Well, I’ve finally done it – the newly revamped version of my website is now live! If you’ve seen this post via email or social media, please go over to jddavies.com and take a look. There’s a fair bit of new content, including on the ‘News’ page. Above all, the new version should be a lot easier to navigate, and, from my point of view, easier to keep up to date. It’s also much easier for me to highlight individual books, so the homepage currently has Destiny’s Tide, the first in my new Tudor trilogy, my award-winning non-fiction book Kings of the Sea, plus Gentleman Captain, the first in the ‘journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll vary these ‘featured books’ from time to time. Scroll further down, and you’ll find my most recent blog posts, including this one. The very bottom of the homepage now features improved social media links, a search facility, plus a new archive search, which allows you to search the blog by month. Please send me feedback about the new look, and suggestions for new content!
In other news, I had a great time earlier in the week at the Canelo author party (i.e. my digital fiction publisher). It was great to chat to some of the staff and connect faces to the names on incoming emails, but at these sorts of events, it’s always especially nice to have a chat with fellow scribblers. So I had lengthy chinwags with Simon Turney and A J Mackenzie – the latter actually being two people, the husband and wife team of Marilyn Livingstone and Morgen Witzel. My chat with them was particularly enjoyable because I’d recently been reading their ‘Hardcastle and Mrs Chaytor’ series, excellent, atmospheric historical mysteries set on Romney Marsh in the 1790s. I like the strong, interesting central characters and vivid sense of place that characterises these books, so I hope there’ll be more to come. It’s also not often that one can have an informed discussion in a bar about Admiral Duncan’s victory at the battle of Camperdown in 1797!
Anyway, the party’s over in more senses than one, and it’s time once more to get down to hard work on the next book in the ‘Jack Stannard’ Tudor naval trilogy!