Blog | Alison Morton Author

Writing Challenge Days 25 & 26: Favourite books as adult and as a kid

I really dislike this one. Well, perhaps not the second one about childhood books as I’m no longer a kid and can give you a definite answer.

Beloved children’s books
Heidi by Joanna Spyri
The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat
What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
Every single Jennings school book by Anthony Buckmaster
Every single Narnia book by CS Lewis

As a young adult, I started reading clever Regency novels by Georgette Heyer, The Saint crime thrillers, the Angélique series by Juliet Benzoni, everything by Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton plus Dennis Wheatley adventure fiction.

Now it becomes complicated…

In fiction, I read across genres, but probably mainly historical fiction (especially, but not exclusively Roman), thrillers, some romance, literary fiction, thoughtful science fiction, some contemporary fiction, ‘non-dripping body parts’ crime and espionage fiction. In my life I’ve read thousands of novels and enjoyed 90% of them.

If pushed, I would say anything by Lindsey Davis (Roman detectives Falco and Albia), William Boyd’s Restless, still anything by Georgette Heyer.

But my ‘favourite book? It’s no one book. It’s the book I’m reading at the time.

Writing challenges so far:

Day 24: What to write next
Day 23: What did you write last?
Day 22: What’s your current word count?
Day 21: My preferred genre
Day 20: Characters’ favourite food (and drink!)
Day 19: Characters’ pastimes
Day 18: Characters’ pet peeves(!)
Days 16 & 17: Favourite outfits (combined)
Day 15: The many-hatted author
Day 14: Show your workplace
Day 13: A funny family story. Or not
Day 12: Early bird or night owl?
Day 11: Favourite writing snacks/chocolate porn
Day 10: Post an old picture of yourself
Day 9: Post 5 random facts about you
Day 8: What’s your writing process?
Day 7: Introduce your ‘author friend’
Day 6: How the writing all began
Day 5: What inspired the book I’m working on
Day 4: The setting for the new Roma Nova book
Day 3: Introducing the main characters Julia and Apulius
Day 2: Introduce your work in progress
Day 1: Starting with revealing information

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, INSURRECTIO and RETALIO. CARINA, a novella, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories, are now available. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. NEXUS, an Aurelia Mitela novella, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines… Download ‘Welcome to Roma Nova’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email newsletter. You’ll also be first to know about Roma Nova news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.

Writing Challenge Day 24: What to write next?

Ah, well, that’s a bit in the air…

I’m now 20,000 words into my new Roma Nova novel, so I have a good 60,000 words and a mountain-high pile of research. That will see the year out, I think.

Depending on what happens next in the book world, next I might take up writing the second book in my new modern day non-alternative thriller series again. So far, we have murder, dashing Italian policemen, corruption, a chase round Trajan’s Markets, a booby-trapped bomb and a reckoning with the past.

As I’m not under constraint to write to contract I can please myself. However, I do like to put myself under a bit of pressure, so I’d hope to complete the first draft of that thriller in 2021.

But as for any reasonable story, there’s a bit of thought-work to be done first such as releasing the characters into the wilds of my brain to run around and see what they get up to…

But who knows what the future may bring?

Writing challenges so far:

Day 23: What did you write last?
Day 22: What’s your current word count?
Day 21: My preferred genre
Day 20: Characters’ favourite food (and drink!)
Day 19: Characters’ pastimes
Day 18: Characters’ pet peeves(!)
Days 16 & 17: Favourite outfits (combined)
Day 15: The many-hatted author
Day 14: Show your workplace
Day 13: A funny family story. Or not
Day 12: Early bird or night owl?
Day 11: Favourite writing snacks/chocolate porn
Day 10: Post an old picture of yourself
Day 9: Post 5 random facts about you
Day 8: What’s your writing process?
Day 7: Introduce your ‘author friend’
Day 6: How the writing all began
Day 5: What inspired the book I’m working on
Day 4: The setting for the new Roma Nova book
Day 3: Introducing the main characters Julia and Apulius
Day 2: Introduce your work in progress
Day 1: Starting with revealing information

Writing Challenge Day 23: What did you write last?

This blog post 😉

Okay, that’s a cop-out answer. If this means ‘real’ writing, it would be a (long) short story. But before I reveal more about that, let me digress.

Writers write a variety of stuff, not only their published stories. in the past few weeks, I’ve written a slew of blogposts for this challenge, four guest posts, rejigged my entries on Amazons US, UK and Germany and drafted my monthly newsletter. Oh, and and I’ve written another 5,000 words for my new book.

The writing challenge resembles me speaking to you direct, i.e. wittering on, but the posts have got my ‘writing muscles’ back into shape after a rather dull patch this summer. It’s also released me to talk about several things I wouldn’t normally have the chance to air and post photos that are only mildly embarrassing.

The guest posts are a great way to contribute to the writing community and to make my own work known more widely. A Roman history enthusiast carves a new world from medieval chaos! on Anna Belfrage’s blog and Serious About Writing a Series on Tony Riches Writing Room are already published. There is, as Romans could have said, a quid pro quo in all these things and I’ve had the great pleasure of welcoming guests to this blog on Thursdays.

The Amazon stuff? Usually a task relegated to the back office, but it’s vital for authors to keep the content fresh as well as updated on the world’s biggest bookselling platform (sorry). And the newsletter is something I send out each month to keep ‘Team Roma Nova’ informed about what’s going on and hopefully entertain them. This month there’s a special announcement on the book front plus a fantastic contest to enter. That will go out later this week.

The new Roma Nova book which I’ve provisionally called FONDATIO is rolling along quite well. The research (essential for any historical fiction) is quite heavy as I’m up against scarcity of resources but I have acquired two fantastic books Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 by Guy Halsall, a 600-page doorstop, but crammed with information and discussion, and the golden one, Noricum, by Géza Alfödy. Both are chock-full of sources and references which are even more important when the primary source material is lace-thin on the ground.

So what else? Oh, yes, the new long short story… Well, it’s part of a project called Betrayal in collaboration with other historical fiction writers. Official cover reveal day is Thursday (15th October). Do join me then on my Roma Nova blog for more about this exciting project!

Writing challenges so far:

Day 22: What’s your current word count?
Day 21: My preferred genre
Day 20: Characters’ favourite food (and drink!)
Day 19: Characters’ pastimes
Day 18: Characters’ pet peeves(!)
Days 16 & 17: Favourite outfits (combined)
Day 15: The many-hatted author
Day 14: Show your workplace
Day 13: A funny family story. Or not
Day 12: Early bird or night owl?
Day 11: Favourite writing snacks/chocolate porn
Day 10: Post an old picture of yourself
Day 9: Post 5 random facts about you
Day 8: What’s your writing process?
Day 7: Introduce your ‘author friend’
Day 6: How the writing all began
Day 5: What inspired the book I’m working on
Day 4: The setting for the new Roma Nova book
Day 3: Introducing the main characters Julia and Apulius
Day 2: Introduce your work in progress
Day 1: Starting with revealing information

Writing Challenge Day 22: What's your current word count?

Word count is something writers can and do obsess about!

In fact, it can become a tyranny which I wrote about here. (There are cats and orangutans.)

The new Roma Nova book I’m working on (introduced here) is progressing steadily, if slowly. Word count is now up to 18,000 words, double what it was on Day 2 of this challenge, but we’re still in Virunum where Julia and Apulius met and they aren’t having an easy time of it.

It’s set in AD 370, so I’m double checking the research as I go along. things were a little ‘complicated’ in Noricum towards the end of the fourth century!

Onward!

Writing challenges so far:

Day 21: My preferred genre
Day 20: Characters’ favourite food (and drink!)
Day 19: Characters’ pastimes
Day 18: Characters’ pet peeves(!)
Days 16 & 17: Favourite outfits (combined)
Day 15: The many-hatted author
Day 14: Show your workplace
Day 13: A funny family story. Or not
Day 12: Early bird or night owl?
Day 11: Favourite writing snacks/chocolate porn
Day 10: Post an old picture of yourself
Day 9: Post 5 random facts about you
Day 8: What’s your writing process?
Day 7: Introduce your ‘author friend’
Day 6: How the writing all began
Day 5: What inspired the book I’m working on
Day 4: The setting for the new Roma Nova book
Day 3: Introducing the main characters Julia and Apulius
Day 2: Introduce your work in progress
Day 1: Starting with revealing information

Writing Challenge Day 21: My preferred genre

Crumbs, there are some interesting topics in this topic! The problem with this one is that essentially genres segment books into one thing or another, slicing away any possibility that a book may seep into another. 😱

Unpicking this…

Historical fiction is an umbrella for biography (Julian by Gore Vidal), adventure (Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk), romance (any Georgette Heyer Regency story), literary introspection (The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco but also mystery), historical whodunits (any of the Falco or Flavia Albia series by Lindsey Davis), epic saga (anything by Edward Rutherford), police procedurals (Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series), a portrayal of a time of great change whether in the ancient past (Mary Renault’s brilliant novels of Greece) or the explosion of 20th century world wars (Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks) which still resonate strongly with us now.

Some subgenres such as alternate history (um, the Roma Nova thrillers) and historical fantasy (Naomi Novik’s Temeraire) insert speculative or ahistorical elements into a novel.

Thrillers and mysteries can include political, conspiracy, crime and spy stories, or very popular at present, psychological thrillers. They can range from the shocking and horrific (Stephen King), almost unbearable to read to cozy village mysteries such as the Miss Marple stories.

Action thrillers include ransoms, captivities, heists, revenge and kidnappings as themes and sometimes plunge into terrorist and drug fields. But often there is a female sidekick/scientist/pawn in such stories, or these days a female lead with a male sidekick. The tension between them is nearly always laced with a dollop of sexual chemistry, if not romance. Interspersed are the sadly out of fashion ‘caper’ stories which are light-hearted action stories.

But what are they when they stray into another genre like Ken Follet’s The Key to Rebecca, Ellis Peters’s Cadfael or Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series featuring Gordianus the Finder?

Romance shouldn’t be a problem, should it? Boy/girl meets girl/boy and after various trials and tribulations, they arrive at a happy ending, or at least, a happy for now ending.

End of.

Well, no. Romance subgenres can include contemporary, historical, romantic suspense, paranormal, science fiction romance, fantasy, time-travel, multi-cultural, erotic romance, epic, saga and chicklit. As you can see, several of these seep into other genres.

So romance is another very large umbrella. In fact, a book without an emotional relationship would seem to be rather bland in my er, book.

Going boldly where plenty of people actually have gone before, we enter the science fiction and fantasy genre where we find criminality (J D Robb’s Eve Dallas series), space exploration, intergalactic warfare, multi-dimensional transfiguration (The Expanse) and good old fantasy with dragons (Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern), witchcraft (Neil Gaiman’s Stardust) and mythology (Lord of the Rings J R R Tolkein). Many of these have a strong element of romance.

And then there are classics like 1984 and anything by H G Wells or Margaret Atwood which comment on where humans have changed their society, often for the worst. Are they merely dystopian or social science observations?

Sci-fi subgenres can also include environmental issues, hard science, computing, time travel, comedy, historical elements, biology, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, military sci-fi, space opera, new world colonies, lost in space and/or time, space western, steampunk, alternative history(!), all of which cross different genres.

So we have another gigantic umbrella…

I’m not going into other territories as it would take a book on its own, but the above genres/umbrellas are among my favourites, even though some of the subgenres are not.

I’m really not too fussy about genres. They give a guide when selecting a book, but I never rule one out because of its supposed genre. Ultimately, it’s about the story, the characters and the writing and how that combination takes me on an emotional journey when I might learn something about myself and the human situation. Oh, and enjoy a thumping good read.

Writing challenges so far:

Day 20: Characters’ favourite food (and drink!)
Day 19: Characters’ pastimes
Day 18: Characters’ pet peeves(!)
Days 16 & 17: Favourite outfits (combined)
Day 15: The many-hatted author
Day 14: Show your workplace
Day 13: A funny family story. Or not
Day 12: Early bird or night owl?
Day 11: Favourite writing snacks/chocolate porn
Day 10: Post an old picture of yourself
Day 9: Post 5 random facts about you
Day 8: What’s your writing process?
Day 7: Introduce your ‘author friend’
Day 6: How the writing all began
Day 5: What inspired the book I’m working on
Day 4: The setting for the new Roma Nova book
Day 3: Introducing the main characters Julia and Apulius
Day 2: Introduce your work in progress
Day 1: Starting with revealing information