point of divergence | Alison Morton Author

Judging for Words With Jam

STOP PRESS: Winners announced!

The quality was impressive; it caused much sweating of the brow and drinking of tea. Congratulations to the three winners, but also to all those on the long and short lists. http://www.wordswithjam.co.uk/2017/07/first-page-competition-2017-winners.html ——————

A few weeks ago, I was delighted (and rather flattered) to be asked to judge the Words […]

Site-splitting

So, split the atom time. Well, as I’ve created two blogs out of one, it’s more a case of splitting the byte.

Being an author today means developing entrepreneurial skills, especially marketing ones. I’m not talking about selling – although that’s ultra important – but about making people aware of your book’s, or books’, existence. […]

Historically logical or completely bonkers? The sliding scale of alternative history

Basically, alternate history is a type of speculative fiction where stories are set in a world where historical events have unfolded differently from the way they did in the real world. The event that changed history (point of divergence or PoD) must be in the past from when the story is set and have affected […]

Alternate history and the butterfly of doom

A butterfly in the Amazon jungle makes that little extra flutter of its wings and a few weeks later there’s a storm or even a hurricane in the Caribbean that wrecks cities. That’s a little crudely put, but this is the idea behind Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory. In reality, the butterfly’s flapping wing is just […]

Alternate history at the Historical Novel Society Conference 2012

That the HNS included a workshop on alternate/alternative history at the 2012 was a factor in my signing up to go. Christopher Cevasco (editor/publisher of the award-winning, but now sadly defunct, Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction), led it with verve and patience.

My earlier post on this blog on alternate history gives […]