Hooks, Convenient Engagements and Latin account rolls

I’m in the throes of writing about religious guilds and merchants in medieval York.  Over the past couple of days this has involved a lot of staring at transcribed account rolls in Latin, picking out the few words I can understand, and guessing madly when it comes to the others.  Like Shakespeare, I have ‘little Latin and less Greek’ … and that must be the only time I have been able to put myself in the same sentence as Shakespeare!   It is, actually, much more interesting than it sounds, and time has flown, which is why it’s taken me until now to announce the winner of the ‘hooks’ contest.

I’ve got two copies of Convenient Engagements to send out, and having fallen back once more on ‘eeny meeny miny mo’, they’ll be on their way to Lacey and Ruchita as soon as they send their postal addresses to jessica@jessicahart.co.uk .

I was a bit quick off the mark with putting Kate Walker’s 12 Point Guide back up for grabs, as Serena couldn’t get in touch immediately - my copy is already on its way to Mary in Canada but Kate has kindly offered to send Serena another copy anyway – so I’ll be more patient this time!

It looks as if my course From the slush pile to the shelves: writing fiction that sells  at the University of York will be running this term after all.  That starts in a couple of weeks, so I’ll be putting up more craft posts as that goes along – so get ready to tell me more about your stories as we work through conflict, setting, situation, plot, dialogue, first pages and the nitty-gritty of the writing process.

Have a wonderful weekend.  Mine is going to be spent scratching my head over medieval politics, economics and the Hanseatic League.  Funny how, now that I have to get it right, it seems so much easier just to make it all up and write fiction, and yet the moment I have to start a new romance and am staring at a blank screen, I think it would be so much easier if only I knew what it was I had to say …