Category: MONTHLY UPDATES

Happy New Year, one and all.

Here’s hoping you all had a memorable virtual Christmas season, and wishing everyone of you the very best throughout 2021.

Greetings, one and all.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

SONNET 73 — Number 5 of my top 10

Greetings, one and all.

Things are beginning to look up for THE CORISCO CONSPIRACY. A well-known literary agent to whom Raphael Sone sent a query has requested that parts of the novel be rewritten and the manuscript resubmitted to her.

Wish him luck!

Greetings, one and all.

On this, the third anniversary of my plunge into social media, I am very happy to inform you all that, as of today, my blog has been visited a little over 27,500 times; I have 3,235 followers on Twitter and just under 8,600 connections on LinkedIn.

Greetings, one and all.

Last month Raphael Sone reviewed a new novel by the London (Ontario)-based author Gaston Mabaya.  The full text of his review reads as follows.

L’HÔPITAL

Auteur déjà d’une demi-douzaine d’ouvrages généraux et un recueil des poèmes, l’écrivain congolais canadien Gaston Mabaya vient de publier son premier roman, le tome 1 de sa trilogie Bulamatari, auquel il a donné le rusé titre de L’HÔPITAL.  Le roman est fascinant à plusieurs niveaux, en commençant par son titre – car plus d’une institution médicale figure dans le récit.  À nous de deviner laquelle fait le sujet du titre.  L’HÔPITAL est un casse-tête littéraire avec lequel l’auteur nous mène de la côte ouest africaine jusqu’à l’Inde en passant par la Turquie, sans nous permettre de respirer en route.  Un véritable “page-turner”.  J’ai hâte de lire le tome 2 de la trilogie Bulamatari, un nom dont l’origine est presque aussi intrigante que la fiction de Mabaya.

Greetings, one and all.

Last month, my blogger, Raphael Sóne, started querying agents and publishers about putting out my war memoirs.  If any of you in the writing community know literary agents who are interested in historical fiction, especially those likely to enjoy reading about my life and times, please put in a word for him or drop us a line at MusketmanShakespeare@gmail.com

Many thanks for your support.

COMING SOON

The Corisco Conspiracy, Raphael Sóne’s novel, an early draft of which was blogged on this site in 2018, is now being prepared for publication.

Set for the most part in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, The Corisco Conspiracy is a historical novel of diaspora Africa narrated by none other than the Bard of Avon.  The bard’s best friend and ghostwriter is an African philologist.  His second wife, the hitherto unidentified Dark Lady of the Sonnets, is a native of Corisco (an island in present-day Equatorial Guinea).  And two of the novel’s other principal characters are a London couple of Malian descent.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Although they never formally declared war against each other, England and Spain were in conflict for more than half of the forty-something years that Elizabeth the First sat uneasily on the English throne and Philip the Second menacingly wielded the Spanish sceptre.  For twenty of those years, from 1585 to 1605, the man whose name would later become a synonym for the word “English” was employed by Spain as a Roman Catholic counter intelligence operative.  The Corisco Conspiracy is his gripping first-hand account (in crystal clear prose) of the events which led up to the Gunpowder Plot, of which he was the mastermind.

SYNOPSIS 

April 1585: recusant Jesuit messenger William Shakespeare arrives in Rome expecting to meet his best friend, a budding playwright with whom he wishes to enter into a partnership in the entertainment industry.  But his friend left Rome about one month earlier to go and complete a doctorate in philology at the University of Salamanca.  Before he decides whether to proceed to Salamanca or return to London, another messenger, a certain Guy Fawkes, brings him new directives from his employer: the Bishop of Winchester, a crypto-Catholic prelate of the Church of England.  As instructed by His Excellency, William travels to the West African island city of Corisco in the Kingdom of Malabo.  There he meets the woman and some of the men with whom, after suffering religious discrimination for over two decades, he contrives the most diabolical assassination plot in British history.

THE NARRATOR

Musketman Shakespeare is the darling of social media.  He is well-liked on Facebook.  Set up in 2017, his blog was visited over 25,000 times within the first three years of its being established.  As a “Jesuit messenger at Roman Catholic Church”, he has thousands of connections on LinkedIn – many prominent religious leaders among them.  And as the “Mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot” he is followed on Twitter by swarms of admirers, not a few of whom work for the Vatican. 

THE AUTHOR

Raphael Sóne is a translator and bardolater.  The Corisco Conspiracy is his first novel.  It was originally entitled The War Memoirs of William Shakespeare.  Mr. Sóne lives in Cameroon, Canada, Colombia and Mexico. He can be reached at www.MusketmanShakespeare.blog