Author: judeknight

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How to use the wheel on a sailing ship

I’ve been bringing my heroine and her entourage from South Africa to England in the latest draft of Unkept Promises, which has meant a lot of research about the type of ship, its size and configuration, what type of accommodation Mia might have found herself in, where she and children might be out of the way but also out in the air during the day, and all sorts of other things that I never mention in the book (but that I need to know so I don’t make any egregious errors).

At one point, she goes off to talk to the ship’s captain, and I set out to find out where the wheel was on a brig-rigged schooner. Which led me to wondering how the wheel worked, which led me to this YouTube clip. You’re welcome.

(The maker of the video notes that he didn’t include the use of the sails, a major factor in steering a sailing ship, as any yachtsman knows.)

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Introspection on WIP Wednesday

 

I try to write characters with side-kicks so they have someone to talk to. My hero of Unkept Promises has no-one for most of the novel, so readers need to see inside his head. ‘Show, don’t tell,’ they say, but don’t you sometimes find that your hero, heroine, or even villain is all alone and you need the reader to know what they’re thinking? Share me an excerpt with some introspection. Here’s a bit of mine, from Unkept Promises.

The house had been sold, the remaining servants had all taken positions elsewhere, so Jules was bunking down in the spare room at a friend’s place. He was sailing soon, and perhaps would never return. The navy wanted him in the Bay of Biscay: him and his ship. When the war was over, he’d retire. He had been at sea, man and boy, for nearly twenty years, and what he’d said to Mia had been echoing ever since. Once the war was over, the Navy would offer little chance for advancement. They’d have more captains than ships, and he had never been willing to use his family connections to edge out men as well qualified as him and perhaps in greater need.

Besides, he had a family. He wanted to build a home with them, see his children grow, wake up to his wife’s welcoming smile.

The cemetery was his last stop before he sailed. He stood before Kirana’s grave, the flowers someone had left long wilted on the mound of still raw earth. The tombstone he and Mia had planned was not yet in place, but he could see it in his mind’s eye. “Here lies Kirana Redepenning, devoted mother and friend. Taken from us far too soon, she will always be in the hearts of Julius, Euronyme, Perdana, Marshanda and Adiratna.”

“I will look after them, Kirana,” he promised. “They will want for nothing.”

 

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Tea with Kitty and Mia

 

Eleanor was delighted to have Lady Catherine Stocke and Mrs Julius Redepenning to tea with her this afternoon. The two had been friends since they met at Haverford Castle half their lifetimes ago, when they were children. Lady Kitty was one of Eleanor’s many goddaughters, and Mia was the daughter of the man who had, in that long ago summer, been cataloguing the Castle’s library.

It was not many years later that Mia married in Haverford Castle — married Captain Julius Redepenning, who was a cousin of Eleanor’s nephew, the Earl of Chirbury.

Eleanor knew that Mia hadn’t seen her husband since the day of the wedding, since he immediately returned to his naval posting in the Far East — and the native mistress who had borne his children.

“What brings the pair of you to London?” she asked, as she handed them their tea and invited them to help themselves to the delicately iced cakes. She had heard, but gossip could distort, as none knew better.

“I am sailing to the Cape Colony where the Captain is currently posted,” Mia replied. “Kitty has come to see me off.”

“How lovely,” Eleanor said. “You and young Jules are to be reunited.”

The amusement in Mia’s eyes suggested she knew that Eleanor was fishing for confirmation of the rumours, and she kindly obliged. “He has been away at sea and might not be aware I am coming,” she explained. “But my friend Kirana is very ill — consumption, I believe. I am going to nurse her, and to bring Jules’s children home with me if the worst happens.”

Eleanor, who had rescued a number of orphaned Haverford by-blows and given them homes, educations, and futures, found nothing to object to in that objective. “So I understood,” she conceded. “I have been telling the harpies I totally approve, and you will apply to me, Mia dear, if you need any help.”

This happens just before Mia leaves for the Cape Colony, and the bulk of Unkept Promises begins.

 

 

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Here, There Be Dragons

 

Synchronicity, much? On Friday, I was part of a government-run workshop on the reform of New Zealand’s copyright laws. On Sunday, I discovered my House of Thorns on two ‘free book’ websites. Both seem to be run out of the same country, but the perpetrator’s name is only on one of them.

He’s a man who is part of a political movement to get rid of all intellectual property protections. He claims that books are ‘loaded by readers with the permission of authors’, but his own site says, ‘we assume in good faith that those who load books have permission to do so.’ He replies to authors who ask for their stolen material to be removed from his site with some version of: ‘I will obey the current law which says I have to take this down, but I’m doing you a favour finding you readers, and if you can’t make money without interfering with my business, you need a new business model.’

I heard some of the same arguments at the workshop: pirate sites help authors by exposing them to readers who can’t afford to buy their books; copyright law currently stifles creativity and economic growth by limiting access to works; people should be able to use work created by others in order to create something new.

So let’s take those points one by one.

Pirate sites do not help authors

The thieves who take our books like to refer to Neil Gaiman, who famously responded to the widespread theft of his books by making American Gods free for three months, and seeing his sales go up. He compared pirate sites to libraries, or borrowing a book from a friend, and those comments been quoted ever since. This was the best-selling and rightfully admired Neil Gaiman, right? With the 10th anniversary expanded edition of a book that was best-selling and multi-award winning on its original release. With all due respect to a magnificent writer, his test doesn’t tell us a lot about the impact of piracy.

Others have had very different experiences. Maggie Stiefvater, a best-selling fantasy author, saw a huge drop in sales when her books were pirated, which led her publisher to cut the number of book copies for the next in series. So she also did a test, creating a book that had the first four chapters, over and over, plus a message about book piracy. Read the linked article to find out what happened.

The pirate sites aren’t doing this for love. They make money from ads and other digital products associated with the site. The pirate that stole House of Thorns commented in an interview I found that he is running a successful business (his pirate site) that pays him well.

Every book people download from his site is a loss to the author, and even a couple of hundred downloads might be enough to change an author’s career, sending the signal ‘no one wants to buy this book’. I have friends who have changed genres or stopped writing altogether because they’ve poured their heart and soul into a book for the hundreds of hours needed to bring it from conception to birth, put in more grueling hours marketing it, and had little or no interest. Good books. Well-researched, well-written, well-edited books. The books they might have written are now lost to readers.

It is professionally hindering advancement of people who would follow the footsteps of great authors who have significantly contributed to the creative narratives that societies need regardless of geographical boundaries and situations.

No one will be encouraged to be authors or to dream big of having their works published because they are not compensated or recognized. The monetary side of publishing a book, for instance, is a manifestation of a person’s recognition of another person’s ability and creativity. By trivializing the act of downloading a material without properly compensating the author or publisher, you are, in effect, putting a big stop to the wheel of what we know as a creative process. [Independent Publishing Magazine]

Most readers who download from pirate sites can afford to buy them

Readers who can’t afford books don’t, by any means, make up the bulk of those who download from pirate sites. The Guardian article notes research showing that most such thieves belong to the higher socio-economic groups and are better educated than average. Even if they don’t want to shell out for a book, thus helping to support creativity and innovation, they have alternatives.

Cash-strapped readers are able to belong to libraries, borrow from friends, buy second-hand. Each of those instances depends on an original sale, and — in the case of libraries — potentially an on-going payment based on the number of copies in libraries (at least, that’s the case in New Zealand).

I read voraciously. I buy books and I borrow from my library, because I expect my author accounts to fund my reading and I just don’t earn enough to pay for all the books I read. But I well know that every pirated book that is downloaded is a lost sale. I won’t do that to another author.

The pirates argue that I’m getting my books to people who otherwise wouldn’t read them. That wasn’t Maggie Stiefvater’s experience, but let it pass. Where did the idea come from that people are doing me a favour by reading my books? Don’t get me wrong. I love my readers, and I’m glad they enjoy my stories. I reckon we’re in a partnership, where I provide the words and you provide the images. But if you don’t think I’m worth the pittance I charge for each book, then do yourself a favour and read someone else.

By the way, I always enable the loan function when I load a book on Amazon, so if you want to lend a book of mine you’ve enjoyed to someone else, you can do it. Amazon has instructions for how that works. I also have a special price set for libraries in the book aggregator I use to reach the places where libraries buy books, so if you’d like your local library to carry my stories as ebooks, tell them that all the novellas are free to libraries, and the novels are 99c (US dollars). I’ve been poor, and I love libraries.

Copyright law protects creativity so people can get on with writing books

If you’ve been around on this journey with me for a while, you know that my goal is to make enough from writing so I can leave my day job. I’m not blaming pirates for my failure to get there so far. It’s a very complicated market, and well oversubscribed with books, including those ladled onto Amazon by people who are gaming that giant’s algorithms. But it bears repeating, every book of mine downloaded ‘free’ from a pirate site is a lost sale — a few cents that would have taken me closer to my goal.

I figure I can at least double my output if fiction was my full-time job. If you think that it’d be a good thing for your favourite authors to write more, then not downloading stolen books, and reporting digital piracy when you see it, is one thing you can do to help.

People should get permission before remixing the creative works of others

The workshop on Friday included creators of content from the gaming industry, musicians, photographers, and artists. I was the only author in the three table-sessions I attended, though others might have been in the room. The other creative types all agreed that their industry had benefited from remixes — games that used characters from popular games, clips of music put together into a new work, images that provided a base from which an artist created something original. I guess the fictional equivalent would be fan fiction.

Under New Zealand’s current copyright law, getting permission to do this kind of work is tortuous and often (when the creator died forty years ago or is unknown) next thing to impossible. I can buy changing the law to make it easier for orphan works to be used in this way, but I still think that some kind of regime that requires best efforts to get permission gives the original creator the protection that encourages creativity.

And I think the moral rights of a creator not to have their work used a way that offends their belief system is pretty important, too.

I write my own stuff; don’t steal it

So those are my random thoughts this sunny morning in a New Zealand autumn. I write my own stuff, and I’m going to continue doing so, despite the sea monsters, dragons, and pirates that infest the wild corners of the indie publishing digital world. I can’t stop the thieves. I barely have time to notice when people steal my stuff and put it up online for other people to pinch. But don’t expect me to be grateful. If you load a book onto a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you run a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you download from a pirate site, you’re stealing. The justifications such sites use are a pack of lies. Don’t be a thief.

Time to go to the day job.

For more on this, see:

Suzan Tisdale on Book Thieves Suck

Maggie Stiefvater on her experiences

The Guardian article, which includes what other authors said

Naturi Thomas-Millard on Digital Piracy Is the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Us, Said No Writer, Ever. 6 Reasons It’s a Bigger Threat Than You Think

 

 

 

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The disease that made you in fashion

One of the biggest killers of humankind in history (apart from other humans) has been a tiny organism we now call Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In ancient Greece, it was considered the most prevalent disease of the age. Throughout history, it has been feared and the symptoms treated with despair. And in the nineteenth century, it was a fashionable way to die.

The most common form of tuberculosis attacks the lungs. Sufferers experience chest pain, fatigue, night sweats, loss of appetite leading to a general wasting away, and a persistent coughing up of phlegm and later blood (and bits of lung tissue). Eventually the patient’s lungs are so invaded by the disease that they suffocate and die. Sounds sexy, right?

No. Not that bit. What our Regency and Victorian poets and artists admired was those features of the disease that fit their ideas about the causes of illness and their concept of beauty.

First, not knowing about germs, they thought that the causes of the illness varied by social class. When the poor died in their filthy overcrowded rooms, they had the Graveyard Cough, the White Plague, the King’s Evil (so called, because the touch of a king was thought to be a cure for the version of the disease we now call scrofula, a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands). These were diseases of poverty, immorality, and criminality, which were all clearly linked, since poverty was obviously the fault of the poor. (Come to think of it, some modern commentators haven’t moved on from that belief.)

When the wealthy died, it was clearly a different disease, since they were rich, moral, and altogether less smelly. It was consumption, so called because the person grew thinner and thinner. It was, so medical theory had it, an excess of emotion and genius typical of the artistic mind that slowly consumed the patient. They were killed by fiery passion.

And look how lovely they were while they died! Was it fashionable to be slender (rather than hearty and robust like the working classes)? Not being able to eat made you thin. Was it fashionable to be pale (rather than tanned like those horrid workers who must toil in the sun)? Loss of blood will make you positively pasty.

Since one in four deaths in the nineteenth century was caused by the disease, many fashionable poets, musicians, painters and authors died of consumption, which confirmed, in the minds of the fashionable, that their creativity had killed them. Add to that the predilection of said creative types to glorify death by consumption in their poems, operas, and novels, and hey presto. A horrible slow wasting death becomes desirable.

Kirana, Jules’s mistress, is slowly dying of consumption in my current work-in-progress, Unkept Promises. Her death will be written some time in the next few days, poor soul. 

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Character sketches on WIP Wednesday

Young Dreamer Imagining a Fantasy World with Imaginary Characters

Different people work different ways. I often start with a plot idea; maybe work it up a little into a story idea. But at some point, usually very early on in the process, I get down to imagine character, because my characters always drive my plot. Their decisions make all the difference in what happens, so I need to know them before I start writing.

I’m at that stage with two books now that I’m in second draft mode on Unkept Promises and To Win a Lady. I’ve started with character sketches, which I’ll then — for the main protagonists — work  up into a proper hero’s journey. I’ll also begin a character questionnaire, and I’ll continue to add to that as I write the story, referring back during editing to make sure eyes don’t change colour and people don’t age ten years overnight.

Whatever your process, can you share some of it with us — something about one of the characters currently occupying your author brain?

Today, I’m giving you part of a character sketch for a character in the Belle’s next project, tentatively titled ‘Come What Will’. All the authors in the box set will set their stories on the same island, so we had some shared characters to invent. Mine is a shady fellow.

Cuthbert Howarth was the sole servant that Jacob Brokenshire kept from his illegal enterprises, and that out of guilt more than affection.

The Howarths had been involved in the Brokenshire smuggling enterprise from the first. Josiah had supplied the money that came to him on his marriage, but Mordecai Howarth had supplied the know-how. They were never equal partners; Josiah was always the owner and in charge. But the Howarths regarded themselves as partners, and always assumed they would one day inherit the business, since Josiah and Jacob showed no signs of producing heirs of their own.

Smuggling is not a safe enterprise. Over the years, the Howarth ranks were thinned almost as much as the Brokenshire’s, as those taking the front-line risks fell prey to storms, excise men, and other dangers of the sea.

Cuthbert was left orphaned at age 13, in 1788, when his father was hanged and his mother died, purportedly of a broken heart. A club foot meant he never went to sea like the other men of his family. Instead, he worked on the administration side of the business.

When Jacob shut down the illegal enterprises and sold the legal ones, Cuthbert begged to stay with him, and became his butler, manservant, and general factotum.

In his spare time, he has searched every corner of the island. The fortune that Jacob has amassed, and that Cuthbert believes should be his, is either hidden so well that he could not find it, or it is elsewhere.

He has also, in a small way, kept up the smuggling, unbeknownst to Jacob, focussing on high-value items such as information.

Cuthbert is a skinny man of 42, very tall and prematurely bent, with rusty brown hair thinning on the back of the head. His eyes are green. His nose is large and shows signs of having once been broken. He walks with a limp, particularly when he hurries, but otherwise does not suffer from his infirmity.

He regards everyone on the island as interlopers and potential thieves, but hides this behind a supercilious air.

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Tea with Sophia Belvoir

“So tell me, my dears,” Eleanor said, as she poured tea for the two Belvoir girls, “what do you know of this duel? I understand you were present at the time of the challenge!”

Felicity’s eyes shone with excitement. “Mr Winderfield was given no choice, Aunt Eleanor,” she insisted. “Mr Andrew Winderfield, I mean.”

“You probably know more than we do,” Sophia ventured. “After all, Aldridge was second to Weasel; that is, Mr Wesley Winderfield.”

The duchess shook her head. “Aldridge would not discuss dueling with his own mother, Sophia. Especially since he knows I disapprove of the way His Grace encourages Mr Winderfield — Weasel, I should say, for clarity — to behave towards his cousins. I have heard he shot before the end of the count!”

“The scoundrel,” Felicity said. “He has had to leave town, of course, and Lord Aldridge says he will never be his second again, so he had better not go around any more insulting people’s mothers.”

“And quite right,” Eleanor agreed. “The Winderfield brothers are among your admirers, are they not?” She was looking at her tea cup, so could have been referring to either sister.

Sophia, who was still smarting from her brother’s lecture about not encouraging the possibly base-born sons of the Earl of Sutton to dangle after Felicity, said, “We see them from time to time at Society affairs. But we leave for Bath this week, Aunt Eleanor, so I imagine we will not come across them until next Season, by which time this controversy about their birth should be resolved.”

The duchess, whose spy network in Society must be the envy of governments everywhere, did not comment on what she must know: that ‘from time to time’ meant nearly every event she and Felicity had attended all Season, since she first met Lord Elfingham, the older brother, in a small village in Oxfordshire. He had snatched a child from the path of two runaway carriages and ridden away with her heart. If he was courting either of the sisters, it would be Felicity, of course: the younger, prettier, more vivacious one. Sophia had no intention of discussing any of that.

Perhaps Aunt Eleanor understood, for she changed the subject. “I hope you will be back in London for the meeting of our philanthropic committee in September, my dears. I think you will like what I have in mind.”

***

Sophia will be part of the organising committee for Aunt Eleanor’s house party, which was featured in Holly and Hopeful Hearts. Watch this year for To Win a Lady, the novel-length form of my novella from that collection, starring Lady Sophia Belvoir and James Lord Elfingham.

 

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Amazon is haunted, and I don’t like it

I’ve been puzzling for the past two days, since the latest plagiarism / ghostwriting scandal hit social media, about why I find the use of ghostwriters to create fiction so disturbing. After all, I’ve been a ghostwriter myself, many times. I’ve written letters, articles, reports, white papers, and many other government and commercal documents that would go out with some one else’s name on them. After one particular Government Budget, I wrote articles that would appear in the same publication for opposing sides: one by a bishop and the other by a financial planner.

I also have friends who are ghostwriters: who take the stories that other people have to tell and craft the words that make them come alive in a reader’s head. Sports people, politicians, victims of crime, mountaineers, ladies of pleasure — all sorts of people have their names on autobiographies or how to books that were written for them.

So why shouldn’t a busy person pay someone else to turn their idea into a novel that they then publish under their own name? 

I’ve mulled it over, and I’ve come to a conclusion. It’s a lie and a cheat. 

If you’re a pop star, and you want to produce a book about your life or your craft or your favourite recipes, the concepts the book presents are all yours. The book is presenting you. Even if the words are provided by someone else, you are not deceiving the reader. They’re getting what they set out to get — a book that tells your story, or shares your knowledge, or lets them cook the food you like to eat.

When I sell you a fiction book with my name on it, I’m doing something fundamentally different. I am selling you something with a particular voice, a way of building character, a type of descriptive writing, a tone and style that comes from being written by me. My stories are all different, of course, but they carry the same hallmarks. If you buy a Jude Knight story, you expect to read a Jude Knight story — and you will. I write my own books.

I am an author because I write my own books. 

The celebrity who has a ghostwriter write their autobiography is not an author and isn’t claiming to be; they’re a celebrity with their name on a book about them. If that book is about their experience as a round-the-world solo yachtsman and they’ve never been on the ocean in their life, then they’re a liar — not because someone else wrote their book, but because they are misrepresenting who they are.

The person who gets other people to write their fiction books for them is claiming to be an author, and that’s a lie. They are misrepresenting who they are.

But wait, you say, maybe they have written some books. One or two or six. That makes them an author, doesn’t it? Not of the rest of the books they claim, that other people have written, it doesn’t. They’re cheating their reader of the repeat experience of the author’s voice, and to me, that breaks a compact between writer and reader, a trust relationship, that should never be broken.

Most people don’t (and can’t) write a book a month.

So here’s the thing. I don’t publish as often as I’d like. I have various ailments. I have a day job. But even in a perfect world, I wouldn’t publish once a month. If I did, I’d be compromising the quality. I write fast, but I still need time to edit, to proofread, to have the occasional conversation with physical, rather than fictional, people.

And very few people can publish once a month. If you see a writer doing so, be suspicious. There may be a good reason. The amazing Grace Burrowes had a huge number of manuscripts before she published the first, so they came out in quick succession. Others save early books of a series to publish quickly. I plan to do this with the first few books in the Children of the Mountain King series so I can publish one a month for six months. And some people do write fast and have no friends. I’m not saying it can’t be done. 

Just be careful out there. It’s a jungle, and I’ve just discovered that it’s full of ghosts.

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The man who could have saved millions

Look up maternal mortality figures for Britain and the United States in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries and through to the 1930s, and you’ll see why childbirth was so feared. Every year, between four and eight women would die for every 1000 total births, during the birth or within the following 42 days. Factor in that few couples practiced ways of limiting conception, and women faced this risk time after time. Breastfeeding was a time-honoured way of spacing babies, since conception is suppressed in many women while fully breastfeeding, but by the nineteenth century, wet nurses were fashionable for the upper classes, so men commonly had nine or ten children, often with two or more wives in succession.

Puerperal fever, the killer in many cases, was no respecter of persons. Indeed, physicians were more likely to carry the disease than midwives, since they went from attending to autopsies and infectious diseases straight to assisting at a birth. Mary Wollstonecroft died in 1797, after a doctor was called to help remove the placenta when she gave birth to the baby named for her, who would later become well known as Mary Shelley.

The father of hand-washing

Use the internet to look up who first discovered that hand-washing saved lives, and the name Ignaz Semmelweiz will populate your search screen. He was a Hungarian doctor who, in the 1840s, began collecting mortality statistics in two maternity wards. In one, staffed by doctors and their students, mortality rates were five times as high as the other, staffed by midwives. He made several changes to align the routine between one ward and the other, but to no effect. Then one of the pathologists died. He’d pricked his finger during the autopsy of a woman who died of puerperal fever, got very sick, and died. Apparently, such deaths among pathologists were not uncommon, but Semmelweiz noticed that the man had shown all the symptoms of puerperal fever.

Semmelweiz realised that puerperal fever wasn’t uniquely a post-natal disease of mothers. He then theorized that doctors were getting little pieces of corpse on their hands when they dissected bodies, and those caused the fever. He made his doctors and students wash their hands and instruments in a chlorine solution, and maternal deaths in the doctors’ ward dropped dramatically.

Problem solved.

Hold on. Not so fast.

While all the facts about Semmelweiz are true, the appellation ‘father of hand-washing’ is wrong for two reasons.

First, he wasn’t the first

He wasn’t  the first to notice the correlation. In the 1790s, Alexander Graham, a naval doctor who had retired from the sea to work in a hospital in Aberdeen faced an epidemic of puerperal fever, and recorded his conclusions about the 77 cases in his care.

‘… it is a disagreeable fact that I, myself, was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women.’

He recommended burning the women’s bedclothes and told doctors to carefully wash themselves and to change their clothes between patients.

In the United States, a few years before Semmelweis, physician and poet Oliver Wendell-Holmes drew the same inferences.

‘… the disease known as puerperal fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient, by physicians and nurses.’

They weren’t the only ones.

In France, there was Antoinne Germain Labarraque. In Ireland, Robert Collins, In Britain, Thomas Watson. All of them advocated hand-washing to save lives.

Second, no one wanted to know

Medical science laughed at the notion that doctors might be inadvertently killing patients.

Gordon was hounded out of Aberdeen, and had to return to the navy, where his knowledge of handwashing informed his surgical practice and undoubtedly saved many sailors. But not medical practice. Labarraque, Collins, and Watson fared better, being honoured for their medical achievements, but scoffed at for their theories of hygiene, their recommendations disregarded.

Semmelweiz, perhaps because of his aggressive attitude, was the worst treated of all. He publicly berated those who didn’t agree with him, in increasingly abusive terms. In one letter, he said:

I declare before God that you are a murderer and [history] would not be too unfair if it remembers you as a medical Nero.

In 1865, aged only 47, he was committed to an asylum, probably beaten, and died of sepsis — ironically, the same infection of the blood stream that was still killing all those women he tried to save.

There’s good news, and there’s bad news

Even after Lister proved the connection between germs and disease, hand-washing took a long time to catch on. In the Scandinavian countries, midwives adopted hand-washing early, and had the earliest drop in maternal deaths. Other countries reluctantly followed, the United States as late as 1930. All the evidence in the world is not enough to change minds that are set on what they want to believe.

Even today, close to one third of maternal deaths in Africa and other developing parts of the world are from puerperal fever. They could be prevented by washing hands in an antiseptic solution and wearing clean clothes (if such supplies plus the knowledge we take for granted were available to birth attendants).

 

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Black moments on WIP Wednesday

Each story reaches a moment when things go wrong. In the most gripping stories, at some point, things go so wrong that the hero or the heroine or both can see no way out. Prue has been killed when the building exploded. Rede is in the hands of his enemies, bound and helpless. Even in a romantic comedy, the black moment (though it might be more of a grey moment) brings despair to the characters we’ve come to love. Cecilia and Marcel have a magical kiss, and then must part. They are from different worlds. It’s over.

It isn’t, of course, at least not in my stories. I choose for my protagonists to find love and for their love to be returned. The happy ever after is just within reach.

But, still, the barriers must seem, at least to them and preferably to the reader, impossible to overcome.

This week, I’m inviting you to give me a clip from your work-in-progress showing part of your protagonists’ black moment. Mine is from Unkept Promises. My hero is tied to a tree, bound and gagged. And my heroine is trying to rescue his son against overwhelming odds when this happens.

“Quick, Mrs Redepenning.” Luke was urging her down, his hands firm on her calves as he knelt. She leapt from his shoulders. “Quick,” he said again. He led the way slightly around the tower to put it between them and the carriage they could now hear approaching.

This side of the hill was less even, full of bumps and hollows. Mia followed Luke as quickly as she could. He had just entered the trees, and she was less than a dozen paces behind him, when she caught her foot and came down flat on the hillside.

For a moment she could only lie there, winded. Voices from the other side of the tower had her pulling her knees under her to get up, but she froze again as they grew closer.

“I’m telling you, Captain, we didn’t hear anything.”

She recognised Hackett’s voice. “And I tell you to find him. You!” His voice retreated. “Get the boy. I’m not waiting to be ambushed.”

“Hey!” The man closest to her shouted after Hackett. “Not so fast. We haven’t been paid.”

“I don’t have time for this. Follow me, and you’ll get your money.”

Now. While they were arguing. Mia crept towards the tree line, keeping low.

She might have made it, but for the riders who appeared at that moment, coming up the hill through the trees on a path that approach the tower from the side. One of them turned his horse and in a few quick strides was in front of her. The moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun he had pointed at her.

“Stand up very slowly,” said a cultured English voice; a woman’s voice, and one she had heard before, though she could not, for the moment, place it. The other riders had joined the first.

Hackett and his men came down the hill towards them. Any thought that the two parties were aligned faded in the light of the weaponry each pointed at the other. Perhaps Mia could use this to her advantage.

“Madam,” she said, “please, I beg you, help me. Those men have kidnapped my son.”

The woman nudged tell course closer and bent to look into Mia’s face. It was Lady Carrington! What was that wicked woman doing here? She had fled England long ago; indeed, most of the Redepenning family thought she must be dead. The lady raised both eyebrows.

“Euronyme Redepenning. How interesting. Fancy running into you, here of all places.” She looked up the hill at the approaching ruffians. “Do come closer,” she invited. “I may have captured someone of interest to you, and I am willing to trade.”