A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Dylan Thomas wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales in 1954.  It begins:  “One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.  All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find . . .” For the full text:  http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html


Pixel of Ink today!

Footsteps in Time is being featured on Pixel of Ink today! http://www.pixelofink.com/bargain-ebook-footsteps-in-time-a-time-travel-fantasy/ https://www.facebook.com/PixelofInk As always, it’s available everywhere 🙂 Buy at:  Amazon At Apple Ibooks:  Footsteps in Time At Barnes and Noble:  Footsteps in Time Amazon UK:  Footsteps in Time For international customers: ebook:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/38722 paperback:  https://www.createspace.com/3566163


A Thank You and Book Give-Away!

The 28th of December will be my one-year anniversary as an indie author and to express my thanks to all of my readers, whether of my books, my blog, or both, I’d like to give you a gift of a free book! Between now and January 10th, you can download a copy of Daughter of Time or The Last Pendragon from Smashwords for FREE! Click on the book cover for the Smashwords web page for Daughter of Time:    Coupon code for The Last Pendragon:  GN59S    


The Wildwood — the lost forest of the UK

Imagine all of the UK covered in a thickly wooded landscape, much like portions of the western United States.  I just spent the last 1/2 an hour looking up native plants in Wales, trying to come up with a couple that would have reliably flourished in Gwynedd in the 13th century.  My sister-in-law is a botanist, and she agreed that agrimony and juniper would good choices.  What has been difficult to determine, as with the Roman and ancient roads, is what the landscape looked like in the Middle Ages.  England was mostly denuded of trees by then, but it is possible that wasn’t the case in Wales.  So when we see these broad lanscapes in the uplands with no trees, was that what they looked like eight hundred years ago?  How do we find that out? According to scientists, only Read more…


Happy Thanksgiving!

I have a houseful of people today, for which I am very thankful.  In celebration, I have new book covers for Footsteps in Time and Prince of Time.  I am so excited to have them updated.  It will take some time for them to populate through all the outlets, but hopefully the paperbacks and ebooks will soon be in sync!


Vortigern? Who was he again?

Vortigern was a King of the Britons who is remembered for welcoming the Saxons into Britain during the dark ages and then being unable to get them to leave. This site:  http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artwho/who.htm would very much like to rehabilitate Vortigern.  He has extensive information on this site. Our knowledge of Vortigern comes from some early sources.  Gildas, who wrote a moral history of Britain, states, around 540 BC:  “At this meeting, the council invited the Saxons in three keels from Germany, as a counter to the threat from the Picts in the north. This is followed after some time by a conflict over the annona (payment in kind), after which the Saxon federates devastate the country. Vortigern, who may have been named by Gildas, is not portrayed by Gildas as a sole ruler, or a High King if you will. He rules Read more…


Sharing numbers redux . . .

Last August, I posted my sales numbers for Amazon US through July, and thought now was the time to share more.  I released two new books in September:  The Pendragon’s Quest, the sequel to The Last Pendragon and The Good Knight, my medieval mystery.  The only reason my numbers are holding up is because I’ve sold hundreds of copies of The Good Knight in the last two months. Other than The Good Knight, my sales numbers for total books, and the subsequent rankings for all my books, have been down this fall by as much as two-thirds.  I want to reiterate the importance of writing more books.  My big seller since March had been Daughter of Time, which was selling up to 50 books a day at times.  Down to 14 a day now, with the commensurate slow downs for Read more…


Stonehenge

  Stonehenge is one of many rings of standing stones built by the ancient peoples in Britain, in this case on the Salisbury Plain. More is known about Stonehenge in particular than other stone circles because it was so well preserved that real archaeological work has been done around it. A ‘henge’, in archaeological terms, is a large enclosure. It appears that the first ‘henge’ at Stonehenge involved no stones at all, but was an earthwork, composed of a ditch, a bank, and a series of dug holes called the ‘Aubrey holes, all begun around 3100 BC. The Aubrey holes are round pits dug into the chalk of the plain, each about a meter wide and deep, with steep sides and flat bottoms. These holes form a circle a little less than a 100  meters in diameter. In a way, then, Read more…


Gerald of Wales

We are talking about Gerald of Wales because, as a churchmen, he exemplifies the tensions and complicated nature of the relationship between the Welsh and Norman church in the Middle Ages. Gerald was the grandson of Gerald of Windsor and Nest, a princess of Deheubarth, who established Carew Castle after the Norman Conquest of this region of Wales. Thus he was mixed Norman and Welsh descent, and as our daughter writes in her senior thesis, “His Welsh ancestry meant he could act Norman” and side with the Normans but never be accepted as fully Norman. He himself “decried” both Normans and Welsh for despising him, arguing that his uncertain identity left him accepted by neither culture. At the same time, he spoke French primarily, and Latin as a churchman, with only a little Welsh, and overtly participated in Norman efforts Read more…


How did Latin get into English?

It was the Romans right? Well, ultimately, but not necessarily because they conquered Britian in 43 AD. The Romans controlled Britain from 43 AD to when they marched away in the beginning of the 5th century.  During that time, they built roads, towns, forts, and established a government.  Upon their departure, the ‘dark ages’ consumed Britain, with the assistance of several invading groups (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, plus Picts, Scots, Irish). The people who lived in Britain at the time were Celtic and spoke a language that eventually became what we know today as Welsh.  As the story goes, these invading groups pushed the Britons into Wales until a real wall (Offa’s Dyke) permanently created a barrier between them. Latin had been spoken by the Romans, of course, and had entered the Welsh language as a result.  “These borrowed words are Read more…


The Wild Boar in Britain

Four hundred years ago, wild boar officially became extinct in Britain.  A wild boar is a creature that weighed upwards of two hundred pounds. “The wild boar is a member of the pig family, Suidae, and is an even-toed ungulate or artiodactyl. It is a large mammal, with an adult male weighing up to 200 kg., or occasionally more, and with a head and body length of up to 2 metres. The tail, which is usually straight, is about 25 cm. long. Female boars are about two thirds of the size of the males, although both stand about one metre in height. A prominent feature of the wild boar is its coat of short, thick bristly hair, which can vary in colour from brown and black to grey. In western Europe, boar generally have brown coats, while in eastern Europe Read more…


National Novel Writing Month 2011

Today is November 1 and National Novel Writing month begins! If you’ve never heard of it, this is an opportunity to write 50,000 words in one month on a new book.  Here’s the official site:  http://nanowrimo.org/en/dashboard Here’s my novel link: http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/drsarah Feel free to be my buddy 🙂 Starting today, Nov. 1, I’m going to be doing a full court press for the second Gareth and Gwen medieval mystery.  I even have a cover!   And maybe, just maybe, I have a plot.  I have a three page outline, single spaced, which for me is incredible.  I try not to be a pantster, but outlines have never really been meaningful for me.  Until now!  We’ll see how it goes. If you think you’ve got 50,000 words in you, come join me for NaNoWriMo (thirty days and nights of literary abandon)! Read more…