I just gave my first in-person author’s talk after a two-year hiatus and it was a delight to be talking with readers and other writers again. I spoke about my current work on a medieval murder mystery featuring a female troubadour protagonist. Thanks to Parisot LibraryLit for organising the event. More talks coming up in…
Category: Writing
World Book Day 2022
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Planning a Novel 3: Sleuths Galore
I’ve been looking at other novelists’ sleuths – medieval or otherwise – as part of my current work on a series of medieval murder mysteries. The novel I am writing features a Catalan female troubadour and is set in 11thcentury Toulouse. Other sleuths I’ve been studying include Ellis Peter’s Cadfael, Donna Leon’s Brunetti, Lee Child’s…
Planning a Novel 2: Envisaging Characters
In planning my latest novel, I’m now moving on to envisaging characters. I’ve created a ‘character book’, with a page on each of them visualising what they look like, their back stories, their motivations. Some of my characters are real historical people where there is information known about at least the basic events of their…
Planning a Novel 1: Mapping and Settings
Novel planning in progress. I don’t have a lot of study wall space but what there is is starting to fill up! Above – locations and maps for the key settings and journey from medieval Toulouse, to Pallars Sobira in the Pyrenees, and the Iberian kingdom of Aragon. Moving upwards images are San Sernin in…
Reading and Writing
Last week, reading Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree to my two grandsons, age five and two weeks, made me realise why I write fiction myself. My five-year-old grandson has just started reading. It is so exciting to see him doing that after literally five years of his mum and me reading him three stories every night…
Writing a medieval murder mystery
I am on Day 7, at the end of week 1 of the NanoWriMo challenge to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. See my earlier post on starting the challenge and a second post on my writing playlist. If I were going to write the same number of words on each of…
Medieval novel playlist
I’m currently undertaking NanoWriMo November – aiming to write 50,000 words of my new novel about a female troubadour (or trobairitz). NanoWriMo asked for a playlist for my novel so here it is: The working title for my novel, A Morsel of Love’s Bread, is taken from a line in the troubadour poem, ‘Ab la dolchor…
Joining NanoWriMo November
Since I’ve had a writer’s block for over a year, I decided to sign up to NanoWriMo November and see if this could help kick me into a place with a substantial new novel draft to work with. National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel…
Rambling vine
I am a guest on Alison Morton’s writing blog today, talking about how living in France inspires and affects my writing. ‘I fell in love with the pace of village life, which gives me focus to write.’ ‘My writing is inspired by material culture—objects in museums, archaeology, illustrated manuscripts—and by sensory experiences of places.’ ‘I…
Tracey Warr Writing 