Blue Valley–Paranormal Historical Fiction
Welcome to Christine Rice, this week’s inspiration award winner. She’s writing about her paranormal, historical fiction book, Blue Valley. Welcome Christine! __________________ Everyone has a story they have to get off their chest, and for me, Blue Valley was that story. It began in (gack) 1988, when I was a directionless artist, and decided to apply for an Archaeology fellowship with a distant university. I didn’t care where it was, I was just yearning for an adventure, some productive reason to leave my house and my city and do something no one else was doing. I hoped to get sent to the Middle East, but I got sent to California to dig up the least known, least visited, California mission. Soledad. I was an emotionally immature, culturally sophisticated girl from Brooklyn, plopped in the middle of America’s salad bowl for six weeks of historical Read more…
The Goblin Market–Jennifer Hudock guest post
Today’s Inspirational Award goes to Jennifer Hudock! Welcome to her and her story of memory, magic, and mystery . . . ________________________ I grew up reading and living faerie tales. When I wasn’t firmly planted in the pages of a book, I was out rolling down the mountain behind the house or ducking in and out of tree forts and tunnels playing tag with pixies and the Green Man. In college, I study Christina Rossetti’s poem, “The Goblin Market” in depth and fell in love with the idea. Two young women alone in the world with nothing but each other… When the course I was taking finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “Goblin Market.” Where did it come from? Why was it there? Did it have a purpose? Who created it? I wanted to explore the market itself more Read more…
The Weather in Wales
When my son took his American History class, he read to me from the diaries of Lewis and Clark when they wintered on the Oregon coast after coming all the way across the country. Mostly what they did was complain about the rain: “Rained again today.” “Rained all night long and into the morning.” “Rained all day for the third day in a row.” Having grown up in western Washington State, I know all about this problem. Having lived through the last two years in Eastern Oregon, I am intimately familiar with this problem. We had frozen rain and hail on May 17th. Wales, climate-wise, is nearly identical to the Pacific Northwest coast. This was our experience. Here’s Dolbadarn Castle. In the rain. This is the forecast for Bangor, Wales for the rest of the week: Five-day forecast (Details) Tomorrow 19 MayFair Read more…
Time Travel in the UK: Blue Bells of Scotland
Welcome to Laura Vosika, this week’s Inspiration Award winner and guest poster. She is the author of a time travel fantasy set in Scotland. I’ll let her tell you the rest. . . . ______________________ I am usually asked if I’m Scottish, or if I was inspired by Diana Gabaldon, when I tell people about Blue Bells of Scotland, a story of time travel set in—you guessed it—Scotland. I am Dutch, Czech, and German—no Scottish at all that I know of—and although I like the Outlander series, especially Jamie, I only heard of the books when people started asking me the question. Strangely enough, my Scottish time travel trilogy springs from a children’s novel and a trombone solo. Not two things often associated with philandering time travelers! By luck perhaps, Scotland happens to be central to both the novel I Read more…
Medieval Siege Weapons
Within the world of medieval warfare, there were multiple kinds of siege weapons: ballistas, battering rams, trebuchets, and catapults. ‘Catapult’ can be used as a more general term for all throwing siege weapons: “Catapults are siege engines using an arm to hurl a projectile a great distance. Any machine that hurls an object can be considered a catapult, but the term is generally understood to mean medieval siege weapons. The name is derived from the Greek ‘to hurl a missle’. Originally, “catapult” referred to a stone-thrower, while “ballista” referred to a dart-thrower, but the two terms swapped meaning sometime in the fourth century AD. Catapults were usually assembled at the site of a siege, and an army carried few or no pieces of it with them because wood was easily available on site. Catapults can be classified according to the Read more…
If you were David, a time-traveling Prince of Wales . . .
My After Cilmeri series follows a family (two teenagers and a mom) who travel in time back to the Middle Ages. One passage in Prince of Time prompted me think about all those products we buy here. How many–were we to take them back with us to the Middle Ages–would truly prove useful? Like David in the book, imagine walking into a pharmacy with a backpack and trying to decide with which items to fill it, if that was all you could take back in time. David focuses primarily on medicines like antibiotics, antibiotic cream, and antihistimines. Somewhere I read that we’ve lost more knowledge in the last 2000 years than we’ve gained, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily true, medieval people did have pharmaceuticals. Many herbal remedies can be very effective. Some of what they used even resemble what we have today. Read more…
J. R. Tomlin . . . A Kingdom’s Cost: A Novel of Scotland
Welcome to today’s Inspiration Award winner, J. R. Tomlin, who writes historical fiction set in fourteenth century Scotland. Thanks so much for stopping by! ________________ Someone recently asked me what I would write if I were to write the book of my heart. I said I had written it. It was A Kingdom’s Cost. Why? There is a very old story in Scotland about a man named Sir James, Lord of Douglas. When the great king, Robert the Bruce, lay dying, he called his faithful friend and lieutenant Sir James Douglas to him. ‘Good Sir James’ the Scots called him. The English called him ‘the Black Douglas’. The king bade him to remove his heart from his body and to carry it on crusade, in penance for the king’s sins. In Spain, the Douglas and his men, fighting the Moors Read more…
The Kingdom of Mercia
After 500 AD, the Kingdom of Mercia became one of largest and strongest Saxon kingdoms in England, and only faded with the transcendency of the Kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great (ruled 871-899). The first Mercian king to truly dominate England was Penda, ruling from 626-655 AD. Both Bede and Nennius describe the swath he cut across Britain, sometimes in alliance with others (Cadwallon and Cadfael of Gwynedd to name two) and sometime on his own reconnaissance. His paganism was a particular sore point: “In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, written in the early eighth century, Bede of Jarrow describes him as ‘a barbarian more savage than any pagan’ with ‘no respect for the newly established religion of Christ’” and “In the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, Nennius describes Penda as ‘victorious through the arts of the Devil, for he was not baptised, and never believed in Read more…
The Roman Fort of Caerleon (and King Arthur’s Camelot?)
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Caerleon, a word derived from the Welsh ‘fortress of the legion’, was the seat from which King Arthur ruled Britain. He wrote: http://www.caerleon.net/history/arthur/page7.htm “When the feast of Whitsuntide began to draw near, Arthur, who was quite overjoyed by his great success, made up his mind to hold a plenary court at that season and place the crown of the kingdom on his head. He decided too, to summon to this feast the leaders who owed him homage, so that he could celebrate Whitsun with greater reverence and renew the closest pacts of peace with his chieftains. He explained to the members of his court what he was proposing to do and accepted their advice that he should carry out his plan in The City Of The Legions. Situated as it is in Morgannwg (Glamorgan), on Read more…
Gemini Sasson: The Crown in the Heather
This week’s inspiration award goes to Gemini Sasson who writes about medieval Scotland. Welcome Gemini! __________________ For years I’ve been a fan of Celtic music. Nothing stirs my soul more than the skirl of bagpipes. I also have Scottish ancestry on my mother’s side. The first time I went to Scotland, I felt like I’d come home, even though I’d never been there before. It was a very surreal feeling. After seeing the movie Braveheart (yes, I know it’s full of inaccuracies, but it was great storytelling), I was inspired to write something epic. My curiosity about the rest of the story, beyond William Wallace, had been piqued and so I began to read, and read, and read . . . Four years later I had three books about Robert the Bruce written, although they’ve since undergone many revisions. In Read more…
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