Susanna here. Eight years ago, when I was writing The Firebird, I did something I’d never done in a novel before. One of my readers, Lee Ann Ray, had written to me asking whether Robbie McMorran—an eight year old boy in The Shadowy Horses—would ever get his own story. At the time, I’d thought to myself, “But he’s only eight (or, as he would have corrected me, eight and three quarters)—too young for a book of his own.” Then I realized that he had been eight and three quarters way back when I’d written that book in the mid-1990s, which... Continue reading

Susanna here, and in the spirit of the season I’ve been thinking about tales of haunted houses—and not only as a reader, but a writer. I’ve been thinking of the stories—what it is that makes one work for me, and when I first began to fall in love with them I’m fairly certain it was Edward Mulhare’s fault. I loved the television series of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-1970) and spent countless childhood hours glued to his performance of the grumbling, charming, ghostly Victorian sea captain forced to share his home with a modern-day widow and her children. I’m... Continue reading

Susanna here. I’m in a different time zone this weekend, on the west coast of Canada at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference—the highlight of my writing year. This has been a busy day—I’ve moderated a panel session on world building, taught another on mining your own life for story ideas, coached some other writers through blue pencil sessions, and am now having a short break before tonight’s dinner and this evening’s “Shock Theatre” radio-play-style entertainment, in which I’ve been given a speaking part. This will, then, of necessity, be a shorter post. But I’ve been thinking of something all day,... Continue reading

Susanna here, with a post from the road—I’m currently in Scotland doing research for the new novel, The Vanished Days (a sort-of-prequel to The Winter Sea) and since my much-beloved Microsoft Surface laptop/tablet thingy, which fits so perfectly into my handbag for traveling, is old and cranky and had updated itself one too many times and no longer connects to the Internet, I’m forced to rely on my iPhone to compose this post, so apologies in advance for any irregularities. I was going to try to give you a proper travelogue post with a look at a few of the... Continue reading

Susanna here, considering it more than a little ironic that I should find myself in charge of this month’s What-We’re-Reading post, since having been caught in the whirl of activity that accompanies seeing one child off to university (in Europe, since my children never do things by halves) whilst fighting the lure of the ever-present Research Rabbit Holes that keep opening up for my current novel, and trying to pack for a Very Rapidly Approaching trip to Scotland, I’ve had no time for reading anything you’d want to hear about. Fortunately, my fellow Wenches have plenty of suggestions for your... Continue reading

Susanna here. My elder son is moving in a few days, and that has me grateful that he lives in modern times, when he can freely move across an ocean to another country without having to navigate the complex social etiquette involved in introductions that our ancestors were bound by. In another age, we’d have been busily rounding up letters of introduction he could carry over with him. I’ve come across countless examples of these in my years of doing research for my novels, including including the one Admiral Thomas Gordon wrote in March, 1724 to General Dillon at Paris... Continue reading