Buy the audio book of Troublesome Disguises- the First Francis Vallemont novel here- it's a whodunnit and is set in London and the Royal Court of Richmond, at Christmas, 1588/89. The ideal Christmas present. Written and read by the author. Remember though: it is me reading it and it is my first attempt and I'm not a professional reader- hence, the incredibly cheap price for a nearly 11 hour audio performance! Listen to a 50 minute chunk first- here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VYCUDHVM

Well, TDOTD's going reasonably well. So I've been tweeting a bit at night, after a long day's writing. Now,  feel I should keep up the blog. Going online and seeing how hard all those creative people work at marketing their work, is an inspiration to me. Marketing is not easy and for writers, who like me just want to write, it's a bother, I think. But I see now that it has to be done. (But not by me...signing off...will post new work here. Just need to write and read. It'll sell in the end.)

London? The greatest city in the world! (I know, you thought yours was!!) I used to work there years ago, when I was in my teens- it's a truly great city. And that is why I've placed my hero, Francis Vallemont, there. I know that City well- I worked there for nearly four years and, of course, have lived there on a few other occasions over the years, working and playing, though briefly. You should go there. It is drenched in history and can be very romantic- every bit as much as Paris! With the parks and the little back streets, and wealth and poverty- all life is there. And it's a very young city, by which I mean, many young people work there- they go there to get a start in life, a start that their hometown wouldn't be able to offer them. Just as Americans go to New York or LA, I suppose, or provincial French people go to Paris. Of course, I now know much more about London's history than I did when I lived there. I can appreciate the place more. We have good maps of the place from Elizabethan times, and some excellent primary sources (that's first hand or eyewitness accounts), so it is possible to reconstruct it in the mind- well enough, I believe, to set a novel back there, and make your characters live and breathe. That's what I'm trying to do- but I'm using the whodunnit form to keep me disciplined otherwise, I might get a bit literary and writerly, and start to think spouting my thoughts is somehow clever. Constructing well plotted and charactered stories is my aim- I'm not one of those novel writers who thinks he's a poet! I am writing about what I know. My character is from the Westcountry (like me) and has come to London in his youth (as I did), but Vallemont is having much, much more success with the ladies than I ever did!