Katherine Roberts

This month, I'm excited to have a short story published in a new anthology about famous women and girls from British history. ( Muse: or should that be British  her story... ?!) Templar Books asked authors from the History Girls blog to tackle a woman from a different period of history, and I chose 60AD, when the Romans were in charge of most of Britain but the British were not very happy about it... in case you haven't guessed, my 'herstory' is about Queen Boudica and her two brave daughters. (I like to live dangerously!) You can find out more in my guest posts at: Winged Reviews Girls Heart Books You can buy "Daughters of Time" at good UK bookshops, online from  Amazon , or order direct from Templar .

Pick up any award-winning or best-selling YA novel today, and chances are it'll be told in the first (normally young female) person. So I ought to have been on to a good thing with picking the first person viewpoint for "I am the Great Horse"... except my book is told by a (definitely male) horse, and they aren't very romantic as a rule. If I'd been cut-throat commercial at the planning stage for this book, I might have let Bucephalas' groom Charmeia tell the story. But then it would have been a totally different book, and possibly a different story since Charm did not get to fight in all of Alexander's battles alongside the king. So it could have been a romance - but it's not. And it could have been a horsey book aimed at girls - but it's not. Since it was neither of those things, the publisher wasn't quite sure how to market it, which is bad if you're talking marketability in a bookshop, but maybe not quite so bad online where several...

No, not shrink-wrapped mermaids on a 3 for 2 offer at your local supermarket, you'll be glad to hear... but the fantasy author's equivalent! This weekend, you can download my award-winning Echorium trilogy Kindle ebooks for only 99c or 99p each (see below for details). The title of this post was inspired by the lovely Shelley Workinger's blog, where I was invited to guest yesterday for her Foodfic Friday series. Mermaids, you see, swim in the warm seas around the Echorium, and in the first book of the trilogy "Song Quest" they are being hunted for their eggs. The 'quest' part of the title takes young Singers Rialle and Kherron from the Isle of Echoes to the frozen mountains of the Karch in a desperate attempt to stop the hunting. These books were first published more than ten years ago, and Song Quest was my debut novel for young readers - winning the very first Branford Boase Award back in 2000. So revisiting the texts for the ebook versions was a...