Hi Bernard,

 

We met once, about two decades ago, at the Historical Novel Society conference in Albany. I was a 20-year-old college student who wanted to write a crime novel set in Georgian London, and you were very patient in recommending me sources. I feel certain I was very annoying. Twenty-year-olds are almost always annoying when they’re trying to act confident and professional.

 

Though that crime novel never came together, I was lucky and persistent enough that I actually have become a professional writer, though not quite in the way I’d expected then. Instead of historical fiction I’m the head writer for an animated YouTube history series while also writing sci-fi novels for Warhammer.

 

You came up in an author chat group the other day, as several of us were peer-pressuring colleagues to read The Winter King as a study in describing sword fights. Someone mentioned that you’d had a rough couple of years, and that Sharpe’s Storm ended without a promise of him to return.

 

That’s of course totally understandable, but it did remind me that I owed you a short message of thanks.

 

I count your books as one of the chief reasons that I became a writer. I wanted to be an author since I was a boy, but it was in reading through Starbuck and Sharpe as an early teenager that I really began to pick up on craft, like how you insert character blocking into dialogue in order to avoid overusing dialogue tags. (Great trick, I’ve thoroughly stolen it.) And of course, I studied and dissected your action scenes, as well as your author’s notes and the writing advice you generously posted on the website. That stuff being available was vitally important to me, and made a big impact at a crucial time.

 

And speaking to fellow authors I know I’m not alone in this. So on behalf of all of us who graduated from the unincorporated Cornwell Academy of Fiction, thank you. It meant a lot to us.

 

Best,

Rob Rath