Tag: guest post

Guest Post: ‘Putting Science in Fiction’ by R J Corgan, author of Cold Flood

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I’m delighted to welcome author R J Corgan to What Cathy Read Next today.  RJ’s first book, Cold Flood, a thriller set on a geological expedition was published recently.  Followers of my blog will be aware of my fascination with the facts I come across when reading fiction – you can read my latest Fact in Fiction Friday post here – so you can understand my excitement when I saw the subject of RJ’s guest post.

You can find further details about the book below, along with purchase links.

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Cold FLoodAbout the Book

For geologist Kea Wright, when a volcano erupts under an ice cap, it isn’t just a good time, it’s a living. Camped at the base of an icecap in southeast Iceland, Kea and her team are investigating landforms created by catastrophic floods. With only days left in the field season, bad weather on the way, and the volcano due to erupt at any time, the team is struck by a tragedy that threatens to shut down the entire project.

As the team rushes to complete their work, the expedition continues to be plagued by setbacks, leading Kea to wonder if the initial tragedy was an accident after all. During her reluctant – and inept – attempts to investigate, Kea inadvertently stumbles upon a secret. One so valuable, someone is willing to kill to keep it hidden.

Format: ebook (270 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: 7th April 2018   Genre: Thriller

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

 

Find Cold Flood on Goodreads

Guest Post ‘Putting Science in Fiction’ by R J Corgan, author of Cold Flood

Reading the news or any mystery novel, it seems there are a billion different ways to murder someone. Equally, there seem to be just as many ways for a forensic pathologist to figure out how it was done and whodunnit. Whether in Sherlock Holmes or in Bones, science is often vital to enable the sleuth to solve the case.

Astronaut Mark Watney in The Martian uses, and battles, the laws of physics to figure out how to get back to earth, the planet Mars and some potatoes his only companions. The author, Andy Weir, takes the reader on an adventure where science is central to the resolution. This is tricky to do in novels as the author must inform the reader without appearing to lecture. However, when the author is able to successfully convey their passion for a topic – and the thrill of discovery that drives so much of scientific discoveries – the reader is hooked.

Over the last decade pursuing my degrees, I found reading scientific journals, dense with references, charts, statistics, and methodology sections, a difficult chore. Worse than that, it was only through universities that I was able to access these expensive journals. It was only after I left academia that I began to appreciate that there are other, more fantastic, stories hidden behind many of these articles. Not just of the scientific findings, or the mind bending mathematical differential equations, but the stories of the researchers themselves.

Scientists leading expeditions in the remotest regions of the world are often doing a mad balancing act. Putting aside the fact that they have to acquire funding, manage the logistics for travel, food, and equipment for all of their team members, they also have to ensure the safety of every member under hazardous conditions. They do this while simultaneously mentoring and educating students, managing course loads, and addressing concerns, and enlisting the help, of local populations.

At some point they even manage to collect the data. They do all this while being separated from their children, their families for long periods. And they do this year after year, after year. On my latest expedition to a volcano in Nicaragua, one of the research scientists was 74, and I could barely keep up with him as he leapt on and off the back of the jeep, literally choking on his dust as he jogged ahead of me around the slopes of the volcano. Respect is due.

I wrote Cold Flood as a tribute to these researchers. They labor to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, ones most of us will never read. I hope that by telling their story, the reader will get a glimpse of some amazing places and spend some time getting to know some truly amazing people – and maybe be inspired to join an expedition themselves.                                                                                                      © R J Corgan, 2018

mapping Cold FLoodAbout the Author

Raised by librarians, RJ has a PhD in Geology, and has worked on volcanoes and glaciers across the globe. Cold Flood  is his debut novel, mixing genres of actual scientific expeditions and thrillers.

The adventures of Kea Wright will continue in the forthcoming novels Meerkat Murders and Mammoth Drop in 2019.

Connect with R J Corgan

Website  ǀ  Facebook ǀ  Twitter ǀ  Goodreads

Blog Tour/Guest Post: The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman

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The Reading Party Blog Tour poster

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Reading Party, the debut novel by Fenella Gentleman.  I’m really looking forward to reading the book but in the meantime I have a wonderful guest post by Fenella about how the germ of an idea during a creative writing exercise was transformed into the subject of her first novel.

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The Reading PartyAbout the Book

It is the seventies and the colleges of Oxford are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female Fellow. Impulsive love affairs with people, places and the ideas in her head beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact.

Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date.

Format: Paperback, ebook (304 pp.)    Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 14th June 2018                      Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Reading Party on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘The Reading Party’ by Fenella Gentleman

Well, this is fun: I’ve never done this before!  One of the great things about being published is getting to know the book blogging world, which is more extensive than I realised, and talking direct to readers and potential readers, who suddenly become real people.  So, a big thank you for this opportunity to do both.

How did I come to write about an Oxford reading party – something so tantalisingly, even infuriatingly, obscure?

Well, I went on one many years ago.  In fact, I went on two reading parties – in my first and third years at university.  It was a batty tradition at my college to invite a group of students for a week of hard work and hard play, in a rambling house on a Cornish cliff top, so they could revise before their exams without getting into a state.  The selection process was opaque, and I was as surprised to be asked on the trip as I was to get into Oxford in the first place.  I thought the whole notion anachronistic, but in the end found it oddly wonderful.

For years afterwards I considered arranging something similar with colleagues or friends, but at the time I couldn’t see how to do it.  Still, it must have stuck in my mind.  When I started writing fiction, I found myself recreating the reading party on paper.

This is where another strand comes in.  I’d been at one of the first male colleges to go mixed, I’d worked briefly for a feminist publishing house, and then I’d spent years amongst the growing number of women trying to hold their own – and often more – in professions dominated by men.  I was fascinated to see how women negotiated their working lives in such unforgiving environments, and particularly how some of them became trailblazers – unintentionally or otherwise.  When I began writing, this theme kept peeping through.

Even so, the real starting point for what became The Reading Party was the central character.  She emerged as a result of a creative writing exercise, in which you had to draft a conversation between two people talking about somebody else.  I imagined a pair of male academics being spiteful about a young female colleague.  This amused people, so I worked her up in a short story in which this woman, at the time called Buttercup and with streaks of blue hair, had to run an Oxford reading party with a tetchy older man.  The feedback was again encouraging, and someone suggested I tackle this scenario in a novel.

I had one big reservation: the connotations of privilege.  So I tried setting my story in a younger university: it lost something.  I sent the students to a rural vicarage: that was too tame.  As for narration, each chapter had the voice of a different student, with a different perspective on this nutty week, but that didn’t work either.

Eventually I realised that the whole point was the archaic set up, and that its oddities could be the source of much tension and humour.  Then things fell into place.  This would be the story of a feisty young woman – a historian with radical ideas – arriving at Oxford in the mid-1970s just when the men’s colleges were beginning to go mixed.  It would be about what might happen if she was asked to host a reading party on the Cornish coast alongside a much older man, and if – against all the strictures about setting a good example – she found herself drawn to someone who was ‘out of bounds’.  She would narrate, betraying the muddled confidence and insecurity of so many women under pressure, but always poking fun at the ridiculous.

I did lots of research – this is not my story and Sarah Addleshaw is not me – but it was easy to imagine myself inside her head and I enjoyed doing so.

Of course a ‘reading party’ doesn’t have to be this rarefied Oxbridge thing.  Nowadays I hold my own version every year with a bunch of girlfriends: we have a ball.  All you need is a place to go, a mix of people, a good book, and some food and drink.  Anyone can be part of that.  I’d love there to be reading parties all over the place!

© Fenella Gentleman, 2018

Fenella GentlemanAbout the Author

Fenella Gentleman studied PPE at Wadham College, Oxford, when it went mixed. She participated in two reading parties in Cornwall. After graduating she worked in publishing, before moving into marketing and communications in the professions. She lives in London and North Norfolk.

Connect with Fenella

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads