Blog | Alison Morton Author

New year, new blog title!

What?

When I first started this blog on World Book Day not quite three years ago (4 March 2010) I had just signed my indentures as a mad newbie writer, so the title Write a Novel? I must be mad! was an appropriate one. While I will never give up learning – no human being, let alone no writer ever should – I feel that it’s time for refreshment. And we’re not talking about a cup of tea.

My first book, INCEPTIO, comes out on 1 March this year. I have survived the initial mad phase and am passing into the institutionalised one where I hope to produce novels on a reasonably regular basis. Perhaps I will never be released from this obsession of writing…

I write thrillers with a strong heroine. She gets into scrapes: treason, death threats, kidnappings, betrayals, let alone organised crime, and comes near to losing her life and her love several times in the course of the novels. She has a temper, but tends to let it out only when she thinks she’s being treated unfairly. But she matures and learns valuable, if not always palatable, lessons about herself.

But her biggest challenge is the world she lives in, mainly because she wasn’t born there. Roma Nova, lying somewhere between the Northern Confederation of Italy and New Austria was founded sixteen centuries ago by a group of Romans fleeing persecution by the Christian Emperor Theodosius in AD 395. And they’ve managed to tough it out until the 21st century.

Welcome to the world of Roma Nova.

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 as likely to prevent that storm with an equal number of changes both ways. The random nature of the ‘butterfly effect’ makes it impossible to predict which way at any given time.

This equalising idea is a bit boring, so writers tend to opt for the doom scenario, ladling all sorts of dreadful consequences over the butterfly’s head. Closely related is the ‘For the want of a nail’ theory when one tiny missing thing leads to world-changing events. And they’re always bad ones.

In alternate history, writers can play with these types of ideas to introduce a point of divergence to bring about full-blown complex political, economic and social change. In Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, a butterfly is crushed in the time of the dinosaurs by a time-traveller which has the consequence in the ‘present’ of electing a fascist leader instead of a moderate one. Alternatively, in a film like Sliding Doors, dealing with a purely personal story, missing a train splits the heroine’s life into two possible timelines, one transforming and the other fatal.

If you’re fascinated by the butterfly of doom as a story device visit TV Tropes.

In our timelime, or OTL as alternate historians abbreviate it, the poor Red Admiral is known as the butterfly of doom. Writer and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov, mentioned it in his work. The Red Admiral was especially abundant in Russia in one year in the late 19th century; the markings on the underside of its two hind wings seem to read ’1881′. That year, the Russian Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.

Everybody has potential points of divergence in their lives when they make choices. But the butterfly, or missing nail, can make those choices for you.
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Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO, and PERFIDITAS. Third in series, SUCCESSIO, is now out.

In defence of round-robins

Oh, the sneering! Oh, the superiority! Even Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) is on BBC Radio4 broadcasting a series of witty ripostes to round-robins (RRs).

Now some RRs are painful: long-winded, which goes hand-in-hand with boring; poorly composed and/or typed; with scattered blurry photos; and produced with tight margins in tiny, coloured or weird fonts. But some gems are witty, near professional offerings, mostly photos with hilarious captions leaving you wanting more. The best ones make you grab the ‘phone or start bashing out an email to the sender immediately after reading.

In time-strapped, intense lives, the RR can reach many more people without the sender getting RSI, paying a fortune for individually printed photos or dying from exhaustion and insanity repeating the same stuff up to, and possibly beyond, a hundred times. How are RRs different from all the blog posts we chuck out indiscriminately into the digiverse?

But, like trying to avoid the slush-pile that many writers end up on, how do you write an RR that’s entertaining, informative and has that spark of something special? I’ve been sending them out for over twenty-five years, well before the time they became fashionable, so I’ve got some experience.

Keep these key points in front of you:

The recipient may only have a quick minute to scan your letter, so keep it snappy
Include lots of photos, but interesting, non-forced ones. Do not reduce them down to such a low resolution that they look like a blurry mess.
Do not witter on about Jemima’s first day at school. Most people have been to school, so have their children – we know. Just say J has started school and add a photo of her in her too large uniform.
Yes, a mention of holidays, but not a detailed description of the sangria night when you all got trollied. As above, we know this experience.
Achievements – careful does here. Of course, say that Jemima bagged a first in Icelandic or her sister passed her hairdressing apprenticeship and has secured a stylist job in a top London salon – these are great things. But don’t go on about it (Even I was reasonably restrained about the publication of my debut novel INCEPTIO on 1 March 2013. 😉 ).
What people in the family are doing now – as in the point above. A brief sentence or two is enough.
Try to inject some wit, but don’t force it.
And guess what? Edit it! An RR is like any other piece of writing and if you are sending it to recipients who are your friends and relations, they deserve the same courtesy as the rest of the reading public.
Lastly, make sure you leave a space at the end for a short, personal, handwritten message and signature.

Do you write or receive RRs? Go on, now, tell me your thoughts…

Updated 2025: Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. As a result, you’ll be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.

Grammar Nazi or dilettante?

I’m reading a book at the moment full of “prithee, varlet” language. It’s as irritating as Hades, but maybe that’s just me. The atmosphere of fear is building, the characters are forming and the plot slowly emerging.

But despite the over-elaborate language, the author’s grammar is spot on. And that’s what saves it.

Writing is a form of communication and when we structure writing correctly then our message is unambiguous, even in “prithee” language. The reader reads what we intended them to read. Even in a very minimalist-styled book such as any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, the accuracy and clarity of the writing enables the reader to see exactly what the author is saying.

If we don’t write clearly, then the poor reader has to re-read sentences and pause to work out what he or she thinks we meant. After a few jolts to continuity, it’s inevitable that the reader’s pleasure diminishes. And after too many, the reader chucks the book on the floor.

Editors can, and do, do a wonderful job, but even they get to the hair-tearing stage in the face of relentless sloppiness. If they have the choice of working on a well-written manuscript and one weighed down with mistakes, guess which one they’ll prioritise?

Poor grammar and spelling are the things that irritate readers of self-published books most, and most quickly, even in a free book. We have so much choice these days, why would we spend precious life-hours reading something that is written in a careless and sub-standard way?

However fabulous the plot, characters and narrative thrust of the story, good grammar and spelling matter.

Horrors to avoid (Any one of these makes me chuck the book on the floor.)
your/you’re
Can you say ‘you are’ instead? If so, then it’s ‘you’re’. ‘Your’ is to indicate something belonging to ‘you’, e.g. your book.
it’s/its
Can you say ‘it is’? Then it’s ‘it’s’. 😉 As with ‘your’, when used to show something that belongs to ‘it’, ‘its’ doesn’t have the abused apostrophe, e.g. “Gorgeous book. I love its cover.”
There/their
Can you say ‘here’ instead of ‘there’. e.g. ‘there are /here are’? There you are, then. Remember, ‘their’ is very possessive…
Affect/effect
‘Affect’ is an active verb. ‘Effect’ is the outcome, e.g. cause and effect. A quick way of remembering is that A comes before E, i.e. you have to affect something before you can see the effect.
‘Bored of’ or ‘bored with’?
Please don’t start me on this one. I hope you know the correct version. See me in the comments if you don’t.

Updated 2024:Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.

It's raining, it's pouring!

One of the first things we notice in the mornings is the weather. How many of those first tweets go something like this:
‘Brrr – cold as I crawl out of bed – not LOL’
‘The sun. At last. Damn, I have to go to work.’
‘DH now in garden shed building an ark. Blasted rain!’

We even report average weather:
‘Nice and sunny here, a bit overcast but OK. What are you up to today?’

Some primeval instinct drives us to orientate ourselves in the day the minute we’re awake. Cave man asked whether it was a good day for hunting, gathering or beating the crap out of the neighbouring tribe. Today, we look out of the window and wonder whether the car will start in the damp, if the heatwave will continue or the delivery person won’t appear because the snow’s too deep.

We need weather to frame our lives. And so do our characters, but not in a nice way. They need disruption.

Firstly, a writer can use weather to add weight, obstacles and trouble to a character’s dilemma. Weather can change the plot: snow falling might stop planes flying, bring down power lines, prevent a vital meeting or elopement. Prolonged, heavy rain may cause flooding, damage to vital papers, trapping a character in a cave or cellar or a beloved pet drowning.

Weather can affect a character’s mood: sun generally cheers people up and rain depresses them. Wind is well-known for, er, winding people up. Any teacher will confirm that kids become more jittery and argumentative if there’s a gale blowing outside.

And thirdly, using weather to reflect inner turmoil adds a layer to the story: character C is waiting for character D and the meeting is going to be difficult, C paces around, fidgets, keeps looking out of the window, his stomach is queasy. The wind outside is blowing rubbish down the street and the sky is getting blacker by the minute…

How to write weather
The key is to integrate weather into the story as it affects the character at that point. I write thrillers and the reason I might describe weak winter sunlight, or perish the thought, a sunset, is that the horizontal light gets into the hero’s eyes and blinds him when he’s taking a vital shot.

Some less extreme ways to introduce environmental conflict into a scene could be:

If teenagers are meeting anywhere outside on a first date, make it rain;
If a woman takes her young grandson sailing, a squall blows in;
If a man is afraid of the dark, make it a moonless night, preferably in the country, either windy or raining. Possibly both.

While weather is a vital ingredient, you only need to mention it once and the reader will set the scene themselves:

We ate quickly, ignoring the rising heat from the afternoon sun.
Next morning, it was still snowing and she’d left her boots in the car.
I wasn’t surprised to see him an hour later. He came in through the service entrance, shaking rain from his umbrella.

The reader can then take their experience of rain/snow/scorching heat and use it to ‘see’ the scene in the book. If it’s rain, some readers will imagine heavy rain, others a drizzle, but it doesn’t matter. The precise nature of the rain isn’t important – all you need to do is mention the wet stuff and the reader’s imagination will do the rest.