Standing on my Shoulders

In 2014 about this time of year I fell ill with a mysterious virus. For while it was touch and go. I was told to lie in bed and not move, as I started my recovery.

I had bad days, very bad days, and days when I could just about manage.

It was at this time I wrote my first history book. The Women of the English Civil War. During my travels with the Sealed Knot re-enactment society, over the previous fifteen years, I had gathered information and researched the lives of the women of the 17th Century.  As I thought my time was coming to a close, and was told I must not get out of bed, I'd use the time to write the book I always meant to get round to doing.

Obviously I'm still here. Despite the last two years of recurring illness, I'm making headway again. This is me on the right last week. Happy, being a lady who lunches with my friend.

My book is still selling well, in fact I have written quite a few books now, some for fun, some were requested, some for competitions. 

My 'The Women of the English Civil War' has been used in research for PHD study, for dissertations, parts of it copied and sold on by people who thought I wouldn't find out.
A Guardian article a couple of days ago, The BBC History Magazine, a few months ago.

Now books are being written and sold, on various ladies, from my Women of the English Civil War using my research. Is it serendipity? Is it the Zeitgheist?  Or is it that History is the same story told again and again?

Now I might have believed any of the above, if I hadn't actually spoken to the relatives of the women in my book, from whom I got my information. If I hadn't found information hidden for years in the Ashmolean where I worked, doing research on the exhibits, as part of my job.

At the time (2014) there was hardly any recognition of the contribution that women made during the English Civil Wars, which was why I'd written my book. So,I self published on Amazon. Later I started Nuova Stella Publishing with my husband Andrew to promote my books and other rising new stars.

An agent told me recently that there was no call for women's history fictional or otherwise. The market was dropping. The following week The Witchfinders Sister, and the Apothecaries Daughter appeared and they went down a storm. One of them being a Richard and Judy's Bookclub of the week winner.

The book I have just finished is called "A Farthing for Oxford". It is about one woman's life during the English Civil War and the ensuing Protectorate. It has been written and re-written until it was perfect, and should be out on Amazon soon in book form.

This woman is not an appendage to a man. She is her own woman, as far as she is allowed to be, by the time she lives in.

Anne Farthing my central character is affected by a mixture of events in her life, that had actually happened to many of the women that I researched for Women of the English Civil War. An agent told me it was too realistic and people didn't want to know about everyday life in the 17th Century. It was too much like a history book.

So I concentrated on the story and took out the irrelevant historical facts (rewrite 3 & 4).

I stood on no-one's shoulders to give me an up with my recent book. 

I copied nothing, I researched everything. I lived it in part, as a re-enactor for the past 20 years. I used 17thC diaries of various women, waded through outrageous spellings and hundreds of pages of what women thought was important to them at that time.

Most of my books have 4 or 5 star reviews.

None of my books are zombie books, all of them sell. So I hope Farthing will not only sell,
but be the first of my books to be reviewed by a newspaper, and BBC History Magazine, with whom I have a love hate relationship. Love the fact they use my work. Hate they put another person's name on it.