Tag: Writing Research

Writing The Heirloom

Published on by Carol Jones

Story ideas are elusive. They usually sneak up on me, a little idea here, another there, until one day I have a number of characters, a gestational plot and some themes flitting about in my head.

In the case of The Heirloom, I began thinking I’d like to write a story about a ‘witch’ but not one set during a historical witch hunt, nor one steeped in big magic, more the everyday kind of historical wise woman who finds herself mired in trouble. The setting snuck up on me during research when I found that Sussex had a long history of ‘witchery’, but no one had ever been executed for it. The fact that some of my distant ancestors hailed from there added to the allure. And somehow a little family secret about one ancestor marrying her deceased husband’s nephew inspired another story thread.

A week driving about East and West Sussex researching the locations, architecture and countryside provided plenty of research material once I returned home to Australia. I pored over maps and photographs I had taken, especially those from a visit to the Weald and Downland Living Museum near Chichester. This reconstructed village helped me picture the cottage where my main character, Philadelphia grew up, and the garden she and her mother Susanna tended.

For the Queensland settings, I lived in Brisbane as a child and have spent many holidays there since. The Brisbane River is a powerful presence throughout the city, winding through its suburbs. And the architecture is quite different to other Australian capitals. The landscape of the granite belt in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales where parts of the story are set is rugged and would have been quite forbidding for those first Europeans who came that way.

As well as her sideline as a wise woman, I gave Philadelphia a more respectable trade as a milliner. Two hundred years ago, clothing was handmade and hats were obligatory. Many women worked in this field, including several generations of my ancestors. And one of the joys of writing historical fiction is researching my characters’ wardrobes!

Paperback available through online retailers or order at your local bookstore. Order ebook or audiobook at the link below

https://geni.us/theheirloom

Work in Progress

Published on by Carol Jones

It doesn’t have a title yet. Or a contract. But here’s a taste from the middle of the story (I don’t want to give too much away!) A dual-time story set in East Sussex in 1821 and Brisbane in 2024.

The gravestones loomed like grey shadows in the moonlight as she set out down the terraced slope. Some of the stones were ancient, etched with lichen, faded memorials remembering only nameless ghosts. Others belonged to people she had once known: women who had perished in childbirth; babies taken by the cholera; old men dead of apoplexy. And one, the earth only newly grown over, belonged to a lad not much older than her — dead after stepping on a rusty nail while shovelling manure in his master’s stable. They had brought him to her mother when the surgeon could not be found, but by then he was wracked with convulsions and the poultice of dried puffball she applied was too late to save him. Philadelphia had stood at her mother’s elbow ready to fetch whatever was needed, but no one could fetch a miracle.

It was to poor John Cooper’s grave she headed. It rested halfway down the slope; a cherry sapling sheltering it to one side while his infant sister’s grave lay to the other. Reaching it, she halted several yards distant and paused to remember the living boy and summon her courage. He’d had brown eyes with a crescent shaped scar hooking the corner of one eye. Right or left, she could not recall. But she remembered the way his thick brown hair flopped over his forehead and how he would flick it away with the back of his hand. He had given her an apple once, too perfect for any horses, so he said. She hoped that he rested in peace and would understand her intent.

Writing Historical Fiction

Published on by Carol Jones

People often ask how authors motivate themselves when working so much alone, particularly if they have no looming deadline. As a writer of historical fiction, one of my tactics is to read myself into motivation. In the early stages of a new book idea I don’t have the impetus of lots of words already written to get me going, so I turn to other authors’ words (usually nonfiction) to inspire my creativity. Prod it along, so to speak. Inevitably an idea strikes. In other words, for me reading = writing.

For me, reading = writing

Here is a stack of books I turned to when writing my latest novel The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay. Perhaps the titles will give you a few clues as to its setting. If you sense that the book covers quite a bit of territory, you’d be right. Set in the early twentieth century, it moves from a grand country house in Devon, England, to a homestead in rural Australia. Life in the English Country House and Historic Homesteads are both excellent pictorial references that helped me envisage these settings. And Servants was an excellent resource to understand the relationship between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ at that time.

Along the way, the characters travel by ship through the Suez Canal, sailing via Colombo, Sri Lanka, before reaching Australia. Two Happy Years in Ceylon is a reprinted travelogue from the late nineteenth-century, and a treasure trove of description about Sri Lanka at that time from an English traveller’s perspective.

And although the novel isn’t set on the battlefields of World War One, the characters’ lives are impacted by these events. Hence, Vera Brittain’s must-read Testament of Youth, Juliet Nicholson’s The Great Silence and several wonderful and moving collections of letters and diaries by Australian soldiers, which helped give an authentic voice to some of the passages in the novel.

There were many more books, of course, plus a myriad of online sources. But these were a few that really helped me through some rough patches in the writing process.

Road Trip Two

Published on by Carol Jones

Strange encounters of the feathered kind…

In a previous post I alluded to the feral goats I encountered on a road trip to North Devon, while researching my novel The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay. A further trip to south west Victoria, a region I have visited often in the past, brought a strange encounter with a very large, feathered opportunist.

As parts of the novel are set on a farming property in this volcanic region I wanted to refresh my memory of the countryside. The volcanic soils make it perfect for farming and it is famed for its wool, dairy and wheat. The old cones of dormant volcanoes speckle the rich farmlands, many of them with lake-filled craters. For example, Lake Purrumbete, near Camperdown, is one of the world’s largest crater lakes at 2.8 kilometres across.

The basalt rocks that once spewed from these volcanoes are ubiquitous as building materials throughout the area. Dry stone fences, woolsheds and homesteads are all constructed of this dark blue/grey stone, including the fictional homestead ‘Wuurnong’ of my novel. As a young woman I lived for a year on a 5000-acre sheep and wheat property in this region and I remember its magnificent bluestone woolshed. I think I was more impressed by the woolshed than the grand bluestone homestead.

The dogs escorted Brian and Molly across the paddocks to inspect the bluestone woolshed in all its utilitarian grandeur, barking at a couple of wood ducks on the dam

The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay

Anyway, a refresher trip was called for and a pitstop on that journey was one of my favourite picnic and walking spots near Warrnambool — Tower Hill. Tower Hill Wildlife Reserve sits in a volcanic crater at the heart of a cone shaped hill, partly filled by a lake. It is part of the Aboriginal cultural landscape and visitors can join a walk through the reserve with a guide from the local Worn Gundidj people. Another interesting fact about Tower Hill is that the land was degraded by pastoral activities but in the 1960s volunteer groups began replanting the crater using a 1855 painting by colonial painter Eugene von Gerard as a guide.

Looking at the Tower Hill crater from the rim of the cone

Tower Hill is renowned for its wildlife, with 150 species of birds, grey kangaroos, koalas and… emus. I had encountered the emus of Tower Hill before. One tried to steal an ice cream from my son on a previous trip. (At a winery picnic an emu stole one of those hard umbrella-shaped lollies on a stick from a friend’s child and we watched in horror the lollie’s progress down that poor emu’s very, very long neck).

This time my husband and I looked on fascinated as the emu in the photograph strode over to a tradie taking time out to eat lunch in his ute with the window open. As the emu approached, the sensible man quickly closed his window. Then we all watched in amusement as it knocked on the window with its beak for about a minute before walking away in disgust when the man refused to wind down the window and offer it his sandwich.

The rangers ask that you don’t feed the animals. But I think they forgot to tell the emus.

Nan’s Cottage

Published on by Carol Jones

When I decided to set the first chapter of The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay in a Victorian coastal town, Port Fairy came to mind immediately. It’s a popular holiday town but also one of the oldest European settlements in Victoria. On the banks of the Moyne River, adjacent to a small historic island that is home to a colony of shearwaters and with a great surf beach, Port Fairy has plenty of atmosphere. It’s also a fishing port and its streets are lined with early colonial architecture.

She listened to the water lapping at the pylons and fancied it beckoning softly to all those who would venture out into unknown seas.

The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay

The Secrets of Bridgewater Bay is a dual-time novel and my contemporary protagonist’s family hail from this region of Australia. I decided I needed to find her grandmother a suitable house in Port Fairy. The house where she discovers that first clue to the disappearance of her great-grandmother Rose.

There are numerous simple stone cottages in Port Fairy, mostly built in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many are built from the local basalt, a volcanic rock found throughout the area. South-west Victoria is pockmarked with 400 volcanoes, now long dormant, but they have left behind craters filled with lakes. More of that in another post.

For the moment, imagine my character Molly sifting through the contents of her dead grandmother’s home and wandering along the boardwalk by the river, haunted by the ghosts of her own past.

The boardwalk along the Moyne River, Port Fairy