In the weeks since I last posted I’ve made some progress with the first draft of A House Divided. My original intention was to have 50,000 words completed by Christmas, NaNoWriMo style, but the eye incident detailed below intervened and I was held back. I’ve now (finally!) hit that word count and as I've written the ideas for this story have inevitably continued to evolve.
A House Divided was always intended to be ‘alternative history’ (after all, the byline is ‘This is not the story you know’—see the cover to the right) but if I bring my current crop of ideas to fruition the story is going to end up considerably more ‘alternative’ than I’d originally envisaged! As a result I’m going to take a short break from writing to do some research and clarify those idea-germs further… and decide whether I think this alternative is plausible enough to fly. Ultimately, I’m left with a choice: do I follow my instincts as a historian or a novelist?
In the meantime I'm going to return to The Invisible Infanta and investigate putting it onto a POD footing. I'm also hoping to offer it on Smashwords eventually (thus going beyond Amazon/Kindle) but I can't do that until late April, thanks to Kindle Select.
My to-do list is therefore:
*Decide whether to use Lulu or Blurb. Any advice/comments on this gratefully received!
*Make changes to the draft to go with either/both.
*Research the following: Manuel's Portugal, Maria de Trastamara's life after her marriage (if it should be available; very possibly not but that's what extrapolation is for), and try to discover more about Germaine de Foix, Ferdinand of Aragon's second wife...
...and let's not forget my kitchen renovation!
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