Are you working on a new series set in the Age of Sail? Have you written a naval thriller set during the World Wars? Are you passionate about seafaring stories? Sapere Books wants to hear from you!
We are actively looking to acquire nautical fiction from both debut and established authors. We are particularly interested in historical naval fiction, nautical thrillers, and books in a series.
If you are an author who owns the rights to a previously published naval series, or a writer working on a new nautical novel, please get in touch and tell us about it!
Email our Editorial Director, Amy Durant, directly with some information about your nautical writing and a synopsis of your naval novel and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
We hope to hear from you soon!
When did you first start writing? Did a specific event encourage you to start?
In the 1990s. I can’t be more specific as I went to several creative writing classes, usually with the same tutors. The class would start out well attended, then people gradually would drop out – usually in winter. Then the following year the funding would change and we’d start up again at a different venue. But I always persevered and about three or four of us went to the same classes, which I enjoyed very much. Finally one tutor suggested I sent off some of my stories to a magazine. The first one was rejected but the editor must have seen something in my writing and made some useful suggestions. So luckily my next one was accepted by Ireland’s Own. I still have the cover framed on my wall. It’s dated August 1999 and has the picture of a Connemara pony on the front.
How much research do you do?
For Song of the Shuttle I went to Quarry Bank Mill, a working cotton mill near Manchester owned by the National Trust. The volunteer guide on duty was so helpful, explaining how the machines worked, then demonstrating them. He was really patient answering all my questions. From a large second hand book store in South Manchester I was lucky enough to find a book from the television series about the American Civil War shown back in the 1990s. It was packed with information and original photographs which was invaluable to my research. Other books like ‘The Hungry Mills’ and ‘Reveille in Washington’ helped enormously and also a map showing the major battles of the war.
For subsequent books I’ve turned to Victorian history which has always interested me. The internet is invaluable too. Where else could you discover the uniform that an American military hospital orderly wears?
Tell us about where you write / your writing habits.
I’ve set up office in a small bedroom since my son and daughter have left home. It overlooks the back garden and I can see the small birds bobbing about in the trees. I’m afraid I’m not an organised writer or set time each day for writing. I have a habit of waking up at an unearthly hour with an idea in my head and can’t get back to sleep until I’ve typed it out. I did try to write those ideas down on a pad by the bed but couldn’t read my writing in the morning. So I drag on a hairy old dressing gown – and tracky bottoms in winter – and sneak off into my office for an hour or so. Then I slip back into bed and sleep soundly.
What part of the writing process do you find most difficult? Starting, knowing when you’ve done enough research, the ending?
Most of my stories are written in my head long before they reach the page. Then when I have time I want to get down the information as quickly as possible. Of course I have to go through it all again and edit it. Sometimes I seem to write in Polish! I’m not keen on editing and don’t like rewriting at all.
How real do your characters become and do they ever seem to control their own storyline?
My characters do seem to take on a life of their own and I instinctively know how they will act. This is a very perceptive question as many times my ideas and plots will change when faced with what a character would do.
Do you ever feel guilty about killing off characters or do you relish it?
I have sat and wept when one of my characters died. Normally it’s only the baddies that ‘get it’. I feel they get what they deserve.
What are you reading right now?
At the moment I’m reading a spy novel by John Le Carre and persevering with it. I get annoyed by the macho attitude of the men though! I have Lamentation by C. J. Sansom waiting in the wings. I love his Shardlake novels.
What is your favourite book?
My favourite book is Jane Eyre. I’ve always loved it from being young when I had the Dean and Son version for young readers.
What book do you wish you had written?
Something brilliant like The Book Thief. I’ve recommended it to so many people and they’ve all enjoyed it.
Do you love any genres/books that are very different from what you write?
I have very eclectic taste. I really enjoy Terry Pratchett books. Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels are a favourite and also Lyndsay Davies’ Roman detective Falco. Although they are historical novels, they are very different from the romances that I’m writing.
Tell us something surprising about you!
I’ve had a painting exhibited in Manchester Art gallery. I won a competition where all the art classes round the city sent a painting that was inspired by one of the Gallery’s paintings. It was called ‘Things to Do’ and in one corner featured a cosy armchair, a book and a cup of tea. The rest of the canvas had an ironing board, a dirty frying pan, an un-ironed shirt and lots and lots of socks – black with a different coloured heel. None of the socks matched! The blurb was that I’d rather sit reading than doing all the chores. Along with a certificate I received a bag of art goodies. Unfortunately I don’t have time to go to any art classes nowadays.
Chapter One
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Danny Sanchez arrived at 10:27.
It was already bedlam; hundreds of people covered the dusty patch of waste ground beyond the white walls of the property, shouting, pushing, arguing among the cacti and scruffy palms. The excavator’s arm loomed menacingly above the roof of the two-storey villa.
The demolition had been scheduled for nine a.m., but frantic negotiation had earned the elderly expat owners a three-hour stay of execution while the house was cleared. The whole neighbourhood turned out to help, Briton and Spaniard alike. A stream of people walked back and forth along the edge of the unpaved road, carrying everything and anything they could salvage – doors, windows, even the kitchen work surface. The problem now was where to put it all. An incongruous pile of household items was collecting around the trunk of a fan palm. Danny watched as a negligee blew free from a box and wrapped itself around a cactus.
Christ, what a mess.
In eighteen years of journalism, Danny had witnessed dozens of horrors – people cut from the wreckage of car accidents, a woman leap from a burning building, a suicide on a railway track – but this was something new. They were going to demolish Peggy and Arthur Cookes’ house and nothing could be done to avert it. He’d seen the paperwork. Nearly every penny the poor old duffers had was invested in the villa; a lifetime’s equity would be smashed to rubble. It was like waiting for an execution.
The Junta de Andalucía, southern Spain’s regional government, had sent a woman in her mid-thirties to oversee the demolition. Crafty, Danny thought; people found it harder to get angry with a woman, especially an attractive one. Her hard hat and fluorescent bib bobbed at the centre of a tightly-knit group of people. Guardia Civil officers in green boiler suits formed a protective ring around the Junta woman. Then came the leaders of the protestors, waving documents and trying to argue over the shoulders of the Guardia officers.
Behind them was the press pack, two dozen strong, cameras and microphones waving above the crowd as it surged and rocked. Gawkers and curious children milled at the edges, wondering what all the fuss was about.
For her part, the woman from the Junta looked genuinely distraught at what she had to do. Danny had no idea whether she could follow the English words being bellowed at her, but it was obvious she understood the gist. She kept pointing to the paperwork on her clipboard, raising hands and shoulders in shrugs of helplessness. Someone, somewhere had decreed the demolition must go ahead; it was her job to get it done.
The Cookes were inconsolable. Peggy sat on an armchair that had been dumped among spiky clumps of esparto grass. Tears carved streaks through the dust that had settled on her face. Danny recognized the armchair; he’d sat in it when he’d interviewed them a year before, when the demolition orders were first served. Arthur Cooke had looked dapper and defiant as he posed for the cameras back then; now, every one of his seventy-three years weighed upon him. He stood with his hand on his wife’s shoulder and turned moist eyes as Danny approached.
“Not now, mate,” he said, shaking his head. “The bastards are about to ruin us.”
Danny nodded, glad he’d been spared having to ask the obligatory “How do you feel?” It was amazing how dumb those four words could make you feel sometimes.
Peggy Cooke wanted to speak, though. “Why us?” she said, her voice shrill. “Out of all the hundreds of people, why does it have to be us? I want you to print that. It’s not fair.”
Why us? That had been everyone’s first reaction in March 2009 when the judicial demolition orders were delivered to eleven different families dotted around the municipality of Los Membrillos. It seemed so monstrously unfair, given the scale of the problem in Almeria, the province that occupies Spain’s south-eastern tip. A Junta survey had uncovered more than 12,500 irregular constructions in just ten of the worst affected municipalities. But the Spanish legal system was a Heath-Robinson contraption manned by characters from Kafka; immense and baffling in its complexity, arbitrary in the decisions it dispensed and spitefully prescriptive when it did so. It was one of the dangers of emigrating to Spain, the flipside to all the sunshine, fiestas and good living.
Not that it had worried the tens of thousands of Britons who had flooded the Almanzora Valley at the turn of the century, buying up villas and plots of land for self-builds, breathing life into the moribund rural communities that nestled below the Sierra de los Filabres mountain range. But the rush to expand had left thousands caught in the legal quicksand between the local and regional government of Andalusia. Local councils could grant licences to build, but the regional government had the right to challenge those licences. The catch-22 was that no one would stop you from planning to build a house; the house actually had to be built – and the money spent – for it to come to the Junta’s attention and challenge its legality.
Why us? Danny knew the answer to Peggy Cooke’s question; he’d interviewed the mayor of Los Membrillos. “We had so many applications for building licences, we were swamped,” the mayor had said, unlocking a cabinet and indicating three large cardboard boxes leaking paperwork. We only got round to processing eleven.” That was the bitter irony of it; by trying to follow the rules, these unlucky eleven home owners had created a paper trail that Junta officials could follow back to specific properties.
Time was ticking on. The crowd was getting angrier, the shouting louder. More Guardia officers arrived. Danny phoned everyone and anyone he could think of who was involved with the case.
It was the usual pass-the-parcel.
The council blamed the Junta, the Junta blamed the courts, the courts blamed the council; all down the line, each link of the chain shrugged its shoulders and pointed to someone else. Arthur Cooke watched Danny in action, hoping that this man who spoke such perfect Spanish could somehow work a miracle. Danny finished the phone call, shook his head. The flicker of light in the old man’s eyes dulled.
Paco Pino arrived at 11 a.m., yawning and scratching at his chest. “My one day off,” the photographer said, screwing a lens onto one of three cameras dangling from his neck, “And this has to go and happen. Just my luck.”
Danny was glad the Cookes couldn’t speak Spanish; crass comments like that were the last thing they needed to hear. Not that Paco was a bad person; experience had simply made him blasé, like everyone who made a living reporting other people’s misfortunes. Truth be told, Paco was a saint in comparison with some; Danny had spoken to one of the journalists sent by a UK red top to cover the announcement of the demolition orders the previous year.
“We won’t be interested again now until they knock the things down,” she said as she left, nodding toward the cloudy March sky. “Let’s hope they do it in summer, eh? I might get a bit of a tan.”
The pile around the palm tree grew: beds, sofas, lampshades, mirrors, cardboard boxes stuffed with clothes and crockery. Danny looked at his watch. Not long now.
At ten to twelve, uniformed officers of the Policia Local cleared the last of the protestors from the garden and checked no one was left inside the house. There were more scuffles on the white gravel outside the villa, more insults in English and Spanish. The property’s black gates had been lifted from their hinges earlier to allow the excavator through. Having shoved a final protestor outside, Guardia Civil officers formed a human barrier in the space between the gateposts. Protestors waved paperwork at the Junta woman as she looked at her watch and waved toward the workers.
The sudden roar of the excavator’s engine caused everyone to freeze and fall silent. The crowd turned as the engine revved and the excavator’s mantis arm uncoiled and rose above the house. For a moment, time seemed stilled…
…and then the air thundered as the excavator’s claw drove down through the roof. An angry moan emerged from the crowd as the arm rose and hundreds of dislodged tiles showered and smashed on the ground. The excavator arm dipped once, twice, three times more, prising the roof apart before ripping backwards and pulling free a ragged-edged section of brickwork. Looking through the jagged rent it created was surreal; the neatly-tiled interior walls had been exposed, giving a view inside a giant dolls’ house.
The Cookes stood holding each other: Peggy sobbing; Arthur straining to keep her on her feet, his face stoic. They were tearing his house down, but he wouldn’t show a flicker of weakness. Another huge section of wall tumbled away; it fell to the ground with a thud. Dust rose, people coughed, choked, began walking back along the road. Danny pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth.
The Spanish woman atop the ridge didn’t really care about the foreigners; their house was illegal; it had to come down.
She was only there for the spectacle, to have something to tell her friends tomorrow at the market.
She was the first to see it.
Her mouth gaped; then she began to scream and point toward the corner of the house. People looked to see what the noise was but the sounds were rendered unintelligible by the rumble of falling brickwork and the excavator’s diesel chug.
But the dust was settling now; people were following the woman’s outstretched hand, squinting as they too noticed the thing wedged in the narrow gap between exterior and interior wall.
A Guardia Civil officer rushed to the excavator, banged on the window. The machine fell silent. Other people had noticed the shouting woman now and were pressing closer, shading their eyes, unsure of what they were seeing. For the second time that morning, a sudden silence halted the crowd.
Danny thought it was a mannequin at first. And then the corpse fell forward, bending from the waist, its blackened head rocking back and forth. Some people screamed; others stood open-mouthed; some turned to run.
Arthur Cooke’s face remained expressionless as he stared at the semi-skeletal corpse lolling from the broken wall of his house. Then, without moving a single muscle of his face, he toppled forward and fell heavily to the earth.
Need to know what happens next? Get Scarecrow now from Amazon.
The Cooper Museum, housed in a small building in the heart of historic downtown Upland, offers a cozy and often crowded venue for local events. A favorite place to hang out with city residents, this cheery place often invites authors whose books feature the history of American towns and people, especially people from Upland, California.
I wrote my first edition of He Wrote Her Every Day in Upland and printed twenty copies in time to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. Based on letters Mom had saved from my father in Germany during WWII, the book was my mother’s gift to share with the family. This hard-cover version of their story includes photographs and follows a narrative using all the documents and souvenirs my mother saved. When I received an invitation to present my book on Author’s Day at the Cooper, I was delighted—and a bit apprehensive.
I decided to prepare a visual display of a few of Dad’s letters and many of the souvenirs. Did I mention that Mom saved everything? I needed three tables, but managed to make do with two. A three-foot square map mounted on a display board earned center stage, balanced between my tables. It was also a place I could hide if no one showed any interest in my book.
The map, sent to all the soldiers and their families from the Army post-war, depicts the route this Infantry division traveled from the beginning of the war until the final return of the last Occupation troops. So when the recommissioned Queen Mary finally brought Dad home, Mom already had the map of the route taken by his troops known as the Railsplitters.
Our afternoon of book signing invited walk-through traffic in the patio area outside of the small museum. A beautiful afternoon in California promised our group of about a dozen local authors a busy opportunity to talk to our neighbors about our books. I was hoping for a few sales and a chance to meet my fellow writers.
Flattered when the assistant curator pulled a chair up at my table, I smiled widely as he began to go through all of the V-mails, coins, K-ration kit remnants, and the seventy-five-year-old postcards that make up my father’s collection. He looked through the assemblage of bits and pieces that had been the focus of my writing for about a half hour before, at last, he raised his head and just said, “Wow!”
Hungry for some positive feedback, I answered by asking, “Wow what?”
His response was a surprise. “You should not have all of this sitting out here in the sun for anyone to handle. This should be in a museum.” I thought he was trolling for a donation to the Cooper, but no, he assured me that mother’s bits and pieces needed a place where scholars could read the primary documents and preserve them for posterity.
He told me about the National WWII museum in New Orleans, LA. It took me a year to do it, but Kim Guise, curator of the museum in New Orleans, guided me through the process and helped our family contribute the collection to them. Mom was tickled to sign the donation papers and make it official. The museum staff is currently working on a display of the letters and souvenirs of Private James William Hendrickson, Jr. It is, according to Guise, the largest collection of letters and documents from an individual American soldier.
This was exciting, but the best experience at the Cooper came on yet another day when my display had been transferred from the originals to mere copies. The Railsplitter Map held pride of place and looked as sharp and clear as the originals.
He Wrote Her Every Day will be published by Sapere Books and is coming soon!
The Daily Mail and The Sun are both pretty shitty newspapers, I ought to know: I wrote for them both.
Why? Because they were the only newspapers that paid decent money to journalists working out of Spain.
Anyway, stories that were suitably comic, tragic or grotesque enough for The Mail or The Sun only occurred infrequently on my patch – but when they did, I entered an incredibly stressful, real life version of the cartoon, “Wacky Races”, as the first journalist to get there and get the pictures and facts, got the sale. The rest just wasted time and petrol, and I was always in competition with at least 3 or 4 others.
And it was those missed sales that started chipping away at my integrity. Because if you work for shitty newspapers, you very quickly begin to behave in a shitty way.
With me, it began with a bit of cheeky chicanery. Much of rural Spain consists of unmarked dirt tracks, the names of which are known only to locals, so most reporters rely on rural petrol station attendants for guidance, and I often slipped the staff a tenner to misdirect any other strangers asking around.
Pretty tame stuff, but it was the start of the road to Shitsville. And once you’re on it, the question quickly raises itself: How far down the road are you prepared to go?
I found out in 2010, when I covered a story about the collapse of a house which had killed two expats in a tiny hamlet way up in the mountains.
When I got there, I deployed my usual set of tricks. First of all, in order to find the house, I lied and said I was a friend of the dead couple and was there to pay my respects. This got me detailed directions, as well as plenty of pats on the back and commiseration from local Spaniards. I may even have squeezed out some crocodile tears for their benefit.
The property was all locked up and wrapped with police incident tape, so I climbed the fence and started looking for a decent angle from which to take a photograph, clambering, hopping and jumping all over the rubble as I did so. When a neighbour of the dead couple emerged and asked me what the hell I was doing, I ignored his question and asked him the only thing that interested me: ‘Have you seen any other reporters here before me?’
When he said, ‘No’, I climbed back over the fence and started looking for somewhere with Wi-Fi coverage.
I got the sale. But as I was celebrating in a local bar, looking through the photos I had taken, I began to notice that there was dried blood and other types of biological matter all over the collapsed concrete pillars and rubble. Then I noticed some of it had stained the tip of my desert boot as I’d been merrily desecrating a place where two people had died a sudden and likely very painful death.
I lay awake that night, and slowly came to the realisation that I did not have what it took to be a fulltime tabloid journalist. My journey along the road to Shitsville had ended.
And that’s where Danny Sanchez was born. Because Danny does have what it takes and I enjoy exploring the grottier side of journalism through the prism of the character.
Most readers warm to Danny immediately, but others don’t, and I suspect it is the ruthless side of Danny’s character that is the reason for this – he climbs walls, he lies, he goes through bins, he enters people’s homes uninvited and he “borrows” documents – in short, he does whatever he has to in order to get the story.
The trick is to make the people he is investigating so loathsome that the reader sympathises with Danny, despite his shady behaviour.
Anyway, for those of you who dislike the character, I’d ask that you cut the guy some slack – he trawls through the shitty side of journalism so I don’t have to.
Sapere Books are publishing books of mine from two different series involving two different detectives.
One, involving Lieutenant Josef Slonský is set in 21st century Prague; the other, featuring the university lecturer Master Mercurius, takes place in 17th century Netherlands. There are obvious differences in setting that inform the writing.
Slonský is a career policeman. He is inclined to take the occasional drink to get the mental cogs turning faster. There is nothing much in his life except his work, and since he is 58 when the series starts, the threat of retirement looms large. Slonský has all the support that modern science can offer, including a mobile telephone, though he does not really know how to do anything beyond making calls on it.
Mercurius is very much an amateur, an accidental detective who falls into the work when a series of abductions in Delft leave the local authorities baffled, so they send to the University at Leiden for a clever man who might help them solve these; and the Rector sends Mercurius. He is a young man, only 33, a lecturer in moral philosopher and an ordained minister, and he has little in the way of science to help him.
To my mind, though, none of these is the major difference between the series. I award that distinction to the fact that Slonský books are written in the third person, whereas Mercurius narrates his; and I thought it might be instructive to discuss why that is so.
I would love to say that it was the result of a carefully balanced decision, weighing all the factors for and against either approach, but if the truth be told the stories just came out that way. In my head, the action in Slonský appears as a film in which I stand back, observe, listen and record, whereas the Mercurius books involve me as a character in the tale I am telling. I toyed with telling Mercurius in the third person, but it didn’t feel right, and I have spent a bit of time thinking why that might be.
I think the reason is that Slonský is a big character, but he has a large regular supporting cast and it is important to me that we should get to know them. If he were also the narrator, I think he would dominate too much. Mercurius, on the other hand, is the only character who appears in all that series of books, and as the only consistent element the story has to pivot on him anyway.
This is not just of analytical interest. Many crime novelists consistently favour one or the other approach. I am prepared for either, but it changes the way the story develops. In Slonský stories things can happen when he isn’t around; Mercurius only knows what he sees and hears. That inevitably leads to a slower unwinding of the evidence, because it would seem forced if all the clues turned up in an afternoon. Slonský can send his colleagues out to investigate several lines of enquiry and bring them back together for a conference; Mercurius spends a lot of time travelling to discover things for himself. There is no telephone or telegraph system that he can use, and he does not possess a horse.
There have been rare examples of writers changing the voice during a series – Conan Doyle had Holmes writing one of his stories, for example – but generally once the choice is made, you’re stuck with it. It seems strange, given how important it is, that I am not more systematic in my selection!
LYING AND DYING, the first thriller in Graham‘s Slonský series, is available to pre-order now.
Full-time employee by day, aspiring novelist by night? Then you’ve come to the right article, my friend! That’s how every author who ever nabbed themselves a publishing deal started out. So, let’s do what all dreamers do, and make a list:
1. Be Prepared.
Dib-dib-dib, as the Boy Scouts say. Be prepared to make your first priority a notepad and a pen. Don’t leave home, work, or bed, without them. Inspiration is all around. That punch-line you blurted out. The way someone pronounces, ‘Yugoslavia’. The colour of Boredom. Get as ephemeral or literal as you like, but write it down. Because you’re a writer, remember? It’s not 9-to-5. It’s stride-in-your-step, adrenelin-jolting devotion!
Between You and Me: Check that notepad is tantalizingly empty, and the pen actually works before you get too attached to a brainwave. Ahem.
2. Time on your Side.
Writers tend to fall into either early-morning or late-night camps. That’s because our brains rather wonderfully surrender all traces of reality when we’re pre- or post-dreaming. Marian Keyes set her alarm a couple hours ahead of the office to complete work on her first novel. Jay McInerney kept cosying up to the keyboard way past the midnight hour. No matter which option hits the mark, make it a date.
Friendly Advice: When circumstances don’t allow, don’t beat yourself up. Keep jotting down ideas as casually as you like, and know you’ll make it up to your manuscript with a ream of words waiting in the wings.
3. Plan, plan, plan!
I’d like to be one of those streamlined, linear-types, writing at stealth from beginning to end, but guess what? It doesn’t happen. I know where I’m going. I’ve a pretty good idea why we’re going there, but midway is about as far as I get, plot-wise. Then it’s time to iron-out the initial plan. If you’re armed with a water-tight synopsis, I look on in awe, but I need to submerge in the writing before emerging with a first draft.
Lesson Learned: If something isn’t working, it’s because it doesn’t work. Move on. Re-think. Re-write. No Re-grets.
4. Prioritise
As nice it would be to flounce off into the nearest vestibule and announce an early retirement from all daily responsibility, it’s first things first. Your mind can’t wander into fiction beneath a cloud of household chores or office deadlines. Pin them down. Get them done. Then consider yourself free to focus.
Working Lunch: Make the most of any break. Walk. Think. Be alone. Listen to your characters. Trust your instincts. Jot those thoughts down in that notepad you carry these days.
5. Bite into the Best Bits
There’s no point setting aside time, staring at a screen, wondering where to find a word count. Sometimes you have to take it by surprise. Don’t think of it as a book. Start with that ending you can’t wait to write, or the big reveal you know has to happen. Hit the highlights. Pick out the praline, and throw away the toffees! Why not? It’s your work. Kill off that character before they’re introduced in chapter eight, you absolute maverick! Look in the rearview, and you’ll find a picnic trail of plot development.
Novel Navigation: Make sure there’s batteries in the torch. In other words, map each scene in a working synopsis as you go along. See that shard of light up ahead? That’s the ending, compadre.
Visit Patricia’s author page or find out more about her second novel, Girlfriend, Interrupted.
Sapere Books is a digital and print-on-demand publisher of exciting new submissions and brilliant backlist books.
We are excited to be launching our first titles on March 1st!
Our launch books include An Unquiet Ghost by Linda Stratmann – the latest novel in her intriguing Mina Scarletti mystery series; The Gaslight Stalker by David Field – a brand new voice in historical crime; Dead Ernest by Frances Garrood – a touching story of love and loss; and The Gathering Murders by Keith Moray – the start of his thrilling Scottish detective series.
Check out our AUTHORS page to see all of the brilliant writers who will be publishing their stories with us in 2018. We have lots of exciting announcements coming soon, including a brand-new series from award-winning Irish author, Cora Harrison, and Regency crime from best-seller Elizabeth Bailey.
