13. June 2024
I’m reading Whirligig and loving it! In fact, I plan to read my whole Shire’s Union trilogy back-to-back. How conceited is Buxton, you might be thinking, to read his own work and trumpet about it. But I’ve never understood those writers or actors who cringe at the idea of enjoying their own work. To be honest, I think most of them are putting on an act, self-deprecation or embarrassment judged a safer harbour than admitting they secretly read their back catalogue under the duvet with a...
11. July 2020
How does writing a second book compare to writing the first? I’m beginning to build awareness of my second novel, The Copper Road, in advance of its release on July 26th, and one Goodreads follower has already posed this question. It’s got me thinking. Has it been easier or harder? Did I approach it differently? Do I like my second novel more than my first?
22. February 2019
The truth is though, people do. In the same way we judge a plate of food before we taste it, a house by a front door, a company by a logo. Heck, when out walking my impeccably well-behaved Golden Doodle, Duffy (see The Dog Days of April) I’ll judge a dog from 80 yards by the tilt of its owner’s hat and reroute accordingly.
11. January 2019
Aunty Pip started work at Bletchley Park in 1943. By then it was already a big operation. She would have been eighteen or nineteen. I’d long wanted to take my family there. Pip was the connection, the blood tie to the past, but even without that deeper link, there’s something very special about Bletchley.
13. November 2018
‘Tell me when you’re loaded,’ says Jeff. He’s training me on the job. Our Captain has us in skirmish formation, five yards apart in the woods up on Droop Mountain. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting us to get off the track. It’s rough ground to advance over; I’ve never scrambled across fallen trees in full civil war kit while carrying a heavy Springfield musket. Life hasn’t prepared me for this. Why would it? I’m yet to fire my first shot.
16. October 2018
I’m sleeping between two Springfield rifles. Each would be as long as I am were the bayonets fixed, but that’s not a good idea in a civil war dog tent, so called because when the soldiers first saw them they said they were only big enough for a dog. There’s two of us in here.