FAQ

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the gentleman’s detective in Victorian London who settled private scandals outside of the public eye through research, disguise and inquiry. I was forever doodling “Henry Grim, Knight Detective?” in the margins of my research. My poor 19th century research thesis! I think the thing is still sulking in a corner somewhere, upset that I ran off to London with its more exciting cousin, the historical novel, the first chance I got!

I had the terrible luck one summer to be the only girl in a mechanical engineering lecture. I was supposed to spend my afternoons deriving equations, but I used to sneak off to a cafe and work on this novel about a group of misfits at a boarding school for knights. Simon & Schuster bought the series with only about 75 pages written, just as I was about to graduate. I moved to London’s East End and had 3 months to finish writing the book. I was horribly frantic.

I think the setting chose me, really. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with Victorian London, boarding schools, knights, Harry Potter, detective stories, ethics and moral obligation, and those bleak dystopian novels. I suppose if you took everything jumbled together inside my head and turned it into a setting, you’d probably get something like “Knightley Academy” every time. I suspect ‘alternate Victorian era boarding schools’ is my default setting.

June 2011.

Your local independent bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. It is also available for Kindle and as an audio book. The paperback will be available in March 2011. 

Currently, there are three books planned for the series—a good old-fashioned trilogy. I’m not following Henry’s school years, and the reason for that becomes apparent in the second book, which will be available in June 2011.

You can preview the first two chapters for free here.

Hopefully! Film rights are currently being packaged with producer Andrew Panay in order to further develop the franchise for the big screen.

Please see my contact page to determine the appropriate channels.

Yes! I love visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and conferences. I have a specific section for school visits concerning types of presentations, rates, and a teacher’s guide for Knightley Academy HERE. I am currently living in the U.S.

Karen Kavett designed the website and Kaleb Nation built the code. I, er, helped…with text.

Shortly before Knightley Academy was published and I had not yet become Violet Haberdasher, I began making videos on YouTube under my real name. These videos attracted a following and thus the community was born. In that way, the online community more closely resembles something like Nerdfighteria, spanning the interests of its members and the subjects I bring up on Twitter, Youtube and BlogTV. I never anticipated that, by recording myself talking to a video camera, I would inadvertently gain an online following of teens that would begin vlogging, tweeting and blogging about Knightley Academy. I thought the two things would stay separate.