DISCOVERING SLANDERLEY
After years in the professional publishing world, in retirement I decided to take full control. Being a computer nerd, I welcomed learning the procedures to produce a book both in print and digital.
I found an unpublished manuscript from decades past, my only work of fiction. In the 1980s, after reading Daphne du Maurier's powerful mystery, Rebecca, I was surprised by the questionable morality of the resolution. That led me to write a parody to suggest a moral interpretation. It wasn't necessary to read Rebecca to appreciate the story. But if you had, you would catch many of the sources behind the names, along with the origin of some plot twists.
I took some chapters to my writing group, and they encouraged me to expand and improve the work. Thanks to their comments, I did so and found ways to mount the story in distributors other than Amazon, the only choice for some readers. Find these options on my separate book pages. This became Slanderley: Love and Death in Cornwall.
Having invented Slanderley, I developed a second book: The Slanderley Curse: Nuns and Mayhem in Cornwall.
I am now halfway through composing Slanderley at War: Treachery and Deceit in WWII.
Cornwall has long been a favorite place to visit, so I incorporated my experiences there with much archival research, online courses, and newspapers from the era covered in the books. So a secondary purpose of the stories is to reveal the life of a particular time in a particular place.
A longtime fan of British humor, I enjoyed slipping that style into the stories as well. Only my musician friends know how skewed or silly I can be, as revealed in my songwriting.
I found an unpublished manuscript from decades past, my only work of fiction. In the 1980s, after reading Daphne du Maurier's powerful mystery, Rebecca, I was surprised by the questionable morality of the resolution. That led me to write a parody to suggest a moral interpretation. It wasn't necessary to read Rebecca to appreciate the story. But if you had, you would catch many of the sources behind the names, along with the origin of some plot twists.
I took some chapters to my writing group, and they encouraged me to expand and improve the work. Thanks to their comments, I did so and found ways to mount the story in distributors other than Amazon, the only choice for some readers. Find these options on my separate book pages. This became Slanderley: Love and Death in Cornwall.
Having invented Slanderley, I developed a second book: The Slanderley Curse: Nuns and Mayhem in Cornwall.
I am now halfway through composing Slanderley at War: Treachery and Deceit in WWII.
Cornwall has long been a favorite place to visit, so I incorporated my experiences there with much archival research, online courses, and newspapers from the era covered in the books. So a secondary purpose of the stories is to reveal the life of a particular time in a particular place.
A longtime fan of British humor, I enjoyed slipping that style into the stories as well. Only my musician friends know how skewed or silly I can be, as revealed in my songwriting.