MyAnglo/German ancestors led ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

When writing about their history, I embellish the hard facts from the archive. I imagine how they lived. Family stories, cards, letters and memoirs, inform my imagination. This, mixed with a very large dose of social history, makes up my writing resource.

Why have I written about my family, in historical fiction format? I hear you ask.

Well, to be honest, my research left family members, unimpressed. My accumulated pile of documents and certificates left them cold.  They just could not see the exciting story he records revealed to me.

So I decided that the facts presented in a story might grab their attention. To my delight, my family now love the story of their ancestors. And to my surprise and joy, so have hundreds of readers from around the world.

Many readers have asked me, why I mention the weather…

How are you doing today, you guys? Let that be the first thing you tell me in the comments below!

So this is what I have in store for you today: what I learned from my experience as a first-time author. My debut book was called Philippa. It was a period drama and heavily family-centric, geared toward an all-inclusive audience, published in 2013. It’s been five years since, but I still remember it like it was yesterday. Additional details, summary, blurb, and the cover of my book can be found on my website’s book page here. It’s a quick read; you can head on there and come back to continue with this post in less than 30 seconds. I won’t use up all this space to just repeat all that minutiae again here. Instead, I’m going to utilize it to tell you the things you came here for…

© S.J. Carver

Originally published as ‘1888’ in VETO III (2009).

This is another relatively old piece that kicked around quite a while before someone published it, supposedly because of the colourful language. (I remember one editor telling me it was her policy never to publish anything she wouldn’t want her grandmother to read.) I’m pretty sure it was originally written sometime in 1999. It’s interesting to me as an ancestor of Shark Alley, because it was my first attempt at writing a ‘Victorian’ scene, while you can also already see the preoccupation with nested narration and ghoulish storytelling, the profession of Jack Vincent, the ‘Death Hunter’ hero of the novel.

The nights were drawing in now, and dead leaves were mingling with the shit and the sludge on the streets. The year drew towards a merciful end, marred only by the certain knowledge that 1889 would just be…