Author: Alice McVeigh
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Are you still limiting your reading to characters you can “root” for? – If you are, you’re missing out!
#GoneWithTheWind #JaneAusten #AlwaysAusten #PrideAndPerjury The other day on Facebook someone – let’s call her X – complained about a (non-Jane Austen) novel that she couldn’t finish, because she couldn’t like the heroine enough to “root for her”. Some people berated X, but I’m actually a massive believer in not finishing a book. There are so…
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Why Your Friends Hate Your Books . . .
I recently received an email from an old friend who’s also a novelist, though in a very different genre. “Hi Alice, I’m feeling low and in need of advice. Maybe everybody secretly dislikes me, but my friends and family, neighbours and acquaintances generally just don’t care about my books. They’ve sold great, and one was…
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Pride and Perjury ~ Releasing in Two Days!!!! + a Giveaway!!!
An introduction to my Pride and Perjury . . . Pride and Perjury, my short story collection, ambushed me while I was planning, and even plotting, my fourth novel in the series, and my seventh altogether. It was the holes in Pride and Prejudice that bothered me. The omissions – my own, in Darcy, as…
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May Is a Big Month for the McVeighs!!
First, we shall see our daughter Rachel, who is a Presidential Scholar (Ph.D-level) at Harvard. Once term is over at Harvard, she’ll be home!! Second, my husband’s Music in Edwardian London (designed to please my fellow music lovers, my husband’s new book about music in London 1890 to 1914) is released. On the same day,…
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Austen’s characters: Love them – or just love to hate them????
When the natives get bored on the Facebook Jane Austen Fan Club – and they seem to get bored perilously easily – some member almost always pipes with “Poll!!! Who’s the worst mother/villain/sister/adulterer/whatever in Austen’s novels?” Polls are conducted… opinions shared… and sometimes some seriously vicious judgement calls get handed down. According to some, Mrs…
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Why bother with my ‘Darcy’?
Why bother with my Darcy? Why not just re-read – for surely everyone here will certainly have read it! – Pride and Prejudice, itself? I was asked this question by a sceptical fellow tennis-mad friend. “After all,” she added, “You’ve admitted that the plot is mostly the same.” FIRST ANSWER: Because Austen never married. In…
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Because I Love to Give Value Here …
HOW TO GET LEGITIMATE READER REVIEWS This is a column not only for (a) readers (how to get to read and review ARCs of new books for free) but ALSO for (b) writers. (How to get more, and often more professional, book reviews). Let’s start with the readers. Here, I think you have to be…
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Indie Book Awards – to enter, or not to?
Sometimes I’m just going… ‘Whaaaaat? Me on Always Austen again? Regina’s messed up. It can’t be me, already!’ (Note to self: Regina never messes up. She is enviably organized!!! And so… it is me. Tough luck, people!) Anyway, we came back, yesterday, to a freezing London, from a freezing northern Virginia, where we visited my…
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And the band played on …
This piece was prompted by a question on Facebook’s Pride and Prejudice page, where someone openly doubted whether it would have been likely for Darcy’s Pemberley to be shown off to random visitors in the early 1800s (as occurs in Pride and Prejudice, of course). Well, of course it was. Visitors came then, as they…
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The Perils and Pitfalls of “Writing Like Austen” (Part One)
I’m always being asked how I can write in Austen’s style. Trouble is, I don’t know how I do it. Though I suspect it has something to do with having been a professional ghostwriter for 15 years – and learning how to inhabit celeb’s/other writers’ voices – and something to do with being a musician…