Research is a lifelong occupation so it's hard to factor it in, but I reckon most books take 5 months from start to finish. |
So far it's 43 books in 25 years. |
So the books have a greater appeal to a British audience, but that hasn't stopped them making best-seller lists in places like Brazil, Japan and at least a dozen other countries. |
Television is a young person's medium. |
The discrepancy is entirely based, I think, on the fact that I write best when I'm writing about what I know, and that is British history. |
The one thing I will not do is read other peoples' unpublished work. The reason for that is that it doesn't help. |
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one. |
We have a gaff-rigged topsail cutter, which sounds much grander than she really is, but she's exquisitely beautiful and shamefully slow and we spend a lot of time aboard when we can. |
What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness. |
Writing is a solitary occupation. |