#BlogTour #AnAbidingFire by M.J.Logue @SAPEREBOOKS @HOLLIE_BABBITT

Blog Tour An Abiding Fire by M.J.Logue

Today I welcome author M.J.Logue to BeadyjansBooks with news of her exciting new historical novel An Abiding Fire.

The Cover is absolutely stunning with the Flames hovering over London and sets the scene beautifully for this murder mystery set in 17th century London.

About the book:

Murder and mystery in Restoration England! Perfect for fans of C. S. Quinn, S. G. MacLean and Alison Weir. 

How do you solve a murder when you are one of the suspects… 

1664, London 

Life should be good for Major Thankful Russell and his new bride, Thomazine. Russell, middle-aged and battle-scarred, isn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect husband for an eligible young woman but the moment Thomazine set eyes on her childhood hero, she knew they were destined for one another. 

But Russell, a former Roundhead, now working for the King’s intelligence service, was never going to have a simple life in Restoration London. 

Unable to shake suspicions of his Parliamentarian past, someone seems hell-bent on ruining his reputation — and his life. 

Whispers about his sister’s violent murder follow him and accusations of treason abound. 

When more deaths occur Russell finds himself under suspicion. 

He is ready to escape from the capital, but Thomazine is determined to find the truth and clear the name of the man she loves. 

But who is the real killer and why are they so keen to frame Russell? More importantly, will they succeed? 

And has Thomazine’s quest put them all in mortal danger? 

An Abiding Fire is the first book in the Thomazine and Major Russell Thriller series, compelling historical mysteries with a dash of romance, set in seventeenth century England.

Now, here is a lovely guest article written by the author especially for my blog when I invited her along to share some insight about her own writing processes and in which she talks about the soundtrack to her writing.

On being an author by M.J.Logue

People say what’s the hardest thing about being an author and, you know, I think it might be writing blog posts.

The books are no trouble at all, bless them. I woke up at 6.15 this morning pondering parallels between the current political climate and the Interregnum – which are neither original nor enlightening, so only me and the cats will ever know about them – but you may infer from this that I slip in and out of the 17^th century pretty much as naturally as breathing.

It’s the present I struggle with, or at least that aspect of the present that relates to writing about writing. I’ve never struggled with writers’ block – which is not to say that I don’t have every empathy with them as do: in our old house, I used to get up every night when everyone was asleep and go into the spare room and tuck myself up in bed there and write for hours on the laptop. Well, we moved house, and we don’t have a spare bed any more. After that, when we had a Rayburn, I used to sit on the laundry chest in the bathroom with my back against the radiator – fuelled by the Rayburn, you see, it was always hot – and write for hours on a Kindle. Don’t have a Rayburn in our new house either, so it’s downstairs in the dark for me now. But I can go for weeks – months, even – and not write a word on paper, and then sit down and put a novel down beginning to end in about a week having constructed it all in my head already.

And so what is there that I can share, about my writing? And the only thing I guess really is – music.

It’s not a theme that comes through in the books, much. Thankful Russell occasionally plays the fiddle but, as he’s the first to admit, has a voice like a cracked vase and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and although Thomazine is a soldier’s daughter and knows most of the sweary songs that a respectable young lady of Restoration society really ought not to, she isn’t much prone to giving voice.

But I write to music. Not even necessarily music that seems very appropriate, at first glance. Sometimes it’s music that makes no sense at all either to the plot or to what I think the character is like, but that just fits, it makes them come alive on the page when the noise is going on in the background. You might imagine that the boy Russell – being a 17^th-century boy – only really flows as a character when I’ve got some kind of Baroque opera thing going on. Actually he hates opera, but he does early 1990s goth like nobody’s business. There’s nothing loose or sentimental about it – or him – but it’s hard-edged, fierce and driven, no trills or frills about it. And then sometimes for variety’s sake he won’t be obligingly gothic, but silly and bouncy, because under all that dark techno there’s an embarrassingly strong vein of S Club 7. 

Mrs Russell, on the other hand, fires up for 90s alternative – Jane’s Addiction and Nirvana and Green Day – but although she’s fiery and noisy and joyful, there’s a lot of protest and counterculture going on under there. She is the daughter of one old Leveller, and the wife of another.

It takes me a while to put a soundtrack together. It usually starts with one song then as the writing progresses I add the ‘right’ songs, and then I put them in the right order, and then eventually I listen to the playlist on repeat while I’m editing and then I’m very thoroughly bored of all of it for a while, because the irritating thing about having characters who are pretty much real people is that the blighters have a habit of liking the things they like and not, necessarily, the things I like. Jingly-jangly mainstream chart pop and rap set my teeth on edge but every now and again sweary sarcastic rap and cheesy 70s heavy metal are the things that my characters need and the unfortunate author has to just suck it up.

I have tried writing to the music I like and it’s like pulling teeth. It’s a bit like trying to feed a sulky baby but in reverse, sitting there at your keyboard – well, come on, Russell, the words? – with that wilful gentleman folding his arms and looking all arch about it in my head. Uh-uh. No words, mistress. Not one word more, till I get S Club. And he means it, too. Mrs Russell can normally be bribed into compliance; once you have a paragraph out of Thomazine, she’s normally in the mood for just let me tell you this, and well, and then I said – but not him, the gorgeous glacial creature. He needs to be sweethearted a little bit – searches for things that sound a bit like, or half-heard snippets of something that was on the radio a lot in 1997, part of a film soundtrack –

It’s like a jigsaw, putting together those three minutes of perfect music for your characters’ moods and the scenes they’re in – I have in my head, for instance, a rainy day and the silver light falling through the window and there’s a young man with fair hair standing at the window with his hand on the glass watching the rain on the bent black trees, and the music is Arvo Part’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”. I don’t think it’s Russell, though, whoever he is, he’s a sad young man and whoever it is he’s sad about it isn’t going to come good. And so I know what the story is, but I don’t know who the story is. I need more pieces.

Finished jigsaws are available on Spotify, if you’re curious. 

M.J.Logue Author

Author Bio

M. J. Logue (as in cataLOGUE and epiLOGUE and not, ever, loge, which is apparently a kind of private box in a theatre) wrote her first short novel on a manual typewriter aged seven. It wasn’t very good, being about talking horses, but she made her parents sit through endless readings of it anyway.

Thirty-something years later she is still writing, although horses only come into it occasionally these days. Born and brought up in Lancashire, she moved to Cornwall at the turn of the century (and has always wanted to write that) and now lives in a granite cottage with her husband, and son, five cats, and various itinerant wildlife.

After periods of employment as a tarot reader, complaints call handler, executive PA, copywriter and civil servant, she decided to start writing historical fiction about the period of British history that fascinates her – the 17th century.

Her first series, covering the less than stellar career of a disreputable troop of Parliamentarian cavalry during the civil wars, was acclaimed by reviewers as “historical fiction written with elegance, wit and black humour” – but so many readers wanted to know whether fierce young lieutenant Thankful Russell ever did get his Happy Ever After, that the upcoming series of romantic thrillers for Sapere Books began.

Get in touch with MJ

She can be found on Twitter @Hollie_Babbitt, lurking on the web at asweetdisorder.com, and posting photos of cake, cats and extreme embroidery on Instagram as asweetdisorder.