Everywhere I look, these days, I notice someone reading Ken Follett’s World Without End. Yesterday, I saw someone wading through it on the bus to work; later, someone else reading it in Starbucks. In December, I’d see several open copies each day on the beach in Cabo San Lucas. World Without End has been out …
Who would have thought that Google Earth would provide a temporary solution to imagining a foreign landscape in medieval times? I’m all in favour of using the Internet for research, but I didn’t expect to find answers with this great tool. I’ve been stuck in my writing for a few weeks, now. There are a …
What makes a good novel? Plot? Characters? Subject matter? An enduring theme? What are some of your favourite novels over the past few years? The Da Vinci Code? The Corrections? The Time Traveler’s Wife? Something dark, like The Road by Cormac McCarthy? Is your fancy “literary” novels or blockbusters, like works by Ken Follett or …
When I was in my mid-teens, I had a very good friend who was a bit of an intellectual. He was shy, quiet and somewhat of an outcast, like me. We were bookworms, and in our reading and discussions, we moved through a fairly impressive range of topics. Spirituality, the occult, politics, literature, advertising and feminism were …
When St. Benedict founded the Benedictine monastic order, I believe he was attempting to establish religious utopian community. He may not have agreed with this idea, but he certainly established high standards of behaviour and conduct for his monks in order to achieve a community devoted to the pure pursuit of religious practice and contemplation. Benedict’s …
I had originally envisioned my novel taking place within the narrow confines of the monastery. The great advantage of staying inside is that life there is relatively simple. Yes, there are conflicts and sometimes even high drama, but compared to life outside the monastery, things inside are easy. Everything was going according to plan, but …
Yesterday’s post included a picture of Chaucer’s Monk from The Canterbury Tales. The portrait seems to be smudged and what the hell’s that on his head? A porkpie hat? He’s a rather goulish-looking figure, all told, and nothing like the “manly man” Chaucer describes in The General Prologue: His heed was balled, that shoon as …