An artist
'Segovia' — one of my paintings.
A little about me
I began by training as an artist, then a lawyer, and for several years worked for Ashursts, one of the leading firms of commercial solicitors in the City of London.
After starting a family I took the opportunity to devote more time to my creative interests and travelling.
Here I am with my youngest son
How the book began
Journeys in South and Central America led to the inception of ideas for a book set at the time when the New World was still little known to Europeans and when England barely featured as a player on the global stage.
Cerro Rico
Potosí
Before oil made nations rich…
Over four hundred years ago, when Spain was a superpower determined to uphold Catholicism throughout the world, her wealth derived largely from gold mined in Mexico and silver from Peru.
In modern-day Bolivia I saw the mountain that was a principal source of those riches in silver – Cerro Rico – the 'Rich Mountain' of Potosí, once both the highest and most prosperous city in the world, now almost dead and entombed in dust.
From Cerro Rico the silver was mined and then transported over mountains and by sea, eventually arriving in Panamá on the Pacific coast for carriage by mule train across the isthmus to Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean. This was the 'silver train' that Drake attacked in his first great enterprise. The success of the raid was to lay the seeds for the growth of England as a naval power, and change the balance of world domination forever. A wonderfully exciting story in itself…
Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen - a woman we all know about!
But what if a woman had been there?
Read the history books and it might be supposed that below the ranks of royalty and the nobility, women took no active part in events of any significance. They were invisible. Yet they must have existed, and they must have been influential, then, just as now.
When I first contemplated the idea of including a woman in a novel based on Drake's early exploits, I thought it was too improbable to be viable. But after putting aside initial scepticism, it soon became apparent that this scenario was by no means beyond the bounds of possibility - and pushing the envelope of possibility is what I like to do.
Women did travel to the New World; merchants sometimes took their families on long voyages - the idea of including a woman in a journey to the Indies was certainly plausible.
A European man and woman in Peru from The Chronicles of Guaman Poma, an indigenous noble, written between 1600 and 1615
What if a woman had sailed with a merchant on one of Drake's early voyages? She might not have been on the voyage that Drake made leading to the attack on the silver train, but perhaps on one of those earlier voyages that are little documented…
…and here I am with my son and daughter
Why include a woman?
I want to write the sort of historical novels that I like to read - intelligent adventures, involving both romance and action, that provide a passage to another time and another place - stories that are exciting and engaging, amusing and poignant, and, most importantly, that are peopled with characters with whom I can relate. So I want strong female characters as well as men in my stories, and I want to be in the thick of what's interesting and important. I don't aspire to be a queen or a duchess, but neither do I want to be confined to the bedroom and the hearth!
At the Costa…
Rana Dasgupta at the Costa with me and (from left to right) Claudia Boers, Margot Taylor, Jill Widner and Lane Ashfeldt of Pulp.Net
Developments...
On February 10th 2009, a scene from an early draft of To the Ends of the World was shortlisted for the Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition, being one of ten selected from 645 entries.
The adjudicator who made the final selection for the shortlist, and who awarded the overall prize, was Rana Dasgupta, author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, which has won praise from Salman Rushdie as a 'novel of exceptional and astonishing strangeness'.
On 9 March, at the Costa Cafe in Piccadilly, a book compiled from the ten shortlisted stories was launched: The Willesden Herald New Short Stories 3.
The book is now available from Amazon, as well as direct from the publishers in the US, or through bookstores around the world.
Love Writing by Sue Moorcroft
Love Writing
This wonderfully useful 'how to' book by Sue Moorcroft contains a wealth of good advice on the business of writing romantic fiction with a host of contributions from experts in the field - and there's even a little piece by me.
My involvement, in the section on promotion, arose through my work in co-ordinating the Verulam Writers' 'Get Writing' Conference for the second year running. The event has grown enormously since its inception four years ago, and now attracts writers from all over the country with speakers ranging from leading editors and literary agents to best-selling authors.
For more information on the Conference, and the activities of my excellent writers' circle, please visit The VWC website.
Love Writing is available through most bookstores and from Accent Press.
