It’s hard work writing a book. I am spending hours reading and researching information that at times contradicts itself. I just want to type out the story but there is no point if it’s inaccurate.

In the last four weeks I have bought seven different books about Elizabethan England and read them all from cover to cover. Each one fills a little of the picture but there is always a little piece missing or at odds with someone else’s writings.

Of course the greatest problem is reading references to Shakespeare when I know he didn’t exist and that it was pseudonym used by Anthony Munday. References are made to documents that refer to the Stratford-on-Avon Man that I know cannot be true but I only have what another person says is the fact. We never get to see a copy of the actual document.

I was in Stratford-on-Avon a few months ago and in the church where the Stratford-on-Avon Man was Christened is a copy of the entry in the register. Look as I may I could not make out the name ‘Shakespeare’ at all and wondered if there had been a mistake. It was so messed up and interfered with that it was meaningless.

I have had a look at his actual will online this week. The reference to Shakespeare leaving two well known London actors money is squeezed in between two lines of the original writing and it’s an obvious forgery to bolster the Stratford-on-Avon claim to fame. The whole thing is simply wrong.

Who ever wrote the body of writing we all call ‘Shakespeare’ it wasn’t that bloke from Stratford-on-Avon.

I have found some good pointers to the actual person being Anthony Munday but I can’t reveal them until the book is finished or I will create my own spoiler.

Ah well, back to the reading and notations I suppose.