Characters | Alison Morton Author

Elizabeth St. John, Elysabeth Scrope and the Princes in the Tower

I’m delighted to welcome historical novelist Elizabeth St.John to the blog especially as she is going to reveal a secret about one of the English crown’s biggest mysteries…

Elizabeth ’s critically acclaimed historical novels tell the stories of her ancestors: extraordinary women whose intriguing kinship with England’s kings and queens brings an intimately […]

Erica Lainé: Landscape and Memory

This week’s ‘writer abroad’ is Erica Lainé (or should that be L’Ainé given her family’s origins in the Channel Islands?). She originally trained for the theatre at the Arts Educational School in Tring. Later in London, she worked in the Libraries and Arts department of the London Borough of Camden, running the box office for […]

Antoine Vanner: Writing about a female protagonist – a challenge for a male novelist?

I’m delighted to welcome back Antoine Vanner, creator of the Dawlish Chronicles series featuring Royal Navy officer Nicholas Dawlish (1845-1918) and his wife Florence (1855-1946). Nine volumes have been published to date and I’m looking forward to reading more!

Antoine’s own adventurous life, his knowledge of human nature, his passion for nineteenth-century history and understanding […]

Writing Challenge Day 27: What's your favourite trope?

Strictly, a literary trope is a rhetorical or figurative device, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect. Today, it’s also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices and motifs in creative works.

Right, now we’ve got the formal stuff out of the way, let’s look at how it […]

Writing Challenge Day 20: Characters' favourite food (and drink!)

Hm, an interesting one…

Let’s start with drink. Carina lives on coffee; she was brought up for her first 24 years in the Eastern United States (EUS) and like many office workers in the early 2000s, she drank industrial amounts of it.

On the way to my desk next morning, I grabbed a […]