Rome & Pirates – a great combination

Just received two new books to review, both of them from Constable & Robinson. ROME: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a huge compilation of contemporary commentaries from the founding of Rome to the end of Justinian's reign in AD 565, edited by Jon E. Lewis. Then there's A BRIEF HISTORY OF PIRATES & BUCCANEERS, by Tom Bowling, which looks like a text-only version of "The History of Pirates" by Angus Konstam that Thalamus published way back in 1999, but since I haven't had time to get into it yet, that may be an unfair comparison.

A bit of non-fiction will make a break from the mammoth reading of Manda Scott's "Boudica" quartet (almost finished) and Stephen King's "Under the Dome". In between, I must find some time to finish a piece on the thrills, trials and tribulations of rewriting the novels of GA Henty for a modern audience (four available now at Smashwords.com, [plug].

A New Novel Upload

Finally, I got through the last minute cuts ’n fills and got "By Sheer Pluck" online. What was supposed to take about three weeks for Thalamus Publishing last year, ended up taking five months (on and off, in between a few other things) of revisions and re-ordering the original Henty text to conform to a more modern narrative flow.

What's missing now is a video trailer for Youtube and the Reckless Books website (www.recklessbooks.co.uk), but that's going to take some time – a lack of visual material is the problem.

Next, it's back to working on the fifth book, "Avenging Khartoum", which picks up where "Storm Over Khartoum" left off (logically…)