This week I found out that my novel The Cleansing Flames has been nominated for the 2011 CWA Ellis Peters award. Here’s the link to the CWA website that tells you all about it.
Congratulations to all the authors on the list (which as you can see includes three Faber authors!):
Rory Clements Prince (John Murray)
Sam Eastland The Red Coffin (Faber & Faber)
Gordon Ferris The Hanging Shed (Corvus)
Andrew Martin The Somme Stations (Faber & Faber)
RN Morris The Cleansing Flames (Faber & Faber)
Imogen Robertson Island of Bones (Headline)
I feel honoured to be in such distinguished company. For those of you wanting a bit of background to the book, here’s a short talk I made when it first came out.
Blogophobia?
Yes, I know. It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. I got a good ticking off about it from Mike Jacob, one half of the writing duo Michael Gregorio. “You’ve got to keep it up to date,” he told me, ” otherwise people will stop coming back.”
I’m sure he’s right. The truth is, though, that I’ve just been too busy writing my next book – the first in a new series featuring a new character, Silas Quinn. Plus we’ve moved house and I took on a lot of day-job type work, which meant that I just didn’t have any time for blog postings. And I didn’t really feel I had anything interesting to blog about – until the Ellis Peters news came through this week, that is.
Those are my excuses anyway, though I think there may have been a more deeply-seated reason. I think I might have developed a fear of blogging. This increasingly common condition, known as blogophobia, is quite often a reaction to a period of excessive blogging, or blogorrhoea, which was certainly I suffered from when my first book Taking Comfort was published back in 2006.
The initial enthusiasm and optimism for this new method of communicating with the world quickly spirals out of control and turns into an addictive habit. The blogorrhoe-ic is overcome by feelings of remorse and self-disgust and then withdraws into a period of blog-silence. I’ve just come through that stage and I’m hoping to get my blog usage back up to a normal, healthy average.
In other news
I’m doing an event on Monday as part of the Guildford Literature Festival. I’ll be appearing with my fellow historical novelists Emma Darwin, Maria McCann and Rose Melikan to talk about various aspects of what we do. The show starts at 2.30 at The Electric Theatre, Guildford. Elizabeth Buchan is chairing the session. For further details, visit www.guildfordbookfestival.co.uk
Many congratulations Roger! And I really hope you win…
Many congratulations, Roger, on your short-listing. Ironically, this is the only one of your books I haven’t read yet, so I’d better go out and buy it! I’ve really enjoyed the previous three in the series, anyway – good luck with the final stage of the awards process. And good luck with the new Silas Quinn books.
Thanks for the kind wishes, Rhian and Len. Len – it’s not obligatory!