Well, it is amazing the things you discover, just by being visible on the net.

Marshal Zeringue wrote to me to ask if I would like to contribute to a site he maintains, based on a very cute and interesting idea.

What he does is ask authors to describe the action on page 69 of their novel. How does it fit into the developing narrative? Is it atmosphere or drama, character-based or location, dialog or straight prose.

I wrote one a couple of weeks ago and Marshal has just emailed to say the pages are live. If you would like to see how it works, here are the links:

* Pg. 69: Kate Mosse's Sepulchre
* The Page 69 Test: Sepulchre
* Kate Mosse

A bientôt

Kate

Following on from yesterday - the YouTube post! - I've just found out there are some more links available. They come from my UK publisher Orion:

- extra 1 - Tarot
- extra 2 - Debussy
- extra 3 - Musical Inspiration

I've also just been sent a link to a review of Sepulchre in the Washington Post - and the reviewer seems to have enjoyed it!

A bientôt

Kate

You can catch me on video on YouTube - there's a surreal thought! But first ...

This week is paperback publication in the UK - tomorrow, in fact. Not anywhere else though. That's just how publishing is. All sorts of countries - from Brazil to France, America to China - publish at different times of year - and sometimes years and years apart. At the same time as preparing to be in Bulgaria to talk about my last novel, Labyrinth, I am gearing up for UK press second time around for Sepulchre and the novel's next first publication in Norway!

Strangest of all, in these competitive times when readers could so easily be tempted to listen to music or go the movies or the theatre instead, is the latest sorts of publicity techniques being used.

For Sepulchre paperback publication, my UK publisher made a mini film specifically for YouTube. I know little about internet social networking sites, but have teenage children who occasionally ask me to look at strange and wonderful clips - such as sneezing pandas or a young man known to the world as 'Star Wars Kid' ...

For the promo for Sepulchre, we went into the woods near to my house in the UK. On a day of sharp, white, cold winter sunlight and the crack and snap of twigs and frozen leaves underfoot, I wandered around looking like the unseen extra in The Blair Witch Project. Later, we recorded a reading from Sepulchre. The result is something that is both entirely alien to me and extremely intriguing. The figure does not look like me, the voice does not sound like me, the landscape does not look like one that I know and love. It is, at the same time, utterly wonderful. Very much seeing the heart of Sepulchre interpreted by someone else and made real.

This, I suppose, is the nature of writing, of film making, of composition. To capture the integrity of the moment, the emotion and atmosphere that lies behind the character and plot and action.

Already, even though the mini movie has only been up on YouTube for a matter of hours, American readers have been watching and responding.

A bientôt

Kate

In the UK, we still have the tradition of May Day being a public holiday. For a writer, these few visible links to the past, reminders of older times, are both intriguing and inspiring. Any reader who has enjoyed the novels of Thomas Hardy or any of the great English 19th century authors, from Ms Austen herself to the more Gothic writings of ghost writers such as M R James or Algernon Blackwood, will have a sense of the rural English calendar and the folklore that goes with it.

In France, unlike England, the most commonly respected public holidays of the past are linked to the church, rather than to mythology or country folklore. Saints Days are more significant, particularly in the southwest, as opportunities for country fairs, for holidays, for dancing and singing.

In Sepulchre, this network of local fairs and holidays became a wonderful way for me, as a novelist, to build up a network of events. The key, when writing fiction based on or inspired by true historical events, is to ensure there's a good balance between private events - those happening in the key settings, such as the Domaine de la Cade, where Léonie and Anatole are staying with their aunt - and public events, such as a local fair that allows all the characters to come together in, say, the square in Rennes-les-Bains. Or, using the incident of a real-life flood in Carcassonne in October 1891, as a way to move the action forward. Researching such landmark events can be done via tourist sites, history sites, in museums, and by looking at collections of old photographs, music programmes and advertising posters. All of these things can - might - fuel your plot and give you additional ideas.

After all, when telling the story, it's never just about what a character does, but also how they do it. It is the background colours, as much as the foreground image, that makes one story stand out from the next. Reality and imagination are never very far apart ...

A bientôt.