I asked… you answered. As I prepare to go through the whole thing with a keen eye and red pen, I’ll keep you occupied with a new chapter preview from the upcoming Sin & Secrecy!

Been analysing my own work recently. I tend to just tell the story as I want, and think about the deeper details later. Like, what are the themes of The Berylford Scandals: Lust & Liberty and the upcoming sequel, Sin & Secrecy? Loyalty is a key one in both books. But in Sin & Secrecy, a recurring theme is family animosity. Uncles versus nephews; sons versus mothers. And while sibling has battled sibling since Cain and Abel, in the novels of the period we’re talking about in Berylford, they all seem to get along reasonably well. Natasha Rostova and her brother Nikolai are very close in War & Peace, as are Andrei Bolkonsky and his sister Marya. Many argue, in the same novel, that Hélène Kuragina and her brother Anatole are a bit too close. Then think the Bennet sisters in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Right down to their forming alliances for antagonistic purposes in the works of Dickens and Mervyn Peake, e.g. Samson and Sally Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop and Cora and Clarice Groan in Gormenghast.

In more recent times, if you try to name an antagonistic brother-sister relationship, my mind automatically turns to Cersei and Tyrion Lannister in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. However, strangely enough, I poured none of this influence into creating the domestic warfare between Abel and Rebecca Stirkwhistle for the Berylford novels. It started off as just a one-off argument, with Abel actually having some affection for his sister. But as I wrote, I found it was far more fun to write their scenes if they were sniping and threatening one another all the time. You can find the beginnings of that in the latter half of Lust & Liberty, and it continues into Sin & Secrecy as you’ll find previewed below:

Excerpt from The Berylford Scandals: Sin & Secrecy — Chapter IV: Who Holds the Power Here?

No idea what I’m talking about? Get up to speed with The Berylford Scandals by purchasing Lust & Liberty on Amazon here.

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I have now sold at least 65 copies of my debut novel in the 15 weeks that it has been available. Quite an achievement in itself, when you consider that most self-published authors don’t sell 50 copies of their first book at all. For the most part, the response has been very positive, though many readers have come up to me and remarked on how their vocabulary has expanded since reading.

The recurring point of “criticism” (for want of a better word) has been the characters’ names, which some have viewed as complicated. So I am dedicating this next post to discussing how complicated character names are rife within literature and that mine are on par with, if not easier to read than some authors.

As has been discussed before, several great 18th, 19th and 20th century authors influenced my literary style when it came to writing The Berylford Scandals: Lust & Liberty and the related works that came before and after it. Of all of them, two stick out in my mind in having unorthodox, whimsical and downright weird character names. They are Charles Dickens and Mervyn Peake.

When it came to writing the first full Berylford novel, starting back in 2008, I began with a list of 40 characters, many of whom I renamed as time went on, particularly as their surnames were swapped with those of my extended family. To give a few examples, Whitlock, Osborne, Gwynne and Warwick. Others, such as Gussage, are named after areas in Dorset, just as J.K. Rowling named some of her better-known characters after places in England (think Dursley in Gloucestershire, Snape in Suffolk and Flitwick in Bedfordshire).

And then there are those that are just downright odd and came from my imagination, and were partly influenced by those two aforementioned novelists: Dickens and Peake. Any fan of literature will know that Dickens’ characters all had quite characteristic and complex names, some of the more complicated to read on a page that strike me include Tulkinghorn and Jarndyce from Bleak House, Flintwinch and Tattycoram from Little Dorrit, Grewgious from The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Pecksniff and Chuzzlewit from Martin Chuzzlewit. The same goes for surnames like Barquentine and Prunesqualor from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books.

Upon reading those, would it be fair to say that surnames such as Vyrrington, Haffisidge and Rudgerleigh are less-complicated to read? I would say so. Having said that, those three surnames underwent numerous changes across the eight-year writing process for Lust & Liberty. Only one major family retained their surname from start to finish, and is definitively very Dickensian or Peakesque. Stirkwhistle. I don’t remember how that name came into my head when it did nearly ten years ago, but naming one of my favourite characters to write — Abel Stirkwhistle — I could not imagine him being called anything else.

If all characters in all novels set in a real-life place were given mundane names, how would they be memorable or unique, not to mention representative of the author’s style?

By popular demand, I am going to dedicate some future posts to telling the story behind creating some of my more favourite characters in my Berylford universe; how they first came to be in the stories and what or who influenced them.