Three months on since setting up my own imprint, publishing my second book A House Divided and buying back the rights to the first Turn of the Tide, what am I doing now?
Research – It’s fun to buy books and feel virtuous while doing so, after all they are essential research material… Even more fun delving into them, even if they (and the experience) aren’t always what I expected.
Winning the toss was a little book on Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots.
My first experience of reading non-fiction on a Kindle and I must say I prefer hard copy – much easier to flip backwards and forwards and mark the text. I have added highlights, but am not absolutely sure how (or if) I’ll be able to find them again. The content was a mix of fascinating and slightly shocking – the quotations from letters and speeches (if they are accurate, as claimed) provide wonderful insights into Henry’s character, but some of the author commentary is outspoken and definitely not pc.
I was hoping a book on the plague in 17th century Italy 
would provide information relating to the early years of the century, but no. However as with a lot of research, the wealth of information it did give of later periods kept me reading right to the end (and just maybe might be the basis of an entirely different book, once my 3rd book in the Munro series is done and dusted.)
But I’m putting it well away out of temptation’s reach for the time being and turning to French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century, which is looking, at first glimpse, very useful indeed.
Now here’s the thing – I love research. I find it endlessly fascinating and generally the difficulty is pulling myself away from research to start writing. But just now that isn’t an issue because although I’m gathering a lot of information, what I haven’t found (yet) is an historic event that has so caught my attention that I have no choice but to write about it. And so, as yet, I haven’t fixed a time frame for Munro no 3.
There are several more books awaiting my attention though, and any one of them just might contain the ‘nugget’ I’m looking for.