What Scares Me?
In honor of Halloween, I’d thought I’d share what scares me … (originally posted at: http://toddrwrite.com/blog/2011/what-scares-author-sarah-woodbury.phtml) When I was a little girl, I had an army of stuffed animals to protect me at night. Cuddly the bear, because he was the biggest, would nestle next to my right shoulder. Yellow-hopper (the yellow bunny) would buttress my left shoulder, and Mr. Octopus and Raggedy Andy would sit sentry on the pillow. I stationed all the rest—bears, bunnies, horses—facing the window. I had a big bed too—a double—with a wooden headboard and a gaping foot-high empty space underneath it. That’s where the monsters hung out. Every night, I lay flat on my back, perfectly still, so that I wouldn’t make any noise and my movements wouldn’t bring them out. I also had a big closet that loomed along the inner wall. I always Read more…
Scots, Scottish, and Gaelic … what’s the difference?
What language were people speaking in 13th century Scotland? Undoubtedly, that is a question that keeps most people up at night. In a nutshell, in 1288, in Scotland, people spoke three local languages regularly. At the time, they called them: French, English, and Scottish. What is confusing is that those are not the names used to refer to these languages NOW. French, was Norman French. Robert the Bruce, a great King of Scotland, descended from the Gaelic Earls of Carrick, and on his father’s side from “ancestors in Brix, in Flanders. In 1124, King David I granted the massive estates of Annandale to his follower, Robert de Brus, in order to secure the border. The name, Robert, was very common in the family. Brought up at Turnberry Castle, Bruce was a product of his lineage, speaking Gaelic, Scots and Norman Read more…
Children of Time now available!
Children of Time, the fourth book in the After Cilmeri series (fifth if you include Daughter of Time), is now available at AMAZON, AMAZON UK SMASHWORDS and as a PAPERBACK AT AMAZON! It should arrive soon at other venues (Nook/Sony/Apple). Children of Time November 1288. Bereft of a king or rightful heir, England hurtles towards civil war for the second time in a generation. When David, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Lili, travel to London to attend the wedding of William de Bohun and Princess Joan, they have no intention of involving themselves in local politics. But as infighting leads to murder, David and Lili find themselves at the center of a far-reaching conspiracy. Trapped between history and legend, they must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to save not only their own country, but the people of England as well. Meanwhile, back in Read more…
Medieval Scottish Clans
All my books have so far been set in Wales, and my ancestry is Welsh, but it’s also Scottish. Lately, I’ve been exploring that history more. Here’s a map of the lands of the great Scottish clans: http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/the-great-clans-of-scotland/ One of my clans is MacKay (also known as Morgan? Really? Another Welsh connection?), from the far north. My ancestor, Donald McKay, fought for one of the Highland divisions against the United States in the Revolutionary War. As payment for his service, and because the Crown did not want all these Highlanders coming home to Scotland with nothing to do and no land to do it on (since the Highland Clearances had already occurred), he was given land in Nova Scotia. My multiple great grandfather, also Donald McKay, was born in Shelburne, though he emigrated to Boston, where he built clipper ships Read more…
The Black Death in Wales
The Black Death is generally understood to have been caused by the flea on a rat that appeared in Europe from Asia, having come from the steppes. The Black Death came in three forms: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic, all caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. These three forms had a mortality rate of 30-75%, 90-95%, and 100% respectively. http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/Black.html Skip Knox writes: ‘The Black Death erupted in the Gobi Desert in the late 1320s. No one really knows why. The plague bacillus was alive and active long before that; indeed Europe itself had suffered an epidemic in the 6th century. But the disease had lain relatively dormant in the succeeding centuries. We know that the climate of Earth began to cool in the 14th century, and perhaps this so-called little Ice Age had something to do with it. Whatever Read more…
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