Guest Post: In the Shadow of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt, author of Daughters of the Witching Hill

Today I have the pleasure of hosting Mary Sharratt, author of the excellent historical novel Daughters of the Witching Hill. I'm curious to know how being an American living abroad has shaped her writing and her choice of subject material. Welcome, Mary, and thank you so much for joining us!

People always tell aspiring writers to write what they know. What I know is travel: from landscape to landscape, country to county. The experience of otherness and strange homecomings in unfamiliar places. My writing has been shaped indelibly by my life as an eternal expat. Wanderlust infected me from an early age. I have been a traveler—and a foreigner—nearly my entire adult life.

Born and raised in Minnesota, I studied German in college. Later I married a Belgian. From the age of twenty-three onward I have lived in Belgium, Austria, and Germany. Then in 2002 we moved to the Pendle region in Lancashire, Northern England. It wasn’t long before the wild moorland cast its spell on me.

The back of our house looks out on Pendle Hill, famous throughout the world as the place where George Fox received his ecstatic vision that moved him to find the Quaker religion in 1652. Fewer people know that this region is also steeped in its lore of the Pendle Witches of 1612, the real people at the heart of my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill.

When I moved to the region, I knew nothing of these Lancashire witches but was haunted by the images of witches I saw everywhere I went: on pub signs, private houses, sign posts, and even an entire fleet of commuter buses going into Manchester. At first I assumed that these witches were creatures of folklore and fairy tale. But then I became spellbound by their true and heartbreaking story.

In 1612, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged for witchcraft at Lancaster. But the most notorious of the accused, Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, cheated the hangman by dying in prison before she came to trial.

This is what the court clerk, Thomas Potts, had to say about her in A Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knowes. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Mary Sharratt

Bess was a cunning woman and healer of longstanding repute and had practiced her craft for decades before anyone dared to interfere with her or stand in her way. I believe she was so frightening to her enemies because she was a woman who embraced her power wholeheartedly.

Once I learned her story, I had to write a novel about her. Other novels have been written about the Pendle Witches, but the ones I’ve read don’t portray the witches in a very good light. I wanted to give the story back to Bess, give this woman what her world denied her—her own voice.

It meant a great deal to me to inhabit the same landscape as my heroine—her saga unfolded almost literally in my backyard. Researching this book wasn’t a mere exercise of reading books, then typing sentences into my computer. To do justice to these real people, I had to go out into the land—literally walk in my characters’ footsteps. Using the Ordinance Survey Map, I located the site of Malkin Tower, once home to Bess and her family. Now only the foundations remain. I board my horse near Read Hall, once home to Roger Nowell, the witchfinder and prosecuting magistrate responsible for sending the Pendle Witches to their deaths. Every weekend, I walked or rode my chestnut mare down the tracks of Pendle Forest. Quietening myself, I learned to listen, to allow Bess’s voice to well up from the land. Her passion, her tale enveloped me.

As a writer, I am obsessed with history and place, how the true stories of our ancestors haunt the living landscape. No one in Pendle can remain untouched by the witches’ legacy. I hope you will be as moved by their story as I am.



Be sure to come back Tuesday for my review of Daughters of the Witching Hill and to enter the drawing to win your own copy! And visit Mary's website for more information about her and all of her books.

Guest Post: Helen Hollick, author of The Kingmaking (Pendragon's Banner, Book One)

I am absolutely thrilled to have Helen Hollick here today for a guest post. She has been one of my favorite authors since I first read the Pendragon's Banner trilogy back in the mid 1990s. I am having a hard time believing that it has been about fifteen years! The best thing about the re-release of this great series by Sourcebooks is that it gives me a happy reason to read them again. I remembered that I loved them, but I had forgotten WHY. Now I can put it into words and my review will be up a bit later today.

Now, I would like to welcome Helen!! My question to her was:

Has your writing process changed since the first edition of The Kingmaking was published in 1994?

Gosh, yes!

I suppose (I hope!) my writing has matured, and I now have the confidence to think of myself as a professional author (albeit one on a level of prosperity similar to the proverbial Church Mouse).

One of the most difficult things for new writers (and established writers?) to do is sing praises of their work. It is so hard to not appear to boast, and then there is always that nagging little voice saying, "But what if people are just being nice? What if my book is really a load of rubbish?"

Believe me, it takes a lot of confidence to shove that voice aside, and it never fully vanishes.

Every so often something happens to rock my confidence (yes even after having 8 books published) and I start thinking that maybe I am not a good writer after all.

Having said that, on the whole I know that my books are good. I am proud of what I have written. Therefore, I will blow my own trumpet as and where I can. After all, no one else is going to tootle it for me.

My writing style has improved, I think; there are things I know now that I wish I’d known back in 1993 when I was first accepted by William Heinemann here in the UK. Little things, maybe, but they can make such a difference to a good read.

Not starting sentences/paragraphs with a character’s name for instance - looking down a page in the first edition of The Kingmaking you would find lines starting like this:

Arthur walked into the room…
Arthur took a sip of wine…
Arthur mounted his horse and cantered away…
How much better to write:
Walking into the room, Arthur….
The wine tasted rich and fruity. Taking another sip, Arthur…
Mounting, and kicking his horse into a canter, Arthur…

Going self publish with my latest adventure/fantasy pirate-based series has taught me to take more notice of the editing process. With William Heinemann the editing was undertaken by the Publishing House, though of course it was still up to me to proof read, make corrections etc.

I very much relied on Heinemann to edit the original Kingmaking, however. By the third book, Shadow of the King, I had found the confidence to protest at any changes I did not approve of. A copy editor had totally altered my style of writing. Where I had written a sentence of dialogue to make it sound as if the character is in the past - "Shall I not?" for instance, she had altered it to "I shall not." I was very indignant about that.

I was also extremely angry that when The Kingmaking was originally published in the US the wrong file had been sent. The uncorrected proof. It was this file they printed from., but by the time I found out it was already too late, the books were printed. I gave up counting the errors at 360. One I will never forget is Arthur’s "bread stubbled chin." It should have been beard stubbled, of course. To this day I picture Arthur with croutons on his face.

(Just have to break in for one second here to say that I READ that edition and, the story was so engrossing, I never noticed any mistakes!)

If you want to write, editing is so important. Not just for the checking of spelling, punctuation, continuity, but for the plot, the idea. You, as the writer, know perfectly well what is happening and why because all the information is in your head. Your reader can only go on what you have written, however. And if what you have written does not make sense… you are scuppered. A good editor will spot the problem.

I cannot remember who said this, but it is a terrific quote: "When I wrote that only God and I knew what I meant. Now only God knows."

I also have the confidence to delete whole passages. For that first Kingmaking I would agonise over taking out one word. Now if my instinct tells me something is not right, out it comes – even if it is a whole page or a whole chapter. In fact my first draft of Sea Witch started about 50 pages before where it starts now. I realised that for this type of book I had to get straight into the action, not ponder on my hero’s early childhood as I had with The Kingmaking. So I hit the delete button for what had been about a month’s worth of work.

Without sounding big-headed, I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the proof of this Sourcebooks edition of The Kingmaking. I am not saying it is perfect – there are bound to be one or two missed typing errors, and maybe on reading it you decide the story is not your cup of tea, which is fair enough. It would be a dull old world if we all liked to read the same things, but I enjoyed the read. I fell in love with Arthur all over again – and cried at the sad bits. And there were one or two passages that I had to go and check in the original version, for truly I did not remember writing such thrilling stuff.

Did I really write that? Gosh!

Thank you, Helen! I'm always fascinated to hear about the writing process. I'm so glad to have had you here today!! What an honor, and a thrill, for me.

Be sure to visit Helen's website and come back later today for my review....