maybe end on having a good story. So hopefully that’s something that we can we can all take away from from this season. So that concludes this episode. That concludes season two of the History Quill podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. But before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to the historyquill.com/bonus to get our bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction featuring guest authors Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening for any historical fiction writer so make sure you check it out. You can find the link in the description or enter it into your browser.

57:13 Julia Kelly: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure you like, subscribe, and leave us a comment or a review. Thank you so much for listening.

00:13 Theo Brun: Hello and welcome to The History Quill podcast. My name is Theodore Brun. I am an author of epic historical fiction and I’m here with my lovely co-host, Julia Kelly. Julia, how are you today?

00:26 Julia Kelly: I am very well. I’m quite excited because I’m at the start of some new projects. So I’m putting down plans for new words, which always feels really good. And it feels appropriate because we’re almost, almost a spring. So new beginnings all around while we’re recording this episode. How about yourself?

00:46 Theo Brun: Yeah, I’ve been doing some writing, unfortunately not for myself, but do you remember we talked about this ghost writing project for kids, sort of semi fantasy, it’s actually a thriller, or a kind of mystery novel. So in a way, it’s appropriate to the topic that we’re going to cover today. But so that’s going quite well, actually. So a little bit of a sideways step from historical fiction, but meanwhile, other things going on in that in that genre as well.

But today’s episode, as I alluded to, is about crime. It is about mystery. And we’ve got a great guest for you today, Vaseem Khan, who is a prize-winning author of both crime fiction and also historical crime fiction. And he’s also chair of the Crime Writers Association. So we’ve got a very esteemed guest for you today. Shall we meet him?

01:51 Julia Kelly: Vaseem, welcome to The History Quill podcast. A very warm welcome as we’re going to have what I’m sure will be a great discussion about historical crime fiction as well as other things. But before we get started, I wanted to make sure to ask you to give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and your books.

02:08 Vaseem Khan: Right, well, first of all, thank you for inviting me on. It’s lovely to be here. What can I tell you about myself? So, well, I’m a writer, obviously. I’ve been writing for a very long time. I wrote my first novel age 17, sent it in some agents, was roundly rejected because it was rubbish. And spent the next 20 odd years writing another six books across various genres, including historical, before I was published with a crime novel 10 years ago called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra.

It’s about a middle-aged policeman in Bombay, modern Bombay, who solves crimes but also inherits a baby elephant. I never expected it to be published. I was as shocked as anybody else at how well it did, and it basically gave me a career. And then five books in that series, and then I pivoted to historical crime fiction with a series called the Malabar House novels, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, set in 1950s India. Other than that, I’m the current chair of the 70-year-old crime writers association, the first non-white chair, and we might touch on that. I’m one of the country’s leading amateur cricketers. That’s a lie, that’s not true, but I do play a lot of amateur cricket.

03:19 Julia Kelly: I was gonna say, that’s interesting. Didn’t realise that.

03:24 Theo Brun: It’s great to have you with us. Thanks for that intro. We haven’t met or certainly I haven’t met. I think Julia may have met you before this episode but obviously I was looking up at what could be found out about you online and see all these kind of milestones as it were in your life. So it’s really interesting to me that you say that you wrote your first novel when you were 17 because I was kind of thinking what happened? Something it felt like a switch just got turned on in 2015 and like, ratatata, out come all these books, which obviously is, I thought, well, maybe that’s not exactly how it happened. But you did have this experience, I think it was, if your Wikipedia page is correct, after university where you went to India for 10 years, which must’ve been incredibly kind of rich, varied and eye-opening personal experience for you. 

Do you think that was like one of the key ingredients to, you know, that fed into your writing that then enabled you when you came back, I suppose it was still some time after you came back, wasn’t it, that you that you finally got your the first of the Baby Ganesh books published. But do you think that all fed into that kind of winning formula when it eventually came together?

04:44 Vaseem Khan: Well, thank you for calling it a winning formula. On the subject of Wikipedia, I’m going to go on a mini rant here for about 10 seconds, because my page is massively out of date. And every time my publicist or anyone tries to change it, Wikipedia changes it back. Just don’t get me started on that. Yeah, I grew up in this country, but my parents were from the subcontinent. And I never, you know, I never went there until the age of 23.

Yes, I wrote my first novel, Age 17. I was reading Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld series, and I thought, this looks really easy. I can do this. So I wrote a comic sci-fi fantasy. I told my parents, I’m not going to university because I’m gonna be a rich and famous writer. You can imagine how Asian parents took that. Anyway, it was, as I said, rejected. And then I did have to go to university and do accounts. I became a management consultant. And I was lucky enough that the company I was working for got a massive contract in India.

My boss walked in the office one day and he looked around. He came over to me and he said, Vaz, you look like you can speak Indian. Well, he was a very funny chap, my boss. And anyway, he took me out to India, age 23, and it was a massive culture shock because it wouldn’t have been much different to you, the pair of you going out to India for the first time. I’d never been everything I knew about India was from, say, from, you know, a few snippets my parents had told me, but also from Bollywood movies. And if you’ve ever seen one of these things, you’ll know that they bear no relationship to reality whatsoever. I went for three months, spent 10 amazing years there. And when I came back, I wanted to put all of those amazing memories off the subcontinent into a book. I never expected it to be published. It was called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. And it gave me a career.

06:34 Julia Kelly: Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what attracted you to crime, and then pivot into, or I guess the transition into historical crime writing as well, because I’m very curious about where those two genres intersect, given that that’s also what I’m doing as well.

06:52 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, well, crime fiction for me, I think, was something that came a lot earlier in my life. I watched the Agatha Christie Poirot series starring David Suchet in the 90s, and I used to watch it with my father who loved it. And I could never understand why, because he could barely speak any English. And yet somehow halfway through every episode, he’d point at the screen and he’d say in Urdu, his native language, that’s the killer.

And somehow, most of the time, he was always right. I don’t know if he’s blind guessing or he had some sixth sense. You know, you could see dead people or at least the people who made other people dead. And anyway, so I fell in love with the genre, particularly the golden age tropes of crime fiction. But all throughout the time that I was writing books and sending them in from wherever I was in the world to agents, I didn’t write a lot of crime fiction, I have to be honest. I started with sci-fi, then I did some historical stuff.

I did some literary fiction. And when I eventually came to write the book that got me published, it didn’t originally start as a crime novel. It was more a book about the 10 years I spent in India. And then I decided I love crime fiction, so I’ll make it into a crime novel. And then at the very end, I decided to shoehorn this baby elephant into it. It was never part of the original plot.

It was simply a symbol. I mean, I should be clear to listen as the elephant doesn’t talk or sing or fly or solve mysteries. It’s a device. It’s a symbol of India. And I put it in there because I met elephants for the first time on the streets of of Mumbai, which obviously you can’t do in the UK unless maybe you’ve had a few too many on a Friday evening.

08:40 Theo Brun: You got an amazing, what’s the word, just beautifully colourful titles, particularly to the Baby Ganesh books. I think that maybe is part of the humour of the books as well that comes through in the books. But also, it just flicks, I mean, you’ve already got quite a backlist as it were, a list of bibliography, and just flicking through the synopsis of each of them, you really get this sense of this, I don’t know what you would call it, a dichotomy between the European and, you know, your, your, I suppose your background of living and growing up in London, and therefore European characters and or even European interaction with the subcontinent and other bits of, let’s say, call them, you know, the Asia and the east. Is that something that you deliberately aim at? Is that an interesting fault line for you, but that that sort of crossover between those two things and how they interact?

09:40 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, very much so. I mean, I’ll answer that and partly answer the question that Julia also posed, which I just realised I didn’t quite answer, which was why the pivot to history? Well, one, history was my favourite subject in school. And but what I realised when I got out to India and began to learn a little bit of the history of this incredible country was that we’re pretty crap at teaching, teaching anything to do with India, Indian history in our schools. 

And I understand we have a curriculum and I really enjoyed the curriculum learning about World War II and the Tudors and all the rest of it. But it would have been nice to learn a little bit more about this country that Britain shared a 300 year relationship with. Not all of it was good. And we do tend to in history and not just us, but most countries tend to cover the things that make themselves look good rather than things that possibly make themselves look not so good.

And once I began to learn that amazing history of a country that is essentially thousands of years old with ancient cultures and philosophy and religion but in a very in a very important fundamental way the modern India that we see today was largely a function of that period just after the British left in in 1947 because so many of the things that were established and became the roots of this modern India were a function of the impact that the British had over those 300 years. And I guess for me, seeing that history and then seeing this contemporary India that was moving forward at a rate of knots, I mean, the money that was flowing into the country at the time, the way that the urban centres were changing. My boss, whose name was Terry, he was a sixty-year-old snowy haired gent from Kent. And after we’d been there a few months, he came to me and he’s a funny guy. And he said, Vaz, I’m really worried. And I said, Well, Terry, why are you worried? He said, every time I come into the into the office, all these Indians are really happy to see me don’t they know what my ancestors did? And I said to him that Indians are they understand their history, they know their history, but they’re far too busy moving into the future to almost becoming a global superpower now to dwell too much on the past. And those are the things I obviously want to explore in my books.

12:10 Julia Kelly: I’m curious about how you went about digging into the research as you talk about exploring these different elements, but then also, of course, all of the things that come into play when writing anything historical, you know, needing to ground your story in time and place and all of those elements that really make it feel like it’s authentic and accurate, I guess, to the time. How did you start diving into that research?

12:35 Vaseem Khan: You know, whenever people talk to me about research, I always take my cue from one of my favorite writers, a literary writer. We only wrote really one one amazing book and it was called A Suitable Boy and his name is Vikram Seth, which I’m sure you guys have come across. Now, A Suitable Boy is, it’s a book that took him 10 years to write and it’s one of the longest books in the English language. It’s, you know, like 1500 pages or a million words or whatever it is. But Seth basically locked himself away for a decade, he ignored his family, ignored his friends, and the research is so painstaking, and for some people it’s too painstaking. You know, he at one point he spent, because one of his characters was a shoemaker, he went and spent a month working in a shoe factory. Now I haven’t quite got to those levels of research, but I do do a lot of research, and I think most historical writers will be familiar with what I’m about to say next, which is that 95 to 98 percent of the research that you do never ends up in the book. And it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t, because you’ve got to strike a fine balance between showing off and showing people how much you’ve learned about that period and moving the plot forward and the momentum that goes with that. But at the same time, you want to give just enough so that people are immersed in a particular environment. 

And also for me, it’s very important that because I’m exploring history, which, and because my books are sold around the world and a lot of that is in Western countries, which don’t know a lot about, the readers don’t know a lot about Indian history. It’s very important for me to tease out themes that I think would be of interest to both Indians and Western readers. And, you know, I can talk a little bit more about that later.

14:29 Theo Brun: Is there something not only about the research and the sort of substance of whatever the topic or the period of the book that you happen to be writing, but also, I’m wondering whether there’s a difference in nature when it comes to, you know, the Indian attitude to a crime story or a thriller story. And, you know, you mentioned Agatha Christie, I suppose if I was to, you know, give you the stereotype English version, it’s the cosy crime, the little village but deadly, you know, killers lurking in the bushes as it were. And is there something to play with in terms of creating contrast between those two things? And if so, I wouldn’t know, like, what are the differences in your view for a sort of crime story in the Indian mindset?

15:19 Vaseem Khan: Well, let me take the first of my historical as an example. So Midnight at Malabar House. So this is set in 1915 Bombay, just a few years after Indian independence, the horrors of partition when a million Indians killed each other in religious riots, Gandhi’s been assassinated and he was all set to lead India into its new future, but he was gunned down by a fellow Hindu for various reasons.

Now into this environment, I introduce India’s first female police inspector. She’s qualified. Nobody knows what to do with her because India is an intensely patriarchal society at the time. Some will say it still is. The police force is incredibly misogynistic. So they dump her in Bombay’s smallest police station called Malabar House, with a whole bunch of other rejects and misfits. And then the murder of an English politician based in India happens and she get somehow the case lands in her lap and she has to go off and solve it. And she has to solve it in the company of an Englishman, a forensic scientist from Scotland Yard who’s deputed to Bombay to help them set up their own forensic science lab. His name is Archie Blackfinch. And what you have is these two people representing the two core themes of that period, which is Persis, who’s come through the independence movement, fought for independence, and largely that’s because of the feeling of not just, you know, we don’t want to be ruled by a colonial power anymore, but because of the injustice, the crimes that, if we’re talking about crimes, the crimes that many Indians felt that their colonisers were able to commit without any form of punishment or censure. And then you’ve got Archie, who, you know, he wasn’t part of that because he’s just come to India. He wasn’t there during the Raj.

But the Raj hangs heavily around his neck. So he represents this 300 years of colonial rule and injustice. And of course, like any good crime or historical novel, there is a will they won’t they get together, but how can they possibly do so? It would ruin her career to be seen in a public relationship with an Englishman, but that’s part of any good narrative. So yeah, absolutely. For me, I think when you contrast a city like Bombay, which even then was incredibly populated, with a cosy crime, Midsomer (type) village of maybe sort of a few thousand people. 

And Bombay today has 20 million people in its greater metropolitan area. And unless you’ve been there, it is impossible to imagine the cacophony, the sounds, the sights, the smells. It’s like being hit in the head with about 10 different frying pans as soon as you step outside your door. Using that as a canvas for a crime novel, I think. Particularly in an incredibly turbulent historical period, was incredibly exciting for me to do, but I think most readers have responded to that as well with the Malabar House novels.

18:24 Julia Kelly: I’m always curious to get the perspective of an author who writes in series, because within historical fiction there are of course series, but I think historical crime in particular lends itself to that. I’m at the very beginning of my historical crime writing journey, and I’m finding that it is very different than writing standalone novels, you know, carrying these characters through elements of things.

Like a will they won’t they or themes that you develop in book one that you want to sort of carry through the whole series. Can you talk a little bit to what it’s like writing in series and how much planning and development you do in order to then create this world that readers will follow from book to book?

19:14 Vaseem Khan: Well, it’s the only argument, isn’t it, that you often hear of plotters versus pantsers and by pantsers we mean people who write by the seat of their pants. They sit down with an idea and just bash out a novel. You know, personally, I think that all writers do do some planning, but some love the mythology of saying that they can sit down and just write a whole novel. I’m a plotter. I think it’s especially if you’re writing the kind of books that I write, which have a lot of cryptic clues. They have historical themes that I’m keen to explore with each book, a lot of historical research, and then you’ve got clues and alternate suspects, and it all becomes very complex. So I’d spend months planning before I actually start writing. And for me, I think the key with series fiction is, and you probably won’t hear this a lot, because often when you have writing seminars, people say, well, what’s more important, plot or character? And people will hedge their bets and say sit on the fence and say, no, they’re both equally important. Well, it’s not true. With series fiction, characters are more important. And the reason they’re more important is because publishers know that if you can create characters that readers fall in love with and want to spend time with, they will forgive you the odd plot hole. They will forgive you the odd historical inaccuracy. And they will buy the next book because they just want to spend more time with your characters.

So more than anything else, I believe your characters have to have something I call charisma. That doesn’t mean they have to be entirely good or entirely wonderful, but they do have to have something that appeals. And another example I can give is the Shardlake novels. Right, those are historical crime novels set in the Tudor period, if I remember correctly. But they, you know, the lead character is a hunched back lawyer who is incredibly intelligent, but in that society of that era, clearly he’s not top of the tree because of his slight disability. 

And yet we fall in love with him because of his mind, because of his ability to navigate this incredibly difficult period in history when, you know, with the dissolution of the monasteries and the rest of the things that were happening. So, yeah, great characters, I think, the most important bedrock for historical fiction series.

21:40 Theo Brun: Yeah, that’s interesting. I can see, I don’t think I’ve got the experience of both of you in terms of crime and that sort of particular necessity of having all the mechanics, if you like, of the plot working out into forming the complete structure of the mystery. But I can see how in a series, you know, you need that for the characters that follows through from one book to the other. 

But what I was wondering was technically, when you are populating a particular book with the different characters and the different possible culprits, do you switch horses a lot? Like as you’re developing characters, do you go, oh this would be a killer motive for this woman or this man and this is how it’s all going to work and then suddenly you get an even better one for another character and start reconfiguring exactly what’s going to happen in this book. I mean maybe that’s part of the process of trying to figure it out as the reader anyway, and the fun of being the writer and the originator of it. But does that happen with you? And if so, kind of what does that look like?

22:47 Vaseem Khan: It happens a lot, you know, although, you know, I often, I have a detailed plan before I start writing. And I’m sure this is the experience of most writers that no matter how detailed your plan, you will find that plots and characters and will will shift under you, simply because the act of writing itself, you know, means that you’re creating on the go no matter how rigid your, your plan is and I can give you an example.

So this is the fourth in the Malabar House series, and I’m waving it around because I quite love this cover. It’s the first title I’ve ever been allowed to keep, Death of a Lesser God, and it’s got this white tiger on there for a reason. And in this book, so it’s the fourth in the Malabar House series, and it started originally as an attempt for me to invert the narrative. So you’ve got a white man, James Whitby, born and raised in India, who’s been convicted of murdering an Indian nationalist lawyer, 11 days left before he’s hanged.

His father, an old colonial industrialist in India, forces through a last minute investigation, and my protagonist, Persis and Archie, reinvestigate because James Whitby claims that he’s innocent, claims he’s the victim of a form of reverse racism, and he’s being punished for the sins of his ancestors during the Raj. So they start off in Bombay and they end up in Calcutta, which was the former centre of the British Empire in India before it moved to Delhi. And it was an old series of villages, tigers going around snacking on locals until the British came and drained the swamp and built Calcutta. But part way through writing this book, I came across during my research the fact that during World War II, there were about 150,000 American soldiers, GIs, camped in Calcutta and its environs because they were trying to stop the Japanese advance into India from the eastern side. 

And 20,000 of those were African American black soldiers. And Indians, Calcutans had never seen black soldiers before. And so, you know, it was an incredible meeting of different cultures. And even then, the white soldiers, the Americans were segregated. The black soldiers had their own barracks, they had their own swimming pools and entertainment and the rest of it. And the white soldiers tended to keep to themselves.

But the black soldiers went out into the streets of Calcutta and integrated a bit more with the locals. And once I knew this, it was utterly fascinating to me. I had no idea that this had ever happened. I decided that I was going to have a second murder of a black American GI at the end of the war, and I would build it somehow into the book. So I had to unwrap the plot a little bit and seed this in without losing the James Whitby case, and then somehow find a way, see if they can connect or not connect. I mean that’s part of the essential mystery. So yes things do change, do change as you go along.

25:53 Julia Kelly: I love hearing that because I’m at the beginning of plotting a book right now. And I know no matter what I do, there are going to be things that I discover, whether it’s research or, you know, characters going in a different direction. And I find it very reassuring hearing about that with a completed book. And congratulations on keeping a title, by the way, I know that is not easy when it goes to the whole publishing machine.

I want to make sure and take a few minutes to talk about some of the other things that you do in your life, including your being recently named chair or elected chair of the CWA. Would you like to tell us a little bit about the Crime Writers Association and your role in it?

26:35 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, sure. I mean the CWA has been going for about 70 years. It’s the largest association of crime writers in Europe, one of the largest in the world. It hosts the prestigious Dagger Awards, which are one of the world’s most important awards for crime fiction. And I am the first nonwhite chair.

26:51 Theo Brun: Of which you were a winner, we should say, in 2021. We should have dropped that in earlier.

26:56 Vaseem Khan: Well thank you Theo. I did, listeners I did not pay Theo to make that public announcement. Midnight at Malabar House, the first in my historical crime novels, won the historical dagger and yes it’s very important, it gives you worldwide exposure and for me it put my career to the next level.

I did have to think twice about whether or not I wanted to be chair of the CWA because it’s extra work that I don’t need. But then at the same time, what I believe is that crime fiction has been leading the way in introducing new voices, new stories into publishing. And we all know that there’s been a debate over the last 10, 15 years about making the creative arts more diverse.

And my personal experience has been reasonably positive. Yeah, it took me 23 years to get published in the first place, but since being published, I’ve seen incredible change. I’ve seen lots of different voices come on who were previously excluded. Is that the right word? It’s more that the industry is very risk averse and the inertia is so strong that it doesn’t really like change. And if in the past books that have been successful, successful have been mainly books written by white authors with white protagonists set in white environments, it’s very difficult for the publishing industry to think that they can make money by publishing something different. Thankfully, that has changed. And it’s not just about colour, you know, people of different genders, sexualities, people who have come from working class backgrounds, who are traditionally very found it very difficult to get published. All of those changes are happening. Yes, we’d all love it to happen at a faster pace. 

But I think overall, that map of change has transformed the kind of books that we offer to readers. And I’ve always believed that readers are intelligent people. If you give them a choice, they can decide for themselves whether or not a Vaseem Khan book set in India is interesting to them and worth reading. But if you never put those books in front of them, they will just stick to what they know, which is more Midsommar, more Agatha Christie. Nothing wrong with that.

But I personally believe that it’s as a reader first and foremost, it’s exciting to me when I come across a book that’s set in an environment with protagonists that I personally, that a community that I don’t know anything about, and then I can learn something about that as well as enjoying, hopefully a good read.

29:33 Theo Brun: Yeah, it sounds like you think that it’s the industry sort of suppliers have changed their approach as opposed to the appetite may well have been there just untested as it were in terms of readers out there just saying, give me a good story.

29:49 Vaseem Khan: Very much so. And you know, one of the funny things is in my Malabar House series, I kill a lot of white people. And, you know, most of the people who get killed in my books are white people. And I do that partly because I know that I have a wide readership in America, in Australia, in the UK. And people like something familiar, as well as something that is new to them. So there is a way to bridge, I think, that gap. And because of my dual heritage growing up in the UK, but having that Indian heritage, spending time out there. I think I’m able to do that in a way that readers respond to. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having familiar tropes, but I think it’s also very exciting when you have something new as well that you learn.

30:35 Theo Brun: You put together a course for the Curtis Brown Creative Writing School. And I had a couple of questions really related to that. One was when you’re teaching people how to do what you do, crime fiction or historical crime fiction. On the positive side, is there a magic ingredient that you think should always be in there or something, something that you can sort of call the magic ingredient? And also, is there a kind of classic pitfall that all rookie authors coming into this area of fiction, again, are falling into, and maybe you can help them steer around.

31:15 Vaseem Khan: There is actually. I know people often fudge these kind of questions because they don’t want to upset anybody, but I won’t fudge it. The number one reason that books submitted to agents are rejected is because they do not meet the minimum standard of quality to be published. Now I know that’s something that people don’t want to hear because reading is supposed to be subjective. Writing is supposed to be subjective and it’s all everybody’s opinion.

But when it comes to the sharp end, particularly with big publishers, agents are inundated by submissions, literally thousands, across the piece, not just historical. And if you submit, say, a historical novel, then the first thing the agent wants to know is, is the quality of this writing in terms of the actual writing, the plot, the characters, the handling of themes, is it at a level where I can push it forward?

Commissioning editors who are the people who buy these books and will they look at it and say yep this is something that we can see ourselves publishing and on a bookshelf and out with critics reading it. So that’s the first barrier and specifically for historicals I think you need to write about something I personally believe that you care about. Of course we don’t have personal experience of you know if you’re writing about the the 1200s or whatever we don’t have personal experience.

But there needs to be something that you care about and it should shine through in what you’re writing. Now, just simple example, with my Malabar House novels, I indulge in something which I call historical revisionism. What I mean by that is correcting some of the things that we’ve learned through historians writing about India, who have largely been middle-aged white men. Nothing wrong with that. I read a lot of their books to try and get some of my information, but we haven’t had much of the Indian perspective.

And so simple things like, for instance, I mentioned in Midnight at Malabar House that the fingerprinting system that we use in the West was invented by two Indians in Calcutta. But their supervisor during the Raj was an Englishman named Henry. And so it was called the Henry classification system. Then it went to Scotland Yard and then from there it went around the world. And it’s largely the same system we use at the moment, although a bit more techified.

So small things like that I seed in and people write to me, my readers, and they say, we had no idea about this, we had no idea. And that passion for that history shows through in small nuggets of information like this. And so I would urge anyone who’s writing historical fiction to be passionate, to write about something, a period of history that they’re passionate about so that they know when is the right place to seed in things like this.

34:05 Julia Kelly: I love that advice about having passion for what it is that you’re writing about and, and finding ways to bring that to your books. I wanted to ask one last question. And again, you know, we’re talking about all the things that you do in addition to all of the books that you write and all the work that you do. So I wanted to ask about your work at the Department of Security and Crime Sciences at UCLA. I’m sorry, UCL. I’m from California, clearly a bit of a slip there. UCL, University College London. How does that come into your work as an author? Do they influence each other?

34:42 Vaseem Khan: Well, I’ve been at UC Edwards University College London in London for 17 odd years. And I keep trying to leave because the books have gone really well. But because I don’t teach and I don’t do the research myself, I’m not an academic. It means that I have lots of time to go off and do book stuff and my boss doesn’t want me to go anywhere. And I actually enjoy it. I enjoy because I don’t spend the whole day writing. I write for about four hours in the morning, then I have the rest of the day free and I’d get bored senseless or my wife would find me tasks around the house to do.

And so I quite enjoy and we work a lot in the department. I help manage projects and we work a lot on crime and security topics. And I particularly help with a centre for future crime, which sounds very Tom Cruise Minority Report, but it’s looking at how future technology will be used by criminals. So we do work on artificial intelligence and crime, how that’s being used. And I could scare you straight right now if I told you, you’d never go on social media again or post anything again.

If you knew what AI algorithms could do by just hoovering up your social media profiles. We’re working on autonomous vehicles and how criminals might, you know, hack into them and use them for crime. So for me, because I write historical, not a lot of that information is useful now. But, you know, I love working with my colleagues and you never know, because as a writer, the one thing you can’t guarantee is what you will be writing three years from now.

And I may well end up writing contemporary novels featuring very futuristic crime. So it’s good to keep my hand in.

36:17 Theo Brun: Or else you come full circle to your sci-fi origins.

36:21 Vaseem Khan: I’ll just say this in passing just to show people that no matter how, you know, for want of a better word, successful you are as a writer, there are always things in the drawer that you can’t get published. So for 20 years, I’ve been working on my magnum magnum opus, which is a literary novel set in Egypt from the years 1899, the beginning of the British protectorate in Egypt to 1970 the end of General Nasser’s reign. It covers three generations of an Egyptian family and it’s told in the style of magical realism so it follows one of my favorite books. This is where my love of history came from, books like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Shogun by James Clavell, Birdsong by Sebastian Fawkes, all of these incredible books that dissect a period in history for us. So my book has been 20 years in the making, I cannot get my agent to read it, cannot get my publisher to read it because they say it’s got nothing to do with your crime novels, your readers will get confused. So I’m hoping that I will get to J.K. Rowling levels at some point where I have so much power that I can just publish anything I like. But I’m not quite there yet. One day.

37:34 Julia Kelly: One day. Well, this has been fantastic. Before we go, I want to make sure that you have a chance to tell people who are listening where they can find you online and how they can follow on with your career. And maybe one day the magnum opus, you never know.

37:52 Vaseem Khan: Well, I hope so. You know, in India, we have a saying, may sugar be put into your mouth when you say something like that. So, well, even if you Google my name, you’ll find my website and you can see what the books that are out there, what’s being released. By all means, if you if you like your historical fiction and you like a few murders thrown in, do try the Malabar House novels.

They seem to be doing quite well around the world and people do enjoy them and I do get lots of feedback and occasionally people do pick me up on getting a historical detail wrong. I mean one very irate chap, he wrote to me from the States in fact, he might even have been a Californian, Julia, and you know he started, well yeah, well he started very nicely by saying oh dear Mr. Khan, I really love your books, really love, really love this, sorry that’s not a very American accent, and then he said on page, page 82, line 17.

You’ve got Persis driving around in a Jeep and she rolls down the window. And I regret to inform you, but that model of Jeep in 1950 did not have any windows. And to be fair to him, he was absolutely correct. I had made a mistake and I wrote to my publisher immediately and said, please, can you make sure that I never put in a Jeep with damn bloody windows again, because I don’t want another letter from this lovely, lovely man in California, Julia’s friend.

39:12 Julia Kelly: I’ve had a similar, I’ve had a similar letter from somebody about farm equipment in the UK in 1942. So don’t worry happens to all of us.

39:22 Theo Brun: That’s great. All right, well, you’ve heard it from the man. There are lots of ways to get involved with Vaseem Khan’s work. And it’s been a real pleasure having you here on the episode. So thank you so much. And we wish you well with your next one for the future.

39:49 Julia Kelly: What a fantastic interview and a lot to talk about, I think. We have got a little bit of time to do that, but first I think Theo, you have a bit of a reminder for us.

40:01 Theo Brun: I do, I do. I want to let all of our listeners know about a special bonus episode of the podcast available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode about how to succeed in historical fiction. And we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors, Gill Paul and David Penny, who share with us the ingredients of their success and how you can succeed in the genre as well. To get the bonus episode, go to thehistoryquill.com/bonus. You can find the link in the description or enter it into the browser.

40:34 Julia Kelly: Yeah, we really encourage you to sign up and receive that because there’s a lot of fantastic advice and insight in that bonus episode, especially if you’re a historical fiction author and you won’t want to miss it. Okay, when it comes to having chat about everything we’ve just listened to with Vaz, I think we have a lot of places that we can start, Theo. Do you have anything in particular that stuck out that you want to tackle first?

40:59 Theo Brun: Yeah, I think the probably the last thing he said, or the last big thing he said, which was this kind of dose of reality. You like a bit of dose of reality. I mean, rather than as he in his words, fudge it and give some sort of little detail about what’s good or what’s not. I think, you know, that the sort of essence of reading something and you can tell, can’t you, in in 30 seconds of reading, like whether someone can write or not. And that is a reality. And often, I mean, I don’t know, you’ve probably got similar experience of people sharing stuff or friends of friends sharing stuff that this, he’s written a novel or he’s written a story. 

And I have to say, it’s always like drinking a cup of cold water when you read the first page and you think this is, I can’t actually read this. It’s not completely awful. And whether, yeah, is that, can you teach that? Is that just something innate? I don’t know, but it’s definitely a reality that comes with the turf.

42:07 Julia Kelly: I think it’s an interesting point because for me, you know, writing is a craft and you work at it. And I think as an author, you hope to continue working at it for, you know, a long and healthy career. But, you know, certainly I’m not the writer that I was when I first queried. I hope I’m not the writer, you know, in 10 years that I am today. I hope to continue to keep growing and changing.

But I think part of, part of that is understanding that, you know, writing again is a craft and it is something that you need to work at. I do think that there is something to be said about understanding what is, if the goal is publication, what is a manuscript that is ready to be presented to an agent, ready to be presented to an editor, ready to be acquired. And it’s not a first draft. It’s something that has, you know, that level of quality.

 And I think that’s a great reminder as well. And it may be difficult, I think, for some people to hear that because, you’ve poured passion and excitement into your manuscripts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready yet. It doesn’t mean that it can’t become ready, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t grow as an author, but I think it is important to remember that, even though writing is subjective, there is also an industry. And if you wanna play in that industry, you need to understand what it is that you’re getting yourself into and the requirements of it.

43:37 Theo Brun: I suppose it can be a painful experience, or a laborious experience writing out anything, really, whatever the purpose of this piece of writing is. And often you just don’t feel like going back into it and seeing if you can make it better. It’s like you’d rather just push it out to someone and say, there, that’s what I’ve done. And that’s kind of as good as I can get it. Whereas, like you said, the reality is, as we come back to with a lot of guests, it’s kind of the perseverance and endurance. And part of that is the recycling of looking at what you’ve got down on a page. I think the reading, often reading other authors who are really good. And then it’s sort of how you hone your voice, isn’t it? Because so, you know, you can’t say this is good. Well, you can say this is good writing. This is not good writing. You can’t exactly say why, but and what they’re doing different to that one other than a voice is coming through, some sort of voice that makes, that is engaging and sort of catches you as a narrator. 

And I don’t know what, how you, you help people sort of find that, whether it’s a case of reading back your own stuff aloud or something like that. And like, does this sort of sing in your head somehow? But, but it’s noticeable when people have it and it can just be a little bit off, but you can spot that this is not a professional. 

Or not that this is not a professional, this is not of that level that he was talking about, this is not of that kind of benchmark quality. So yeah, it’s tough to assess yourself and evaluate yourself, but I think you do get better at it, don’t you?

45:21 Julia Kelly: I think so. And I think in some ways it ties into his point about, you know, when you’re looking at writing a series rather than a standalone novel, that will be a complete story.

I think I loved his point about writing characters that people care about, that people want to follow. And I think, again, that’s a skill that you can develop and you can really flesh out characters. And you can, as an author, find out more about those characters as you continue to write them and more about the relationships and build out not just that character, but their, again, their relationships, their world, how they move through your books. I thought that was a great reminder of one of the challenges that’s different about writing serious fiction, but can be incredibly rewarding and also can be incredibly rewarding for your readers as well, to follow somebody who you really like to be in the company of. 

A great example for historical crime, or I guess we’d think it’s historical now, some of it was contemporary, is Hercule Poirot. He’s just been fascinating for decades and people connect to the mysteries and to the individual books, they’re following the detective, they’re following the character, and that’s why there’s this sort of almost cult-like fascination with him. He is just one of those characters who people really respond to and latch onto.

46:46 Theo Brun: Yeah, and I suppose that’s that is a danger of crime as well, that if people are going to be dying or sort of dropping like flies, you what is what is there to care about the end of the mystery? I mean, even talking about Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot type mysteries, as soon as you know who did it, you kind of stop caring.

You know, often in the TV series or even in some of the books, there’s the little suggestion of a kind of romance between maybe one of the witnesses and one of the suspects or whatever. But you don’t really care in the same way that you might care in a historical sweeping epic or a historical romance. It is just, as you said, is there a character that you just want to hang out with and see how their mind works? I suppose when it’s someone as cerebral as Poirot or as he was talking about. Gosh, who was it he mentioned? Oh yeah, the Shardlake books. Yeah. And at the end of the day, if you’re in, it’s quite particular to that genre, isn’t it? That it’s the character that immediately pops to mind all the other books and the nature of what happened in those books is not what sticks with you. Whereas for other kind of series, historical series, it’s kind of like, oh, wow, and do you remember that the sort of sweeping plot went over here and then it was this particular sort of dramatic climactic event in history? Yes, the characters are important, but it’s not, the plot doesn’t fall away from it over time in the same way that it seems to a little bit with historical crime.

48:34 Julia Kelly: Yeah, I think the ideal situation is you manage to marry together great plot, great characters, and then an intriguing series hook that will carry you along. I think that’s the sweet spot. And telling people how to do that can be difficult because you know what I think will make a great character and a great series hook.

You know, readers might disagree with me, but I think that’s part of what you’re trying to do as an author who is planning out these longer series is what’s going to keep this interesting. How is this going to be intriguing to somebody and what, what are people going to carry care about carrying through from book to book? And I think he’s right. There is something about having a detective with charisma of some sort. You know, it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not necessarily, you know, one size fits all, but something that draws you to them as a reader.

49:23 Theo Brun: No, I noticed when he well, actually, I think it was from the background reading I did about him that his first offer or contract was a four book contract, which when I read it, I thought, if I was a debut novelist, I got a four book contract on the one hand, you’re going, I’ve got the golden ticket. And on the other, I find that quite intimidatins. He’s written many books already and he’s like okay yes I can do four more books. I don’t know whether that struck you in any way or whether you would find that intimidating or encouraging.

50:07 Julia Kelly: You know, I think all I can do is speak to my own personal experience. So when I first got a contract, it was for a series of three books. and I had, of course, you know, when you’re an author who nobody knows anything about because you’re a debut, you submit a full manuscript. and then, so what I did was I submitted a full manuscript and I submitted a plan for two more books after that related to that first manuscript. This was a series.

Writing that second book was a very different experience than writing that first book. You know, when I was unpublished and I desperately wanted to get a contract and be published and enter this world that I felt very kept out of, I got some advice that I didn’t appreciate at the time. Somebody told me, enjoy the time you have now when you’re not writing to contract because it’s never gonna be like this again. And I think I thought, but I wanna be published. I want a contract.

Why would I do that? And I understand now what they were trying to say. I think what they were trying to say is when you have entered the world of publishing, when you have a contract, when you’ve been published, there’s always going to be a level of pressure on you. There’s always gonna be a level of timeline. You know, when is the next book due? Or what is the next book that you’re writing to try to get another contract? You know, there’s always an element of what comes next. And I think there is something really beautiful about not having that same pressure on you.

Completely understandable if, you know, people who are listening, if their goal is to get published, I would, I would probably feel exactly the same way that I did when that person gave me that advice that, you know, it would be difficult to imagine not wanting that. but there is something that is a bit of a luxury when you do land, a contract or you have had a taste of what being published can be like.

Having that open-ended free time to play, explore, to figure out and to build the muscle that is being a writer, there is nothing quite like it. So I think when you’re presented with an opportunity, most people are going to take the opportunity and I think that’s great. I think there is sometimes a bit of intimidation that comes along with that. And certainly my experience was, it’s very different writing book two of a series than writing book one of a series when you’ve had that time to have, when you have the luxury of time, before anybody knew anything about the book.

52:32 Theo Brun: Do you find, just sort of pivoting to something a little bit more technical, perhaps, which is he obviously went from crime fiction to kind of back into historical crime fiction, which didn’t seem like a difficult jump for him because as he said he’s passionate about history and naturally interested in that culture as well. You I know have now done, is it two or three books in your Parisian Orphan series?

In terms of what you’re writing. I know there’s only one out but but there’s more coming on there.

53:00 Julia Kelly: Yes. Yeah, so… Yeah, I’m starting, literally starting book three right now. I’m doing all that pre-planning. So, uh, yes. Yeah.

53:10 Theo Brun: Yeah, are you finding that you’re having to learn a lot of new stuff in terms of how you go about the writing of this book because it’s crime?

53:21 Julia Kelly: You know, it’s funny, I think I’ve got a pretty solid grounding under me because of the other things that I’ve written when it comes to developing character. So I know going into a project, I’m going to flesh out the characters, I’m going to do these things in order to kind of help myself out, to really familiarise with myself, with who I’m writing about. Do I still end up in situations where characters are quote unquote misbehaving or going off in directions that I didn’t expect and I need to adjust the plot in order to reflect that? Absolutely. But I have a lot of experience with that, and so I have a pretty good method. 

What I have been fascinated and frustrated sometimes to realise is that I am having to develop that around the plot of a mystery novel. And so I’m learning from book to book what’s important for me to know before the book starts, what I might need to adjust on the fly. Book one, I had a pretty solid idea what was going to happen and how it’s going to develop. I literally, in order to sort out all the motives and the alibis and everything, I had a cork board and little pieces of string connecting everybody, it looked insane. But for book two, I didn’t do that. 

54:38 Theo Brun: Does anyone teach you that or you just figure that out for yourself?

54:40 Julia Kelly: I think I watched a lot of police procedurals and they always have a murder board. And so I was like, you know what? Let’s just build a murder board for this book.

I didn’t do that for book two because I quite frankly didn’t have the time. I was writing to a tight deadline, talk about deadline pressure of a second book. And I ended up finding that I was having to go through and make much larger scale editorial changes in the developmental edits. And so what I’m doing for book three, I’m really, really, I’m working backwards. Basically, I’m really trying to understand what it is that the killer, the motive, you know, all of those things are all of the alibis, where everybody claims they were, you know, different things that I can seed in through the book. So I’m doing much less of the going back and saying, okay, I realised that I need this character to say this thing for this thing to make sense and for this all of Locke. So what I’m trying to do is kind of reverse engineer the book and then from in terms of who did it.

And then go from the beginning and start to build those things in through my outline. It’s much more structure than I’ve even done for my historical fiction novels, my standalone novels in the past. But I think that because it’s a mystery and because so much of it centres around that puzzle, I really want to make sure that I get it right. And I think it also helps me to just work through a bit of that beforehand. This is all a theory. So, you know, follow along to find out whether this actually works.

56:11 Theo Brun: But I, yeah, I’m fascinated by the theory though, because I sort of, you know, it was something along the lines of like you work out what happened factually like this is what this is what actually happened then you kind of how do you conceal that barrier it’s like Churchill’s thing of you know the mystery wrapped in the enigma and then the riddle all covered by a riddle or whatever his description of the truth was but, you know, you kind of build, build red herrings and build like you say, different alibis, different motives of different characters, but that’s not what happened. 

You have that kind of central thread of already of like, this is who, this is why, this is how, more or less. And let’s bury that so sufficiently that no one can… well, as few people can guess it as possible. Is it something along those lines or…?

57:10 Julia Kelly: Yes, but also make sure that I, as the author know what that is before I bury it. I think that’s a big part of it. So I’m not excavating it as I go. I’m sort of knowing where I’m moving towards. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s been a fantastic sort of thought exercise and it’s really interesting hearing somebody else talk about how they outline and, you know, how much detail they go into because I, you know, in some ways I think.

Authors are always looking at other people’s processes and trying to figure out, you know, what works for somebody and could that work for me? Which is why I find conversations with authors about craft just endlessly interesting.

57:50 Theo Brun: Yeah. And do you have to, I mean, I know you’re doing forties, aren’t you? But are you doing a lot of research of police procedure and detective procedure in that of that period and like the technical details of the stuff they had to go on? Like he was talking about fingerprints and things like that.

58:08 Julia Kelly: One of my favorite things is that Agatha Christie was writing during this time and she was very good about keeping up with scientific developments in this area. So there’s a lot of, a lot of books that have been written about her science and how it developed and changed throughout her writing career. Super helpful. 

58:27 Theo Brun: Yeah, some shortcuts would be good.

58:30 Julia Kelly: So yes, I try not to get, yeah, I try not to get too into the weeds because I think it can be very easy to veer off. And I’m not writing a forensic scientist. I’m writing basically an amateur detective. and so I try to make sure that I’m not doing too much of that, but I do need to be aware of things such as, you know, the developments in, in fingerprint, ooh, pardon me, uh, the developments in fingerprinting that, that he was, he was discussing with us. So yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. And if you’re, I mean, if you’re an author who likes historical research, there’s a mine of historical research to do while writing historical crime.

59:05 Theo Brun: Well, that concludes this episode of The History Quill podcast. But before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to thehistoryquill.com/bonus to get a bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction, featuring guest authors, Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening for any historical fiction writers, so make sure you check it out. You can find the link in the description and enter it into your browser.

59:30 Julia Kelly: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure that you like, subscribe, and leave us a comment or a review. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.

[00:00:00] Theo Brun: Hello and welcome to this month’s episode of the History Quill podcast brought to you by the History Quill, the home of historical fiction writers. And I’m here with my lovely co host Julia Kelly. Julia, how are you?

[00:00:29] Julia Kelly: I am very well. I’m, uh, I’m actually pretty excited because I feel like ever since this podcast started, I’ve been telling you about these books that I’ve been writing these books that I’ve been editing. The last book went off. It’s developmental edits went off, uh, as of recording this, uh, last the week before this recording.

So I am looking to the future and I’m looking at. Writing something new and I’m very much enjoying the process of figuring out what that’s going to be so it’s been it’s been fun It’s felt very very refreshing. How about you?

[00:01:02] Theo Brun: Yeah, that sounds good. I think I’m in a similar place in that I, I think I ended last year feeling a little bit frustrated with a few things. So I sort of turned the page, um, this year and have. Yeah, brought a different attitude to it, different approach, and opened up my mind to different ideas. And I’m actually having quite a sort of fruitful time in terms of new ideas and ideas that I’m pulling together for the next novels that I’m going to write.

So, all together, I’m in a good place, I would say.

[00:01:33] Julia Kelly: Ah, wonderful I love it when the creativity starts and it starts feeling productive as well at the same time. It’s a good place to be in

[00:01:40] Theo Brun: Absolutely. Well, today we’re going to do something a little bit different. Um, we have a, not a historical fiction author as our guest, but we in fact have Steve Dacus, who is the founder and CEO of a organization called the Research Arsenal, which is a historical archive primarily focused on the American Civil War.

Um, but essentially he’s been busy digitizing all the resources, letters, photos, um, official sort of technical reports and all kinds of stuff that makes for an incredibly rich resource for anyone who wants to look back into the past and tell actual history or historical fiction as well. So it’s going to be really interesting, I think, chatting to him about everything archival.

So should we get into it?

[00:02:33] Julia Kelly: Yeah, let’s go

[00:02:41] Theo Brun: Right. Well, it’s a great pleasure to introduce a slightly different guest for today’s episode. Um, someone who is, I would say, in the nitty gritty of what it is that we do when we’re writing historical fiction and trying to recreate historical scenarios. We’re very lucky to have Steve Dacus with us, and Steve is the founder and CEO of the Research Arsenal, which is a historical database that he’s got up and running, which hopefully he’ll tell us a little more about.

Over in the US, mostly it covers the American Civil War, but it’s obviously an amazing resource and an amazing model for what’s possible when it comes to setting up these historical archives that can be so useful. Um, so Steve, welcome to the History Quill podcast. It’s great to have you.

[00:03:32] Steve Dacus: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

[00:03:34] Theo Brun: Yeah, well, I’d love to know You can’t do a project like this or get involved in a project like this without having a deep love of history, full stop.

So do you want to, yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit of your kind of story that built up to the idea of, of, uh, founding this, um, archive and how that came about?

[00:03:57] Steve Dacus: you betcha. I mean, really the genesis of what was going on is like, I mean, kind of like you said, I was a history geek and a history nerd, uh, all along, even at school, uh, whether it was, uh, in history writing, you know, reports or in English class writing, you know, fiction, uh, essays, uh, and always, it always be in the genre of a historical setting, you know.

And, uh, I took whatever, whatever reason I took to the American Civil War as a niche, uh, type, you know, I guess framework of what I was interested in, uh, you know, other people were interested in World War 2, World War 1, um, you know, whatever, but, uh, I kind of latched on to the American Civil War, which is kind of popular back in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up.

And, uh, so, you know, fast forward, I mean, I was always a history nerd, always read books. And, uh, fast forward to just about basically five, six, seven years ago. Uh, I do living history, historical interpretation. I do, uh, I’m a docent at a few museums, you know, that I, you know, talk to the public at. And, you know, the history geeks in us, we always see things on the internet and like save photos and put them in folders.

Right? Like, like, Oh, that’s a cool photo. I save it in a folder. Uh, or I come across a really cool reference that I want to put into an article. Uh, and so I, I put that as a, as a, you know, save that or bookmark that. And my friends and I were all talking and like, especially at this point in our lives, we have like a million different folders with a million different photos in there labeled and we can’t, I can’t find what I want to, you know, look for and, uh, and in my head, I’m like, there has to be a database that I could just like search like a specific photo.

Like, you know, especially trying to describe in an article. I was trying to describe how soldiers. clothing in a very, uh, actually I was kind of making fun of how, uh, modern kids where, you know, actually when I was growing up where they’re bit brims, you know, flat brim turned up off the side, kind of all weird.

Uh, I was gonna make an article that basically says they did that 150 years ago, uh, in the U S and I couldn’t find the specific photo I was looking for and I knew I saved it in one of my folders. And so I said, man, there has to be a database somewhere that just you can type in keywords and you know, it pops up, right?

And there’s not. There’s nothing. Um, and fast forward to trying to research linguistic, um, I guess period, period language. Again, trying to talk about or bring in certain verbs or words that obviously have died out in our modern lingo today. Uh, in my head, I’m thinking, man, there has to be a database of, you know, thousands of letters that people wrote home that we can, you know, keyword search and I can search for the word, you know, Mississippi or search for the word, uh, whatever it is and figure out how often it was used and, uh, the context of how those words were used.

And kind of look and see from, you know, mid 19th century to later 19th century, if those words died out or not. Right. And again, no, there’s, there’s nothing. And as a researcher, I was like, I’m not the only guy who, who wanted this or who wants this. And so, uh, realize there’s nothing out there and long story short or short story long.

Uh, I, you know, we friends, friends and I, uh, got together and we just started compiling. Um, every image we could, we got partnerships with some national databases and national archives, like the Library of Congress that has one of the largest collections of Civil War photos out there. And what our, our specialty is, is we take those photos and keywords, you know, tag everything in the image.

Uh, and so now we have a database that, that, you know, we can search and look and research kind of the material culture of the Civil War. And I understand this is, you know, it’s a niche, you know, but, uh, there’s. There’s a lot of people who are really interested in one of the things that people kind of confuse us on is they say, Oh, yeah, you’re just another ancestry or another genealogy side.

Actually, that’s not the furthest from the truth. Our focus is on the material culture and the, I guess, the culture of the time period. And so whether it’s the, you know, thousands of searchable photos that are keyword searchable, or the letters that are keyword searchable, or, you know, ordinance returns, or, you know, Letters that actually specify what, what regiments were issued specific, you know, for us that getting a nitty gritty, um, one of the things I kind of culminated and I’ll stop talking here.

Uh, the, one of the things that kind of culminated is, is a, a German, a German author kind of got with us and said, hey, this is awesome because he was able to research, he found an ordinance returns from one of the regiments he was, you know, framing his, his writing in. And he was able to put, you know, those details of what that soldier would have been carrying, how many cartridge boxes, and how many rounds of ammunition he had because he had that document that issued that.

And it’s those details that really separate out, um, you know, I guess, subpar, uh, writing from, from, from the nitty gritty, from the things that really latch on to people, you know, and, um, yeah, sorry, that was the genesis of everything, yeah.

[00:09:11] Julia Kelly: So, Steve, you’re speaking my language here because just yesterday, um, or rather the day before I was, I write primarily about World War Two and I focus on Britain. And so it’s a really well documented time period with a lot of photographs and all these things, but simple things sometimes trip you up.

Like, I was looking. I was searching and searching and searching, and it was the worst type of thing because I had looked it up. I had found what I was looking for, but about 6 months ago. And so I was going back to try to reconfirm something and stupidly. I didn’t save whatever it was that I had used to confirm this.

I was looking at how train times and locations and routes would have been displayed in Paddington station in London during 1941 and I know I found it and I cannot find it again. And no matter what I plug into Google. Eventually I found something that I think gets me close enough and I can do a little bit of creative rewriting, um, on the scene because I want to get it right, but I don’t necessarily have a single place where I can go and put my hands on that information.

So I love the idea of being able to keyword search and. Obviously not my primary area, but I think it’s a really fascinating approach to archives. And I’m also really curious because I do have a background in historical research, and I was a journalist, so I’m used to digging around in archives. I’m used to going through material, trying to find these little details.

But for writers who are sort of just starting out into historical fiction, and they might be finding the idea of archival research intimidating. How do you kind of talk to them about approaching this and sort of making it a bit more accessible for, for those people?

[00:10:47] Steve Dacus: Yeah, no, actually, that, I mean, that was one of the other things that, you know, my friends and I kind of got frustrated on is in order to find what we were looking for, we had to travel to different state archives, county archives, national archives. And, and no one has the time or the money to do that. And so, again, our, our goal is to do that for you.

We, we partner, right now we partner with a fair amount of, of, you know, county and state websites, uh, or sorry, state archives. And we take those records, and of course we focus on our, you know, mid 19th century. But, uh, we take those records, we transcribe them, we put them up for you, uh, for your reference.

And you’re right, like, going to the archives, for the first few times I went there, it’s really intimidating.

[00:11:26] Julia Kelly: Yeah.

[00:11:27] Steve Dacus: don’t know what, what do you do? What do you not do? What’s okay? Like culturally, like what’s, I’m not a researcher, but you know, you, you, you figure it out. But man, those, those first few times you, you feel out of, out of the water, you know, but, uh, yeah, for sure.

[00:11:43] Theo Brun: Do the, um, it feels like the sort of timing is right for this, that the technology, you know, has sort of recently developed that, that this feels like a kind of tip of the spear, if you like, of things that could happen a lot across the archival world of the West, let’s say, or in each different countries, you know, pick your topic as it were.

Obviously, the American Civil War is a, is a hugely popular and rightly so interesting area of history for anyone living in America. Um, Does it bring a different kind of a person because of the nature of, you know, the technology is there now that, um, people are sort of bringing a different sort of mentality to it?

And who are the kind of people that are using your stuff? Are they amateurs who, who’s like, you know, great grandfather was involved on, so if I could get, get the, the age gap right. Or, or, or is it, or is it like professional novelists or professional historians who are going, oh my gosh, this is gold. I wish, I wish you’d invented this 20 years ago, but, but this would now will do.

[00:12:54] Steve Dacus: Really, so the really your first question is, is where it’s at of who, you know, are we, are we expanding who is getting into research and archival material? The answer is yes. And the best example I can use. is people who use slider rules versus when calculators became really popular, right?

In order to use a slider rule, uh, of course, this is my mom talking, right? Um, but, uh, it was complicated and really the people who went basically from, you know, trig and on used slider rules, uh, and there’s, you know, for people who are kind of middle math, like, they were like, oh, I forget that, like, I’ll just do long division.

And then the calculator came out and that basically evened the playing field across the board. And maybe that parallel comes over to this of, of, yeah, you know, historically, you know, we have these professional historians or archivists or authors that really knew their stuff and they got that, but no one else with the state archives and research stuff.

And so what this is allowing us to do is, is, you know, what I call, I’m a hobby historian, you know, even though I’m. Uh, getting a little bit more on the professional side of things, like I’m still just a nerd at heart, a kid at heart that likes to go to research stuff, and it’s we’re opening it up to people who kind of like with the calculators, right?

It’s easier, it’s manageable, and as far as the time frame, you mentioned it, I mean, you hit the nail on the head of, of, uh, being in this perfect time, perfect place in history, uh, we are in a digital revolution, uh, of our digitizing archives, scanning them, transcribing them, the AI on these things.

Transcribe a lot of the material automatically now the handwriting not so much. That’s a whole other thing but Yeah, no, it’s it’s we are in a digitization revolution of archival material allowing The standard hobby historian to or author to do this. So That’s I think that’s 100 percent true

[00:14:51] Julia Kelly: I’m curious about, um, again, you know, because we, we talk primarily to, um, to writers who are at various stages in their careers, um, you know, having giving somebody a bit more of a, of an idea of how they might use an archive like this. I know you mentioned this German author who was able to write about, um, you know, the ammunition that somebody would have, you know, worn and various things, but for somebody who’s trying to, to give more material, um, texture to their books, to give sort of a sense of the slice of life and all those details that we all love when we read historical novels, cause it’s really transporting.

What are some of the things that you suggest people dive in and look for, um, when

[00:15:34] Steve Dacus: Yeah,

[00:15:34] Julia Kelly: kind of exploring?

[00:15:36] Steve Dacus: You betcha. Uh, I mean, again, I hate to stay focused on, on the Civil War, but obviously that’s our

[00:15:41] Julia Kelly: No, go for it.

[00:15:42] Steve Dacus: the, uh, we’re getting, getting the weapons right, right? Like, for instance, um, knowing every regiment had, were issued different weapons, um, and different cartridge boxes and, and, you know, some regiments carried certain equipment while others didn’t.

Now, the, the, the issue is the, the public doesn’t know what they don’t know when they read. So, uh, But yet they know enough to know when something’s wrong or off, you know, like uh to I don’t know I I hate to bring this up. But like the the uh, the drama that is Napoleon the movie right like um you have

[00:16:16] Julia Kelly: Yeah. Go

[00:16:17] Steve Dacus: that’s that’s a really good way of you know, but not only is it bad story, bad writing but bad historical context right, so I don’t want to get into that a whole lot.

[00:16:26] Theo Brun: I hear you. I hear you.

[00:16:28] Steve Dacus: The historic, the historical world is just like appalled at how can you get so much wrong. And even though the public doesn’t know what they don’t know, like I said, they still know when something’s just not right, right? And people who also know, like people who, I mean, if you’re reading historical fiction, you’re reading it because you’re interested in history.

So there’s already like a little side part of your brain that’s, that is already researching historical side parts. And so if you get certain things wrong, or if you describe something wrong, then you’ve lost, you know, say, half your audience or a quarter of your audience because you just, you’re not, the details aren’t right.

And, but yet on the, on the contrast, when you get the details right, when you say, hey, you know, Private so and so picked up his Sharps carbine that he was issued a week ago and he’s he’s he’s the first time he ever loaded It was in combat, right? That detail is not only true but it is transporting it those details bring out the nitty gritty of your story to where people even though they don’t know what they don’t know they can tell that mistake. Those are details that really matter and so much history is stranger than fiction.

I mean, the stories that are actual true history are actually one of the best stories out there, you know, and so there’s no need to make stuff up. So, um,

[00:17:49] Theo Brun: And are you seeing that? Are you seeing that in people’s use of it? That it’s not just people come here looking for something that they sort of half expect to find, that it’s actually turning up interesting stories that no one could have imagined. And then people are using those.

[00:18:08] Steve Dacus: yeah, exactly. So, whether it’s equipment, getting the description of equipment right, or keyword searching letters, and we have 30,000 letters. You can keyword search from both sides, get a really good feel of linguistics, of words used, of the sentiment, and really the mindset of the soldiers that fought, and the mindset of the wives and the family at home, right?

Uh, and so, all it takes is you read, you know, a few letters, and you really get a good idea of what these guys were thinking, going through, living through. Uh, when you like when you’re typing in, um, uh, or when you’re writing a story on, like, say a rainstorm and someone like walking through or sleeping in a rainstorm, I mean, we have dozens of letters of guys describing like, yeah, I tried to sleep last night, but it poured the whole night and they, I mean, these guys are, I mean, I wish I could talk like these guys, right?

Right? Like, I mean, the descriptions they use are amazing. Uh, the words they use are very, um, Yeah. Yeah. I guess they paint that picture and I mean you don’t get that. Um, and just modern archives or, you know, modern modern databases And so sorry answer your question. Yeah, they’re using the the text and the ordinance returns.

We also have morning reports of like how many soldiers, uh, showed up present and accounted for on duty on a specific day, you know, so like you can say hey, you know 13 guys were in this company at this point in time. It’s just those details really matter especially to historians that want to read some historical fiction And it gets it right, you know, so that’s that’s really uh, what prompted this and and really like I said to bring that Napoleon into it. Like that’s it’s a lesson learned of what not to do.

[00:19:45] Julia Kelly: Steve, I just wanted to, I just wanted to go back to something that you were talking about, because I think it’s a really good point to bring home for people who are sort of starting to think about, um, using some of these things like diaries and letters. Capturing the sentiment of a time is so important because often, I think, as historical authors, you know, we go to the secondary sources, we go to the big books written by people with big degrees, you know, who are experts in the field, and they give you a really good overview of a period of time, or even sometimes a period of months or days, depending on what subject you’re looking at.

But I think that often can be at a slight remove and can give you a sense of sort of what the big picture was, but it can be very different getting into the archives and looking at what people were actually writing home and looking at how many contradictions there can be. And I know I’ve, I’ve done this before with, um, in the UK, there was a project called the mass observation diaries where people were asked before the war actually to write.

Uh, about their daily lives, and then it happened to coincide with World War Two. So we have this incredible record of what people were thinking about reacting to headlines, reacting to what was going on, and then also reacting to just kind of the mundane details of daily life that gives you a much stronger sense of the war.

In a period of time, I imagine you get the same thing with the Civil War. You get people who are actually engaged in these battles. And even though we know that eventually, you know, this side or that side is going to win this, their feeling in the moment is this is going terribly. Or, you know, there’s just a, you get a different flavor and a different sense of what reality was to these people.

[00:21:24] Steve Dacus: Yeah. No 100 um, it really kind of going along with that is you have, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing what, uh, you can tell because, you know, really history, unfortunately, history is washed out when you try to take it from the academic level to the high school level to the grade school level, or just the public level, it gets more and more and more washed out to where you just get these overgeneralized concepts.

Uh, and when we were transcribing a lot of these letters, it amazed me the sentiment of the Northern soldiers versus the Southern soldiers. I mean, you get the classic. It’s a classic cliche of the Northern, you know, the Union fought for slavery and fought to preserve the Union, um, and then the Confederates fought for, you know, states rights and, and, you know, to keep the, the right to preserve slavery, uh, and you have, you know, that, that kind of overarching idea and you read some of these soldiers that very clearly state why they’re fighting and neither one of those are why they say, you know, um, it’s, it’s really interesting, especially at the, the, The soldier level, not the, you know, commander, general or president level, uh, but at the, just the individual soldier fighting, it is amazing how many soldiers are fighting for none of those reasons.

[00:22:41] Theo Brun: Do you have a pretty even spread between the confederate side and the, um, union side? Because I, I, my impression was from the, is it the ordinance returns that they were federal ordinance returns so that the records were better on their side, at least for that…

[00:22:56] Steve Dacus: Significantly.

[00:22:58] Theo Brun: sort of records. But then in terms of the letters and the images, presumably, well, I don’t know, maybe just it happens that it’s spread one way rather than another.

But, but I imagine you’ve got a better shot of, uh, of having a kind of balance there.

[00:23:13] Steve Dacus: No, actually, really good point, and this is what is frustrating in Civil War research in general is There are very little confederate records, period. Very few confederate photos, very few confederate letters, very few confederate returns, very few confederate anything. Uh, and really like to answer your question, like numerically, uh, I would say the last time we checked about 70 percent of our database was federal or union and that, you know, the other 30 or 25, whatever percent is, is confederate.

And, you know, it’s just, unfortunately, there’s so many records that are lost, uh, you know, after the South lost, uh, I mean, before, actually, when they retreated out of Richmond during the war, they burned, I mean, buildings worth of documents, um, they burned so much, so many documents were destroyed, the civilians, the citizens of the South, they didn’t want to be a part of it anymore, that’s, that’s really what prompted the whole Western migration and the Wild West, is they’re like, hey, let’s Let’s get away from here.

Let’s just go in the West and just start over. And, uh, a lot of people didn’t want to be part of the South. They, they just, there was no pride in it. Well, that’s, that’s another argument. But like, there, there’s not a whole lot of, uh, you know, they just, so they threw away a lot. They destroyed a lot. There’s a lot not there.

Uh, and so unfortunately, like I said, the vast majority of federal records are union records. We do have, I mean, like I said, we still have, you know, 20%, 30 percent that are still Confederate records. But it’s not, it’s nowhere near what the federal side is. So good point.

[00:24:46] Julia Kelly: I’m going to ask you a question that I think I might. You might know the answer to based on some things you’ve said, but I’m always curious because everybody has a different approach to this, um, you know, authors, historians, whoever it is that you speak to. When you’re approaching historical fiction, how closely do you think an author should be adhering to fact and how, how much do you think, um, an author should be able to sort of take that license of where, where do you think it’s appropriate to take some artistic license?

Now, obviously Napoleon is maybe an extreme example of artistic license.

[00:25:18] Steve Dacus: Yeah. Really good question. I mean, I hate to dictate what someone’s story is. I mean, obviously it’s your story, do it, do with it what you want, but I mean, if you accept the framework of a historical fiction, then I think you really need to To do it well, you know, to do it as best you can. If you’re going to set it in a specific setting, then really, like, once you set that framework, then I think it’s important to get the details right, right?

I mean, like, one of the best examples is, uh, so the movie Gettysburg, if you’re familiar with it, really, you know, comment out here, but the movie Gettysburg was based on a historical fiction. Um, it wasn’t on a, on a documentary. It wasn’t on a book or a historical book. It was a historical fiction, um, that was set in a timeframe with true people, real people in real settings in real time.

Uh, but there was a fair amount of fiction in there. Like there, you know, three or four characters, you know, were completely made up. I mean, one major supporting character never existed. Um, And so, I mean, they, they really got that detail right, I mean, they got, that’s really almost, I mean, that was really close to a, to a historical book.

But, really, the more details you can get in there, the more, I think, the reader can latch on and really transport their mind into what you’re trying to describe as far as the scene. You know, if you’re reading historical fiction, most people generally have some interest in history to begin with, whether they, you know, Watch, you know, a history channel or whatever, you know, YouTube documentaries, but they already have a mindset of history.

And if you get some of those details, right, or if a history nerd reads a detail that only history nerds will have, um, or will know, then, then actually, you know, it’s something that, you know, a little gem that’s really important. Uh, it’s kind of similar to like Star Wars nerds when, you know, with these new Star Wars movies, when you put gems from the old, the old trilogy, and these, these nerds are like, Oh, I know that.

That’s, that’s a call back to somewhere else.

[00:27:25] Julia Kelly: Yeah, it’s an Easter egg.

[00:27:26] Steve Dacus: An Easter egg that’s really important, and so you can do that historically as well, uh, by getting, you know, details that are true. If you get it wrong, you really get it wrong, you know, and, and you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to alienate a good portion of your, your readers.

[00:27:41] Theo Brun: I think what’s, what’s so amazing also about what you’ve created is, is, is as a resource, you know, the, the ease and the speed with which somebody wants to tell a story can immerse their imagination, their minds in the actual true historical detail, then what you actually enable storytellers to do is avoid cliche.

It’s always, it’s always, it was one of the first things I learned was the chances are if you haven’t done enough research that. You’re going to come up with something cliche because your brain is just going to rehash something that you’ve picked up from somewhere else, may or may not be true. And so this sort of sets people free who are prepared to spend the time, full immersion on the detail, don’t need to recreate all the detail in then the telling of a novel, let’s say, but at the same time having that.

Can enable you to avoid pitfalls of cliche and obviously drawing actual real stories, real, um, you know, life experiences and all the rest of it that it just, you know, then it’s down to your storytelling skill, you know that how you knit these things together in an imaginative way to tell a good story.

You still got to tell a good story, right? So, um, yeah. But, but it sort of frees you up, it arms you and equips you in a way that, that otherwise it would be quite the, well, we all know, right, Julia, um, the headache that it, it can be to, to, to, to dig up, spend hours looking for things that if you could just do a tag word search, and then five, five photos popped up, I mean, that would help a lot, help, help very quick.

[00:29:22] Julia Kelly: Yeah.

[00:29:22] Steve Dacus: Exactly. No, and, and that’s really where we were, we’re already saving thousands, all right. Well, I mean collectively thousands of hours of research time, uh, you know, if you want to keyword search, you know what soldiers thought about rain or what they thought about rations or food or what they thought about weapons, I mean like Literally, all you do is keyword search those words, and any letter that has those words in there will come up.

I mean, so really, I mean, and that was usually, or that is the problem with historical fiction, or just historical research in general, is you have to invest the time, and man, sometimes you just don’t have the time, and you settle for, you know, a few hours research, and it is what it is. That’s what you got.

You got to get writing. And so then you’re, you’re stuck with, you know, I researched for like a day, you know, maybe two or three days. And I mean, I, I got to start getting some content going. And, um, and what this, like what our website allows us to allows you to do is. Is at least getting a niche or getting a genre getting a keyword or uh, Like if you’re trying to write about a specific setting then you can keyword search those and hopefully Reduce your time of research to get what guys thought about it what guys were issued the equipment people had and what they you know just Everything going on again, our focus is on the material culture of things.

I mean, like for the photos, you can keyword search certain items and look and see how these guys wore it. I mean, how they wore their coats, how they wore their hats, how they wore their vests is totally different than how we wear them today. And when you can describe a detail and really let your, let your writing just paint that picture of how these guys flamboyantly wore their coats.

Uh, man, that, that sets you apart from, from authors that you can clearly tell have not done their research, you know? Um, and that’s the thing, you can, you can tell the, the authors have done research. The writing brings it out. You can tell these guys have done the research, um, and again, our whole goal is to compress that time of research, uh, significantly,

[00:31:21] Julia Kelly: I’m really curious, sort of thinking back over this, over this entire conversation we’ve had, and, um, especially about, again, I, I’m so fascinated by the letters and the diaries, as well as photographs, of course. I guess for me there’s always the question of, um, with something like the Civil War, where a lot of people have done a lot of, uh, genealogical work, they’ve looked into their ancestry, and there may actually be living descendants of some of these people.

Do you have some sort of best practices or guidelines for authors who may be, you know, lifting details, or in some cases, you know, finding inspiration in stories that they find in these diaries or letters. And then fictionalizing that, how do you, how do you walk that line, especially when you know that you want to be respectful and you want to make sure that, you know, you’re, uh, acknowledging that this is a historical record or a historical event because somebody’s descendants may also still, still be alive and be very aware of, um, you know, what their, their descendant had done or their ancestor, I should say.

[00:32:21] Steve Dacus: Yeah, I mean, I mean, that’s a hard question, um, because everyone perceives or everyone views respect differently, obviously. But, I mean, really, I mean, everyone that I’m in, the community that I’m in, People would love the story just to be told, you know, um, I mean, we just had an, we had a, um, a re reunion of descendants of, of a regiment actually here where I live, uh, this summer.

And I guarantee you every single one of them would, if you were to extrapolate or say, take, pull, uh, something that happened from their ancestors, they wrote about in letters and then maybe insert that into your historical fiction with your main character or whatever. I think if you do it respectfully, then, then most people would be happy that that story is told.

I mean, that’s the thing is, is the experiences these guys wrote about, the events that occurred, the events that they wrote about, um, you know, they want their, I mean, our whole goal is just bringing these, the history alive. Bring it, you know, basically making it to where people don’t forget. Whether it’s the Civil War or the, you know, World War I, World War II, whatever it is, like.

These stories need to be told. People need to know about this stuff. And whether we do it through historical fiction, whether we do it through actual historical books, or whether we do it through movies or storytelling or YouTube, whatever, um, anytime, I think anytime you bring this out, acknowledge where it came from, you know, in your, in your, you know, in your writings or in your citations, but like, um, I think most people would be ecstatic to have a piece of their, story told, even if it’s in a fictional

[00:33:59] Theo Brun: Hmm. You reference my last question, because I know we’re running running a little bit low on time. We’ve had such an interesting conversation, but you touched on First World War, Second World War. Are there, have you got any plans as a, as a business, as an organization to expand, take the model of what you’ve done here?

I mean, is there a market for that, for, for taking what you’ve learned in how to set this sort of thing up and, and, and now take it off to another sort of sweet spot of history?

[00:34:30] Steve Dacus: Our, our original plan was to move forward with other genres. I mean, obviously we’re going to probably stick in on the American side of things, but, um, unfortunately, the Civil War is so vast and the documents are so numerous. I have a feeling we’re gonna be stuck here for the foreseeable future. Um, So, I mean, in a way that we’re gonna, I, I just pre, yeah, predicting where, what’s going to happen, honestly, our goal, we would love to do that.

I mean, we have the framework, it’s there. However, I bet someone will beat us to the punch. Um, it’s just, it’s inevitable. I hope someone beats us to the punch, um, on creating another database for each genre. I mean, like, already you have Fold3, uh, or Ancestry on, on the American side of things, that have kind of done this but they focus more on on the person they don’t focus on on I guess the material culture or or the story itself if you will I mean they kind of do but but not really still focus on the person Um, but I I can see uh, number one there there isn’t either I mean world war ii is is just because exploding in popularity right now

[00:35:37] Julia Kelly: Putting my plug in for World War II

[00:35:39] Steve Dacus: Yeah, right.

[00:35:40] Julia Kelly: on.

[00:35:41] Steve Dacus: So, uh, I I am hoping i’m willing to bet that someone’s gonna Come out with something similar to what we have for world war ii and in the next, you know a few years I hope so. Uh, I mean if not, then we’ll catch up but It’ll be a while. So I hope I hope someone beats us to it

[00:36:00] Julia Kelly: Well, speaking of, uh, you know, uh, looking at where you are now and looking to the future, um, if people would like to, uh, follow along with what you’re doing and of course, potentially, um, use their History Cool membership, uh, to, uh, to access the archive, um, where should their first stop be?

[00:36:20] Steve Dacus: Yeah, I mean honestly the easiest thing to do is just do research arsenal.com. Our whole idea of the framework of the name is is an arsenal of historical research, right? And yeah, just go to, you know, researcharsenal.com, uh, you’ll, you’ll be able to see kind of our homepage, uh, any FAQs, questions you may have, uh, and then you can try a free subscription and on the free subscription, I know like we don’t even ask for a credit card, like that way there’s not even a chance that you might forget to cancel or whatever if you don’t like it, uh, and it’s not for everyone, I mean, like I said, we just started and we, even though we have hundreds of thousands of documents, it’s, It’s still proportionally pretty small as far as the records we have, uh, you know, it doesn’t have everything for everyone, and so that’s why we recommend try a free trial go through the searches, see if you can pull up anything if something triggers or if something. You know is there that you that you find interesting then then you can get a monthly or annual subscription But yes, just go to researcharsenal.com and and kind of surf around see what you can

[00:37:22] Theo Brun: It felt very reasonably priced. I have to say as well. It was like less than 100 bucks a year if you’re a serious researcher and that’s like a business cost. Plus you get, if you’re, if you happen to be a member of the history quill as well, then you get a discount. So, but that, that to me, I was like, gosh, the amount of things that go out the door in connection with my business, that seems like good value for money.

[00:37:47] Steve Dacus: It’s reasonably priced we want to attract as many people as possible try a free trial and go from there, you know

[00:37:55] Julia Kelly: Well, thank you so much, Steve. This has been, this has been just fantastic.

[00:37:59] Steve Dacus: Yeah, no, yeah, if you have any questions anything like that don’t you know for your viewers or listeners definitely have them You know visit the website ask questions. You can email us by the side contact form or even if you are You know, don’t want to really get into it. You’re, you’re just curious on if you have a specific keyword or genre, we can do a quick search for you.

I mean, I’m happy to, um, to do that for you and see if it’s worth your time. So, um, you know, if you’re, if you have, you know, viewers or listeners that are interested in the niche of the American Civil War and want to write about it, um, you know, I think this is, especially for being able to describe that material culture of the war, uh, that’s, we’re hopefully your one stop shop for that.

[00:38:41] Theo Brun: It sounds fantastic. Thank you so much, Steve. It’s been fascinating and very different, um, conversation that we’ve had with you. So thank you for that.

[00:38:50] Steve Dacus: Yeah, you bet. You know, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us on.

[00:38:59] Theo Brun: Well, that was great, wasn’t it? How different to our usual fare interviewing historical authors, but a very, very interesting and important part of what we do, I guess. So many great points to come out. Can’t wait to dissect it.

[00:39:13] Julia Kelly: Yeah, I’m really excited to talk about this because archival research is a is a favorite of mine. But before we do that, I wanted to let you all know about a special bonus episode of the podcast that’s available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode is about how to succeed in historical fiction, and we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors.

Jill Paul and David Penny, who share with us all the ingredients to their success and how you can succeed in the genre as well. To get the bonus episode, go to thehistoryquill.com/bonus. You can find the link in our description or enter it into your browser.

[00:39:50] Theo Brun: That’s right, there’s so much great advice and insight in that bonus episode, so do seek it out. Um, you don’t want to miss it if you’re a historical fiction writer. Okay then, back to Steve Dacus, where should we start, Julia?

[00:40:04] Julia Kelly: My little nerdy, um, The historical researcher brain is is pinging like crazy right here. Um, first of all, thinking, I really wish I had this for World War II. Um, I, I really enjoyed that conversation because I enjoyed how much Steve, uh, focused on getting the material world that you’re writing in right. Um, and it’s, it’s very.

I’ve had this experience before. I don’t know if you have as well where I start a book and I think my research is solid. I have an idea of timeline and you know where my characters would be and what would be happening. And then it’s something as simple like what would somebody have been wearing or eating or doing on a specific day as you actually send your characters out into the world and have them interact with the world.

Getting that detail right. And also knowing where to look for that detail can be so challenging sometimes. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience as well.

[00:40:57] Theo Brun: Yeah, I think one of the challenges of medieval writing we were talking about on a sort of online webinar the other day was how to get the dialogue right and Of course, in a sense, it’s all a fiction. Like we’re not writing medieval Anglo Saxon. We’re not really trying to recreate Norse language. Do you know what I mean?

Or Latin or Greek, Byzantine Greek. Um, but you kind of try and give it the veneer of something a little bit archaic. So you’re, you’re, uh, and of course, some people look at that and go, well, that’s either it works really well, or it doesn’t work at all. Whereas I think the wonderful thing for me anyway, about the idea of this thing, the American Civil War is, is all the letters. I mean, it’s not just, you know, the letters, the, the material culture, the images, the, the actual technical detail of the ordinance and all of that. But certainly the, the way in which people express themselves suddenly leapt out to me. It’s like, Ooh, that would be so, such a useful thing to, to have for any period. Um, and, you know, query whether people actually speak how they write. That was a question that I didn’t ask him, but I suppose it’s something that you have to figure out and I’m sure there are, there are enough, you get a sense of that as you read different kinds of letters that people are writing anyway.

But I just love the, the notion of the whole thing because it just immediately thought all the different ways that your imagination can sort of be, ignited by one little detail that suddenly leads on to, you know, a plot point or an idea for a story or a character that’s coming. And there’s just so much there. It’s just great.

[00:42:40] Julia Kelly: Well, it’s really funny. You, you speak about the language portion of it, because I think you’re right. I think that’s one of the most challenging things as an author to do is how do you pitch yourself so that you’re not pulling a reader out of the story because it feels too modern. And of course this applies to detail as well.

And you know, different things. Um, I, I once was at a talk given by, um, Graeme Macrae Burnet, who wrote Case Study, uh, which is a phenomenal book. Um, he’s a wonderful writer, but he talked about going back into the archives and looking at. Women’s magazines from the 1960s to get a sense of how this character would have spoken and how she would have thought about herself and how she would approach life and express that.

And I thought that was a really wonderful way of, um, showing how archives can be so valuable. Maybe you’re not looking for specific detail about, you know, what type of tin cup would somebody have used to drink their coffee or, you know, what would the ration have been, but, but to get a sense of character and layer on detail to your book, um, in a way that a reader might not realize you’re doing, but can be so impactful.

I think it’s, it’s. It’s, it’s a great, it’s a great example of how archives can kind of be really expansive and, you know, they can be inspiration for ideas or the way that you’re going to try to write your prose, um, or of course, you know, those details and those events and the things that you really want to get right.

[00:44:09] Theo Brun: Yeah. And I, I mean, I guess your worlds are, you know, there are bigger archives and there are bigger databases. And for, for the kind of thing that I, I do, you tend to get, you know, a big, let’s say a Viking exhibition at the British Museum, and you go around and you look at all the material culture, and that’s helpful.

And then you might, Go off to a library and find some sort of source material of saga, old sagas that are still there, that someone’s translated, and da da da. But it’s, it’s quite rare that it all comes together. And I don’t know, what’s your experience of, I mean, I know we, we’ve talked about the Imperial War Museum, which is, is, is quite a good repository of, um, uh, material information for you.

Does it work anything close to what he’s describing, or is it? It, it, it, how, how, what’s the sort of level of frustration in terms of your dial when you’re dealing with

[00:45:07] Julia Kelly: know, it’s really funny that there are certain things that will really trip me up sometimes. So the Imperial War Museum for World War II British, um, historical authors is fantastic because they have a digital collection. A lot of it is keyworded, um, not necessarily to the detail that he’s talking about.

And of course, you know, this is more images or objects that have been photographed as opposed to letters, diaries, things like that. So you do have to go digging around in a few different sources. Um, in my experience, but it’s funny, the things that will trip me up. So for instance, the cost of things, um, can be sometimes very difficult to find, uh, depending on what it is that you’re looking for.

So I was able the other day to find out the cost of a pint in 1942, super helpful. It’s a tiny detail that like. I’m the only person who’s gonna care about, but it helps. Um, and it means that, you know, I’m saying it was nine shilling or nine, not even shillings, nine pennies rather than, uh, nine pence rather than, you know, a pound 25, which decimalization and everything hadn’t come in yet, but let’s, for all intents and purposes, let’s just use it as an example.

So it can give some, um. Um, you know, there’s some, some accuracy and some detail there, but then I think what becomes more challenging is when you’re trying to find things like, um, advertisements, shop names, telephone exchanges, I find really hard, what movies were playing, and that’s where you really have to go in and either look at photographs, or you have to look at, you know, newspaper listings, and then in that case, you need to know where to go, and so some of that is just gaining the experience My advice for people when they first start sort of mucking around in archives is to make friends with a librarian because they can kind of walk you through the system because every archive has a slightly different system.

So what’s amazing about something like this is it’s kind of taking all of that, putting it in one place and making it at home. Inexpensive and powered by keyword searches, as opposed to powered by, okay, you know that the index for this archive says that there’s this box that has this set of letters in it.

And then you need to physically go or convince somebody to photocopy stuff for you. And it can be a very long and very arduous process because, of course, digitized yet. It’s better than it was. Trust me, it’s better than it was. Um, but it’s not always as straightforward as you think it’s going to be. And for me, sometimes little things, um, can trip me up, uh, because it just is more difficult to get your hands on that information than you would think.

[00:47:44] Theo Brun: Do you go there and find stories in your, in the course of your research, or do you do you sort of have a pretty clear idea of what you’re looking for, you know, in terms of detail or sort of color around a story that already exists in your head?

[00:48:00] Julia Kelly: So I think the dream for me is that I get to go to, I don’t know, the National Archive here and just like open up some boxes and order some stuff and just spend a couple of weeks figuring out what’s there. It’s never worked like that for me. It’s always been, and I think this is partially probably because I was coming from a, you know, working a day job and writing at the same time.

Um, and then, you know, writing under contract as a full time author. Um, I haven’t always had that luxury of time. I wish I had. So most of the time what I’m doing is I’m, at the beginning of my research, I’m trying to figure out what the book is going to be about, trying to establish a sense of when things happened, how they happened, who a character might have been, and that’s sort of the first level of research for me.

And then it’s, Then it’s the sort of, okay, you have to set your character off into the world and they’re gonna encounter stuff and they’re going to do stuff, and they’re going to eat stuff and wear stuff. And what is that stuff? And filling that, um, you know, understanding how life would’ve worked during that period of time.

You can get some of it from history books, especially ones that are about social history and as he was saying, material culture. But I have often found that what I end up doing is going back and I, I put a little, um, TK. In my manuscript, which I think has a Latin name, but it basically means to come detailed to come later and I go back and I search at the end of whatever draft I’m working on and I knock out the TKs and sometimes that will take me a couple hours.

Sometimes that will take me a few days of researching, depending on how many holes I had in my manuscript. So my general rule is if I’m writing a first draft, I will. If, if it takes me five minutes to find something, I’ll take the five minutes. If I find myself going down a research rabbit hole and it’s going to require a bit more than that, I’ll leave it till the end and I’ll make myself kind of push on and figure out what to write around it.

Do you have a similar approach in that you’ll, you know, stop and research or decide, you know what, this is going to have to wait for another time or?

[00:50:01] Theo Brun: I was quite, I think, I mean, the big example I had a lot of the books that I’ve written, the first couple, I had quite a lot of the sort of material culture know how or knowledge from university degrees, stuff I’d read since then. So it wasn’t like this was not, it was more like revision rather than discovering stuff for the first time and certainly sufficient to tell the story I wanted.

So that was really in the third book where I went down into the Byzantine Empire, which I knew nothing about from the beginning. example of, Oh, I need to now know a lot more than I do. So there was, there was quite a bit of background reading leading into it, but then I, I was surprised how I could kind of get by with, um, as I’m going along, you know, dipping into here, finding a source about, you know, um, the Byzantine navy, for example, or, or this kind of, you know, the administrative, the bureaucracy is a big thing in the way the Byzantines organize themselves and stuff like that. And, um, yeah, it wasn’t so much the TK marks, but I think there was a bit of like, uh, I’ll stop and now I’ll try and find out a little more of the answer, which maybe creates a bit of a stuttery, um, sort of flow to the thing.

Um, so, yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? How you, uh, you can’t know everything before you set out, but you, and you, and, and, and as he was saying, and you, you just said, it’s a business along comes the next book, you’ve got to be efficient, you want to be more efficient. So tools like the thing that Steve’s created is, it just seems like, uh, you know, gold dust in terms of, and hopefully it is the future in terms of where at least your, your area, but even there’s no reason why.

Why further period periods further back couldn’t also digitalize, um, stuff that’s available resources that are available and things like that. Um, I thought it was interesting. I don’t know. You know, we’ve got a little bit more time maybe to discuss. But one of the things that occurred to me that I think you found interesting was, um, about If you’ve got ancestors or people connected with, um, historical characters or actual historical people, what’s your responsibility to them?

And his response was like, basically people just like having their story told. And I think there is some truth in that. And, and I’ll give you an example because my mother actually, on her mother’s side, is American. And, and from Boston, and only recently did she discover that her family goes all the way back to some of the early pilgrim fathers.

So a guy called John Wheelwright, who was actually a quite well known character in that, those sort of early communities around Boston, a place in Massachusetts anyway. And he doesn’t sound like the most appealing character, you know, he was mates with Oliver, he was mates with Oliver Cromwell. I imagine he was quite, quite a, uh, a staunch Puritan, you know, and maybe a difficult man.

And certainly there were stories connected with his life that meant he’d got put into exile basically because he was causing, causing trouble within the community in, in no way does that. Impinge on my desire to hear his story told, you know, you don’t need to know that he was, uh, a wonderfully likable person or, or the, uh, you know, his daughter, I think got kidnapped by Indians and dah, dah, dah, you know, all kinds of interesting things come out, which say nothing really about, um, whether this is a good, good or a bad person, you just are genuinely interested.

There’s enough distance often that, that you just, want to know what happened and does it make a good story? So I thought that was that was sort of flesh on the bones of what you guys were talking about.

[00:53:53] Julia Kelly: Yeah. I, I think it’s, I think it’s tricky also, you know, everybody has a different feeling about these things and obviously certain subjects are much more emotional or, um, taboo or difficult than others. And so I think as an author, you kind of have to balance out what you’re doing. I think also, you know, I’m, I, I will be the first to put my hand up and say, I’ve never written.

a sort of biographical novel of anybody. Um, so I haven’t taken a famous figure and fictionalized their life. And I think that that’s a very different, that can be a very different prospect because that can be highly well documented if they’re famous enough to have, you know, enough material around them that you, you’re going to write the story.

Um, you know, there can be some different conflicting things from, uh, from descendants. Um, I did really like what he had to say about, um, the importance of obviously giving credit and acknowledging, you know, where things come from. And I feel that very strongly. If I use a historian’s work, um, in, you know, researching and inspiration for my book, I try to make sure that I’m, uh, you know, bringing to the forefront.

The fact that this book was a really important source, or if there’s a family story behind whatever it is that I’ve written about, if it’s inspired, and I’ve done that a few times kind of drawn inspiration from real life without actually writing the real story itself, very much writing a fictionalized version.

I think that, you know, you sort of have to weigh your comfort and then, in some cases, you know, in the cases of descendants that can be contacted, I know of authors who absolutely have, um, you know, reached out to. Important figures in World War Two and said, you know, I’m really interested in writing about your grandmother or your great grandmother and sort of figured out a way to work with the family.

If the family has been open to that. And I think that that’s a really interesting approach to it, because in that case, sometimes you can get into personal archives and things that haven’t necessarily been seen by the public before. So every book is different and every, um. Every figure is different, uh, but I do think it’s an interesting question to ask yourself as you go through, um, and look at archives and potentially draw some stories from, uh, from real life.

[00:56:08] Theo Brun: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Really interesting. Well, I, uh, I mean, if ever I have a flicker of an idea for an American Civil War novel, I’ll be straight off to the Research Arsenal And I just I yeah I suppose I suppose we should mention that you get a discount if you are one of the History Quill email subscribers, you get a 15 percent discount with the Research Arsenal and a 20 percent discount for the History Quill members.

So that’s worth bearing in mind. So, um, anyway, that’s, that’s it. I think for this episode, it’s been different. It’s been, uh, interesting. It’s been quite challenging in terms of, you know, his, uh, his sort of commitment to authenticity, I think, was quite a challenge, wasn’t it?

[00:56:56] Julia Kelly: Yeah, and a good one to think about. Absolutely.

[00:57:01] Theo Brun: Cool. Well, that concludes this episode of the History Quill podcast. Before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to thehistoryquill.com/bonus to get our bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction, featuring guest authors, Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening for any historical fiction writer.

So make sure you check it out. You can find the link in the description or enter it into your browser.

[00:57:26] Julia Kelly: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure you like, subscribe and leave us a comment or a review. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.

[00:00:00] Julia Kelly: I am historical fiction author Julia Kelly, and I’m joined by my co host Theodore Brun. This is another really exciting episode of the History Quill podcast, but first, Theo, how are you?

[00:00:25] Theo Brun: I’m doing so so, I would say. I’ve been a little under the weather, uh, of, in the last week, but I’m kind of coming back fighting just about, even if I look a little bit pale today. How about you?

[00:00:38] Julia Kelly: I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I, uh, I’m also, uh, sort of hiding in my, in my writing cave, so, uh, not too much to report unfortunately, um, but I hope you’re feeling better soon.

[00:00:48] Theo Brun: Yeah, well, writing is happening, so that’s good, and I, and the only thing I will report is that I did have some input from my agent. Yesterday, who thought, said that what I sent her was good, which is always a relief. Um, yes, it was definitely a beast, because it was one of those, I’m writing this ghostwriting novel, which I’m not 100 percent sure, well, until she came back anyway, I was like, is this working or not?

And, I mean, I’m always a bit lacking in confidence when it comes to a first draft, so it was nice to get something positive.

[00:01:22] Julia Kelly: Well, we have got a really action packed episode for you today. A really great conversation, um, with historical fiction author Hazel Gaynor. Um, so I think we will jump right into that.

[00:01:33] Theo Brun: Excellent. Let’s get into the conversation.

[00:01:43] Julia Kelly: We are really thrilled to give a very big welcome to, uh, my friend and very, very talented historical author Hazel Gaynor. Hazel, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:54] Hazel Gaynor: Thank you so much. Lovely to be here.

[00:01:56] Julia Kelly: We’d love to hear a little bit about, um, you and your books, just to kick us off and, uh, orient readers who may be, um, hearing about your work for the first time.

[00:02:07] Hazel Gaynor: Oh, a potted history of Hazel Gaynor. The pressure when you’re asked to talk about yourself. Um, so the short version, uh, is that I write historical novels. Mostly set in the 20th century, um, mostly inspired by real events. Um, I’ve, I’ve written about everything from my debut novel focused on the Titanic. Um, that was called The Girl Who Came Home and, um, that was 10 books ago, unbelievably.

Um, which makes me sound old and wise, but I’m not sure I’m, I’m, I’m certainly not the latter. Um, and my latest book, The Last Lifeboat, um, is a story set in the Second World War. And I guess what I’ve always tried to do with all of my novels, even if the premise is something very familiar for readers, is to dig into that piece of history and find a lesser known or an unknown part of that piece of history.

Um, to, to find a voice that maybe hasn’t been written about as often. Um, and I do always try to write from a, a female point of view, to find stories particularly of, um, very ordinary women who found themselves in these exceptional circumstances and, and how they, Um, found strength, uh, within themselves to, to overcome adversity.

And I, I, I’ve just been so fascinated by the stories and the people I’ve discovered in my research. So that’s my, uh, that’s my sort of little whirlwind version of, of, of what I write. Um, and as I said, I’ve been writing for just over 10 years now. I, I live in Ireland, um, originally from Yorkshire. Very proud Yorkshire lass.

Um,

[00:03:59] Theo Brun: East Riding, no less. That’s where my, my mother in law lives up there. Yeah,

[00:04:04] Hazel Gaynor: It’s the best bit of Yorkshire. Uh, so

[00:04:07] Theo Brun: That’s what my wife, my wife always says that.

[00:04:10] Hazel Gaynor: I’m, I’m Yorkshire Irish at this stage. Cause I also got my Irish citizenship, um, a couple of years ago. So I know I’m very proud to have my Irish passport. Um, so yeah, I’m a bit of a mixed bag and I, I suppose I’d pull into all of that in terms of.

Where I, where I find my stories. So I’ve pulled some from Yorkshire. Um, I’ve pulled some from, from British history. I do try to weave Ireland in there when I can. Um, so yeah, I, I just find this job endlessly fascinating as I’m sure we all do.

[00:04:43] Theo Brun: It’s very interesting looking at the list of the books that you’ve read and the variety in terms of the different stories that you tell, which I’d love to ask you about a little bit later. But, but actually, as you were talking just then, um, you know, you characterize what do they have in common, these. uh, ordinary women who were sort of confronted with something, uh, in terms of adversity and how do they get through that?

How do they come, overcome and, and, and find their way forward? And I thought, it made me think actually of, of how you got into writing, which I didn’t know whether you could unpack a little bit more, because I know that your background was in the least for a little while, wasn’t it? Um, and Things went a bit awry in 2008, you hit this kind of wall of adversity and then you pivoted and did something else with your life.

So, and then there was actually a few years, was it three or four years before you published your first novel. So I don’t know if it’s useful for for our readers to kind of hear how you went from, you know, what seemed like a massive setback to actually turning that into opportunity into the career that you’ve now had.

[00:05:53] Hazel Gaynor: Yeah. Um, and, and, and I often, you know, describe myself as a, as somebody who has certainly not followed a conventional path to being a published author. Um, and I think for some people that’s. That’s, that’s good to hear, you know, that there isn’t one, one way to do this. Um, I’ve certainly gone about things in a very strange way, but it’s all worked out.

Uh, so my, my background was, uh, working in professional services firms. So my, my day was very much the corporate commute, suited and booted. Um, I lived and worked in London. Big, you know, corporate office buildings. And then when I moved to Ireland, um, I continued that for a little while. And it’s, it’s interesting because through all of that, I was always the one who wanted to do any bits of creative writing within those jobs.

So if there was a piece of communication, if there was a staff newsletter, um, anything in a team away day, I would always put my hand up and do that. Um, I’ve always loved story. And I suppose that the short way of explaining all of that is I think I was always in the wrong job. Um, I, I had a very successful career, and I never expected to have this second.

Amazing life writing for a living. I didn’t know how you became a writer. I didn’t know any authors. I didn’t have any access to anybody in this industry. Um, and I know a lot of writers have lovely stories of when they were little and they, they always dreamt of being a writer. I was a reader. I absolutely loved reading.

I read from being a very young age. I could read before I went to school. We went to the library all the time. My mom was hugely inspirational in taking me and my sister to fill the house with books. Um, so when I got to a point, as you said, in the sort of, you know, mid, mid 2000s, the Celtic tiger stopped roaring.

Um, and as many people did, I found myself in a situation where the career that I’d had and assumed I could have forever wasn’t there anymore, but I also had two young children. So I kind of had, I’ve always said, looking back, it was a real silver lining. Um, suddenly I was confronted with. Who are you? And what are you going to do with the rest of your life now that this career has gone away? And what I did, which I think is fascinating, is I wrote about that transition. So I started to write about how it felt moving from Literally the boardroom to the kitchen, um, and having two little tots running around and how did I feel about that? And I started a blog. Blogging was all very cool and new at the time.

Um, social media was like this big new way of accessing, uh, people’s lives and stories. I started a blog called, and I’m still very proud of this name, Hot Cross Mom. Um, and it was really cathartic. It was like me somehow exercising this, um, shift in my life. And through that blog, I started to write for local newspapers, had a little column, started to write for features for magazines about being what was called at the time, a stay at home mom.

Um, funny how language changes and that, you know, we wouldn’t sort of talk about a woman like that now. But it. gave me a way of finding my voice, um, and that then led to me doing something I had said for years was I was going to write a book one day. I didn’t know what that book was going to be. Turns out it was about the Titanic.

So, you know, if you’re going to go somewhere, start big. Um, and, and I instantly knew I was doing what I’d been meant to do the whole time. I, I honestly can’t tell you how right this feels. Um, and, and I was rejected for five years through submissions to agents, publishers, and every time I got a knock back, it just made me more determined.

As I mentioned, I’m a Yorkshire lass. There’s something in there about being stubborn.

[00:10:09] Theo Brun: My wife talks about that. Is that a Yorkshire thing? I think it must be.

[00:10:13] Hazel Gaynor: absolutely. Um, and, and eventually I self published that first novel, The Girl Who Came Home. Um, I had finished it. About six months before 2012, which was the centenary of the Titanic sinking, suddenly Titanic was everywhere again. Um, and it was really a decision to, I remember saying to my husband, if I publish this on Kindle, I might get a hundred readers.

Um, and that’s better than it sitting on my laptop, tormenting me. Um, and within a year it had had a hundred thousand downloads. Um, and I had written another novel. I got an agent in the States. A couple of years after that, I got a publishing deal with Harper Collins. I mean, it sounds like the dream happened.

Um, but I feel like I. I really put in the graft and my apprenticeship to test whether I had what it takes to keep going. Persistence, I think, is often what writers need as much as a creative mind. Um, but once I got that yes, it sort of all, you know, it was like dominoes. Just everything kept falling into place.

Um, but yeah, I, I, I took a very sort of circuitous route to, to get there. Um, and now I have wonderful friends, um, a community of writers that I can talk to, that I can turn to. And I love offering advice to aspiring writers because I didn’t have it. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know who to ask. So, um, I love talking about that journey, um, and sharing the, the slightly strange process that, that I took, but we got there in the end.

[00:11:53] Julia Kelly: One of the reasons I love talking to you is because you’re, you’re fantastic at putting into words kind of the experience of being an author and what it is like to try to do this work day after day. One of the things that struck me in your both description of your books and also your description of your career is that idea of finding your voice, but also bringing to light these elements of history that maybe haven’t been talked about before or more or less forgotten by the public.

I’m thinking of a couple of your books in particular. So you can, you know, you can. You can go, go with this wherever you want to go with it. But can you give us some examples of where you go and how you start the process of looking for that? Because I imagine looking for lesser known elements of history is in and of itself a challenge because they’re lesser known.

So you won’t necessarily know they’re out there. What is the discovery process like for you?

[00:12:49] Hazel Gaynor: Well, that’s a great question. And, you know, it’s something that I think anyone who’s writing is always interested in, in idea. Where does idea come from? Um, I’m actually just at the minute rereading Elizabeth Gilbert’s, um, book, Big Magic about the creative life. Um, and she talks about this sense of idea.

And the ideas are all around us all the time. And it’s about being tuned in as a, as a creative person, whether that’s a piece of art, whether it’s a short story, whether it’s a novel. And that some ideas will pass you by because you literally aren’t tuned in and ignore them. And we’ve all had that moment, I guess, where somebody announces a book and you’re like, that was my idea. I was going to write that next, but somebody got there first. And I love that. I love that sense that there are ideas that are for us, and there are ideas that are not for us. And it’s about I guess paying attention and sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it can take years to find the way to write a story and that has been true with me.

So, for example, starting out writing The Girl Who Came Home, I’ve been fascinated by Titanic since I was a teenager when the wreck was discovered. So that was in me, that story, that piece of history was always there. But it wasn’t until I lived in Ireland. And got to that point in my life where I was looking at what do I do next that I read about a group of, um, women, children and men who left Ireland on Titanic, um, and had this incredible story connected to them.

And that was my. That was my version of that story that hadn’t been told before. Um, and then I’ve had things from my childhood. So my second, my third novel, fourth novel, I’m forgetting

[00:14:49] Julia Kelly: It’s, you lose count at some

[00:14:50] Theo Brun: There are a few. There’s quite a few.

[00:14:53] Hazel Gaynor: So The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter was inspired by Grace Darling, who again, I read about and learned about as a primary school student.

Um, this incredible woman. I always felt she was like Florence Nightingale, but nobody knew about her. Um, who lived in a lighthouse up on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland. Um, saved survivors of a shipwreck. Had this incredible story that hasn’t been as talked about as for example, Florence Nightingale.

And she’s always been with me as well. Similarly, The Cottingley Secret. There I go back to Yorkshire finding a story of two young girls talking about finding fairies at the bottom of the garden. And that was that story. So there’s been that. And then taking us up to my most recent book with the last lifeboat, it was sort of a more curated find.

If you like, I wanted to write about evacuees in, in the second world war and that research process. led me to this story I’d never heard of, of children sent away by sea. So sent overseas, away from Britain, not to the countryside, which was the evacuee story I knew. And within that, I read an account of this incredible woman called Mary Cornish, who ended up in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic with several children who were under her care that she was escorting to Canada from Liverpool and how she kept them safe.

Um, and helped them through this ordeal of being lost at sea, um, for a period of time. And, and her story was what led me to create my character of Alice in The Last Lifeboat. So sometimes it has been, I think, idea that has been with me. And other times I’ve gone looking, um, and sometimes I look and I find something that Isn’t meant for me.

And sometimes you’re lucky and you find that little bit of gold that then you grab hold of.

[00:17:02] Theo Brun: It’s great. It’s so fascinating hearing you talk about that. Can I ask you to talk about one book that had, had real personal resonance, resonance for me, just because of ideas that are coming to me about one of the next books I want to write. But it seemed a little out of, you know, your domain of sort of Ireland, Britain, the 20th century, and Yorkshire, which was the bird in a, in a bamboo cage, and this experience of the, you know, this lesser known.

theatre of operations, let’s call it, of the Second World War in China and the expat experience in China. Can you just talk a little bit about where that idea came from? Because that, that interested me that, that you know how two things align when you’re thinking about them and then suddenly, suddenly the idea is there in front of you as well.

[00:17:55] Hazel Gaynor: there, there’s your big magic. This is, this is

[00:17:57] Theo Brun: Yeah, exactly. That is, that is an, that is a classic example. Yeah.

[00:18:01] Hazel Gaynor: Um, and this is why, you know, I think people say, write what you know, or I never ascribe to that. You know, I always want to write what I want to know more about. And, and that was the case with the bird in the bamboo cage. And again, This was an idea that was literally sent to me, literally sent to me.

My agent sent me a link to, um, an NPR podcast recording, which was two people talking about, um, Girl Scout cookies, you know, in America they have, um. Girl Scout cookies season where the girls,

[00:18:36] Julia Kelly: Oh, yes.

[00:18:37] Hazel Gaynor: go around selling cookies. Um, and one of these, uh, people went selling cookies. Long story short, ended up meeting this incredible woman who had been interned in China as an expat in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. what had helped her get through that ordeal was being part of a group of brownie guides and girl guides. And I listened to this and my agent sort of sent it to me and said, just leaving this with you, do with it what you will. And I was like, what is this story? I had goosebumps. And I just replied to her and I said, I’m writing this book.

It’s astonishing. And I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified because I knew nothing about the war in the Pacific. I’ve never been to China. I didn’t know anything about that part of the world, let alone that part of the world in the 1940s. Research is a wonderful thing. Um, and again, found these incredible women who had taken this group of school children and kept them safe through four years, um, under Japanese guard.

And the, the resilience and the, the things they endured collectively and individually just had to be written. And, and again, this. This massive event that we know about, the Second World War. And yet here was a part of it that I feel we don’t hear about as much, the war in the Pacific, um, and what people endured there was very different to what we know about through the war in Europe.

And, and, and again, as I say, it really frightened me. So if you’re feeling frightened, Theodore, then I totally understand because it’s a, it’s a lot, there’s a lot of history in there. But

[00:20:32] Theo Brun: Yeah.

[00:20:33] Hazel Gaynor: I think you’ve just got to trust yourself and I think that comes with experience. I don’t know if I could have written that book 10 years ago.

Um, and that’s what I mean about ideas sometimes taking time. I’ve just finished writing a book literally yesterday. Sort of deadline phase. Thank you. Um, that again, I don’t think I could have written. Ten years ago, so you, you’d certainly learn the confidence in yourself that it isn’t always perfect the first time, far from it.

Um, but you learn to work through the process through rounds of edits and be okay that it’s not perfect the first time. And I think that’s why a lot of ideas and books are abandoned because it isn’t what’s up here. And you think therefore, Oh, okay, this isn’t what I wanted it to be. I’ll just do something else.

But it’s, it’s the job, isn’t it? It’s the work that creates. what we hope will be close to what was up here. I’m not sure it ever quite gets to the, the ideal. If it does, then I’m very envious, but it can get close. Um, so that was an idea that literally, again, was Was given to me and I, I could have done, I suppose, several things with that, but yeah, that’s why it feels different.

And I loved that writing process. I loved the challenge of stepping out of my comfort zone. And that’s then led me to The Last Lifeboat because I felt I wanted to explore the Second World War more, but again, in a different way. So we ended up in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic. So that was a very different situation.

To write about very claustrophobic, whereas The Bird in the Bamboo Cage was very epic and sweeping and, you know, four years. This is The Last Lifeboat’s eight days. So it’s a very different feeling as a writer.

[00:22:27] Julia Kelly: You talk about sort of those ideas that are for you and ideas that aren’t for you. I also heard that NPR story and I remember thinking to myself, that’s a really great story. Somebody’s going to write a really great book about

[00:22:40] Hazel Gaynor: Really?

[00:22:41] Julia Kelly: And I, and I let, and I, it just completely didn’t occur to me that it, that person could be me because I don’t think at the time I was the right person to write that book and I’m so glad that you did because it’s an absolutely fantastic novel.

So there you go. It’s just, you know, proof that these things, uh, these things happen and in real time, I wanted to make sure and ask you a little bit, um, because one of the things that I’ve seen throughout your books is playing with it. you know, narrative structure a little bit, whether it’s through dual timelines or multiple POVs.

Can you talk a little bit about why certain books you feel should be told for you in that way, and how you go about figuring out what a book needs when it comes to a multiple POV or a dual timeline, which kind of in and of itself is always a multiple POV, right?

[00:23:30] Hazel Gaynor: Yeah, yeah. Um, and again, you know, I never, gosh, I was so wonderfully naive when I started and I, I sometimes miss that naivety. And I didn’t, I didn’t think about, should I write this story of the Titanic in first person, uh, third person, dual timelines, linear. I didn’t know any of those terms. I didn’t even know I was writing historical fiction.

I didn’t know enough about the industry to. To know those frameworks, if you like, I just wrote my story and I try to remember that every time I sit down, even now, you know, whatever the industry needs this to be packaged as, uh, whatever, um, way it will be interrogated in terms of its narrative structure.

I need to tell this story. Um, and I do try to remember that now. So there was an innocence about. My first three books were dual timeline, um, and maybe it was a little bit about feeling it fit the story, but me also finding my way as a writer, um, and finding my way into writing history, and maybe there’s a little bit of comfort in pulling back from that history.

Every other chapter or a few chapters at a time and sort of coming back to closer to now I’ve never written the contemporary as in this time. Um, but it’s been two periods of history. And maybe that’s thinking about it now maybe, as I say, just a little bit of comfort in having two strands that you can add to.

Um, it’s very daunting to write in a linear way that this whole story has to happen over the 000 words. Um, but certainly with my first two books, The Girl Who Came Home and A Memory of Violets, it was about a sense of mystery that had been woven between generations. And I think that really suits a dual timeline, dual narrative, um, to sort of that.

Weaving back and forth between one character and another and the reader knows they’re connected in some way, but maybe doesn’t know how. I did it again with the Lighthouse Keeper’s daughter, um, bringing in narrative forms like diaries or letters, and I think historical fiction is brilliant for that because obviously everybody communicated in the written way, and that’s a piece of history our characters can work with.

But I do think if anyone writes In a dual timeline, both parts have to serve the story, so you can’t just throw in a second or third timeline or character to pad out the story. Um, and I think we’ve all probably read multi narrated or dual timeline novels where we just can’t wait to get back to the other bit.

You know, and you’re sort of sad when you turn the page, you’re like, Oh no, she’s taking us back there, I don’t want to, and you’re sort of skipping forward. So. I think both parts have to work. Um, they have to kind of, you know, dovetail really well. And you do have to plan that out, I think, quite carefully in terms of where does one part stop and the next part pick up again.

I’ve never written them in any way other than the reader reads the book. So, I know some writers with dual timelines, they’ll write one, then they’ll write the other, then they’ll figure out how to weave them together. I’ve never done that. I, I write as you read, so I’ll go from then to now to then to now.

Um, and that just works for me. But it can be a wonderful, um, way of bringing in light and shade if the story’s very heavy. You can bring in a sort of lighter thread if you, if you, if your reader needs a little bit of a breather. Um, it’s great for weaving in mystery, generational stories. Actually, The Cottingley Secret, I did that as well.

So we move between 1917 and the fairies, and then a contemporary bookshop in Ireland where this story is now unfolding again. And there’s something lovely about that as a writing and reading process. And then with The Last Lifeboat, I didn’t do that at all, which was It’s a totally different writing experience, but, but I do, yeah, I think the main thing is that both parts have to work hard.

You can’t sort of rely on one to do the heavy lifting and just throw another one in because it’s irritating to, to read that.

[00:28:19] Theo Brun: Can I ask you, talking of different ways of writing, choosing how to write books, you’ve obviously done several books now, I think, with Heather Webb co authoring. Um, is it four that you’re about to publish the fourth? I think that’s,

[00:28:35] Hazel Gaynor: that’s the

[00:28:35] Theo Brun: is coming. The fourth is coming. Um, that just seems totally alien to me. I, I just don’t know how that would work.

Um, can you just talk a bit about a, how that came about and B, how does it work from idea to execution?

[00:28:54] Hazel Gaynor: Yeah. I mean, great idea. Have one author in Ireland, one in New England in America and write books together. What could possibly go wrong? Um, it’s, it’s amazing. Um, and the fact that we’re just about to publish a fourth is testament to that. So Heather and I have the same agent and again, you know, isn’t it amazing how Life brings you in various ways.

So when I finally secured an agent back in 2013, uh, a wonderful lady called Michelle Brouwer, who’s now with Trellis, um, her own agency. She also represented Heather and she connected us and said, look, you two are both writing historicals. You’ve got debuts. We could all do with a friend, right? So, you know, chat, hang out.

And we just got on. So we supported each other. cheerleading on, on, on social media when our books came out. And Heather then sent me an email and said, I’m thinking of creating an anthology, getting nine authors together. to write about the armistice, the end of the First World War. Are you interested? And I was like, yeah.

Again, I’d never written about the First World War, terrified me, but I I was eager to do whatever I could to, you know, expand my career. So I said, yeah, um, and we wrote a book together with seven other authors called Fall of Poppies. Um, went to the States on tour, met Heather, fell in love with her as a dear friend.

And shortly after that book came out. Uh, I messaged her and said, do you want to do another anthology? And she said, no, never again.

[00:30:35] Theo Brun: Is

[00:30:38] Hazel Gaynor: nine authors together in a, in a book. It’s yeah, it’s a lot. She said, but I would write a book with you. Um, and what we decided to do was write a novel that expanded on all the research we’d done for Fall of Poppies, set in the first world war, um, told between two characters. A Guy and a Girl, but written in letters. So an epistolary novel written in an exchange of correspondence between character A, character B, Tom and Evie. One of us wrote each, and it was amazing. We literally wrote letters to each other as our characters through the four years. The Four Christmases of the First World War, and that became Last Christmas in Paris, and we had such a riot writing that together.

We said, should we do it again? Um, and we did. We work on Google Docs, so it’s sort of a live document that we can write, write in. The time difference is really helpful because by the time I’ve got up and written. I can then, you know, tag your it, and Heather picks up when she’s up and about in the States, and then I get up the next morning and there’s stuff added from her.

Um, and talking about dual narrative, dual point of view, that’s exactly how we’ve done it. So we’ve always written together books that revolve around two, two main characters, and we write one each. But we write every single page together, ultimately, through the editing process. Um, and we’ve just said as long as we’re enjoying this, we’ll keep doing it.

There’s no pressure, um, there’s no obligation. If we come up with an idea and we’re both excited, we’ll pitch it. And if our editor wants it, we’ll write it. And so far, um, so far so good. It’s been amazing. And it has also been really helpful to each of our individual writing as well, which isn’t unexpected.

Bonus, my, my book wife, as I call her.

[00:32:39] Julia Kelly: Could you talk a little bit more about how it’s been helpful to you for your individual careers? Um, because I think people might think, Okay, co written book, it’s something completely different. It’s a completely different process.

[00:32:54] Hazel Gaynor: Yeah. And it is a different process because you’ve got to let go, you know, and we all hold onto our books, right? The first draft with the door closed, right. As Mr. King advises us, but this, you have to let go of that from the beginning. There cannot be any ego. You’ve got to be really, you’re being edited all the time, essentially by your co writer.

And, and I guess what it’s. given us both is it’s a side project. Um, it’s, it’s that sense of always creating and it can also be a little breather. So when you’re working on your own book and you get down a plot snag or you just run out of energy, but you still want to work, you still want to write. You can jump into this other project and it’s that, you know, it sounds like a cliche, but it’s like anything, isn’t it?

The more you do it, the better you get at it. Um, and, and I, I don’t know how you both work, but I find it really hard to not be writing. So even when I’ve delivered a book yesterday, for example, I’m now thinking what I need to get back to the next one. And what, what a co written book allows us to do. Which is often running concurrently with our own work is to keep, you know, keep your training gear on and go out for another run sort of thing.

Um, and it,

[00:34:20] Theo Brun: it quicker?

[00:34:22] Hazel Gaynor: I’d like to say yes. No, it

[00:34:26] Julia Kelly: in it, you say yes. But,

[00:34:28] Hazel Gaynor: doesn’t feel like it. Um, do you know what it is though? It’s really great. If you get to a point in it and you’re like, Oh, I’m exhausted. And it’s like, right, your turn, you fill in the next bit. Yes. I think it helps in terms of maybe considering things in a slightly different way, you know, I’ve, I’ve, Heather’s funny, she’s always, we write and I’ll write this lovely, I think I write naturally quite poetically.

But she always says to me, you know, that’s really lovely, but something has to happen. So she’s always, she’s the, she’s the little voice on my shoulder saying something has to happen. There has to be tension. Um, so I’ve learned that now when I’m writing on my own, I’ve got Heather on my shoulder saying beautiful prose, Hazel, but what happens?

Um, and you know, and she’s equally learned similar things from me. So. You know, as I say, we wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t, uh, enjoyable. It’s not easy. I mean, you certainly couldn’t just say to any of your mates, should we write a book together? We have become friends through the process, but it started off in a very, um, I suppose organic way.

It’s not like I, and I have lots of very dear writing friends. And I’ve said to them, I love you very much, but I am never writing a book with you because you would drive me mad and our brains don’t work the same way. Heather and I have a synergy. We don’t write in exactly the same way, but we compliment each other.

Um, and it works, but I I’ve heard of a lot of people trying to co write and it hasn’t worked. So I, I’d approach with caution, I think is my advice. When it works, it’s a wonderful thing.

[00:36:14] Theo Brun: Julia, you up for it? Do you wanna, do you wanna,

[00:36:18] Julia Kelly: I was gonna say,

[00:36:19] Theo Brun: wanna co write a book?

[00:36:20] Julia Kelly: World War II, Middle Ages mash up thing.

[00:36:25] Theo Brun: we’ll meet, meet, dual timeline,

[00:36:28] Julia Kelly: Exactly.

[00:36:29] Theo Brun: timeline. We’ll somehow figure it

[00:36:31] Hazel Gaynor: Come on guys, get, you know, it’s, it’s just waiting to happen.

[00:36:35] Julia Kelly: It’s, it’s funny you mentioned though, because I have, uh, chatted with a couple of, and I do have one writing friend I think I could potentially write with, because I do think our brains are similar and our process is similar, but it’s one of the reasons that I love talking to authors because sometimes I sit there and I think, we just approach this completely differently and it’s fascinating, um, but I don’t know if I could necessarily Make my process work in a way that would work for that person and vice versa.

So it’s, it’s wonderful that you two have figured out what works for both of you and, and how that, you know, also has a positive benefit for your individual careers.

[00:37:13] Hazel Gaynor: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s been, and again, you know, it’s not like either of us ever sat down with this big grand plan, you know, five years from now, I’d like to be co writing books with an author who lives on the other side of the world. Um, but it’s, I think, I suppose it goes back to the ideas, you know, scenario of.

Being open to things and, and if opportunity knocks, what do you do about that? Um, and, and it’s just been a wonderful addition to this crazy job that we all do. Um, and, you know, as I say, it, it wouldn’t necessarily work for any, everyone. Um. But it, but it is, it’s, it’s great fun and we’re, we’re enjoying it, but I am dreading going back to edits

[00:38:01] Julia Kelly: Yeah, naturally. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. Before we go, we want to make sure that people can find you and follow along with your career. 10 books and growing. So where can people look for you online? And maybe if you want to plug what’s recently come out as well.

[00:38:22] Hazel Gaynor: Well I’m always procrastinating on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called these days. So I’m very straightforward. I’m at Hazel Gaynor on most platforms. Hazelgaynor.com is my Website, which as I’m saying it, I’m thinking needs to be updated. Uh, and I have a newsletter as well. So I, I try and do a newsletter about once a month.

Um, to share what’s coming up, cover reveals, giveaways, what I’ve been reading. Um, and I, I don’t, you know, do more than, if I do one a month, I’m doing well. So I certainly don’t fill up your inbox too much. Um, and I have an exciting new release of the Last Life book coming out in paperback in April. So this lovely story that’s taken me on an incredible journey so far is.

It’s coming back, uh, with a new look in April. And we also recently just heard that my incredible narrator, Billie Fulford-Brown, uh, has been shortlisted for an Audies Award, um, and is going over to L. A. for the ceremony in March. So she’s up for Best Fiction Narrator, and she did such an amazing job of Dramatizing, uh, The Last Life Boat.

So I’m so thrilled for her and for the book. So we’ve, yeah, there’s lots, lots coming up. So exciting times.

[00:39:41] Julia Kelly: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us and, and talking us through all of this. It’s been wonderfully inspiring and insightful, uh, all the way through.

[00:39:51] Hazel Gaynor: Thank you. And I look forward to you two and your collaboration, uh, on a, on a novel set

[00:39:56] Julia Kelly: We got to talk about this.

[00:39:57] Hazel Gaynor: was it?

[00:40:01] Julia Kelly: Thank you, Hazel.

[00:40:02] Hazel Gaynor: Thank you both so much.

[00:40:03] Theo Brun: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks Hazel.

Well, that was a fantastic conversation, with Hazel Gaynor. I loved that. So many great points as always, um, to dissect there, but first a little housekeeping.

[00:40:24] Julia Kelly: Of course. Uh, so before we dive in, I want to make sure that I let all of our listeners know about a special bonus episode for the podcast, which is available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode is about how to succeed in historical fiction, and we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors, Gill Paul and David Penny.

They share all of the ingredients to their success with us. And, uh, they also talked to us a little bit about how you can succeed in the genre as well. To get that episode, go to the historyquill.com/ bonus. You can find the link in the description or enter it into your browser.

[00:40:59] Theo Brun: That’s right. And there’s so much great advice in that episode. So do go ahead and try and try and find it. Right. So. Hazel Gaynor, where, where should we start, Julia?

[00:41:12] Julia Kelly: So I love talking to Hazel because whenever I do, whether it’s for a recorded interview, that’s, you know, publicly available or just chatting away over lunch or something like that, I feel like she has. She has wonderful insights into sort of what it is to be an author, what it is to be a professional author, and then she’s also really thoughtful about the craft of writing as well.

So I think, I think maybe, if you don’t mind, maybe let’s start with sort of her ideas about finding the right story and having that story be the right thing for you to write as an author, um, Have you run into those situations before where you’ve thought, you know, This is great. This is wonderful. I’m not at the place in my career where I can write this.

Or, alternatively, this is absolutely the right story for me. And you just have that gut instinct, known reaction that this is, this is for you.

[00:42:06] Theo Brun: I think that, yeah, I mean, there are always ideas coming, aren’t there? And some of them really stick as something close to your heart that you Yeah, seems to have been served up for you. I think that was the point that seemed to really strike you in particular, especially in the negative, almost like that, that you came across an idea and you’re like, that’s not for me.

I can see it’s a good idea. Um, I mean, to put some flesh on the bones, the, the, the question, the reason I saw this kind of connection with, with her story set in China was, I think, because it’s January, you know, it’s the start of the year, um, I’d been reflecting on, like, what is, A story that I want to tell it kind of really, you know, I’d look back and go, that was a story worth telling.

And I think the backstory to this is, is coming to a bit of a crossroads in the stuff that I’ve been writing so far, which is, I’m not sure it’s going to go forward with the publisher that I’m, not I’m with in terms of just a continuation of the series that I’ve been writing. So I was like, what are the kind of stories that really has stayed with me?

And one of them is not actually a novel, but it’s a movie, Chariots of Fire. And it’s always come back to me again and again through my life. You know, when I was a kid, I was a, you know, he tried to be an athlete, so I was interested in it then, and it sort of came back another time and another time. And I was listening to the, um, soundtrack over the, uh, the weekend, and suddenly started having this idea, because, I don’t know if those who may have seen the movie, or it’s connected with one of the guys in it, it’s Eric Liddell, who ends up, although he’s connected with the, the Olympics, which is the main part of the story, he goes on to be a missionary in, in China, and he ends up dying in an internment camp.

Japanese internment camp. And I, it was not the same story that she told, but it, there was a sort of similarity. It’s more of a male story between two brothers and it’s fictionalized and what have you. Anyway, started coming up as an idea. And I, I think a lot of things came together where I was like, wow, I’m at a point where I’m going to start pitching to my Editor for some new ideas.

This has suddenly blown all the others out of the water in terms of the story I want to tell. And it’s like a sort of Cain and Abel story between two brothers, um, in that setting. And, um, yeah, there’s something about it that really kind of gets into your heart that, Although you have other ideas. Um, there are ones that you just suddenly want to get going and start telling and start researching.

And I think that’s probably the best way I can answer that question is, is the actual practical outworking of what that feels like. So we’ll see whether it has traction in terms of Editorial interest from a publisher, but certainly as the author. Yeah, you get the hooks of a story get into you and hopefully this won’t let let me go.

How about for you?

[00:45:14] Julia Kelly: Well, first of all, um, great movie. And, uh, just recently showed that to my husband for the first time. It’s fantastic. Stands up on rewatch. Absolutely. Um, you know, in terms of my, it’s, it’s interesting having this conversation now because I am at a bit of a, um, I don’t know if it’s a pivot point. I think it’s a bit too strong, but I am thinking about what a book that I already have a contract for will be.

It’s the second book on a contract and I’m trying to formulate a pitch and I’ve been Playing around with ideas that just it’s almost like they’re, they’re almost within reach, but I haven’t quite been able to pin them down. And I think that that might be a sign. And I’ve been sort of, um, I made a note or two while I was listening to Hazel speak.

I think that. What started this idea and what started these topics, maybe it’s not quite the right time for me to write about those books, but there is the nugget of something that has come up and I don’t want to say too much because, again, this is this is very much in in the beginning stages of, um.

Even conceptualizing a pitch. There is something there. I know there’s something there and I think that maybe that’s where I need to go off and I need to do a bunch of reading and I need to do a bunch of thinking and just start to figure out what that pitch looks like. Um, and knowing that maybe I, the idea that initially brought me to this subject.

Maybe that’s for a couple of books from now, but there is something really valuable to be had in the moment. So I think there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of value to sort of exploring the world and exploring the research and diving down some research rabbit holes and seeing where it brings you. Um, and then also figuring out, you know, what is it that.

What is it about the idea that that is really pulling you in what’s the hook? What’s the thing that is making you excited and sort of focusing on that because sometimes research can feel so broad and so big It’s hard to get your arms around it when you’re starting to narrow it down to an actual book idea So I think for me that was part of part of what was wonderful about talking with her is it sort of?

Reminded me that you know I can always go back. I can write books that maybe I wasn’t ready to write two or three books ago because they needed time to percolate or I needed time to grow as an author.

[00:47:39] Theo Brun: Yeah, that was an interesting point as well. The idea of feeling a little trepidation in terms of can you actually pull this one off? And maybe that’s always stretching out. That horizon is always just stretching a little further, further ahead of you. Even though, as she said, she was writing books now that she definitely couldn’t have written eight years ago or ten years ago when she started out.

And that’s always, I suppose it’s getting comfortable. Um, with that feeling of a little bit of fear, because it’s slightly the unknown. But you’ve been in that, you’ve got to remind yourself that you’ve been in that place before, haven’t you? Where, even right at the beginning, it’s like, how do you write a novel?

How do you write anything? A chapter? Um,

[00:48:26] Julia Kelly: I have that feeling every time I start a book. It’s, I, I know I’ve done this before, but I have no idea how I did it. And that’s frightening. It’s, it’s, it’s a really, it’s the question of can I do it again? Right?

[00:48:39] Theo Brun: Yeah, there was a brilliant meme I saw recently on social media. It was called something like author’s anxiety or writer’s anxiety. And it was like, I’m anxious because everyone’s reading my, my review. Everyone’s writing reviews about me. I’m anxious because no one’s writing reviews about my book. I was like, I’m anxious because I haven’t yet delivered my.

manuscript to my editor. I’m now anxious because I have delivered my manuscript to my editor. Do you know what I mean? Like there’s basically, you could be anxious about everything in the writing world. So maybe it’s better to just be anxious about not, not too much, or, or at least just get used, get used to that feeling that there’s always something to worry about.

[00:49:21] Julia Kelly: Get comfortable with the idea that you’re always going to be worried about something. Yes,

[00:49:25] Theo Brun: yeah,

[00:49:26] Julia Kelly: absolutely.

[00:49:27] Theo Brun: but, but she certainly, it was nice. Notwithstanding that, to hear her describe that sort of slotting into a kind of mode of being, if you like, that she always didn’t know that was always there for her, but actually now she’s in it, this was what she was supposed to do.

[00:49:44] Julia Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a great reminder that not everybody comes to writing. Um, in a straightforward path, um, you know, different people have different ways of getting here and, you know, different people are at different places in their, in their writing journey, whether that’s a career or a hobby or, you know, whatever it is that, that ultimately you want out of it.

Um, I think that’s a great reminder that it’s not always, not always straightforward.

[00:50:12] Theo Brun: What about the co-authoring side? I know we joked about us co authoring.

[00:50:18] Julia Kelly: know, maybe it will

[00:50:19] Theo Brun: Yeah, it could come to that. Um, what do you think about that? Like, do you, do you find it tempting? Or it’s never occurred to me, I have to admit.

[00:50:29] Julia Kelly: Yeah, I do find it tempting. And again, I think part of, um, what’s important for me would be finding the right The right person with the right approach to it. Um, I think everybody’s writing process is very personal and very individual. And so it’s, it’s 1 of the reasons that I think it’s nearly impossible to replicate somebody’s writing process because ultimately it may not be elements of it might work for you, but it may not be for you full stop.

You know, I think for me, um, a lot of it has to do with balancing, uh, the right idea, the right co author, the right approach to working. And I think you don’t know what that is until you start to actually do the work together, right? Um, but I think you have to, my impression of it is you have to go in with a really strong idea that, you know, this is a professional relationship.

Can be a friendship as well, but ultimately you’re trying to produce something that you’re then going to presumably try to sell if that’s what the end goal is to have it published. And so I think everybody needs to be on the same page. Um, but I’ve, I’ve talked to both, um, Hazel and Heather before, and I think that their partnership seems, you know, uniquely, um, To, to work uniquely well, uh, and I think it’s exciting to see because clearly they get so much out of it on both sides.

Um, you know, as co authors, but also as individual authors as well. I thought that was really interesting hearing about how much it’s helped her, um, with her own books.

[00:52:00] Theo Brun: Yeah, it sounds like you can make, make it a little bit easier by structuring the book in such a way, like they were talking about two point, two point of views. I can sort of see how that would work. Because then you have more ownership over one voice and not so worried about the other one. You know, or more objectively, uh, you know, evaluating the other one on just to help the other person, but

[00:52:23] Julia Kelly: Have you been tempted by the idea of co-authoring? Outside of course of this, this co authoring idea that’s happening live on this podcast right

[00:52:30] Theo Brun: Yeah, exactly. I still think that dual timeline would be interesting. Someone discovering some, some, some archaeological discovery during the Second World War that was connected back to the medieval times. Um, now I think about it. I kind of am doing. I’m involved in this, to some extent, with my ghostwriting hat on.

I think I mentioned to you before this, um, I’ve got a contract to write a, uh, a kind of kid’s fantasy adventure. I mean, like, a bit, it’s not Harry Potter, but it’s like it in the sense that it’s set in the real world, but there’s kind of fantasy magic interrupting into our world, as it were. So it’s not like high fantasy, completely different world building.

It’s set in London, let’s say. And, um, mostly I mean the original idea didn’t come from me, but all the plot came, so far has come from me in terms of getting a synopsis and then I’ve written the first probably 20, 000 words, just me writing it, but it’s going to be this iterative process with not just one other person.

The purported author, but, but they’re like team of creative team, so I don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to go.

[00:53:45] Julia Kelly: But it has this sort of collaborative approach to

[00:53:47] Theo Brun: Yeah, there’s a collaborative approach and you’ve got to, I’ve got to listen to their input and some of their input is definitely useful. Um, others, you know, the, the, the, whatever expertise we bring in terms of story structure and like how. Basically, you have to kind of keep the hooks coming and for that kind of a book, um, maybe it’s more in my court, but yeah, it’s, it’s different.

I’ve got to open my mind and accept that they’ve got a lot of ideas that they’re going to want to see. Ultimately, it’s, they’re going to be their name on the, on the cover, so they’ve got to be happy. So we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

[00:54:30] Julia Kelly: Well, it sounds like a fascinating process.

[00:54:33] Theo Brun: Yeah, I think it’s very different though to the idea of like two co-authors who are both historical writers, let’s do one together. It’s slightly different to that. Well, lots to think about from Hazel’s inputs. So hopefully, we can put some of that into practice.

[00:54:51] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Thank you again to our guest, Hazel Gaynor, for a brilliant conversation. That unfortunately concludes this episode of the History Quill podcast. Um, but before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to the historyquill.com/bonus to get our bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction.

Again, that features guest authors. Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s really essential listening for any historical fiction writers. So make sure to check it out and you can find the link in the description or by entering it into your browser.

[00:55:22] Theo Brun: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure you like, subscribe and leave us a comment or a review. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and we will see you next time.

[00:00:00] Theo Brun: Hello, welcome to The History Quill Podcast, brought to you by The History Quill, the home of historical fiction writers. My name is Theodore Brunn, and I am here with my co host Julia Kelly. Julia, how are you today?

[00:00:26] Julia Kelly: I’m very well, I am, I am doing very well. Actually, I’m in the happy situation of having just sent off developmental edits on a book and heard that they’re going into production, which means that I’m going to be able to start thinking about some new things. It’s this novel idea of starting something.

New and fresh, and I don’t even know what that looks like yet. So I’m really enjoying all of the, the look ahead and the planning and, yeah, just figuring out what my next move might be. How about you?

[00:00:59] Theo Brun: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve had, an interesting month. I actually had my first attempt at a self published book, which came out, I think, since we last spoke. and that’s been quite fun, actually, because it’s kind of short and sweet. it’s a seasonal book. It’s a Christmas book. and it’s been fun sort of gauging people’s reaction, not feeling too invested in the whole thing.

Like, Is this going to work or not? It was more a value to me because I just wanted to understand what it took to, to go through that self publishing route. We’ve done it so many, talked about it so many times with a lot of different, authors, haven’t we? And other than that, yeah, my, my kind of next, magnum opus if it comes to that is, is is quite, does feel quite ambitious.

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking of that, started the research for that, trying to, it’s like a patchwork quilt, which is all well and good, but I need to figure out, you know, something of a flow of a story as well with all the great ideas that are going to make up this novel. So, a bit like you, I’m kind of in a, in, in that kind of ingredient stage of the, of the next big thing.

[00:02:07] Julia Kelly: It’s a, it’s a great stage, but also there’s a lot of thinking and a lot of research usually involved with that.

[00:02:13] Theo Brun: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we’ve learned so much about how much research it takes. So I’m not scared to like go a bit deeper. But that’s fun as well.

[00:02:22] Julia Kelly: Wonderful. Well, today we are going to be talking to, an author, Katherine Clements, who also, does some work as a coach of other authors. And I think that this conversation is going to be quite relevant to a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about recently with our own books, kind of figuring out why we’re writing the things that we want to write, what it is that we are focusing on, and then also some practical craft questions around character as well.

So that should be a really great conversation.

[00:02:52] Theo Brun: Yeah, I can’t wait. Well, let’s meet Katherine.

[00:03:02] Julia Kelly: We are very excited to welcome Katherine Clements to the podcast today. Katherine is going to talk to us a bit about her writing career and then also some work that she does, with other authors. and a little bit about a masterclass that she’s going to be teaching in the month of March.

Katherine, welcome.

[00:03:20] Katherine Clements: Hi, I’m very glad to be here.

[00:03:23] Julia Kelly: Well, thank you so much for joining us. And perhaps you can start out by telling us a little bit about you as an author and your books.

[00:03:32] Katherine Clements: Sure. So, I’m, of course, I’m a writer of historical fiction. and I have three novels published currently, all published with a headline. The first of which is called The Crimson Ribbon, that came out in 2014. Second, The Silvered Heart, the following year. And then the third novel, The Coffin Path, came out in 2018.

All three of those books are set in the 17th century. either during or related to the English Civil Wars. So that’s, that was my, sort of period of history, for all three novels.

[00:04:14] Theo Brun: That’s brilliant. I’m deep in the in the in the heart of the second one, the silvered chair.

[00:04:19] Katherine Clements: Silvered Heart

[00:04:20] Theo Brun: Sorry, Silvered Heart. I’ve got it written. I’m confusing C. S. Lewis there, aren’t I? Silvered Heart. yeah. No, it’s wonderful. I love the, it’s sort of incredibly sort of rich way of writing, like the sensory Way in which you describe your pros kind of really draws you in and then you kind of hit us with what the characters are doing.

but before we kind of get into like more about the writing or other thing, other aspects of of what you do, I just wanted because I know Around your own writing, you’re a great encourager of other authors and other writers, aren’t you? And, you know, you make a sort of powerful case of just keep going, or like, trying to get people over that barrier into either beginning or launching into their dreams, I suppose, of writing.

historical fiction or else just keep going. If you’re already in it, you know, was that moment where you kind of came to the entry point? Was that a big moment in your story? And if so, how did you overcome it?

[00:05:24] Katherine Clements: Fantastic question, and thank you for asking that. I, I really like that term, encourager, an encourager of, of writing and of writers. Yes, basically I do this work, the work that I, that I’m now really focused on working with other writers as a coach and mentor because of my own story. and you know, the, the biggest barrier that I.

faced, when thinking about writing, you know, kind of back in the mists of time, was fear and self doubt. you know, I wanted to be a writer for a really long time, but didn’t do any writing, didn’t do anything about it. And That was because it felt like such a impossible thing, you know, I, I wanted, I knew I wanted to write a novel, I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn’t know how to start and it felt like such an impossible task, such a huge task, but I didn’t know where to begin and I was too afraid to even try because it felt so impossible, who was I to think that I could possibly do this thing?

that started to change for me in my late twenties when I, went through a few changes in my life and. I began what you might call a, a journey, of sort of coming, coming to be more myself. If you like, you know, I, I went through a sort of period of, reflection and, Internal work, sounds all very Californian and, you know,

[00:07:28] Julia Kelly: As the resident Californian I completely agree. You are very accurate on that. I’m just sitting here being like, yeah, that’s what LA feels like sometimes.

[00:07:41] Katherine Clements: so, you know, a journey of self discovery, shall we say, let’s just go for it. which made me. question all of those unhelpful stories that I had been telling myself. And, I began to take baby steps towards writing and, you know, in terms of how I. Overcame that fear and self doubt. I’ll be honest, I don’t think that writers ever really completely overcome that fear and self doubt.

I believe it’s often part of our process. But, in terms of how I overcame that fear that was holding me back and getting in the way, it was through taking small baby steps. That were scary, but not too scary. So I did things like, attending an evening class, you know, starting to try to write short stories, doing writing exercises, exploring the world of, of writing and writers and all of the stuff that’s out there to support aspiring writers yeah, so, so those small steps were, were my kind of first way forward.

[00:09:01] Julia Kelly: Coming off of that, you know, those small steps, I was really struck by What, what I saw is sort of a mission statement on right on the front of your website, which I’m going to read to you, which is always a bit awkward. So I apologize. but it says, hi, I’m Katherine and I help people start writing, stay writing and build bold, meaningful writing careers.

So I wanted to know, what does a bold and meaningful writing career look like to you? And how did you make that transition from that fear and those baby steps to where you are now? Of

[00:09:33] Katherine Clements: great question. I mean, time is, is one short answer, you know, sort of continuing to build on those baby steps. There was a moment where I decided to take my writing seriously. And what I mean by that was I really committed. To writing a novel, to trying to write a novel and did several things, you know, including, going on writing Residential Weeks with the Arvon Foundation.

I was lucky to meet, a mentor quite early on. a fellow writer who was some way ahead of me on the path who could encourage me. And, but also help me to understand that some of the things I was experiencing were, normal, you know, the fear, the doubt, the things that come up along the way that, you know, she really, really helped me to understand that actually this, this was normal.

This is part of the process. And so having, having somebody else there was a big, big help. and. I think just really prioritizing my writing as well and, and, and committing to it, which is difficult, you know, I mean, I think most people start out when they’re doing other things. And I certainly was working in a full time job, a very busy and demanding full time job at the time.

And. Writing around that, you know, finding time, prioritizing writing, which means saying no to other things and sometimes to other things that you want to do, you know, it’s so sort of learning to put my writing at the center of my life and. build my life around it rather than the other way around. And that links to what I mean by a bold, meaningful writing career, because what I do a lot is work with people to help them really identify what I call their why, you know, why they’re writing in the first place, what writing gives to them what it brings to their life, the part of writing that is for the writer alone. So rather than all of the, you know, we all have these motivations. We all want to get published. We all want to be read. We all want to tell stories. We all want to communicate with other people. And all of those things are fantastic motivators. But what will keep you going over the long term is understanding deep down.

What it gives you and what it brings to you, regardless of all that external stuff. And that’s what I mean by a meaningful career. Hmm.

[00:12:54] Theo Brun: like there’s this sort of, I mean, it’s so Interesting listening to you in so much depth in there from like you say, like you haven’t, what are your sales looking like to like, why am I, you know, who am I, what, what is what if I’m not a writer, then what am I? And it’s so I don’t know if you can put some flesh on the bones.

There’s the fear on the one side, but often, you know, what is it that often you find people are actually afraid or the fear of failure, the fear of like imposter syndrome, the fear of I don’t know, they’re readers or looking at, I mean, there’s always that challenge I find as a writer of like staying in your lane and it’s very easy to go, hang on, you know, what’s going on in that guy’s career or this woman’s career and comparing yourself vis a vis, as you said, the other side of the coin, like, why do you do it?

Yes. It’s nice when someone says, Oh, I loved your book. And that lasts for about, Well, actually, if it was it, Mark Twain said that I can live for six months on a good compliment. I, there’s a lot of truth in that, isn’t there? So we’re all like looking for attention to some extent and to be noticed. And we want our.

Our words and our writing and stories to be noticed, but at the same time, it can’t be contingent upon someone else. It’s got a like flow from within. So are you, I mean, maybe you’ve answered this to some extent already, but are you able to sort of be a bit more specific about what was your fear when you were like holding you back?

And, and, and how did you sort of rationalize your way around it? And then what is the real joy and real motor that kind of keeps you going? even now? Yeah.

[00:14:31] Katherine Clements: That is a huge, huge question. and yes, I. Agree with everything you said there. so for me, I think the fear initially was definitely fear of failure. we really want something and I really wanted it, I, you know, I knew deep down and I’d always known since being a kid that I wanted to write. To be a novelist.

I used to say that when I was a kid. it’s sometimes easier to not try and not risk failure than to try and fail. So, I think that was the thing that really held me back. While I could have this dream, this fantasy of how. Well, one day I’m going to write this book and it’s going to get published and I’m going to be a writer and, you know, I’m going to live in a beautiful house in the countryside with my cat and have this lovely writerly life.

while it’s a dream and a fantasy, you know, I can, I can still imagine that that’s going to happen. Whereas if I try and I don’t get there, what does that mean? It’s my dream is taken away from me. So, that got in the way for me a lot. pure self confidence as well and, and just sort of, self belief really, any, you know, belief that, that I might be able to, to do this thing that I had no idea how to do.

as I said before, you know, I eventually. the kind of desire to try became more uncomfortable than the not trying.

[00:16:40] Theo Brun: I mean, it’s like, it’s like a classic, it’s like a sort of classic act one to any story, isn’t it? It’s like the character has to change to something unstable

[00:16:50] Katherine Clements: Yeah, totally. and as I said before, you know, I started kind of making small steps towards it. I mean, I can’t pretend that that was an easy journey. but I kept trying, I kept showing up. In the end, I wrote the book and, you know, I, I was fortunate that my first novel got published and that was my debut novel, The Crimson Ribbon.

I did rewrite that book probably about seven times. So that’s how I learned to write a book. And I’m always saying to people, you know, the only way to learn how to write a book. Is to write a book and what then happened, I mean, I’m sure that, you and your listeners have heard of the kind of second book syndrome before the, the, the difficulty that people can have approaching their second novel, because you’ve done it once, but you don’t know if you can do it again.

[00:17:58] Theo Brun: and have you got those seven drafts in you again?

[00:18:01] Katherine Clements: Yeah, exactly.

[00:18:02] Theo Brun: Now you, now, now you’ve done it once. You’re like, oh my gosh.

[00:18:06] Katherine Clements: yeah, you’ve got to do it again. And my first book did okay. But you know, you mentioned earlier, Theo, about, sales and the pressures that authors find themselves under when it comes to that side of things. it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. So, and you know, in commercial terms, I, I considered it a failure actually.

I don’t see it that way now at all, but at the time I did, and those feelings coupled with the pressures associated with the second book, I found really, really difficult. And the year or two after that first publication were very hard indeed for me. But that experience was the one that really forced me.

To dig a lot deeper into the kind of stuff that we’ve already talked about. So figuring out my why, figuring out why I was doing this, why I wanted to do this, you know, why I felt compelled to write and finding a way to separate my definition of success from the sort of. Vagaries and, and commercial side of the publishing world.

You know, that led me in turn to doing the work that I do now and working with other people on helping them through those similar journeys and those similar processes.

[00:19:55] Julia Kelly: You’re, you’re talking about sort of supporting other authors and helping people understand that this, this whole thing is a journey and this whole thing is a process. And I want to be sure to leave some time to talk about your masterclass that you’ll be teaching because of course, it’s not just, you know, the, the internal journey.

It’s also how, how to go about writing a book. As you said, you do it. You do it once and you wonder, can you ever do it again? But before you complete that first novel, it is so, it can be so intimidating, figuring out how, how to actually write a book. So your master class is called Creating Compelling Characters in Historical Fiction, and I want to, talk a little bit about what your approach is and what you’ll be highlighting.

for students who take this, this class, this, class that I should say is exclusive to History Quill members. what can people expect when they, when they sign up and join you?

[00:20:51] Katherine Clements: Hmm. Well, yes, the other side of, of, you know, the work that I do and also obviously my own practice, but I do quite a lot of teaching and. Mentoring on writing craft. and. Character is one of my favourite subjects to talk about. I believe very much that we come to fiction for the people. you know, character and plot are so intertwined, you can’t have one without the other really, you know, some books focus more on, kind of character driven narratives and some focus more on plot driven narratives and obviously with historical fiction, often we’re dealing with real history, real events, things happening.

that, that really happened. But when we come to fiction, historical fiction, we are seeing those events through the eyes of characters. So, you know, and how those characters, how those characters influence events or how events influence those characters. So I am very passionate about character being the real driver when you’re writing a novel and when you’re writing fiction and that all Characters.

need to be developed in some way. Even minor characters need a little bit of something to make them feel real. You know, when I work with authors on their books, one of the things that comes up the most, one of the problems that I see the most is that characters. lack that depth that makes them feel like fully formed humans, that, that kind of makes them feel like real people, real people that we, that we, that we care about, real people that we feel compelled to follow.

and so my class is going to focus basically on ways to develop character make them, you know, very compelling and very gripping. in, in your novel and focused on the protagonist and your, your kind of main characters, but also we’ll dip in a little bit to minor characters and how to make sure that they’re not like cardboard cutouts as well.

[00:23:31] Julia Kelly: Of course.

[00:23:33] Theo Brun: Is there a balance? I mean, I’m sure there is, but, but I wonder how you would answer like what, where the balance lies between, you know, characters where their depth is in a way to examine the within the novel, like, but it’s putting too much of that on the page or just kind of knowing it yourself as the author and just then writing versus, you know, doing too little as it were, and like, you know, You know, it definitely, it corresponds a little bit to the genre of book, even within historical fiction, doesn’t it?

Like some things are just more action adventurey with, or rompy, as it were, within historical fiction, and others are like, you know, slower, it’s more you want to hear all that internal conflict, because that’s, you know, in essence what the story is about. How do you strike a balance between those?

[00:24:26] Katherine Clements: You’re absolutely right. you know, there are definitely some books where we want more. Kind of internal character stuff and, and somewhere we’re happy to be kind of, you know, kind of swept up with, with the plot and the, and the events that are happening, but even, even at that end, I still will hold firm to the argument that that’s why we’re reading fiction and not history is because.

We want the human story, the human element. So, we need something, we need something to make us care about those characters in order to. I do agree that a lot of character development work is for us as the writer, we need to know a lot more than we’ll ever go into the book. And I think especially with historical fiction that applies to historical research as well, right?

We, we need to know an awful lot more than, than ever makes it to the page. And I think that is the same with characters, but we need to understand their internal. Thinking their, you know, their motivations, what they, all that stuff, like what they want, what they need. but also how they see themselves, you know, what do they believe about themselves and their lives and, what’s their take on, on, on what’s going on around them, you know, we, we need a little bit of that for them to.

To feel for us to connect for us to get that human connection, I think. So there’s definitely a balance. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I would say, I mean a point that I will definitely be making quite strongly during the course is we need to do character development work as writers, but the only way that you really get to know your characters is by writing them.

So, you know, I find that quite often I do a lot of character work at the beginning, but it’s not until about a third to a half the way through my first draft that those characters really start to come to life. So, if you don’t know everything at the beginning, that’s okay. It will, you know, characters will reveal themselves.

[00:26:51] Theo Brun: Yeah, I guess don’t, don’t let it be a block again. You know, to you starting out.

[00:26:57] Julia Kelly: It’s funny you mentioned that. I was going to ask because I am also one of those authors who I do, I think I do quite a bit of character work before I start writing, although I think there’s always room for more and sort of different techniques. So I’m very curious about, about how you approach that.

But I’m also one of those authors who finds usually about a third to half of the way through the book. if something isn’t working, it often has to do with character. And it’s often because characters are behaving in a way. I hadn’t predicted, which is a strange thing to say. And I thought I was never going to be one of those authors who says, Oh, you know, they take over and suddenly, you know, they’re running all over my book and I’m just, I’m just trying to follow them and write as quickly as possible.

But it’s been absolutely true in my career that, you know, Characters have taken vastly different paths than I anticipated for them. do you have advice to authors who find themselves in that situation where they have a significant amount of work done and they’re having to make the decision, I’m either going to go with what this character is telling me, or I’m going to have to figure out something else.

And I don’t know what that something else is, but it might mean scrapping quite a bit of this book.

[00:28:07] Katherine Clements: I’m a big believer in trusting your gut with this stuff, so trusting your instinct. and I think what you’re describing is certainly something I’ve experienced as well, Julia, which is that moment where the character, you know, does something or says something and you think, oh, oh, no, I wasn’t expecting this. Yeah. for me, you know, I think this is something that we each as an author have to kind of come to our own decision about and it comes down to really to that, how character driven are we as a writer, how plot driven are we, but something that I see quite a bit is when, when people have plotted something out and then, but then the character is a little bit at odds and you can tell that they’ve kind of shoehorned it.

The character into certain situations, that don’t feel right for the character that don’t necessarily feel convincing, you know, like the character, the character wouldn’t do that or wouldn’t say that or something. And you can tell that the, the, the writer is just sticking with, you know, clinging on to that plot, and not following.

I don’t know that I have advice as such as a kind of, you know, a sort of a magical fix for that. I personally would always tend to follow the character and what my gut is telling me about the character. And if something feels very right or very wrong, I will usually go with that. Even if it means.

Stuff, but I think that’s got to come down to an individual decision, I think, and how you approach writing in the first place. But I will, just to speak for a moment on, on what you said about how characters come alive for you. I never really understood what people meant when they said my characters come to life.

Never understood that at all. and then when I was writing my first novel, the protagonist, Ruth, is a young woman who grows up in the household of Oliver Cromwell in Ely. And as part of my research, I went. to visit Oliver Cromwell’s house in Ely. This was some years into working on this book, so I’d been writing about Ruth for some time.

And I spent, you know, an hour walking around Oliver Cromwell’s house, going through all the rooms thinking to myself, well, this is just absolutely amazing. Like this is where Ruth lived. This is where, this is the kitchen where Ruth cooked food. This is the room where Ruth served Cromwell, you know, and honestly, I was in there for almost an hour before I suddenly remembered that Ruth wasn’t real. And, you know, and that moment for me was like. She was so real that I had been walking around this house thinking that she was, she had really been there, you know, so it is funny how that happens, but it only happens through the writing and through spending the time with them.

[00:31:34] Theo Brun: Yeah, it’s like, very, very developed imaginary friends that we all go around with. I had a similar experience in Istanbul, actually, but, Yeah, I mean, just to get dial back a little bit on what you’re saying, I would for our listeners point of view, I definitely add a cautionary tale of my own where I didn’t follow my gut.

I was sort of constantly overriding my gut in pursuing a synopsis that had already been agreed with an editor and just like I know that this is what’s supposed to happen. So sort of driving your characters through it. And of course, the first draft was, it just felt very mechanical of just sort of steering these people through a story of like building, I don’t know what the analogy I’ll put, writing by numbers or building a jigsaw, whatever.

And it was this Horror show of a moment where sort of confronted with this reality with my editor and it was like, Oh my gosh, I’ve written this enormously long. I need to basically rewrite the whole thing. But the solution, as you said, was just go back to the characters, you know, start same start starting point, but just, in a sense, follow where they lead.

And so, yeah, 100 percent get what you’re saying, like, in that. Your gut will will tell you when there’s a fork in the road of like, you’re trying to push them where they don’t want to go. Stop, think, you know, maybe just sort of step back for a bit and then see what comes next. So 100 percent that that, yeah, if anyone can avoid making those that sort of mistake and save themselves a lot of time, I would definitely encourage that.

I had I had my my last question because I know time’s running on. We’re going to lose you soon. You, you, you come across everything that you’ve done, your background, you’re obviously a natural teacher with a lot of sort of, you seem to have taken great joy in encouraging others, but also teaching others as well and giving others the benefit of your, your own understanding and experience.

How do you, you know, with a few books under your belt now, how do you keep yourself teachable and constantly improving when it comes to your own historical fiction?

[00:33:36] Katherine Clements: Hmm. yeah, I mean, constantly improving is something that I hope for. You know, I think, I think if you are. If you’re a writer and you care about the craft of writing and the art of writing, then constant striving to get better with each book is, is one of the things, certainly one of the things that drives me.

how do I keep myself teachable? reading. You know, finding books, reading books from authors that I really admire, finding those books that just blow me away in terms of storytelling, craft, beautiful writing, that kind of thing. and tackling. Tackling projects that scare me. So the book I’m writing at the moment, which I’ve been working on for a few years, is a little bit different from what I’ve done before.

It’s more complex. It’s kind of big, epic history. It’s got numerous points of view. So it’s technically More difficult, but also has some other sort of cultural challenges in there as well. and when I was trying to decide what book to write next after The Coffin Path, I had several ideas on the table.

That was the one that scared me the most. and that’s the one I decided to go with because again, it’s going back to that instinct thing, you know, it’s that kind of, that gut feeling of like, well, you know, what do you really want to do here, Katherine? And that was the one that was calling. even though that was the one that felt scariest and the hardest and actually has been the scariest and the hardest.

almost coming to the end of it now. yeah, but also just, you know, staying open, I think, and I continue to attend workshops and events and listen to other writers talking about their writing. especially in areas that I’m not so experienced in, you know, creative nonfiction is an area I’m really interested in.

And so just continuing to learn really and, and stay open to that development. I think it’s really important. It’s part, it’s all part of it. It’s part of the practice.

[00:36:14] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Well, Katherine, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting discussion and I’m, I’m very excited for people who are going to be attending your master class because I think that that work on character and continuing to develop your writing. it’s just, it’s a lifelong practice and one that every writer continues to hopefully get better and better with as as they.

Continue to write. Before we go, I want to make sure that you have a chance to tell people where they can find you online if they want to continue following you, or your books, or of course your coaching, practice as well.

[00:36:51] Katherine Clements: Yes. So my website is. Simply, katherineclements.co.uk, and you can find me on Instagram, that’s my main social media at the moment, @katherineclementswriter. I also have a newsletter called the Inkwell, which people can sign up to via my website at the moment. and you know, I, I email about all, all things to do with writing, writing craft and the, and everything that we’ve been talking about today, really ultimately how to be a productive and happy writer for the long term. So those are the best places.

[00:37:40] Theo Brun: That sounds fantastic. Well, hopefully lots of our readers will be, sort of dropping in behind you and following you from, from this point on. We’re excited. When, when do you think, I hate to say it, but this enormous epic sort of multi multi POV, bestseller, future bestseller. When’s that? When do we see that appearing?

[00:38:01] Katherine Clements: like your positive thinking I’m not sure is the short answer of that. I’m hopeful. realistically maybe the year after next.

[00:38:14] Theo Brun: Excellent. Well, I hope it’s a productive and happy, whatever it is, year and a half. But from now till then. So thank you so much, Katherine. We’ve really enjoyed chatting with you.

[00:38:25] Katherine Clements: thank you so much for having me.

[00:38:27] Julia Kelly: Thank you.

[00:38:34] Theo Brun: Well, that was great, wasn’t it? I loved that. It was great having Katherine on. So many great points, coming from her to just dissect in just a moment.

[00:38:44] Julia Kelly: Yeah, before we do that, we of course have to do a bit of housekeeping. so I wanted to let you know that we have a special bonus episode of the podcast available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode is about how to succeed in historical fiction, and we’re joined by two incredibly accomplished authors in historical fiction, Gill Paul and David Penny.

They share with us the ingredients of success and how you can succeed in the genre as well. To get that episode, go to thehistoryquill.com/bonus. You can find the link in the description or you can enter it into your browser.

[00:39:19] Theo Brun: That’s right. There’s so much great advice and insight in that bonus episode. So if you’re a historical fiction writer, you really don’t want to miss it. So Julia, where do you want to start in talking about, everything that Katherine had to say?

[00:39:33] Julia Kelly: I mean, I think we have to start. So I thought I’d dig first and talk about, what she’s discussed about the why of writing and writing historical fiction. I thought that was such a great point that, sometimes amid all the conversation about, you know, craft and business and how you go about doing this, this job or this hobby, figuring out what it is that really drives you and motivates you outside of sort of all the external stuff is, is so important and maybe something that we don’t focus on as much and we should.

[00:40:04] Theo Brun: Yeah, I think so as well. I mean, her whole story at the beginning, I found really interesting because I could, I could relate the idea of, I mean, it sounds like she’d had dreams and pipe dreams of, of, of being an author for many years, but she wasn’t, she didn’t tell us anyway that she was kind of trying to do writing in those intervening years.

It just kind of sat there as this, you know, you. Yeah, pipe dream, I guess. And, and, and yet there’s that discomfort in her of like having to break through into, I mean, to be honest, like a more existential question, like who she actually was underneath. And when she came in alongside that, like you could, The way she told it sort of sounded like it, everything just started to feel better within herself.

That sort of being who you are thing, which sounds like such a cliche, but when you’re on the outside of that, it’s quite painful, isn’t it? And I wonder whether there’s a lot of people who have aspirations to kind of discover their why for writing, but There is that big barrier at the beginning to overcome and sort of swing into the stream of, yes, it’s hard to be a writer and yes, it’s hard to kind of, in a sense swim, you know, overcome the obstacles once you’re in it, but perhaps the hardest one of all is just believing that you are a writer at all.

And, and, and that’s such a big thing to overcome, isn’t it?

[00:41:29] Julia Kelly: It is. I think for me, part of it is tied into the fact that when I first started out writing, I thought, okay, I know I want to write, I love doing it. I do it in my free time without, you know, any prompting from anybody. So I really want to do this. And I, and I decided I was going to, I was going to build my writing career to the point that I could quit my day job and I could just focus on writing.

And that was the goal. And that was the goal for 10 years. And I was fortunate enough that I actually, achieved that goal. And then once I did that, I, I kind of have my little. Existential crisis. I didn’t have a thing. I was working towards anymore. You know, other than maintaining, obviously maintaining this very big task of staying full time as a writer without going back to my day job because that was always my fear that I would quit and then I’d have to go back because that’s not what I wanted.

And I think it took me a little bit of time to figure out what those other things. That surrounded my writing life were that satisfaction that I got from writing and what that looked like for me that had nothing to do with kind of external goals. It had nothing to do. Ironically, with supporting my career monetarily, even though that had been the goal for so long, but it really surprised me that 10 years into writing I had that.

That why moment and needed to kind of sit down and figure myself out and do that, do that work, which sounds like a very backwards way to do it. But I think sometimes it can sneak up on you and surprise you. I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience where it sort of took you by surprise that you needed to, you needed to go through that analysis.

[00:43:08] Theo Brun: It’s the word that keeps coming to my mind is vision, like you can have in a way, you know, we’ve had that vision of like, Oh, wouldn’t it be amazing to be a published author? And like, there are probably different motives and what we think was good about that. But that is the sort of vision. That’s where we want to get to.

And then you are there. And it’s like you’ve kind of moved up onto a higher plateau or something, but the journey’s still not over. So then what’s our vision for going forward? And, and there are definitely moments it feels like where you have to re, either reimagine what that is like, what are you really aiming at?

Or else it sort of somehow materializes in front of you. But without that, you can kind of get quite stuck or, or, or at least lose the motivation. Like, I don’t really know why I’m doing this. And, and again, you come back to that, the idea of why the, why the vision for what lies ahead, even if you’re, you know, I don’t know, Katherine, whoever sound like fantastically successful author, you know.

You think, well, they’ve still got to have a vision for going forward. Otherwise, what do they do? They just sort of stagnate and stop. So, yeah, and that that that is something that I suppose over time you probably, get more practice that stopping, recognizing that moment where you’ve slightly got a bit hazy on that and you need to clarify what that vision is and then go again.

[00:44:35] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a tricky thing to do, but I think it’s, it’s really necessary and it’s necessary to go through that usually several times, I think over the course of your career because you change as an author, you evolve, the things you’re interested in are different and, and sort of going back to that why is, is really important.

[00:44:54] Theo Brun: No, a hundred percent. So what was one, the other, one of the other things that that, that she was talking about was the second book syndrome. I can’t remember whether we’ve talked about this on between ourselves, but I, I wondered whether you had a second book, book Horror

[00:45:08] Julia Kelly: Well, Theo, of course I do. So, so my background is that I wrote, I wrote seven romance novels or six, six romance novels before I wrote historical fiction. so I came into historical fiction with the very, arrogant idea that I knew what I was doing. that was not the case. It turns out, I wrote the light over London, wrote it fast.

It, it just really flowed. It was great. and then I went to write the whispers of war and that was really my second book. Ironically, it was my eighth book, but it was my second book in the historical fiction genre, and there are a few different reasons. I think that it was. It was a problematic book for me to write, but I really struggled.

I really, I struggled with everything. I struggled with story. I struggled with structure. I struggled with the characters. I had a change of editor in the middle of it. It was really a nightmare. And it was also, a much quieter book in terms of sales than the light over London when the book came to be published.

Now, since then, it’s one of those funny books that has real legs and I still get people. Emailing me and messaging me on Facebook and things about it today. And that makes me so immensely proud because I struggled for that book. It was so hard to get it right. And I, I remember the last edit, I went through edits.

I changed story structure. I rewrote the whole book several times and a new editor came in and she was great. Her name’s Kate Dresser and she. When we kind of had our initial, so you’re going to be my editor now mid, midway through this edit, conversation, I said, look, I’m pretty straightforward. I used to be a journalist.

There’s very little professionally you can say to me that will offend me. If I feel like it is constructive criticism and it is meant to make the book better. So we went through an edit together and she called me and she went, Julia. This book’s good. Do you want to do what it takes to make it great? And I was like, I hate you so much.

But she was absolutely right. And she said, you need to invert these sections of the book and completely rewrite the back third. And she was 100 percent right. And it was worth it, but it was a tough book. I don’t know if you have a similar second book story.

[00:47:23] Theo Brun: mine was a bit different, but I mean, just before I talk about my own, that sounds in some ways, it’s quite encouraging, isn’t it? Because you think that experience of pain, if you like, for that second book could have and the sales didn’t cut, you know, the sort of the payoff didn’t, it wasn’t immediately obvious.

And yet, you know, that could also be a moment where you’re like. You become discouraged and you, not that you give up because it’s too compelling for you, but I don’t know, something like you can take that the wrong way, can’t you? That, that, that sort of sequence of events. And yet you just keep going and you, and it just goes to show, you know, you never really know books once they’re written.

They don’t just, I mean, yes. So in a commercial sense, you’re told, oh, they sunk without a trace, but they don’t really, they still exist and people can find them.

[00:48:12] Julia Kelly: backlist is a really powerful thing. And I think it’s a good, for me, it was a, it was a good lesson that, you know, The initial reception of a book is not necessarily how that book is going to stand for the rest of your career and taking that very long, that long view of things and really, trying to remember that a career is a whole series of books.

It’s a whole series of events. It’s not just, you know, one snapshot in time was really important for me.

[00:48:42] Theo Brun: Yeah, no, well, I mean, to my, my experience was actually a third book syndrome because my first book was my first two books were really one massive book when I first drafted them. So when I submitted a first book, and then it was time to write the second, I kind of already had this quite sort of, I mean, it was extremely rough because it wasn’t really even a book.

It was like half a a book that was too long, but at least it existed. So it was more like reshaping that. And it was the third one where you’ve done that, got a new contract, totally blank page, don’t, you know, have a vague idea. And that was, that was the one that I alluded to in our chat about you know, not following your gut, trying to cut a corner by establishing a really, sort of plotted out synopsis, but actually that didn’t serve me in the end.

And so I’m, I’m in my own writing, I’m constantly Sort of trying to weigh the balance between giving myself the confidence of having thought the story through, but at the same time the freedom to then not fall into that pitfall again and just be sort of dry doing something by numbers rather than letting it actually live and and sort of, you know, as we as we’ve all discussed many times.

But yeah, that was painful. That was painful. You, you overcome it though. Yeah,

[00:50:04] Julia Kelly: You do. I think you have to go through it and you just have to, you know. Be reminded that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and it will, it will be okay. It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to, you know, work itself out in the end. And maybe it’s not quite the book that you thought you were going to have or the sales or the launch or whatever that is.

But, you know, it’s, it’s, again, it’s part of the process. Yeah.

[00:50:28] Theo Brun: 100%. So What was the other, I mean, she was talking about teachability and how she remains teachable, wasn’t she? And, and it’s something that we’ve talked about before with, I remember with Madeline Martin, I think we, we touched on that, didn’t we? And the importance of that. what do you think about what she had to say? that

[00:50:53] Julia Kelly: you know, I, I think teachability is one of those things that, is It sounds like it should be so obvious, but it’s so easy to get in the weeds and kind of not put your head above the line of your manuscript and remember that, you know, you, you should be hoping to improve with every draft you write, you should be hoping to, you know, be a different writer than the very first draft that you ever finished.

and I think that’s something that I it’s, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting because when we’re recording this, we’re sort of. Ending out 2023 and heading into 2024 and I’ve been doing a lot of looking ahead and a lot of planning and figuring out how am I going to incorporate that into my own writing life and my writing practice.

so, you know, I think things like this master class or kind of pitch perfect for me, because 1 of the big things I want to do is try to really go deeper with my characters, figure out how to. Do the planning and the prep work, before I even start writing a book that really sets me up, hopefully for success, or sets me up so that if my characters do go wandering across the page, it takes me less time to kind of figure out what it is that I’m.

what it is that I’m writing with these people and how, that could actually benefit and develop the story rather than resisting it, which has been something I’ve done in the past. so I don’t know about you with, with teachability. How are you kind of incorporating

[00:52:25] Theo Brun: yeah, I thought it was interesting what she said. She was talking about the reading that would, that would definitely be probably the beginning of my answer is like just reading books that you really respect and, and, and, and with a sort of intentionality and consciousness of, of. I mean, not to the point that you lose the joy of the story, but just you do that with a professional eye, don’t you, you kind of go, Oh, this, that was done really well.

And, and then you mentioned her masterclass. I mean, actually, a lot of the things that, you know, she was putting together, you can get. Can’t you from from the joining up the membership of The History Quill and, you know, things like the book recommendations like I know that there’s tons of resources on there on the history quill about, you know, the best historical fiction in different genres to read and.

You know, those they do have a lot of value. Those things I think being steered in directions and like having the benefit of other people’s experience of reading and you want to sort of cut to the chase, you can get to the gold a lot faster through other people’s recommendations. And then, you know, she was talking about sort of community, you know, actual learning of the craft as well.

I mean, I think that’s in, in a way, that’s kind of what we’re doing here, isn’t it? And that’s, that’s where the History Quill membership kind of can give you access to all of those in, in a sort of one stop shop, which is, which, you know, we all need to, to save a little bit of time when it, when it comes to getting to the answers and the things that actually are of value.

But yeah, I love all that. I love the idea of it’s never, it’s never over. There’s always room to improve. And it’s only really looking back, you can go, Oh, yeah, well, maybe there has been some improvement. Yeah,

[00:54:11] Julia Kelly: And I think it’s, you know, you, it’s not like you can sit down and say, this is exactly what I’m going to need for this version of my manuscript. Sometimes you need to stumble into it and then go searching for the resource. So, you know, whether it’s about something like, writing. characters in historical fiction, like her master class, or, you know, some of the blog posts that I’ve seen through the membership, around writing dual timelines, or, you know, writing historical battles, which is not something I’ve done before, but is something that, especially writing mystery novels, there are elements that I can certainly, imagine will be useful for me, that kind of thing, you know, having the resource, At your fingertips, rather than having to wait for conference season to come around or, having to, kind of cast about and try to find what you’re looking for, maybe in a book, that doesn’t necessarily address historical fiction specifically, I think that can be a real challenge and so, yes, I’m a big fan of,

[00:55:12] Theo Brun: yeah, it’s sort

[00:55:13] Julia Kelly: fan of having the access to everything.

[00:55:15] Theo Brun: I mean, it sort of circles back, doesn’t it, on the original point of the fear, like, this is a way of kind of diminishing the barriers to what your next thing is, and like, whether that’s entry into a writing career at all, or like, our sort of level where you’re like, what’s the next thing?

thing for me. And I love what she said about, you know, the most scary book. I’m sort of in that position now where it’s like, Oh, the one I really want to also feels like the hardest and most terrifying one to write. And then sometimes I think You know, maybe you can speak to this as well, like the, the, the signal, if you like a flare of fear, rather, is in some way says don’t go here.

But at the same time, it’s a signal that this is where you must go. And it’s that kind of push me pull you of, of where you feel that emotion that you act sometimes that those are the best places to go.

[00:56:11] Julia Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it is, it is a wonderful, challenging, ever changing, world that we work in, you and I.

[00:56:18] Theo Brun: Yes, 100%. Well, I think it’s about time that we wrap up this episode. so thanks to Katherine Clements for that brilliant conversation and everything that we’ve managed to glean from it. that concludes this episode of The History Quill Podcast. But before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to thehistoryquill.com/bonus to get our bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction featuring guest authors, Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening. for any historical fiction writer, so pay attention and make sure you check it out. You can find the link in the description and enter it into your browser.

[00:56:59] Julia Kelly: And of course, wherever you are listening to this podcast, make sure that you like, subscribe, and leave us a comment or review. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.

[00:00:00] Julia Kelly: Welcome to what is the first episode of our second season, our second series of the History Quill podcast. I am historical fiction novelist, Julia Kelly, and I’m joined by my wonderful co host, Theodore Brun. Theo, how, how are you?

[00:00:28] Theo Brun: I’m doing really, really well, Julia. It’s been a little while, since we’ve been together and a few things have happened, some big events. So I must offer you my congratulations. can you, why don’t you tell, tell our listeners what’s happened since the end of season one?

[00:00:47] Julia Kelly: Well, it’s sort of everything going on in the background. I, you know, it’s funny. I was listening to an episode, of season one, earlier and I started out saying I was really stressed and I said it was because I was on deadline. That was true, but I was also planning a wedding at the same time. And that wedding has now happily happened.

Very, really wonderful day. And we also went on our honeymoon. So I am really getting back into, back into my working life with all of the newlywed bliss that everybody always talks about.

[00:01:19] Theo Brun: that’s so good to hear. It’s a new chapter in, in all senses, really.

[00:01:24] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. It is. It is. So no, it’s been absolutely wonderful. And, you know, the deadlines never stop. I’m still working on various things, but it was particularly sweet to have a bit of a break, to get married and to enjoy some, some time off on a honeymoon.

[00:01:41] Theo Brun: And where did you go on your honeymoon?

[00:01:43] Julia Kelly: We went to Mauritius, which was wonderful.

I spent a lot of time sitting under an umbrella so that I didn’t get sunburned, because I am very pale. and I read a ton of books, and that was just fantastic.

[00:01:56] Theo Brun: Where you’ve got actual license just to read not to write and uh Not put too much pressure on yourself. Well, i’m sure you you congratulations in all senses And and i’m sure you deserve the break as well But but there were many things going on because you had a a novel out I know we both had a novel out the same week.

[00:02:13] Julia Kelly: my goodness! We did! We did!

[00:02:15] Theo Brun: A Traitor in Whitehall. I i’m about halfway through it and I love it. It’s brilliant. I was trying to finish it in time for this, but failed miserably because lots of other things going on, but it’s, it’s fantastic, but everyone should go and buy it.

[00:02:30] Julia Kelly: Thank you. Yes, it came out. And then, I think two days afterwards, your latest came out as well. Is that right?

[00:02:36] Theo Brun: Yeah, that’s right. A Savage Moon. so yeah, that’s, that’s been my latest, although I’ve got a short story coming out for Christmas, which is completely the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of genre and vibe.

[00:02:53] Julia Kelly: I was, I was delighted to see that. So by the time this episode comes out, Christmas will have come and gone,

[00:02:58] Theo Brun: Yes, of course. Yes. Next Christmas,

[00:03:03] Julia Kelly: check that out.

[00:03:04] Theo Brun: Yes, do, do. I mean, it’s like a, it’s like a warm cup of hot chocolate, really, as a, as a story’s go, so.

[00:03:13] Julia Kelly: Wonderful. Well, we are, going to be, maybe not so much warm cup of hot chocolate because I think there’s quite a lot of, of deep emotional, turmoil and maybe some swords and some other things going on in this, in this next episode. but we are going to be interviewing, a friend of yours.

So would you like to, would you like to give us the little teaser of who we’re speaking to?

[00:03:37] Theo Brun: Absolutely. We are going to be chatting to Giles Kristian, who is now a friend of mine. I first, he first came on my radar as, another author. in a way, one of the original authors operating in, in the space that I move in, sort of early Dark Age fiction. But, he’s a great guy and I’m very much looking forward to chatting with him. Well, it’s an absolute delight to welcome my friend and fellow Dark Age novelist, Giles Kristian to the History Quill Podcast, and I’ll just give you a bit of an intro because I do know quite a lot about you. I mean, following your career ever since your debut back in 2009 when you first published Blood Eye, which is the first of your Raven trilogy, an instant bestseller, I think I’m right in saying.

Basically all your books have been bestsellers since then. After the Raven Trilogy came the Sigurd Trilogy, another Viking, saga and two, interspersed with two Civil War books, and, more recently he’s been, doing an Arthurian Trilogy, which is just about to reach its climax, I think, in, January 2024.

Is that the release of? Arthur, I believe.

[00:04:55] Giles Kristian: June actually,

[00:04:56] Theo Brun: is it June? It’s been pushed back, from what I thought. Anyway, but not only is he a historical novelist, he’s multi talented, this, this man. He, recently brought out a contemporary thriller called Where Blood Runs Cold, which, which actually won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize in 2022. And there’s all kinds of other strings to his bow, but it’s just generally a great pleasure to welcome you to the History Quill, Giles. Thanks for coming and joining us.

[00:05:25] Giles Kristian: Thank you for the kind invitation Theo and Julia Very very very nice to be here

[00:05:31] Theo Brun: Well, shall we kick off in a general sense? because, you know, you’ve made a name for yourself in, as I said, in the deep dark ages, but which, you know, we’ve got a bit of a theme for, for today’s episode, which is about legend and myth. And I suppose that area of history, you know, you could argue there’s lesser known, or there’s more scope to, To kind of bring in the mythic, if you like, bring in legend.

But, but in general terms, what kind of attracted you to, that area of history in particular?

[00:06:05] Giles Kristian: Well, this would have to be because my mother was, my mother is Norwegian. so I’m half Norwegian and having spent a lot of time in Norway as a child, growing up in the fjords and around the, around the fjords, just imagining Vikings, imagining people getting on a long ship and going off raiding across the sea.

It was just something that was always weaving in my imagination, but that wasn’t actually the first. Sort of long form fiction that I wrote. I wrote a novel set during the first crusade And I went I was a subject I was interested in I went in I was living in London at the time and I went and did a diploma in medieval history and crusades and things like that just to sort of get some research under my belt and wrote a very long 166, 000 word novel set during the first crusade and Didn’t do anything with it.

I think I, I didn’t really know what to do with it in those days. I think I sent it off to a couple of publishers, just sort of not knowing that you need an agent and I didn’t know how any of it worked and I didn’t get anywhere with it and I’m glad I didn’t because a couple of times I’ve since looked at that manuscript and I’ve thought, wow, okay, but the thing about writing that writing 166, 000 useless words is that it, it was great practice. And when I sort of felt that nothing was going to happen with that story, then I jumped into the Viking Age and thought, Oh, well, let’s, let’s write a Viking novel. It was actually because I was on a, I was on a, my brother’s stag do, and we went to Oslo and, I was organizing.

And one of the things we, we did, which was very cultured for a stag do, was to go to the Viking ship museum just outside Oslo. Yeah, and where you’ve got the two most beautiful and iconic Viking ships preserved and there and you can reach out and touch them across the rope. Of course, you’re not supposed to, but you have to do it.

The Gokstad ship and the Oseberg ship and, and with the bunch of guys that I was with on this stag do I was looking at them thinking, Oh, this is kind of like we’re doing what the Vikings were doing. Just kind of imagining each of the guys in the, in the group on one of the row benches of this long ship and imagining us going out on an adventure.

And, so that’s where the idea came from for the first Viking novel, Raven: Blood Eye. 

[00:08:27] Julia Kelly: I love it. That feels incredibly cinematic, but I can imagine you all enjoying your stag do, but also doing something cultural. I wanted, before we go any further and dive into historical epic, I wanted to ask, how would you characterize the genre? And what do you think readers are looking for when they pick up a historical epic?

[00:08:48] Giles Kristian: Yeah, I don’t know if my Viking books were epics in that sense. I remember when I was first trying to get a publishing deal. I was an agent actually, and I was living in New York, and I’d got an agent in New York, Writer’s House, and they took Raven: Blood Eye and tried to, Find a publisher for it and and were unsuccessful and then I was talking to an agent in the UK and they also represent Conn Iggulden and I was talking to cons agent about my manuscript about Raven: Blood Eye and What she was sort of quite rightly saying was that the thing about Conn’s books is they are epic I mean he takes a subject and he and a big subject at that or a character in history and just sort of It’s massive.

You know, he, he, you know, like the Genghis books for example, and, and she was saying, you know, that’s what he does. And, and I was thinking, yeah, and he does it so well, and, and so my argument, my counterargument was as to why. and I think one of the things that they should consider taking me was that I do something that’s maybe the opposite of that.

I, I, my stories tend to be quite intimate, so they’re not really about the major events of history. They’re just, they tend to be about a couple of guys or a group of people experiencing their life with this thing going on in the background. And, It was obviously I was just blagging it because I didn’t really know how else to, to pitch this

[00:10:15] Theo Brun: Sounds convincing.

[00:10:16] Giles Kristian: but yeah, I just, I just thought I’m going to bring it in and it’s sort of a microscope of just, just the human experience of, of these people involved in whatever’s going on and, and, yeah, obviously it works.

I got. And right. And, and he did get me a deal with Transworld very, very soon after that. So, so yeah, epic in, you know, I’ve written two books during the civil war. Obviously the civil war is kind of a big, big subject matter, but, but I think sometimes that can be off putting for readers because the Civil War is very complicated. There’s religious and political kind of aspects to it that are hard to wrestle with. And I was very keen to sort of For my publishers to not sell it about a novel, it’s not a novel set during the English, about the English Civil War. It’s about two brothers and a sister who find themselves on opposing sides during the English Civil War.

And it’s really about the family. so I, for me, talking about writing epic books is, is about bringing it into something very personal. and, and, and sort of letting the other stuff play out in the background.

[00:11:29] Theo Brun: It feels like there is something there harking back to that tradition of. You know that this, I don’t know if you want to call them the source material of the Viking world and all these sagas and mythological poetry and, and stories that can, as they, as you say, start quite small with. An individual, you know, gets caught up in a story and then the story gets bigger and bigger because, because certainly when you look at your, what you’ve done, and then, and then looking back, you think, wow, what an amazing saga, sort of epic saga.

And I suppose you can use the word epic in a pretty loose sense, but yours. You know, your, when I look at your body of work, it’s nothing if not ambitious, but I wonder what side of that ambitious, you know, do you, do you feel like, I mean, you’ve got these trilogies of Viking sagas, and then more obviously, I suppose, if we’re talking about legend and epic, the Arthurian sort of world, but whether you, you.

Yeah. You just launch out into them. And then in retrospect, you look back and go, wow, that was an awfully big story I just told. And, and, but there must be a difference when you enter into Arthur’s world where, you know. In a sense we’re more familiar with that. In, in talking in terms of legend and epic and what have you did, was there a difference in terms of how you approached, the Arthurian stuff, vi vis-a-vis the, the Viking stuff?

[00:12:54] Giles Kristian: Yeah, that the, I think the similarity between the Viking books and the Arthurian books is that there isn’t much, historical sort of evidence, or certainly in terms of source material, there’s no written stuff for the Vikings that’s written from their perspective. It’s all, it’s all Christian monks and chroniclers that are writing.

So, and the Arthurian story, well. There isn’t one story. There’s, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of different Arthurian sort of myths. so what, what, why that’s attractive for me is that it enables me to fill in all the gaps of which there are so many. So, the Civil War books were more difficult. It’s fairly recent history. There’s so much written about it. There’s so much evidence all around you, you know, you go to a village church in England and it it was probably standing there during the english civil war So you have to describe it exactly as it is, you know, because people are going to tell you otherwise if you get it wrong whereas the thing about the viking books and the arthurian books is There’s so much space for me to to imagine my own version of events and if I look at um If I look at the Arthur, like Lancelot, for example, the reason I wrote Lancelot was because, well, if I’m being cynical, I could say that I saw an opportunity there to tap into an unexplored subject matter.

Everybody’s read books about Arthur and Merlin, crops up all the time. But you never really see anything about Lancelot. So I thought there’s something that’s an untapped sort of seam of potential story gold. And, and, that’s what I, that’s sort of what drew me initially to the idea of that. It was just at first, just a title. I did Lancelot. That sounds cool. And then as I got into it, I thought. Here is almost a blank canvas for me to create my own version of this character. Obviously, the Bernard Cornwell Lancelot is sort of famous for being such a baddie and a wonderful villain. So, I also had in my mind, well, this was my opportunity to rehabilitate, It lasts a lot for the reader, for the readership, of the Bernard Cornwell novels so, but, but really it was for me a blank canvas and that’s what excites me. I don’t want to have to follow a chain of events that’s been told already because Where’s the fun in that? I’m creative, that’s just, I’m not academic, I’m, you know, I’m creative and all I want to do is create new stuff where there was nothing before.

So I could look at the myths and I could try and interpret aspects of them and put them in the novels in maybe subtle ways. For example, my round table in Lancelot I think is just the stump of an oak tree and I don’t really say it’s off this round table but there’s maybe a hint there that they’re gathered the warriors are gathered around the stump of a massive ancient oak tree or uh the lady in the lake is a priestess up in Scotland who symbolically lifts a sword out of out of a pool of water and and that’s which is Excalibur and that’s the lady in the lake. 

[00:16:12] Theo Brun: I loved your, I loved your holy grail. If it was the holy grail in Camelot was this sort of drinking cauldron cup that they went off in search of. Isn’t that?

[00:16:22] Giles Kristian: Oh, in the caves on the Isle of Man I think. Well, that’s another one where I got the myth of the Green Knight idea. Because if you look at the Arthurian myths, they’re bonkers. They don’t really make a lot of sense. And it’s hard, if you’re setting your story in sort of a sub Roman Britain, the, um As I am, it’s sort of a very real, grounded, yes, aspects of sort of magic and belief, but a grounded world.

It’s hard to include the myths because they’re full of giants and magic and dragons and giant boars and things that, really don’t make any sense. So it’s hard to include them. So then you have to think of a way of including them. So for me, my green knight in Camelot was a warrior who’s part of a community who live in copper caves in the Isle of Man.

And they, they, they, They, you know what it’s like, and the copper has tainted their skin because that’s where they live all the time. So they’ve got this kind of green taint to their skin, or this warrior has. And for me, that’s sort of the origins of the Green Knight. And, you know, it’s just, it’s just having fun with it.

That’s, that’s, that’s what I enjoy.

[00:17:34] Julia Kelly: Can you dig a little bit more into how you made those decisions to distinguish this very, very well known character who, as, as you say, you know, there’s a wonderful, very different representation in Bernard Cornwell’s books. You see it all through, you know, cartoons and myths and even Monty Python. you know, what is it that you decided you wanted to write about in terms of character and how did you bring that out knowing that there’s this whole background of myth and pop culture behind Lancelot?

[00:18:06] Giles Kristian: Yeah, well, as you say, it’s the most famous love triangle in Western literature, really, the, the idea of Lancelot and Arthur and Guinevere. And that was obviously central to my story, even though Arthur doesn’t come into it till rather late in the book. for me, there was this whole, the complicated nature of love, really, and the fact that Lancelot and Arthur, you know, they are the best of friends.

They have, they, they love each other. but they both love Guinevere and how does that, how does that play out on a human level? and Originally, I was going to write, and it was going to be, in your words, an epic kind of tale of the Arthurian myths, and that’s what it was kind of, that’s what I set out to do.

But then in writing, in writing it, things changed. Like my father, sadly, ill when I just started the book and was dying as I was writing it. And that changed everything about the book for me. I don’t think on the conscious level, but just because of the place I was in psychologically, I was, I was sad, I was grieving, and the themes of loss, love and loss, and things that can now never be, those, those kind of aspects wove themselves into the book, and it ended up being quite a different book from the one that I perhaps set out to write.

And that’s. You know, that’s kind of probably doesn’t happen very often, that’s, you know, such an emotional thing, kind of influences the book in that sense, but. It’s, it’s the one book of mine where I think out of all of them, it’s the one where people seem to have taken it to their hearts. And I can only assume that’s because my heart was on the, you know, on the page as I was writing it.

And yeah, that’s, I guess that’s the way art works sometimes.

[00:20:10] Theo Brun: yeah, I think that it is an amazing book. If anyone hasn’t read it, it was, you know, it’s one of those ones where you just have to lay it aside when you close the final page and just sit and be quiet for a while and just think about what’s just happened. But, and, and, and the emotion that, You as an author must, or you as a person, individual, going through that grieving process sort of comes out this kind of, not, is bathos the right word?

Probably not. That sort of tragic undertow to that book. But then in a way, it, it translates into Camelot. I found, I read it, I think it was in the first lockdown and like the whole of the world had changed. Gosh, it’s changed a lot since then as well. And, and yet part of the essence of that book, I felt was again, this band of sort of brave, idealists in a way, like trying to keep the dream alive, I think was one of the taglines, wasn’t it?

And, and it was interesting. I know, you know, we’re not here to sort of put anyone on the spot about myth making and the connection with, with the sort of general culture, but I got the sense that this idea of Arthur as a myth, Obviously, it’s been reworked, reimagined many, many times, and yet there was something about the way you’re doing it now, and I can only look forward to the, the, the third book in this trilogy, that seems to sort of say something about the uncertainty of these times, like, The fact that you kind of got to hold, hold on to something in spite of all that’s going on around you and that may be a subconscious thing going on in you or not.

I don’t know. Do you feel like there’s something of the bleeding of our culture, our present day culture that inevitably comes into the books that you write that happened to be about something in the deep past?

[00:22:03] Giles Kristian: If there is, it’s, it is subconscious. And I think it’s almost one of those things where I hear you speaking like that and I think, Oh, that’s clever. I should have meant that. You know, and it’s like when you’re at school and you’re an English teacher, it’s sort of, you’ve got to, you’ve got to work out what the poet meant when he was writing the poem.

And, and maybe you’re miles off and, and maybe, and maybe not. For me, it was the experience of. in Camelot, the experience of Galahad and the idea of legacy, and I think that trailed on from sort of Lancelot, Lancelot, his father, once he’s gone, it’s, it was about how does Galahad, what’s his place in the world and, and how much is he free to choose his own path and how much is already sort of preordained because of whose son, He is, so they were, again, for me, it’s about bringing it down to sort of a microcosm of the human experience, the human condition, I think, rather than looking at sort of the world today and making a social comment.

Although, even with Arthur as well, the next novel, it’s, for me, there’s always something poignant about, time moving on and about, Glory being in the past. And I think maybe that’s just a natural part of the aging process. You know, we remember when we were young and everything was ours. And, you know, everything was so exciting and vibrant and we were legends, you know, in our own lunchtime. But that idea of never being able to go back to that moment and sort of step in the same. Part of the river again because it’s, it’s gone. That’s always very poignant for me. And I think that that does definitely feed in. So there is an idea in, in, in Camelot. and Lancelot of a fading world of, of, of something disappearing.

And yes, certain individuals trying to hold on, trying to cling onto it. And, and maybe even to daring to dream about recovering something that, we all know. Can never really can never really be. and that’s, and that’s sad. I think a lot of my books are sad nowadays. I don’t know why, but when I was my Viking books used to be just sort of just…

[00:24:26] Theo Brun: Swashbuckling. They’re sort of swashbuckling. They’re joy, they’re joyous, aren’t they? It’s just like, I don’t, you know. We’re coming at you, so you better stand out the way.

[00:24:36] Giles Kristian: Exactly, certainly the first trilogy is very much a bunch of Vikings running around doing Viking stuff and I make no apologies for that. You know, it’s um. So it’s time, but, but as I’ve gone on as a novelist, I found that I, I’m only really interested in writing something now if I have to really engage on a sort of heart and soul level.

it has to have to be something that moves me. So the thriller, it was, it was a father and daughter survival thriller in the Norwegian Arctic. The fears of a parent and, and, and how, how fearful I am for the sakes of my children and what I would do and if, you know, if it came down to having to look after them and those kind of fears.

So, yeah, it’s, it’s, the books become more personal and, and more retrospective as I’ve gone on. So, I don’t know, which is, you know, I don’t think it’s healthy, actually, frankly. I don’t know, some people might say it’s cathartic, but I’m not sure. I’m really not sure it’s good to be spending your day, all day, going into these dark places.

I don’t know. What do you think?

[00:25:48] Julia Kelly: It’s interesting you say that I, I think I’m thinking about it now and I think I’ve also gone a slightly darker, darker path in different periods of time in my career. And I, I do know that at the end of the day, it takes me longer, especially in those books to pull myself out of it and to sort of come back to the real world and resurface a bit.

Theo, I don’t know if you’ve had the same experience.

[00:26:11] Theo Brun: Yeah, I was, I mean, the, the last sort of big book I write along these lines, it absolutely shattered me. I was destroyed by it. Not only the process of it, but it was just exhausting. I mean, it was very, there’s quite a lot of darkness in that as well, but I was trying to counter it with some light as well.

And, Yeah, I think maybe that’s why it takes us a bit of a while to, you know, in our particular little corner of the historical writing world, Giles, I know we, we know we’ve got a few colleagues who just burn out, churn out these books, bam, bam, bam, like two a year. And I’m just looking at them going, how do you do it?

I just emotionally, I couldn’t take it. But maybe that’s because they’re slightly different kind of books. I agree. What I wouldn’t, I mean, there is, there is, there are reasons to write books that you don’t feel like you’re, you really want to go on that emotional journey, but I, I just can’t every time I sit down and try and write one, it doesn’t really come out.

So, you want to, you want to be in, you want to be interested by your own characters, and therefore there’s probably more going on than there could be if you were going to write something a bit later and quicker.

[00:27:22] Giles Kristian: Yeah, character is everything for me. It’s really, I know people say character is story and story is character or plot, but it’s true because if you don’t care about these characters, if you don’t really, really immerse yourself in these characters, then who cares if they make it or not, if they overcome these challenges that you as an author sadistically put in their way every day.

[00:27:48] Theo Brun: I think particularly, particularly in that world of swords and splatter, as it were, it’s like, it can just become Monty, it can become just Monty Python, can’t it? It’s just like, how about you, you know, and off comes another limb, you know, it’s got to be something a bit, bit

[00:28:04] Giles Kristian: our, we’ve all cut our hands on a kitchen knife, and that feeling of it just going into, the knife going into a finger, and it’s just a terrible, terrible feeling. And you think, we’re talking about people getting their limbs hacked off with swords here. You can’t really take that lightly, I don’t think.

[00:28:21] Julia Kelly: Well, Giles, I love it when somebody gives me a perfect segue into, into my next question. so you’re talking about character and, and wanting to write about characters that you really care about. I was having a nose around on your website and I really liked this quote when, looking at the section about your, work in the gaming world, the quote is every great game starts with a great story and great characterization, which I thought was a wonderful way to set up, narrative gaming and to connect into also obviously your work as an author.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how, how that has informed your, your novel writing and how your novel writing has informed your writing for, for video games.

[00:29:04] Giles Kristian: Yeah, so I’m working on a game called, Norse, which is a Viking, a Viking game, tactical, turn based tactical game. And, it’s hopefully going to be out next year. And they came to me as a, they looked for Viking authors, I think, and that’s literally just googled and found me. This was back in 2016. And, I’ve been involved in writing this game ever since. And what I, what I love about this is that it’s a perfect sort of antidote to the deeper, darker writing that I’m doing in my novels. When I’m writing for the video game, yes, there’s light and shade. There are kind of, there are dramatic moments in the game, in the cut scenes particularly, where, when we’re sort of writing the cut scenes and, you know, and the actors come into the studio with a mo, mocap suits on and, and act out the script.

And it’s really, it’s really, really gratifying to see, see it come alive in that way. But a lot of it, There’s a lot of humor that I’m sort of trying to get into this game, and I’m really enjoying it. You know, it’s because as I say, it sort of harkens back to my earlier writing, the Viking books, where there’s a lot of Viking insults and bawdy jokes and, you know, pretty lowbrow humor, I have to say.

But it’s really good fun to write and I think it’s important from a sort of a mental health point of view that I get to, to do that at the same time, in terms of the narrative. Yeah, it’s, it’s a different thing because it’s so collaborative compared to novels where I’m just on my own. The game is very collaborative, obviously, because I can’t necessarily write a scene if I don’t know if the guys in Norway, if the, if the programmers and developers can actually.

Do the mechanics for whatever it is that I’m thinking of So I have to go we’re back and forth all the time about what we can actually Do in the game, you know, is it, is it, is, is it possible to, to, to have a character fight a wolf, for example, in this game and, and the designs will tell me yes or no, or whatever.

And if so, then I can go and write the scene. so it’s a different experience, but it’s actually really also nice to. Have an aspect of my writing job where I am talking to other people because as you guys know It’s it can be very lonely this this business of ours And and I used to love that. Um I left the music industry which was very noisy and chaotic and I loved just being a writer and sitting on my own and and doing my own thing.

I loved it. those days have actually passed now and I Actually would like to return to the world a little bit here and there so The gaming is good for that because I get to talk to other human beings.

[00:32:00] Theo Brun: But you’ve had a great relationship. I know you’ve got a great friend in, in Philip Stevens, but a great sort of collaborative relationship with him. And you’ve done quite a few things over the years, haven’t you? You did, I remember the first time I saw you guys working together, it was, it was a poem you’d written about Harold Hardrada. Is that right?

[00:32:19] Giles Kristian: That’s right. Yep.

[00:32:19] Theo Brun: And, and, and he’d, and then you sort of made a video and he produced it and acted in it. And then, but you’ve done a lot of things since. Do you think as a novelist, it’s useful? Or, you know, should we, you know, for our audience, I guess, who, you know, when you identify people who you come across, who, who sort of somehow you click with creatively to kind of cultivate those relationships, and that there’s a positive feedback loop with those kind of collaborative relationships.

[00:32:48] Giles Kristian: Yeah, I feel incredibly lucky actually that Phil and I found each other because we, we are on the same wavelength and we’ve come to a point long since where we can discuss ideas and we’re not, we’re not sort of embarrassed about an idea or, and sort of, or to say to the other, Oh, yeah, that’s all right.

But what about if we do this and we have this kind of collaborative relationship, which just works and and that’s I think That’s not always going to happen. Um You know, especially because in our job you don’t tend to get out and meet different people all the time so if you do find somebody who Who sort of sees the world in the same way or roughly and kind of that you can vibe with creatively It’s it’s so important about we bounce ideas around all the time whether it’s about my novels or he’s working with me on the game As well.

He’s now he’s now narrative director of the game. So he’s directing all the cutscenes stuff like that So when it comes to the writing We can sort of discuss and plan that together so that we know, so that then he knows how it’s going to be shot with the actors and in the studio and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, it’s, it’s really important. and, and as I say, it’s just fun to sit on the other side of a FaceTime call and, and, and tell sort of talk to each other in Viking accents and make up

[00:34:13] Theo Brun: And he does very well in your books. He’s the narrator of your books, isn’t he?

[00:34:18] Giles Kristian: he’s the narrator of my audio books as well. So yeah, yeah.

[00:34:21] Julia Kelly: when it comes to sort of opening your world up and I, I absolutely feel every, every word of that, you know, with writing being a very small world sometimes and needing to introduce. people back into it sometimes. where does your relationship with readers come in? obviously you’ve had a great success and you have a great following.

How much time are you spending and how consciously are you, you know, going out and engaging with readers, whether it’s virtually or in person?

[00:34:52] Giles Kristian: I think it’s hard in person these days because I’ve been to plenty of talks where I’ve been invited to go and talk somewhere. And frankly, I’ll turn up and there’s sort of six or seven people that that’s just. The world. I did an event recently with, with four other authors, and the only people that turn up were people that come with one of us, you know, our family or whatever.

And that was, was four names there. And there was no, nobody had really bothered to turn up. Now, some of that might be to do with how an event is. Publicized, advertised, marketed, whatever. but I think a lot of it is to do with, it’s actually just very hard to get people to leave their home, to come out and see authors.

I think things like this haven’t helped that actually, because I think. There’s so many podcasts now. There’s so many online channels where you can actually see authors listen to what they’ve got to say, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, X, whatever it’s called now. And I think the mystique about authors has gone.

And actually, I think the mystique was really kind of cool. And if we could, if we could turn off all of this. And just be authors and have that mystique again. I think that would be great But now the cat’s out of the bag and we’re all sort of doing this sort of stuff But I do think that doing interviews like this Well, why does somebody need to come and see any of us guys in a library because they can just Click on click on and watch, you know, or listen to a podcast or whatever So I think it’s really hard actually to get people to engage it or to go and engage with with readers in real life Obviously we can do it online and that’s that’s good fun And there’s not an author alive who doesn’t like to talk about their books, I think So if you get a tweet from somebody mentioning your book There’s a little endorphin rush in there.

There’s a you know, it’s a it’s a good thing. It’s I don’t think we want to just sort of send books out into the void and Never know if anybody’s reading them or not. I think it’s just Certainly not for me. I I I don’t do this just for the for my own sort of state of mind I do it because I want people to I want to actually sell a ton of books actually if i’m being completely honest i’m commercially minded I want lots of people to, to, to buy my books and I want to make a living out of this.

so you have to do what you can to, to sort of help that along. so it is great when we get to talk to readers, but it’s not, it’s, it doesn’t happen in real, in, in real, in real life. Very often, I don’t think.

[00:37:31] Theo Brun: It’s a bit like, it’s, it’s, the theme of Camelot coming back again of like, Oh, it was so good before, if only we could go back, if we could put the genie back in the bottle. But, alas, we can’t.

[00:37:47] Giles Kristian: Well, I loved the, one of the things I loved about the music industry was the adrenaline rush of performing, of being on stage, as sort of shy as I was and sort of how nervous I used to get. I still, once I was on stage, that, that rush, that feeling, the, the endorphins was absolutely amazing. And there aren’t many rushes in this line of work, I don’t think. There’s the day your book comes out, that’s amazing, but only sort of in your own head and you’re sort of my book’s out today. Yeah you’re ready for the trumpets to poke through the clouds and blow a fanfare, but nothing really happens. It’s

[00:38:23] Julia Kelly: isn’t it anticlimactic?

[00:38:25] Giles Kristian: It’s massively anticlimactic.

That’s why I always have a launch party, because at least I’m going to have a few drinks and celebrate my book coming out. So, so I make, I do whatever I can to make it a moment, because otherwise it’s just frustrating, because what happens is you go to a shop and you can’t find your book in there and you go, No!

[00:38:44] Julia Kelly: Or you have to wait for people to read it before they tell you that they like it.

[00:38:48] Giles Kristian: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s a bit quiet and I, I, I miss the, I miss the rush of that sort of performing side of, of, of the other, that other entertainment.

[00:38:58] Theo Brun: just on that. I know we can’t go on that much longer because I’m sure we could talk for another hour, but, you do have an interesting backstory and I, and I just need to touch on it. You just did. The music industry, you’re, you’re in this, what do you call it? A boy band, a pop, pop group?

[00:39:14] Giles Kristian: it, it was a boy band. There’s no getting away from it.

[00:39:15] Theo Brun: Back in the nineties called Upside Down, touring with, you know, people like Take That, the Spice Girls, you know, as you said, massive extrovert world transferring into this introvert world, but as it were, but at the same time, you know, a lot of people have described you in endorsements and blurbs and what have you, a modern day scald. And you think, you know, that’s like a Viking singer, storyteller, but literally you. You literally are, you know, your language, the way you write is very poetic and in a lot of ways, probably more, I’d say that’s a defining feature of your, of your writing.

You’ve obviously got this music backgrounds, and you’re a natural born storyteller and you sort of have this range, you know, I was looking at your website and seeing you. You know, this graphic novel, obviously you’re video gaming. Is there a lot going on in terms of just this creativity bubbling out of you?

It doesn’t really matter where it comes out. It’s just, you know, it’s important to allow that to grow and have its expression.

[00:40:23] Giles Kristian: Yeah, I get excited by new things and Well, there are two aspects to this I think one of them is I actually worry about the state of publishing and the future of readers because I look at young people. I’ve got a little boy. who’s 11 and he He watches on his ipad. He watches youtube videos. He doesn’t you know, we’ve got netflix and amazon prime and and paramount plus and all the all these Where you can just go and find all these TV shows which is on films and movies That’s what I’d be doing, but he just watches like these little clips on YouTube like just clip after clip after clip the sort of never ending scroll of random and quite odd videos and and that seems to be kind of Where it’s going and with young people’s attention span, and I, I fear I look at sort of young kids and this isn’t about all young young people today.

But I just think that we’re encouraging that we’re kind of raising a generation of people who won’t have any form of attention span, and I cannot imagine many of them actually sitting down to read a novel. I just can’t and So I fear that in the future, I can’t see who’s going to be reading. novels, out of, out of this, this new generation.

I just don’t, I can’t imagine it. so, so part of my scheme is to diversify and to do other things. So hence the gaming and doing, you know, I, because I just don’t think that you can put all your eggs in the writing basket at the moment. When you see the Booker prize winner talking about, you know, struggling to pay his mortgage and stuff like that.

And you think it’s hard, it’s, it’s hard to make a living. And if you can diversify and look at other avenues, because the world needs stories in, in different forms, and, and we are storytellers. So let’s not just narrow the focus and only, you know, if we’re capable or if there are opportunities to explore other ways of being creative, whether that’s writing films, trying, trying to hand up film scripts or, or video gaming or, you know, Graphic novels or whatever it is, you can get that same sort of kick out of creating in other areas and also things that don’t take a year and a half like a novel does, you know, something you can actually start.

And see the end of is, is also appealing, which is another reason why I loved writing the thriller because it’s, I didn’t even know this before I started writing the thriller. I was like, how, how long a thriller is supposed to be? And I looked into it and said about sort of between 80 and 90, 000 words.

And I thought, what? That’s hard. That’s only half a book.

I loved, I just loved that idea that I could actually sit down and, and, and start writing and think, Oh, I can almost see the end of this project already. Whereas my other novels are just every day you sit down to write, it’s just a drop in the ocean.

Just one more drop in the ocean, and you never seem to be getting anywhere. And I see that little word count, progress bar kind of. edging up so slowly it’s almost impossible to see. so shorter form, projects and creative, endeavors can be really, really rewarding, while you’re waiting for the novel to sort of cook. Yeah.

[00:43:54] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Well, before we let you go, where can people find you online so they can follow all these different things that you’ve diversified into? And then of course, also find your books as well.

[00:44:05] Giles Kristian: well, my website is gileskristian.com and I’m on Instagram at gileskristian and x @gileskristian and that’s basically gileskristian with a k. As long as you put the Kristian with a k, you should find me.

[00:44:18] Theo Brun: That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Giles. It’s been such fun to see you. I’m going to see you in person soon.

[00:44:24] Giles Kristian: We could have gone on for an hour or more. Yeah, I’m going to see you soon. We’re going to go drinking with some vikings aren’t we?

[00:44:27] Theo Brun: I know, we are. It’s, it’s, yeah, the, one of the few perks of having a very populated marketplace is like you get lots of friends of other Viking authors. So, we’re going to meet up for Christmas, or Yuletide, as we’re calling it. so I’ll see you then, but thank you so much for spending time with us.

here on the History Quill podcast. It’s been really, really insightful, fun, and just great to hear you unpack some of these ideas and what your experience.

[00:44:56] Giles Kristian: Thank you, Theo. And thank you, Julia. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you.

[00:45:00] Julia Kelly: Thanks. Well, that was an absolutely fantastic conversation and I can’t wait to dive into it, with you, Theo. There’s so much to talk about there, but first, I think you’re going to, you’re going to tell us about something that we all need to know.

[00:45:20] Theo Brun: Indeed, yes, before we dive in, I just want to let all you, listeners know about a special bonus episode of the History Quill podcast available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode’s about how to succeed  in historical fiction, and we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors, Jill Paul and David Penny, who share with us the ingredients of their success and how you can succeed in the genre as well.

To get the bonus episode, go to www.thehistoryquill.com/bonus find the link in the description or just enter it into your browser.

[00:45:57] Julia Kelly: Yes, there is a lot of really great advice and insight in that bonus episode. We had a lot of fun recording it. So if you are a historical fiction writer, you won’t want to miss it. Okay. Back to this episode. Where should we, where should we start? There is so much to talk about. And I feel like I say that every single time, but I really enjoyed this conversation because I felt like it was so wide ranging.

[00:46:20] Theo Brun: Yeah, I mean, it’s probably quite topical. It was epic, wasn’t it? But it’s interesting. He, he, he sort of, he sort of shied away from wanting to sort of label his own work with that. But I suppose maybe it feels like a high bar or something. I don’t know, but, but his work definitely does meet that standard.

It does have that, that feeling to it. But I, I liked. What he was saying that it always starts small, you know, even if it ends up being this kind of grandiose story or involving grandiose events, it starts just with a character and like with an emotional, like with an incident between two people, and it grows from there.

And I suppose that’s a good. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s always this wrestle of, like, the far, the extremity of your goal and the reality of how on earth do you get there? And often it can be quite daunting, I feel, thinking, oh, now the next novel, what’s it going to be? How am I going to do it? And, but if you just, You know, have a sense of a shape of it, maybe, but then you just start out in this smaller scale, then there’s some, there’s something there that I think is of value.

I think.

[00:47:30] Julia Kelly: I really, really liked what he said about sort of taking these big moments in history or these big stories and making them very intimate, focusing on a character or a group of characters, because I think, at least my experience with writing World War Two has very much been. Getting your arms around this huge subject, which people have written about since even before the war ended, and trying to figure out how to make that into a story that feels relevant to people who are reading it today, who didn’t go through that experience.

That can be really, really daunting, but if you focus down on character and, and understand who it is that you’re trying to write about and what you’re trying to say about them or what you’re trying to put them through, I think that really helps. Focus the story, at least it does for me, and it also helps remind me that really, ultimately, novels, that I really enjoy, often it’s because of those characters who are really central to what’s happening, and you have this very intimate relationship with the character as a reader as well.

[00:48:36] Theo Brun: yeah, I think it’s, it’s got to be relatable, doesn’t it? And you’re, the world that you’re writing in is, is so sort of, I mean, it’s the world war. So it, it could be, it couldn’t really be any bigger and it couldn’t, the stakes couldn’t be higher. in a, in a kind of storytelling sense, but at the same time, you know, You’ve got to sort of thread that needle of one life or a couple of lives that are kind of making their way through these, these great events, but he does that beautifully, I think.

But I think it’s, maybe it’s his experience of his past career as a musician, but not only a singer, you know, performer, he was also writing songs as I understand it as well. And so it’s that sense of, You know, this freedom that he feels of just expressing his creativity, I thought was, was really helpful.

And obviously he doesn’t feel limited by just sort of pigeonholing himself as a writer. He’s, he’s, he’s been in these different sort of creative places and therefore, In a way, his landscape is a bit broader. It felt like quite broad, the way he was talking about, you know, what he does with his imagination, as it were, and where he’s prepared to take it.

And I think there’s possibly a lesson there, you know, whether you, you may be a terrible, you know, artist or photographer or, or love dancing, but not very good at it. You know, there’s always something about, Just giving vent to our creativity that I think will feed back into the stories that we want to tell as well.

I don’t know if you, I mean, you do gardening, don’t you? Is that, is that one of your things?

[00:50:22] Julia Kelly: it is. Although not as much in this, in this flat that I’m in right now because we only have a tiny, tiny little back patio, but I have in the past and I do love it and I love having a creative outlet. I think there’s often a compulsion with creative people to, um. comes out in other forms. So I also knit and I, I used to be a, a swing and blues dancer.

[00:50:47] Theo Brun: Really? That’s so cool. I would love to do that.

[00:50:50] Julia Kelly: that, Oh, it was, it was so much fun. And you know what I really loved about it? so I, I don’t dance as much as I did, when I was living in New York, which funnily enough coincides with me, Starting to publish more and more. Turns out that if you write, it takes up a lot of time and a lot of focus, but I loved it when I was first starting out because I would spend all my day at my my day job as a journalist, and then I would spend all this time after work or on the weekends writing and.

And dancing was such a wonderful way to sort of have something, creative, be something physical also. So whether it’s sort of cooking or gardening or doing something different, sometimes that can be really helpful. And ironically, I’m going to try to loop this all background again. great dancers are great storytellers as well.

It’s just in a different form. So I loved what he was talking about, around. Gaming and telling story that way and through his, you know, experience in the music industry. I thought that was a really interesting take on, on what it means to be a writer and a storyteller.

[00:51:59] Theo Brun: Yeah, and I think it was relevant in terms of from a commercial sense as well, you know, a little bit sobering his, his, what he was saying about his daughter and the attention span and it’s not just. children either, is it? It’s, it’s adults as well that, you know, as a novelist, you’re competing on a multi plane, sort of multimedia, plane, aren’t you?

In terms of basically, what do you, how are you going to hold someone’s interest? And the world is not the same as it was, you know, there’s much more on offer than mere, a big wad of pages. and so, Yeah. What can we do within ourselves? Like, you know, you, you start with a blank page as a novelist, don’t you?

And so, in a way, you kind of get used to the idea of bringing something out of nothing and trying and failing and failing again, and maybe failing another time. Do you know what I mean? And yet. You sort of, there is some direction of travel and maybe that’s an encouraging thing, ultimately, that if you have this ability to concentrate and to tell stories that actually that can come out in so many different ways.

And in a way, it makes that relationship with our ever shifting audience and, you know, the fact the way that they’re evolving and they’re changing, maybe as it creates opportunity as well as. Problems for us. And you know, it’s up to us to, to try and think around that and respond to it, I suppose.

[00:53:30] Julia Kelly: I think it just, is a reminder that, you know, there’s a lot of joy and a lot of wonder in being a writer. Um. But there are also some commercial considerations and some business considerations. If what you want to do is to be published and to have that be. Part of your income or supplement your income or be in your entire income.

But I think, you know, I, I really enjoyed him talking about his Viking books and how, you know, there was a lot of joy there and, and, you know, a lot of fun. And you mentioned that, you know, there’s a lot of fun in those books, very swashbuckling and, you know, writing can serve a lot of different purposes and can, can fill a lot of different emotional needs for the writer, but for the reader as well.

And, and I think, I hope that when people listen to these episodes. they’re, they’re remembering that everybody is approaching this in their own way. Everybody is, wants different things out of their publishing journey. if they even do want to be published. There, there are some people where the satisfaction of having written and having written a book and completed a book is, is the goal.

And trust me, finishing the first book is such a huge milestone and such a huge moment and, and should be celebrated.

[00:54:45] Theo Brun: Yeah. Can you, I can remember the moment of finishing my first book. Can you remember yours? But was it, was it, was there a promise of, of, of like the industry already or was it just purely for you at that point,

[00:54:57] Julia Kelly: So I, I had been, I started writing my first book in graduate school because I thought I was going to go out of my mind if I did any more work on my master’s thesis. so I just started scribbling stuff down and, I worked on that book for maybe three, two, three years off and on, picking it up, putting it down.

And finally I decided I needed, if I was going to tell people, That I wanted to be a writer. In addition to being a journalist, I needed to actually like finish something. So, I do remember I was sitting at my tiny studio kitchen table in my tiny studio in New York, because that was the only place I had to work and it was probably a Saturday night because I decided if I’m going to do this, I’m going to spend the time and the time was, you know, nights and weekends and I finished it and I kind of pushed away from my computer. And I thought, well, that’s really exciting. I’ve never done that before. And it was terrible. I absolutely needed heavy editing, but it was done. And that was really, really thrilling. Do you have a, do you remember where, where you?

[00:56:01] Theo Brun: I do, I was actually sitting exactly where I am now. So I’m in a, in a, a little cottage on, my, my family come from Norfolk, which is the east of England, so I’m up here. I’m visiting in this little cottage I used when I was about in my bachelor days. So this was about 11 years ago, I think. again, this idea that just basically grew and grew and eventually sort of got to the end and it was about March time of whatever year it was.

And it was actually quite a warm evening and I basically put aside the cigar and I had a bottle of champagne and I went out. I think I was literally in. Underpants and trainers and a shirt and I just it was it was warm enough because it was it was supposed to be a little bit ridiculous and you know had my cigar and my bottle of champagne and I literally ran.

I think I had it was listening to music as well. We’re basically running up and down and this beautiful full moon. Pouring out on the landscape, quite warm and just howling at the moon. So, so that was like quite, what’s the word, cathartic, you know, and I don’t think any, I’ve probably not had any moment in my entire writing career that was as fun as that since.

But anyway, it was, it was, it was. Memorable.

[00:57:16] Julia Kelly: Oh, wonderful. Well, I feel like I should have had champagne with me, but I think I was so broke at that time. It was not going to happen. So.

[00:57:22] Theo Brun: Yeah, maybe it was, maybe it was Cava. Who knows? Anyway, it all got drunk, which I don’t think I’ve ever drunk a bottle of anything fizzy or bubbly just entirely on my own out of the bottle. That was a bit extravagant, man.

[00:57:36] Julia Kelly: No, I love it. I think you should celebrate things. And I, I liked what Giles said about sort of throwing himself a launch party because, you know, why wouldn’t you, you should celebrate things. And, and I think little milestones, big milestones, you know, all of that.

[00:57:51] Theo Brun: Yeah. And I know Giles, I think, does carry that with him. Like, I think he’s got a levity to him, which, which definitely comes through in some of the humor in his books as well. But also he, he just feels like quite a buoyant, character to observe as well in, in himself. And, and, you know, I think that’s, it’s, it’s nice to have, friends in the industry like that, who, who kind of make you see that there’s some fun to be had here as well as.

you know, all the struggles that one personally endures.

[00:58:26] Julia Kelly: No, there’s, I mean, I know we talked about it a little bit in the Sid Young episode about, you know, writing community and, and critique groups and all of that. But I think there’s nothing quite like another author who understands what you have just gone through and understands a bit about the, the world of writing, to, to celebrate those moments with you.

So, when you can find them, you, you hold them close to you. I just had, my, my five very close writing friends who, um. I’ve been with since long before I was published, all of them were at my wedding. those that had, have husbands, the husbands were there and there was something really special about having that moment and that celebration with all of them, knowing that we have this history together and we’ve seen each other go through all these different aspects of our career and try different things and, you know, successes and struggles.

[00:59:17] Theo Brun: Well, we’re going to have quite a collection of conversations in which we’ve gone through our, our struggles, you and I together By the end of, by the end of last season and this next season, but yeah, it is a joy to, to, you know, meet with these other authors, talk to you about their experience, our experience. so I hope that, yeah, onwards to the next episode.

[00:59:44] Julia Kelly: Absolutely. Well, thanks again to our wonderful guest, Giles Kristian. I really, really enjoyed that conversation and I think Theo is fully agreeing with me on that. That concludes our episode of the History Quill Podcast. Before we go, I want to remind you to head over to the historyquill.com /bonus to get our bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction, featuring our guest authors Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening for any historical fiction writer. So make sure you check it out. You can find the link to the episode in the description or enter it into your browser.

[01:00:21] Theo Brun: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure you like, subscribe, and leave us a comment or review. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next time.