Paul Pindar

Posted on | June 25, 2010 | 2 Comments

25th June, 2010
The most extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday.

I have been in an email correspondence with a man who is an expert on Jacobean furniture, and to whom Paul Pindar’s house, that amazing carved oak front which is no so beautifully on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is well known.

He sent me a picture of an engraving of the interior of the house, which I had never seen. So there I was, on the 53 bus, suddenly looking into Paul Pindar’s sitting room. What a strange and wonderful experience that was.

The only thing I have ever known like it is when I went to the Bodleian Library to look up Paul Pindar’s book bequest, one of the earliest ever made to the then nascent Bodelian (the eponymous Thomas Bodley was obviously a friend of Pindar’s ) only to find that all the books he had bequeathed the library were early seventeenth century astronomical texts.

I had conceived the idea of the character of Jamal al-Andalus, the Arab astronomer who befriends and helps Pindar in the Aviary Gate, long before I ever knew this.

Strange how art so often imitates life.

Category: Pindar Diamond
Tags: > > >

word counts

Posted on | June 23, 2010 | No Comments

These beginnings can be very, very creaky. I’ve written just over a thousand words in three days. Not much, but a start, as they say.

More importantly, I hope, the whole world I am trying to create is gradually taking shape inside my head. It feels almost like channelling, or something similar. Conjuring up these people and these places from the innermost depths. Dreaming it all into existence. So I’m going to try not to worry about how slow it seems, for the moment anyway.

I’m reading the folklorist Katharine Briggs’s seminal work ‘Fairies in Tradition and Literature.’ And a wonderful wonderful old-fashioned tome that I ordered through Amazon called ‘The Countryside Companion’, first published in the 1930′s.

Both have inspired me hugely. I don’t have time to do any separate research for this book, so I’m just having to do it in tandem. I think it’s going to work rather well.

Category: Pindar Diamond
Tags: > >

New Novel

Posted on | June 14, 2010 | 4 Comments

June 14th, 2010

Good morning, A Winter’s Tale (or at least I think that’s what you are going to be called).

Starting a new novel is a strange business – it seems so weirdly final, I keep thinking there must be something else I need to do (the washing up? dance round a maypole?) but there’s only one way to go, which is just to sit down and write something. (It helps that I’ve had this faintly absurd entry in my diary for some time: ‘start new novel today’. It’s good to have some sort of starting gun.)

I’ve had the first scene in my head for months now, which has made it easier: a man walking down a drover’s path in the late autumn/winter of 1606. Who is he? Where has he come from, and why is he here? Where is he going? There is a place I know in Wiltshire which has one such drover’s path – an incredibly ancient and, to me, mysterious site – so I keep the thought of it in my head as I write.

Nearly 500 words in about two hours. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Reviews for The Pindar Diamond are still filtering through. Here’s a nice one from the Sunday Times (6/6/10):

“Katie Hickman’s The Pindar Diamond picks up four years on from her first novel, The Aviary Gate. In 1604, rumours are washing through Venice’s demimonde that the sultan’s Blue Diamond is in the city. Paul Pindar, a Levant Company merchant in mourning for his lost love, Celia, who has vanished, is convinced that if he gets hold of the diamond it will lead him to her. Nuns, precious gems, swashbucklers and courtesans, plus a plot that will keep you on your toes, are stirred and shaken into pure escapism.”

Category: Pindar Diamond
Tags: > > >

Publication

Posted on | June 8, 2010 | No Comments

8th June, 2010

Bon Voyage, Pindar Diamond.

Category: Pindar Diamond
Tags:

Morning After

Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments

4th June, 2010

Although the official publication of The Pindar Diamond is not until Monday, after last night I feel as though this book is well and truly launched.

Interesting word that: a book is launched like a ship being cast out onto the seas for the first time. Not a bad metaphor. Your book is out in the big wide world, and it will sink or swim (to stay with the the marine imagery for a while) on its own.

The sun is still shining and I keep thinking about last night. The Bloomsbury posse come bearing the most beautiful bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen in my life (thank you Bloomsbury). Little snatches of conversation surface – my editor recalls how hard it snowed the day I was supposed to deliver the manuscript. No courier bikes would run that day because of the icy roads, so my printed manuscript (that old fashioned thing) had to be delivered to her by a man in a van who apparently had to traverse the whole of the M25, picking up his other deliveries, before he got to her.

I find myself reminiscing with a bookseller friend who supported my first novel, The Quetzal Summer (published way back in 1992), and we recall, with some hilarity (the Hay festival Cava is flowing thick and fast by now) how when he arranged a signing for me in one of his shops the only person who turned up turned out to be on day release from the local lunatic asylum. Apprently it was warm in the shop and he was lured in by the offer of a free glass of wine….

Category: Pindar Diamond
Tags: > > >
keep looking »