I saw a picture somewhere on social media posted by an author who is writing their first vampire book. I can’t find it now, but it showed a couple (presumably vampires) in a dance hold.
It will be fun if someone else produces a vampire tale featuring dancers with, let’s say, specialist dietary requirements, but I hope, dear readers, that you won’t forget that you saw it here first. My ‘Galbraith & Pole’ series (three so far, but there will be more) started with Something Wicked which features murder, mystery and tango.
They say you should write about what you know and I’m putting together this blog post between Monday night’s tango and Wednesday night’s tango with a couple more evenings of tango planned for the weekend. It’s fair to say that the references to tango in the book are well researched.
The idea of tango-dancing vampires came on one of my many visits to Buenos Aires, a city almost as famous for its spectacular cemeteries as for the celebrated dance. You seem to see so many more people after dark then are around in the day and, first thing in the morning, it’s easy to believe that the weary, somnambulant creatures propping themselves up on public transport are related to the Undead.
Buenos Aires street scene. Note that the dancers stay in the shadows
Chief Inspector Pole is not your typical vampire. He’s urbane and sophisticated and has been known to cook with garlic just to make a point. But mess with him and you can see a more ruthless side to his character. Fortunately, he uses his powers for good – mostly.
If you haven’t read my Urban Fantasy books before, give Something Wicked a go. It’s just £2.99 on Kindle.
Amazon reviews
Here are some of the things people have said about it on Amazon:
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then Something Wicked is definitely for you.
Cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted
I shall never look at Brompton Cemetery in quite the same way again!
A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!
Last week I mentioned that I’m trying to cut back on the amounts of time I spend on social media, including this blog. So this week, instead of writing about something new, I’m just revisiting the first novel I published, The White Rajah. Join me on a quick trip down Memory Lane.
It was in Borneo around 1980 that I came across James Brooke, the first White Rajah. I was fascinated by his story and decided to write a book about him. It was laboriously typed out on a manual typewriter and submitted to a leading agent who sent me to an editor to do more work on it.
Looking back, this was clearly the opportunity of a lifetime, but I was young and had no idea how lucky I was. The editor was helpful but I just wasn’t able to produce the sort of thing that he was looking for and in the end he said that I was clearly getting tired and should rest the book and come back to it later. So I rested it for something over a quarter of a century.
When I came back to it, I wrote a completely different book. It benefited from the research I had done for the first one and a few pages were actually directly lifted from my previous attempt, but the structure was now completely different. I had always believed that James Brooke was gay, but back in 1980 this wasn’t something that I would have mentioned. Now, though, it seemed okay to write a book with a gay hero, so I did.
The White Rajah was sent off to agents and, again, it was picked up. The agent (who really did seem to know his job and have the right contacts) offered it to four major publishers. It seems that I might have felt the world was ready for a mainstream novel with a gay hero, but publishers disagreed. It was “too difficult” for a first novel. I should go away and write something else first, so I produced Burke in the Land of Silver with a hero (also based on a real person) so heterosexual he goes through three lovers in the course of the book.
The White Rajah, meanwhile sat in a drawer for years before it eventually saw the light of day. It was first published by a tiny publisher in the USA (thank you JMS Books for giving it its chance) and then by a larger publisher in the UK before I got the rights back and self-published. It’s the only book of mine which has had serious tweakings between when it first saw the light of day and now. It’s always had a special place in my heart because it’s my first baby and the version that you will buy nowadays is something I’m very happy with. It’s just £3.99 on Kindle. If the idea of committing to a full-length novel worries you, the characters also feature in a short story that introduces the world of The White Rajah. It’s called The Tiger Hunt and you can find it in Tales of Empire – four lovely stories from four different authors for just 99p.
Everyone seems to be talking about social media these days, largely because of the controversies about Twitter.
Social media are important to writers like me because they provide an important way to tell people about our books. This blog is a form of social media and I’ve been writing it pretty well once a week for very many years. It used to be hosted on Google’s Blogger and you can find an archive going back to 2011 at thewhiterajah.blogspot.com. It can be frustrating because the number of people reading it varies a lot, not just only depending on what I’m writing about but on the vagaries of Google’s algorithms which sometimes point people to small blogs like mine and then switch to focussing on larger sites. I’m not sure that it actually sells many books, but I quite enjoy writing it so, although I am always threatening to cut down on the amount I post, I’m still here. (Either that or you’re imagining reading this, which is a sort of spooky idea.)
If I write the blog to encourage you to read the books, I then have to encourage you to read the blog. I used to do this mainly through Facebook and I have an author page there at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTomWilliams. I still post there but Facebook is a rotten way to reach people these days. I think its time has passed.
Twitter and its like
After Facebook, of course, came Twitter. I used to hate Twitter but gradually grew to love it. Then came Elon Musk…
Twitter is now problematic. It’s lively and I’ve met some lovely people there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of extreme right-wing nutjobs and cryptocurrency sellers to find them. I’ve got over 2,000 followers there which, even if a lot of them are fembots, is too many to just ignore but I am looking at other possibilities. The problem is that refugees from Twitter have scattered all over the place so there’s no single obvious alternative.
Threadsseems fun. There are interesting conversations and I enjoy visits there while reading my feed on Twitter often leaves me feeling quite depressed. I don’t get a lot of interaction, probably largely because I have only 27 followers. That’s the problem with starting again from scratch and it takes a long time to build things up.
Blueskyseems quieter than Threads and I get even less interaction despite my 74 followers.
Is any of this worth the effort?
The thing is, social media take a lot of time. If you want to build a following you have to post regularly and respond to posts from others. Even if it’s enjoyable, it takes time away from life and, specifically, writing. That’s why I don’t do Instagram and make only occasional weak efforts on TikTok. I have cut down on Twitter a lot lately as, thanks to Mr Musk, it seems likely to die. A lot of the time saved has now been lost to Bluesky and Threads, mainly double (or triple) posting but also responding to stuff (easier on Threads because it has genuinely fun stuff on it and I learn things).
In the end, I have to ask myself if any of it is worth it: using Twitter (or whatever) to drive traffic to my blog to try to drive readers to my books. I do think that cutting off social media depresses book sales but do you know what boosts sales? Writing more books, that’s what. Perhaps I should concentrate on that.
Social media is such a minefield at the moment. What do you think?
Some of us who show people round Marble Hill House took a busman’s holiday this week and went to visit Pope’s Grotto.
Marble Hill House
Alexander Pope is important to the story of Marble Hill because he was a great friend of the first owner of the house, Henrietta Howard. Henrietta probably moved here partly because Pope owned house a little way further up the Thames just beyond Twickenham. He was very interested in gardening and his garden was, at the time, quite well known. Unfortunately for him, most of it was on the other side of the road from his house which had a lawn stretching down to the river but little space for the elaborate garden design he wanted. So, this being the 18th century and Pope being quite well off, he built a tunnel under the road to access the rest of the garden. The tunnel was built out from the cellars of the house and the whole underground work was decorated as a grotto, which expanded to have side passages and even an underground waterfall. It was probably the inspiration for the grotto that Henrietta had built at Marble Hill, but his was much larger and more elaborate.
Grotto at Marble Hill
Unfortunately, in the course of 300 years It deteriorated quite badly. His house was demolished and a new building constructed over the grotto. People I know who saw it when we first moved to Twickenham said it was little more than a gloomy cellar with some rocks stuck on the wall. Fortunately, if 18th century grottoes are your thing, over the last few years it has been opened up and substantially restored. Although it was originally decorated with bits of mirror and glass to make a sort of shiny pretty space, Pope later developed an interest in geology and decided to make the whole thing into a sort of mystical mine decorated with different kinds of stones and minerals. We have descriptions of it from the time allowing us to replace many of the rocks that have been lost. The effect is simultaneously gloomy (it’s quite dark down there) and rather pretty. You can definitely feel transported back to Georgian times.
More on grottoes
Coincidentally, Deborah Swift has just written about grotto’s in her newsletter. Here’s the LINK. They are very different to Pope’s and Henrietta’s!
A word from our sponsor
I don’t solicit donations on my blog and I don’t carry advertising. I post something around once a week on average, but I don’t make a penny out of it. If you enjoy reading the blog, the only thing I would ask is that you buy one or more of my books. The cheapest of my books on Kindle costs just 99p. There is information on all my books, with buy links, on this website: http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/my-books/
I would really appreciate it if you could occasionally contribute in this way.
We’re still working the last of summer for all it’s worth. This week we went to Burghley to see the house started in 1555 by William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth. He was the most important politician in the country and built Burghley as his legacy, something that would be handed down through his family, a constant reminder of his power and influence. Not that he had much time to spend there as it is buried away near Peterborough, 90-odd miles from the court in London.
It worked out pretty much as he had planned.
Although the exterior would be recognisable to William Cecil, inside it has been substantially gutted and rebuilt. Only the splendid Tudor kitchens remain largely unchanged.
The rest of the house was remodelled by the 5th Earl of Exeter in the 17th century and then again by the 9th Earl in the 18th. The great long galleries were broken up into smaller (but still enormous) rooms, mainly, it seems, to provide extra wall space to display a ridiculous number of paintings. The family still lives in the house, which must at times feel like camping out in an art gallery.
The 9th Earl commissioned Capability Brown to landscape his grounds. Brown also made changes to the house, including demolishing an entire wing that was obstructing the view!
The design of the rooms features a lot of dark wood and vast paintings of wars and ancestors. Perhaps surprisingly for the English aristocracy, there is little overlap between the two. The Cecils were not a particularly martial family but were better known as collectors. Besides their paintings, they bought porcelain (especially from Japan) and fine furniture. (There are some wonderful marquetry cabinets.) The overall effect is rather overwhelming and surprisingly unphotogenic, hence the absence of photos on this blog. The design works by just being so very, very big. It’s too large to capture well in a picture. It’s also notable for a distinct absence of lightness of touch or humour. It’s about impressing you guests (there have been visits from Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II) not about welcoming them with tea and cake.
We were there for hours and I know of a lot more about Japanese porcelain than I did when we arrived. It’s arguably the finest Elizabethan House in England and well worth a visit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there.
The grounds are beautiful. There’s an ice house for regular readers of this blog who have seen photos of the others I’ve collected. It’s the first one I’ve visited outside West London, although there are examples all round the country.
There’s a sculpture garden too, which displays some interesting works. I was relieved to discover that the 21st century family have exactly the lightness of touch in their choice of sculptures that seems to have escaped previous generations of collectors. It’s not every sculpture collection that includes a mouse on a surfboard.
If you’re visiting, make sure you leave time to look round the nearby town of Stamford, which is lovely.
