I can think of no better way to end the year than to do an interview with my fellow writer, David Blixt, about his latest novel and whatever subjects that come up in the course of our conversation; with David, you never know.

Sharon: Here we are again, David.

David: Thanks for inviting me. Though I’m not sure why you had me lay out a plastic drop cloth before I could sit down…

Sharon: Oh, you never know how these interviews will turn out.

David: Ominous. Have you been watching Dexter?

Sharon: Possibly. So David, you have a new novel out. Tell me about it.

David: It’s about the woman who basically invented undercover reporting, Nellie Bly.

Sharon: The title is “What Girls Are Good For”. Provocative, especially today.

No you all are not hallucinating.  My blog is no longer covered with cyber-space cobwebs; I have a brand-new blog up and ready to read.  Who says the Age of Miracles is over?     I was fortunate enough to lure Margaret George here to discuss her new novel.  But before we begin the interview, I have news about my own new novel, THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA.  It is finally done and is currently in the care of my editors at Putnam’s and Macmillan’s.  While there are some loose ends to tie up and the Author’s Note still to finish, the Deadline Dragon has been defeated at long last.  Of course he is still hanging around the house, blowing smoke rings and sneering.  It is not easy to evict a dragon, but at least he can be ignored for now.  I do not know when THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA will be published, will spread the word as soon as it reaches me.

I am so pleased to have Margaret George here.  She is one of my favorite writers and a friend and wherever he is in the Hereafter, Nero must be thanking his lucky stars that she chose to tell his amazing, improbable story.    Welcome, Margaret.   Shall we get started?   I suspect that patience is not one of Nero’s virtues.  In fact, many people probably assume he had no virtues at all, so your novel is going to be a revelation for them.

I have been gone for so long that I feel as if I ought to re-introduce myself, or at least thank you all for being so patient with my prolonged absences.   I hope that life will get back to normal once I’ve been able to evict the Deadline Dragon, though I would not bet money on that.  I only have three chapters left to do in The Land Beyond the Sea, but since one of them will have me fighting one of the most momentous battles of the Middle Ages, please send me lots of positive vibes; I suspect I’ll need them.

With apologies again for the long delay, Stephanie Churchill and I are happy to announce that the winner of her book giveaway for her new novel, The King’s Daughter, is Colleen MacDonald.  Colleen, congratulations.   Please contact either Stephanie or me to arrange to receive your personalized copy.    I am sure you will love it.   I know I did!

INTERVIEW WITH STEPHANIE CHURCHILL, AUTHOR OF THE KING’S DAUGHTER

I need to start with an apology for the long, long delay since my last blog was posted.  You are getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a writer’s life when that writer is cornered by a voracious Deadline Dragon; survival takes first priority and all else falls by the wayside.  But since I only have four more chapters now to do, I feel that I can afford to surface for air.
I am delighted to relaunch my blog with this interview with my friend and fellow writer, Stephanie Churchill.  Those of you who visit my blog and Facebook pages on a regular basis know how much I enjoyed Stephanie’s first novel, The Scribe’s Daughter.  I tease Stephanie that she has created a new genre—fantasy that reads like historical fiction.  My readers will feel very comfortable in Stephanie’s fictional world, for her novels are rooted in a gritty medieval reality.  They are considered fantasy because you cannot find this kingdom on any map, just in Stephanie’s head.  But there are no supernatural elements; no vampires or ghosts or monsters, although I personally would not have minded a dragon or two.     Her novels are character-driven, but they offer action and suspense, too.
I was hooked from the first sentence of The Scribe’s Daughter: “I never imagined my life would end this way.”    Kassia is an intriguing character and so well-drawn that readers immediately care about her.   For those of you who have not yet read The Scribe’s Daughter, the e-book is being offered on Amazon at a bargain price, just $2.99.   It is also available in paperback, but I confess I have become addicted to e-books for pleasure reading, seduced by the convenience, the ability to increase the font size, and the instant gratification, of course.

We have a winner in our drawing for a copy of Priscilla Royal’s new medieval mystery, The Proud Sinner.  In fact, because of Priscilla’s generosity, we have two winners—Pat K. and Margaret Skea.  Pat and Margaret, congratulations.  I am sure you’ll really enjoy The Proud Sinner; I know I did.  You can contact Priscilla via her Facebook page or website or me via the Contact Sharon option on my website.  Margaret is a writer, too, author of two novels set in sixteenth century Scotland, Turn of the Tide and A House Divided.  She is also the recipient of a grant by Creative Scotland, and is currently in Germany researching her next book, a novel about Katharina Luther.  Here is a link to her website.   https://margaretskea.com/

Priscilla’s publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, has just brought out a new edition of her first medieval mystery, Wine of Violence.   I was very pleased when they asked me to write a new forward for it, as this gave me an opportunity to explain why I think this is such an excellent series.   I have gotten permission from Poisoned Pen Press to post the first chapter of Wine of Violence on my blog.   If you have not read Wine yet, I am sure you’ll want to do so after reading this chapter.  Enjoy!

I am delighted to post this interview with one of my favorite historical novelists, Margaret George.  Her legion of fans will be just as delighted and new readers will soon realize what they’ve been missing, for as this interview vividly demonstrates, she is as amusing as she is eloquent.  I do not think there is a single soul who will not laugh aloud when they read her quip about “Michael Corleone meets  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”    So…..here we go.

SKP:  Welcome,  Margaret.  Of course the first question is why Nero?  Why did you want to write about him?  What gave you the idea in the first place?

Sharon:  I am very pleased to have this chance to interview Priscilla Royal, whose medieval mysteries have long been favorites of mine.  We share many of the same readers, so I know this will be a popular interview.  And Priscilla has generously agreed to do another book giveaway.  To enter, you have only to post an entry on this blog.  The winner will receive a signed copy of The Proud Sinner.  Now before we get started on the new book, Priscilla, you said you have two announcements you are eager to make.

Priscilla:   My first book in the series, Wine of Violence, is being reissued in specially identified trade paperback and e-reader versions on February 3, 2017. The edition is special because one of the finest historical novelists of our time, Sharon Kay Penman, was generous enough to write a new Introduction for it. Am I thrilled? For once, I’m without words. Thank you, Sharon, for taking the time to do this. As I have already told you, I am deeply honored.

Poisoned Pen Press is also publishing a volume of short stories by 35 of their writers to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the press. It is called Bound by Mystery: Celebrating 20 Years of Poisoned Pen Press. It will be out in trade paperback on March 7, 2017. Included is my only short story, The Paternoster Pea. It is Prioress Eleanor’s first case and written long before the series began to see if she and I could get along as character and author. It worked, and we are happily engaged in a long collaboration.

Sharon:  I was delighted when Poisoned Pen asked me to write the Forward for this new edition of Wine of Violence.  I still remember how much I enjoyed my first reading of Wine, for I knew I wanted to keep visiting Tyndal Priory and its inhabitants.  I plan to post the first chapter of Wine of Violence in a later blog so those of you who’ve not yet read it can see for yourselves what you’ve been missing.  But for now, it is the Proud Sinner on center stage, the latest in your medieval mystery series.  Tell us about it.

Priscilla:  As readers, we are often intrigued by where fiction authors get their inspirations. I find my best ideas usually arrive when I am trying least to come up with something.

The Proud Sinner was inspired by watching the 1965 movie version of Dame Agatha Christie’s book retitled And Then There Were None after the original title was thankfully junked. This film, Ten Little Indians, is the one with Fabian. (Yes, him, for those old enough to remember. Awful actor but fun.) The plot involves characters marooned on an island. All are killed. So who was the murderer? Not only did I reread the book, but I watched all movie versions. You can imagine what hard work it was to do that!

Although I am not the clever writer Christie was, and pompously didn’t like her ending, I thought it would be fun to strand a group of querulous abbots, each of whom could easily epitomize one of the seven deadly sins, in one of the worst recorded winters in English history at Tyndal Priory. As they sicken and die, one by one, and Sister Anne is mystified by the causes, the terrified abbots begin to point fingers at each other and grow violent. The ending, however, is not Christie’s. That’s as much as I’ll say!

Sharon:  In each of your books, you have chosen to highlight some aspect of the medieval era.  What is highlighted in The Proud Sinner and why this particular choice?

Priscilla:  After delving into the coin-clipping pogrom against English Jews in Land of Shadows, I needed a short break from murderous bigotry that was beginning to feel a bit too modern. Even though I love drawing characters, I decided to concentrate on a more devious plot as a craft challenge. My editor suggested I highlight medieval food, something which is often assumed to be bland, putrid, and not exactly healthy. For those of us who grew up after WWII, the English diet we knew suffered horribly from rationing and shortages. The medieval diet did not. Meat was usually fresh, often killed the same day as eaten. Spices enhanced meals, as they do today, and were never intended to disguise rotten food. Middle Eastern cuisine, especially the spices like saffron, was brought back by the crusaders. Queen Eleanor of Castile introduced recipes from her native land as well as carpets. Vegetables and fruit were fresh, local, and organic. So I integrated monastic food habits into the book, as well as meals found in inns, and threw in a little lethal element as extra spice.

Sharon:  This is the thirteenth book about Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas, yet you have kept the series fresh. How have you done that?

Priscilla:  Thank you for the compliment! As a reader, I start to get bored with a series when the author seems to be doing so or the voice loses freshness. Of course, I won’t mention names, but there is one writer I still read because the plotting remains excellent, but the main character hasn’t changed in years. Yet readers, and I’m among them, long for one more story even when the authors are so sick of the main characters they want to kill them off. Example is Conon Doyle with Sherlock Holmes who had to bring him back from death because readers demanded it—and he also found it hard to turn down the royalties.

One way I try to keep my series fresh is to take chances. Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas continue to evolve. I give them vacations by highlighting the stories of major secondary characters, a lesson I learned from reading Ian Rankin. On occasion, I introduce new secondaries, like Eleanor’s young maid, and give old secondaries new roles like my prioress’ former maid who married the crowner. Most importantly, from my viewpoint, I still find all my characters as interesting as old friends.

A series must have a natural ending, but characters, pacing, and voice determine that. The Swedish masters, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, saw each of the ten novels in their Beck series as chapters in one larger book, called The Story of a Crime. For my series, I set up a very long arc of novel-chapters. So if a reader wants more of a character or feels a story line is left incomplete, I can pretty much promise that they will get their wish or find the desired resolution in due course.

Sharon:  You have chosen to age your characters normally over the series which means they must change. How have you done this with Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas?

Priscilla:  Each stage in our lives has a different emphasis and strength. Youth may lack experience, but it offers society fresh ideas and direction. Middle age is often centered in family and the drive to succeed in the world. The later years include reflection and perspective. Prioress Eleanor is no longer the young woman in Wine of Violence but an experienced business woman, clever solver of mysteries, and someone who is learning to be a worldly diplomat. She has entered the second stage of her life. Brother Thomas has traveled a different path, but he, too, has entered that second stage. The priory members have become his family and the suffering his children. Yet he still longs to bond with another man. One thing he has learned at Tyndal is that love owns many manifestations. His struggle now is to still find a way to form that loving bond but within a medieval God’s law. Like many in any era, he is beginning to suspect that a rigid Deity is more the product of mortal men’s imagination and the real one might have some flexibility. Aelred of Rievaulx discovered that. Brother Thomas might too.

Sharon:  What are you working on next?

Priscilla:  I’m a bit of a contrarian, often choosing topics less well-known because few others have used them in stories. When I got intrigued with the many military Orders during the crusades, I opted to concentrate on the Hospitallers, not the Templars, and found them much more intriguing. So the next book will take Prioress Eleanor, Brother Thomas and Sister Anne to Minchin-Buckland Preceptory in Somerset, the only priory of Hospitaller nuns in England to which a small commandery of Hospitaller brothers is attached. When the trio arrives, they discover that the prioress they expected to meet has been judged guilty of murder. Although the woman has never contested this verdict against her, she now begs the Prioress of Tyndal to prove her innocence after reading the private letter carried by Eleanor to her from Baron Hugh. What was in the letter than made the condemned woman change her plea? And who did kill the victim, a woman hated by so many that the suspects were all too numerous?

Sharon:  How can readers contact you?

Priscilla:  Should anyone have questions about my books, they can reach me through my website at www.priscillaroyal.com. And I am one of several mystery writers blogging every other Tuesday on The Lady Killers at  www.theladykillers.typepad.com

Thank you so much, Sharon, for inviting me to your blog. You are truly a modern day bard, and I am honored to be one of your interviewees!

Sharon:   It was my pleasure, Priscilla.   I hope you will come back for your next book!

February 17, 2017

WHY I LOVE BERNARD CORNWELL
Those of you who read my blogs or are my Facebook or Goodreads friends know how much I love Bernard Cornwell’s historical fiction.  Since he has a new novel out, The Flame Bearer, which may be his best one yet, I thought this would be a good time to discuss why I find his books so compelling.
In 2011, National Public Radio asked me to select the five best historical novels of that year and write an article in which I explained my choices.   I soon selected Margaret George’s Elizabeth I, Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife, Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing, and Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeeper.   The fifth book proved to be more of a challenge.  I was familiar, of course, with BC’s writing; I’d loved his Sharpe series, set during the Napoleonic Wars, and enjoyed his Grail Quest trilogy.  But somehow I’d not gotten around to reading any of the books in his Saxon series, possibly because I knew very little about this period in British history.   As it happened, he’d just published a new book in this series, Death of Kings, and I decided this was worth checking out.
My only concern was that Death of Kings was the sixth book in the series and I needed to be sure it could be read as a stand-alone, too.    I’ve often been down this particular road, doing a trilogy about Wales and England in the thirteenth century, and what Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen once called “Sharon’s five book trilogy about the Angevins.”     It is a tricky balancing act, for you are writing for two audiences, new readers who know nothing of what came before and those readers who know enough that you risk boring them with too much repetition.    So it was with some hesitancy that I settled down with Death of Kings.
I need not have worried; I was riveted from the very first page.   I soon realized that BC had created a unique character in Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a man who could be courageous, reckless, insightful, stubborn, sardonic, generous, vengeful, and playful—sometimes all in the course of a single day.  By the time I’d finished Death of Kings, I was utterly captivated by Uhtred, and real life then came to a screeching halt as I hastened to order all of the earlier books in the Saxon series.   Book lovers know that the only joy greater than discovering a new writer is finding that this writer has a healthy backlist waiting to be read.    So for those of you who have not yet encountered Uhtred, you have hit the literary lottery.  BC has written ten novels about Uhtred, his kings, his women, and his enemies:   The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horsemen, The Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, the Pagan Lord, The Empty Throne, Warriors of the Storm, and now The Flame Bearer.   Just be prepared to become a recluse until you read them all.
Before I was fortunate enough to get my first novel, The Sunne in Splendour, published, I’d been a lawyer, which I considered penance for my sins.  I am going to draw upon my legal background now, though, to make the case that Bernard Cornwell is the best historical novelist of our time.
What makes his novels so special?   Well, he is a master wordsmith.  He can make his words sing or snarl and he can conjure up images so powerful that they will burn into the back of a reader’s brain, not to be forgotten.   Writing well may seem such an obvious requirement that it is not worth mentioning.  But there are many successful writers whose books are plot driven, their prose pedestrian at best.   A Cornwell novel has all the elements that readers look for—suspense, action, colorful characters, etc.   It will also be sprinkled with small gems, descriptive phrases that soar and make other writers think, “I wish I’d written that!”
Here are a few examples of BC’s lyricism at work.    “The sky to the east was molten gold around a bank of sun-drenched cloud, while the rest was blue. Pale blue to the east and dark blue to the west where night fled toward the unknown lands beyond the distant ocean.”     Or “They were either fishing or cargo vessels and they rightly feared a sea wolf seething northward with the waves foaming white at her jaws.”   And “The drenching dark crept along the valleys on either side of us as a slither of light crackled wicked and sharp across the northern sky.”
What else makes a BC  novel so mesmerizing?   Historical accuracy is very important to me, both as a writer and a reader, and he never disappoints.   His research is thorough and yet it never gets away from him, always a risk for historical novelists.  When I read of a bygone age, I want to know how the people lived, what they wore and ate and believed, but these facts need to be stitched seamlessly into the fabric of the story—the way threads are woven into a tapestry until a pattern eventually emerges.  BC’s tapestry tells us of a time when the Son of God was challenging the old Norse gods, a time when warrior kings and lords fought for supremacy and history hovered at a cross-road; would England be pagan or Christian, Danish or English, united or split into numerous petty kingdoms?
As important as it is for a historical novel to have a solid factual foundation, that alone is not enough.   It must also have characters who are three-dimensional, vivid, memorable.   The major protagonist in the Saxon series towers above them all like the Colossus of Rhodes.  Uhtred is uniquely positioned to understand the wars between Saxons and Danes.  He is Saxon himself, the son of a Saxon earl, who was abducted as a child and raised by the Danes.  He does not love the Christians or their God, but he is a man of honor and fights for them because he’d given his oath to King Alfred and then to Alfred’s daughter, Aethelflaed.
He is also a man of violence, a lethal warlord who glories in the fame he has won in the shield wall and on battlefields soaked in blood.  He is cynical, sarcastic, and impulsive.  He is often his own worst enemy, realizing that he would be foolish to insult a Danish raider, to alienate a king, to offend a bishop with his notorious lack of tact.  Almost every time, though, he then goes ahead and does it anyway.   Definitely a man with flaws, but BC makes us care so deeply for him that those flaws don’t matter; we are always willing to forgive him even when his foes do not.
He is surrounded by other characters who seem very real to us, even those we find loathsome or contemptible.  We do not always like King Alfred; I certainly did not.  But we understand, as Uhtred does,  that Alfred’s vision is a powerful one, the dream of a country called England.    We mourn for those who die and rejoice when others survive.  Uhtred’s world becomes our own, at least for three hundred pages or so, and when we finish that last page, we feel a sense of loss.
Another of BC’s strengths is how well he writes of women.  As strange as it may sound, some publishers continue to harbor an odd bias—the belief that male authors cannot write convincingly of women and vice versa.   I’d never encountered this bias myself, but I have writer friends who’ve not been as fortunate.  For anyone who still clings to this outdated notion, read one of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon novels.  Meet the women who matter to Uhtred.  Gisela, beguiling and bold, the love of his life.   Stiorra, his daughter, who proves that the apple does not fall far from the tree.  The courageous Abbess Hild, who loves God and Uhtred.   The sorrowful Welsh shadow-queen, Iseult.    His women need not be sympathetic to be unforgettable.   There is his sultry bedmate, Skade, whose capacity for cruelty is horrifying, and Brida, his childhood friend and lover, who turns into a monster in the course of the series. Or Aethelflaed, whose youthful joy is leached from her soul by the burdens of queenship and a wretched marriage. BC breathes life into each and every one of these disparate women and when they are on-stage, even Uhtred finds it hard to compete with their star power.
I’ve already mentioned one of the other strengths of the Saxon series books, but it is worth stressing.  BC is very good at the sharp-edged male banter that is the coin of their realm and Uhtred’s sardonic sense of humor is a wicked delight, often surfacing at the most unlikely times.  Any book that can make me laugh aloud goes at once to my Favorites List.
Lastly, there are the battles.  I’ve often said that no writer in the world does better battle scenes than Bernard Cornwell.    George R.R. Martin, no slouch himself at spilling blood, agrees with me.    So does any writer who has ever turned his or her hand at fighting a fictional battle and then reads one of BC’s books.
When we frequently write about battles, we must constantly look for ways to make each battle fresh and original.  When I had to fight a battle in the Llyn Peninsula between the Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, and his brothers, Owain and Davydd, I went to the Caernarfonshire Archives for help, as almost nothing was known of this particular battle.  They dragged out maps and translated several passages for me, and then I drove out to explore the battlefield for myself.  I’d been very pleased to find a river on the map, thinking I could let some of the soldiers drown when they tried to flee.  Much to my disappointment, I discovered that the river was so shallow a snake could not have drowned in it.  But then I saw a sign warning of quicksand.  When writing that scene, I resisted the temptation to go hopelessly Hollywood and so my characters merely blundered into the quagmire and then lost all interest in bashing each other until they could get back on solid ground.
My favorite battles are those that were out of the ordinary, for that made them more dramatic and easier to write: the fog at Barnet Heath, the ambush at Tewkesbury, the Lionheart’s encounter with a huge Saracen ship as he sailed for Acre.   But BC fights so many battles that he has to invent most of them out of whole cloth, and his imagination never runs dry.     Uhtred is always one jump ahead of his foes.  Who else would think to use sails in the assault upon an enemy fort?   Or beehives?    Or horses as a temporary dam to enable his soldiers to ford a river?    Uhtred and his alter-ego author could match wits with Caesar, the Lionheart, or Napoleon, with any of history’s most celebrated battle commanders, and more than hold their own.
What he does is all the more remarkable because his soldiers and their wars span so many centuries.  Uhtred’s shield wall in tenth century England.    The battles of Poitiers and Crecy in fourteenth century France.   Richard Sharpe and his Chosen Men at the siege of Badajoz  in nineteenth century Spain.  He shows us how men fought and what they felt when they were fighting and this alone would make his books well worth reading.
His legions of fans most likely know already that his tenth novel in the Saxon series, The Flame Bearer, was published in the U.K. in October and in the U.S. in November.  For writers, it can be challenging to keep a series fresh and innovative, to prevent it from becoming stale and repetitive.   Many writers struggle with this, no matter how talented they are.  But a few of them not only meet the challenge, they transcend it.
Three of my favorite authors at once come to mind.  Dana Stabenow has written twenty Kate Shugak mysteries set in her native Alaska, each one a joy to read.  Priscilla Royal has written thirteen medieval mysteries that also defy the passage of time, and in P.F. Chisholm’s eight Elizabethan mysteries about Robert Carey, a real-life cousin of Elizabeth I, he continues to thrive.   Their characters are not stagnant or static; they mature and grow, their lives and relationships changing as the years go by. That may be the secret of a successful series; if so, it is one that Bernard Cornwell understands, too.  The Flame Bearer, his tenth Saxon novel, in which Uhtred continues his quest to recover his family legacy—Bebbanburg Castle–is as spellbinding as The Last Kingdom, in which we meet ten year old Uhtred for the first time.    I am already looking forward to the eleventh book.
January 12, 2017

I am sorry that it has taken me so long to write a new blog, but as many of you know from reading my Facebook and Goodreads posts, I have been dealing with an injury that has forced me to severely limit my time at the computer. This, of course, wreaked havoc upon my deadline, gave unholy glee to my unwelcome roommate, the Deadline Dragon, and caused a lot to just slip through the cracks. I am—I hope—on the mend now, though.

In my last blog, I promised to hold a drawing for all of my readers who posted comments about any of my mysteries on that blog. I finally was able to do that drawing and the winner is Chris Torrance. I can give you a hardcover edition of Prince of Darkness or Dragon’s Lair, Chris; just let me know which one you prefer. I started thinking about it after you emerged as the winner and remembered that the first four horses in a race receive prizes. That seemed like a good idea so I drew three more names. Sara, I will be happy to give you a copy of Prince of Darkness, too; you mentioned that you would like to read that one. Rosemary and Thomas Greene , you are also winners. I am afraid you’ll have to settle for paperback editions, but you both can choose between Dragon’s Lair and Prince of Darkness. Unfortunately, I’ve about run out of copies of The Queen’s Man and Cruel as the Grave. Please contact me through my Contact Sharon feature on my website and once I have your addresses, I can send the books out.

I really enjoyed the reader responses to my last blog. So many of you provided wonderful first sentences from books you enjoyed and all of them made me want to read those books. Of course at this point, my TBR list is so long that I’d need nine lives like a cat in order to read them all. That is true for virtually all book lovers. This is why the saddest Twilight Zone episode ever was the one about the librarian who somehow survived a catastrophe, emerging to find NYC was intact but all the people were gone. I saw it as a child, so I am very fuzzy on the details. All I remember is the ending. He was naturally stunned at first, but then realized he could spend the rest of his life reading. But as he sat on the steps of the New York City library, he dropped his glasses and they broke. I think I cried when that happened.

I still have to pace myself when it comes to using the computer, so this will probably be my shortest blog ever. Not surprisingly, it is book-themed. Here is my question: What was the book you read this year that truly resonated with you, one you will long remember? This is sure to give us all dozens of new books to add to our TBR lists as we go happily off into book bankruptcy together.

For me, it was The Underdogs: children, dogs, and the power of unconditional love by Melissa Fay Greene. This was one of the most moving and inspirational stories I’ve ever read. The author tells the true story of Karen Shirk, a young woman stricken at age 24 with a neuromuscular disease that put her in a wheel chair and made her dependent upon a ventilator. She was turned down by every service dog agency in the country because she was “too disabled.” Instead of despairing, she trained her own service dog, but she was haunted by the thought of all the people who were being denied the service dogs that would have enabled them to lead productive lives, especially children.

The result was 4 Paws for Ability, the service dog academy that she founded and runs today in Ohio. The Underdogs tells the story of how this came to be, interspersed with heartbreaking glimpses into the lives of overwhelmed parents struggling desperately to help their stricken children, families whose lives would be transformed by the service dogs that Karen selected for them. As I read this remarkable book, I could only marvel at the resiliency of the human spirit and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The Amazon description of The Underdogs says it better than I could: “Written with characteristic insight, humanity, humor, and irrepressible joy, what could have been merely touching is a penetrating, compassionate exploration of larger questions about our attachments to dogs, what constitutes a productive life, and what can be accomplished with unconditional love.” I have decided that if I am ever lucky enough to win the lottery, a good portion of those winnings will go to Karen Shirk and 4 Paws for Ability. It costs over $16,000 to train one of her service dogs, most of which she finds in shelters; she helps the families to raise the money. But if ever anyone deserved a financial good angel, this is the woman.

I’d like to close by calling a few books to your attention. I do this from time to time, for even though I have not read these novels, I think they might be of interest to my history-loving, book-loving readers and friends. I will start with Samantha Wilcoxson, who has written two intriguing novels about historical figures we have come to care about. Her newest is Faithful Traitor: the story of Margaret Pole. Margaret was the daughter of George of Clarence, who was murdered—no other word for it—by Henry VIII and would later by beatified by the Catholic Church. Her second novel tells the story of a woman familiar to any readers of The Sunne in Splendour, titled Plantagenet Princess, Tudor Queen: the story of Elizabeth of York.

Moving back to the twelfth century, Hilary Benford has just written a novel about Richard I’s sister, Joanna, titled Sister of the Lionheart. I really enjoyed writing about Joanna and can well understand the magnetic pull she exerted upon Hilary. And Charlene Newcomb is continuing the story of two fictional young knights who accompanied the Lionheart to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade. The first book was titled Men of the Cross and her new one is called For King and Country. All of these books are available on Amazon’s mother ship and its satellite sites and the last time I checked, they were garnering some very enthusiastic reviews.

Lastly, there is finally a biography out of the eldest surviving son of Henry II and Eleanor, known to history as the young king and to readers of my books as Hal. It has proven to be harder to hunt down than a unicorn; I am still waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon. But the young king’s eloquent and devoted champion, Kasia Ogrodnik, has just received her copy, I think from Book Depository. I am looking forward to reading it, albeit feeling a bit frustrated that it was not available when I was writing Devil’s Brood. I have a few reservations simply because I wonder if there was enough extant material on the young king to support a full-scale biography.

Dr Judith Everhard, the highly-regarded scholar who wrote the brilliant Brittany and the Angevins, once told me that she’d initially meant to do a biography about the “forgotten” son, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, only to discover that there was not enough material to warrant a biography. She wisely expanded the scope of her project to include the other Angevins, especially Henry, and I will be forever grateful to her for that, as she is the first historian to study Geoffrey and his too-brief reign in Brittany. The author of Henry, the Young King is another noted historian, Matthew Strickland, whose previous books I enjoyed greatly and found very helpful in my own writing. So if anyone can do justice to a biography of the young king, this is the man.

Well, so much for this being a brief blog. You’d think I’d know better by now. One final thought; here is the link to Kasia’s always interesting blog about the young king and his flamboyant family. http://henrytheyoungking.blogspot.com/

July 31, 2016

I am sorry it has taken me so long to do a new blog, but it is never a good thing to anger a deadline dragon; they make awful roommates.    I am trying very hard to get back on track for The Land Beyond the Sea, not easy since I often have to deal with computer sabotage from the aptly-named Diablo; just last week, he suddenly made all the tool bars vanish in Word, right in the middle of a chapter.   To add insult to injury, he ignored all my efforts to restore them, and I finally had to contact the Geek Squad.  Never doubt that computers have a malicious sense of humor.
I was trying to think of a good blog topic, and it occurred to me that it might be fun to discuss opening lines in novels that we like.   I’m sure many of you have your favorites, too, and I’d love to hear about them.   I think my all-time favorite is the beginning of The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley:  “The past is a foreign country.   They do things differently there.”    Probably the most quoted first line is from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”   Below, in no particular order, are opening lines that caught my fancy—at least the ones that first popped into my head when I began this blog.
I am a huge fan of P.F. Chisholm’s marvelous Elizabethan mysteries which revolve around Sir Robert Carey, a cousin of the queen.   If you are not familiar with this series, you are in for a treat.   This is from Plague of Angels: “You could always tell when you were nearing a town from the bodies hanging on the gibbets by the main road, thought Sergeant Dodd.”
Another writer I love is Khaled Hosseini.  This is from The Kite Runner:   “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
Full disclosure:  I am a friend of Stephanie Churchill.  But I cannot imagine anyone reading the opening line of her novel The Scribe’s Daughter without wanting to continue reading.   “I never imagined my life would end this way.”
Here is the opening line of the first book of Diana Gabaldon’s celebrated Outlander series: “People disappear all the time.”
This next entry is also by a friend, Priscilla Royal, whose atmospheric mystery series set in thirteenth century England is also highly recommended.   This is the first line from the first book in her series, Wine of Violence:  “During the dark morning hours of a winter day in the year 1270, the aged prioress realized she was dying.”     How can you not want to know more?
I’ve always been partial to the opening of John Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath: “To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”   The rest of the paragraph conjures up an unforgettable image of a dying land in the midst of a devastating drought.    Just in passing, I think his East of Eden is one of the best book titles ever.  That might make a good topic for a future blog, no?
One of my all-time favorite books is Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I remember browbeating my mom into reading it, and for the first hundred pages or so, she kept complaining, “Are they ever going to get off that porch?”   When they finally did, it was “Fasten your seatbelts” time, with readers happily going along for the wild ride.   This is the opening sentence:  “When Augustus came out on the porch, the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—a small one.”   This foreshadows so much—the humor, the sense of time and place, and even the violence; after all, that didn’t end well for the rattlesnake.
Another of my favorite novels is Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeeper, which I think is her finest novel, and considering the quality of her books, that is really saying something.   Here is the first sentence:   “We came like doves across the desert.”
Probably one of the most famous opening lines comes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick:   “Call me Ishmael.”    I have to confess, though, that Moby Dick is not a favorite of mine. I know it is a classic, but Master Melville told me more about whaling than I wanted to know.   I recently saw a spoof of great books, and had to laugh at the summary of the plot of Moby Dick: “Man vs Fish.   The fish wins.”
David Blixt is another writer friend of mine; I was completely captivated last year by his Star-Cross’d series set in 14th century Italy.   The line I am about to quote must be taken in context, for by itself, it does not seem all that startling.  But for readers of the first book, The Master of Verona, the opening sentence in the second book, Voice of the Falconer, was quite shocking:   “The greyhound is dead!”   The greyhound referred to one of the most intriguing and outrageous and compelling characters I’ve encountered in historical fiction, Francesco della Scalla, aka Cangrande.   I told David that Cangrande had quite a few traits in common with Richard the Lionheart, the same swagger, sardonic humor, utter fearlessness, and arrogance tempered by great ability.   I once used a wonderful line from a Johnny Cash song to describe Richard:  “He was a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”   That phrase applies as well to Cangrande, a real-life medieval lord brought to unforgettable life in David’s series.   These books are filled with fascinating characters—the great poet, Dante, among others—yet Cangrande managed to overshadow them all.   So that opening line of the second novel caused me to gasp in surprise, followed by disappointment.   I’d not expected to lose Cangrande so soon.  But since David was writing of a man who actually lived, I understood that he was following a road map that was not of his making.  Historical novelists are fortunate in that we do get to start our books with these road maps; unfortunately, they often take us places we’d rather not go.   So I assumed this was the case with Cangrande.   I do not want to give away too much of the plot, so I can only say that things are not always as they seem, either in the real world or the realm of fiction.  A very unexpected twist lay ahead for the readers, all the more devilishly delightful because it was absolutely true.
I am going to quote the first two lines from Elizabeth Chadwick’s The Greatest Knight, for the second sentence deserves the highest praise one writer can give to another, a stab of envy and a wistful, “I wish I’d written that.”       The first sentence nicely sets the scene, too.  “In the dark hours before dawn, all the shutters in the great hall were closed against the evil vapors of the night.  Under the heavy curfew, the fire was a quenched dragon’s eye.”     See what I mean?
Some of you may not have heard yet of the recent death of Roberta Gellis, whose medieval-themed novels won her fans beyond counting over the years, including me.   She is perhaps best known for the Roselynde Chronicles, but I also enjoyed the series she wrote later, about an enigmatic, strong-willed woman who ran a high-class brothel in 12th century London.   This sentence begins the second book in that series, A Personal Demon.   “The woman was screaming again.”
I love the writing of Dana Stabenow.  She is amazingly prolific; in addition to her brilliant Kate Shugak mysteries, she has written stand-alones, another series set in Alaska, and a historical trilogy set in the 14th century which focuses upon the granddaughter of Marco Polo. Here is the opening line from one of the Kate Shugak mysteries, Though not Dead:   “The black death did not get to Alaska till November.”
This turned out to be more fun than I anticipated.  But since even I don’t want to write a blog that rivals a novel in length, I think I’d best end the fun here.   If I may, I’ll do that by revealing my favorite opening lines of my own books.   Writers spend a lot of time crafting the beginnings of our books, for they may determine whether a reader puts the book back on the shelf or buys it, so I am reasonably satisfied with all of the opening sentences of my novels.  I do have a special fondness for the beginning of Sunne, that being my first book:   “Richard did not become frightened until darkness began to settle over the woods.”    I also like the opening of Time and Chance:  “It began with a shipwreck on a bitter-cold November eve in God’s Year 1120.”   And the opening paragraph of When Christ and His Saints Slept:   “Stephen was never to forget his fifth birthday, for that was the day he lost his father.  In actual fact, that wasn’t precisely so.  But childhood memories are not woven from facts alone, and that was how he would remember it.”
I think openings are even more important for mysteries than for historical novels.  Here are the opening sentences of my four medieval mysteries.   The Queen’s Man: “Do you think the king is dead?”   Cruel as the Grave:  “They were intimate enemies, bound by blood.”   Dragon’s Lair:  “The English king was dying.  Despite the bone-biting chill of the dungeon, he was drenched in sweat and so gaunt and wasted that his brother barely recognized him.”  Lastly, at least until I can write another one, Prince of Darkness:   “They came together on a damp December evening in a pirate’s den.”    I think I’d choose that one as most likely to hook a new reader.  Do you agree?   Anyone who posts an opinion about one of my mysteries will be entered in a drawing, the winner to get a personalized copy of Prince of Darkness.
Now comes the best part.   Please let me know your own favorite first lines.   Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whatever resonates with you, including any of my books, she hints.
May 16, 2016