Ahem. nodbear and I have a wee announcement. Despite the fact that we are really just a pair of disreputable fangirls, astonishingly, we have been commissioned to write a book about the young gentlemen of HMS Indefatigable. Following our presentation at the New Researchers in Maritime History conference earlier this year, we were approached by the ( Read more... )

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Earlier this week I spent three days doing a book sprint with a some of my work colleagues. A book sprint is basically a short facilitated writing retreat that aims to produce a book from scratch in five intensive days. However we only had half that time and to add to the challenge one of our team was called away on jury service :} As it was, ( Read more... )

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This is a rather long summary of the talk Dr Stuart Allen gave last weekend in Edinburgh on the influence of Admiral Thomas Cochrane on naval adventure fiction. I've been trying to upload pictures to go with this post all weekend but the pesky hackers have crippled LJs scrapbook again. I do wish they'd bugger off. Annywaaay ( Read more... )

Dear mylodon,

350 words of Red Devil pls.

Kthxbai
anteros_lmc
x

PS 50 words knocked off for awful fluffed first penalty.

PPS Hope your nerves have recovered from this morning's performance.

I was having a quick look over my Hornblower Remix draft this morning while having coffee. Daughter, who was wanting a shot of the laptop to play princess games, was peering over my shoulder and wanted to know what I was reading. I told her it was a story about sailors and she asked me to read it to her. So I chose a couple of reasonably ( Read more... )

I'm a day late with this but never mind. Allow me to pimp the Speak Its Name Advent Calendar. A whole host of writers, some of whom might be rather familiar, will be posting a blog entry every day between now and Christmas. I have also been reliably informed that there will be prizes. If you hop over there right now you'll find a post by the ( Read more... )

This week sees the centenary of the birth of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, 14th November 1910 to 23 January 1996. This poem is a perfect illustration of his lyric style; spare, vivid and evocative. And I don't think I need to explain the image this poem evokes for me.

~ Small Boy ~He picked up a pebble ( Read more... )

Several weeks ago, in a comment on her fic Following a Head Injury eglantine_br asked:

Did they used "fucking" as an all purpose word as we do, as in "I'm really fucked now?" Could it be that the ship would fuck you over -- or was it only literal back then?I'm not a linguist and I'm not even a "proper" historian, but I am an archaeologist so I've done a ( Read more... )