Ali Bacon's Blog

I’ve blogged before about letters in historical fiction (and a longer essay here) and I’m happy to report a newcomer to the list of letter-inspired authors.

Annie Elliot is almost local to me and we were put in touch late last year before Annie’s debut novel Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens: Her Story: “So the world will know he loved me once” (Envelope Books) was published.
We met again in January on the actual day of publication when Annie had copies of her new baby to show off, and a very handso...

A friend on Instagram asked me about a recent read, “Does it have an actual PLOT?” she said, “This year, I only want to read properly narrative novels with a beginning, a middle, and an end, not just beautifully-written descriptions of stuff that happens.”

An interesting comment. After all, isn’t ‘stuff that happens’ a plot? Not necessarily.  One bit of ‘stuff’ has to be connected to the next, or provide a hook of some kind to keep the reader turning the pages. You would think this is a sine ...

When Louis Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne, as she then was, she was emotionally fragile, distancing herself from a philandering husband and mourning the death of a child. However, the woman we see in biographies and letters is robust and determined. In early versions of The Absent Heart, she didn’t make much of an entrance until close to the end...

Adapted from my my Beyond the Book newsletter of September 2024. Sign up for future issues here.

If Frances Sitwell is my heroine, who is the hero? It would be easy to argue for Louis Stevenson (who has a way of taking centre stage even when he isn’t present!) but chief contender for male lead must surely be the third member of that curious love triangle, Sidney Colvin, Frances’s ‘companion’ for most of her life, also R.L.S.’s friend and literary mentor.

As in all the best stories from my childhood, the day of my book launch dawned bright and clear, so much so that as we walked down Park Street I worried guests might have chosen to head for the beach rather than the book launch. However my fears proved groundless as the room was soon filling up with friends and fellow writers while Linen Press intern Rosie Pundick, my interviewer Mike Manson and helpful staff from Bristol Folk House soon had things perfe...

Info /booking on my Meet the Author page.

The Absent Heart is very much a novel about letters and how they defined Frances Sitwell’s relationship with Robert Louis Stevenson, but it’s not a novel of letters. I’m actually quite a fan of the epistolary novel and, with all of the R.L.S.’s letters to my heroine at my disposal, I could have gone down that road. But these letters are published and have been for many years. They are well-known, if only by the cognoscenti, and even if I had sought permission to use them (the main edition i...

Beyond the Book is series of articles I began publishing monthly in August 2024 to subscribers. I’m republishing the first issue here today. To receive future issues as they appear and a bonus chapter, sign up here.

I think most writers would agree we don’t usually choose our characters, they choose us! This was certainly the case with In the Blink of an Eye, where I found the story of early photographer D.O. Hill so compelling I couldn’t resist the challenge of making ...

October and November are turning out to be very busy months, first of all with preparations for the Clevedon Celebration of the Book, and soon after that, the launch of Skeins, a Linen Press short story anthology  which is out now.

I’ve been posting madly about everything Just Write Bristol are up to at Clevedon, but for us the most exciting thing is the launch of a new anthology called Quite Weird, a selection of quirky, amusing or weird short stories and flash fiction.

Quite Weird wil...

There’s nothing guaranteed to get an author worked up as a chat about book covers. We all have quite fixed ideas of how our book should look but sometimes a publisher thinks differently and we bow to their knowledge of the market. They usually do know best!

As a reader too, I’m increasingly aware of the impact of a cover, or a cover and title together. As a native of Fife, I could never have resisted Evie Wylde’s The Bass Rock despite knowing nothing about it until I wandered into a book...