From the very beginning I envisaged taking my main character, Rob, through all of The Wars of the Roses from 1455 until 1485. When I sat down to write, however, I found that 1453 and the skirmish at Heworth Moor seemed a more sensible place to begin. This obviously meant covering a period of at least thirty two years, or possibly a couple more if I decided to write about the battle of Stoke. I also wanted Rob to be reasonably fit at Bosworth, so therefore he has to be young enough at the start of the books, so as not to be a relatively old man by the end.

I originally had some misgivings about having a teenager as a main character, as I certainly wasn’t planning on writing teen fiction and wanted my novel to appeal to an entirely different readership. At the same time, however, I felt by creating a young Rob, I was giving readers the opportunity to see him grow and develop into a man. Hopefully this is something that I will be able to achieve, after all we were all young once, and if I try hard enough, even I can remember the frustrations, excitement and anxieties of youth.

As I write this blog, in the spring of 2025, I am already working on books two and three. What is rapidly becoming book three was originally going to be book two and was supposed to find Rob at Blore Heath and Ludlow Bridge, but as I started to write, I felt the four-year interlude between St. Albans and Blore Heath was going to be too much of a gap.

It was always my intention to give a flavour of the National political landscape and that that part of the narrative would suffer if I completely missed out the years 1455-59. Obviously, this left me with a major problem. I wanted Rob and his comrades to be in the forefront of danger and excitement and there were no major battles for them to be a part of.

Fortunately for me, however, Rob lives in Northumberland and during this period, or at least around about this period, the Scottish King, James II, launched a number of raids across the border. And this is what became the setting for book two.

This book will see Rob once again facing combat and hopefully meeting a few old friends, and perhaps foes along the way. At this stage the storyline is pretty clear in my head, but who knows where the characters and events may eventually take me.

The setting, as I’ve mentioned, is the eastern part of the border between Scotland and England, and although my 'invasion’ is fictitious, it is based upon other chronicled events and other border skirmishes.

For generations, both before and after the period my books are set in, the Northern Marches were a dangerous place to live, and I wanted to give my readers a glimpse of what that life in that region could be like.

The book will also have its share of political intrigue and shady goings on in the corridors of power. I make no apology for making Margaret of Anjou my villain. I appreciate that the historians amongst you may argue long and loud about her motives and whether she was a ‘good’ person or not, but for the purposes of my narrative I’m afraid I have painted her in a rather bad light.

From a purely historical perspective, I could not definitively back this position up, but this is just how she feels to me in the texts that I have researched. I appreciate that this is not a particularly scholarly or academic standpoint, but my books are designed to be works of historical fiction and not a definitive historical work on the period.

If you are interested in a more in-depth and scholarly approach, then please have a look at the Bibliography section of my Blog. This contains a selection of the books I have used in my research, but does not include them all, yet!

I feel I should mention book three at this point, as I had already started to flesh out the overall narrative and actually began writing it too.

The battle of Blore Heath, which was followed a few days later by Ludlow Bridge are a little goldfield for historical fiction writers. I really do not want to give too much away at this stage, except to say that I am very excited about shoehorning, so to speak, my characters into the setting of these two clashes.

I am also contemplating having a few scores settled by the end of book three, but what I intend to write and what eventually appears on my lap top screen, can be two very different things.

I think I will leave this for now, but I will try and keep you posted as the books take shape.

All the best.

Spring 2025

Rob's story continues