Where my book wanted to be

 Just pushed the PUBLISH button on a new book!

Not 100% new, but 95% new. The general storyline has not altered but oh! I've spent so much time on  re-writing, improving and slanting it in a new direction, too - Romantasy.

I was never happy with my first attempt and when I started reading Romantasy, well  Wow! I thought, that was where my book wanted to be all the time.  So now it is there, and unashamedly promoted as that. Let's hope it does well. 

This is the first time I've deliberately aimed at one of the more niche genres and I can say it makes Promos a whole lot easier than trying to excite someone with a commonplace historical romance. It may take KDP 72 hours to have a book ready for a reader but I shall be watching all progress with an interested eye. One or two facts about Trust No Maid -

Setting: Ireland and north west Scotland

Period: around turn of 11th century

Characters: New heroine  appears but Olli, Flane, Emer and Skeggi featured in Far After Gold, as they did in Viking Bride and Viking Summer.

Good for him, good for me

It must be all the good weather that is making Facebook and Twitter so quiet. So many things to distract! I am watching the clay court tennis season and working hard on a new book - another Viking story set in Stornoway. So I am not putting anything much on Fb apart from a few pics I have taken recently.

The new book is layering up nicely. My plan for it was sketchy at the start but a fortnight and 13k words in and it is taking shape. If only I knew how it would end!

The weather has turned hot again, so I am walking Tim early in the morning when it is still cool. Good for him, and good for me. Makes for a longer day, and a chance to get much more done. Our garden is colouring up  with everything coming into flower. I haven't planned it, but we seem to have an early summer garden; probably comes of darting off to France in the middle of summer. After the end of July it is a case of restoring order and cutting things back after the riot of growth.

I'd like to get as much done as I can before we do go away. I'd also like to do another Mailchimp mail shot, but am wary because I have forgotten how to do it. I'm not sure it did any good anyway, but then, how would I know?

These are the opening lines of the new book:

Fritha learned to sew, cook and look after livestock before she was ten years old not because she wanted to but because she had to when her mother died birthing the youngest child. 

Maybe I shall add more in later posts. What is it famous authors do? Add lines of the day? Yes, maybe I shall do it too. If I remember, that is.

An Ethnic Enigma

An Ethnic Enigma – Norse, Pict and Gael in the Western Isles Andrew Jennings and Arne Kruse

Introduction

What happened to the native people of the islands of Scotland when the Vikings appeared over the horizon? Were the men killed and the womenfolk bundled on to the ships, leaving the land empty and ripe for resettlement? Or did they survive the Viking visitation living alongside the newcomers and ultimately blending with them? There is still no consensus about which scenario best approximates to the truth, despite it being, for many decades, a topic of debate between scholars.

Busy doing my research - mugging up on facts about Viking life in the years around the first millennium. The above paragraph about sums up the position, but of course, people taken their own  and argue the hind leg off a donkey, as we used to say, to preserve their viewpoint. I haven't decided on my stance yet, but it is always good to know the parameters of an argument. In the Viking  books I've written so far - Far After Gold, Viking Summer and Magician's Bride  and of course Alba is Mine,I haven't really had to make a decision, but I have a niggling feeling I might have to this time. 

First Review for Viking Summer

5.0 out of 5 stars Great plot, fast action. Loved it

15 May 2018

Verified Purchase

This is the first time I’ve read a book by this author and had no idea what to expect. But I quickly found that I was drawn in, immediately involved with the characters, especially the main one, Eilidh, a headstrong young girl, whose story is written in the first person. In fact, I was intrigued by the mixture of first person writing, when we were reading about Eilidh but also there was third-person narrative for the other characters; a very clever way to be able to involve the actions of other characters when not around Eilidh. As a writer myself, I’ve been frustrated when writing in first person, not being able to tell the reader what others are up to unless they are in the sight of the main character. However, to get back to this story, I found that I was reluctant to put it down, so involved was I with Eilidh and worried that when she escapes from one predicament she runs full-tilt into yet another one.

I know nothing of Irish history and so this was something of an education for me and I found it a refreshing change to read about another country in our British Isles.

The writing is very good; the characters fully developed and interesting and the historical setting well researched. The descriptions of the fast games the characters indulged in and the war actions were very well done and true to form. The action was continual and at a good pace. Loved it.

My first review for Viking Summer and I love it! It is available on Amazon Kindle at a very low price!

Sigtrygg II Silkbeard Olafsson

Since I'm editing a book set in Dublin in 1035/6, I thought I should maybe offer some factual information for the reader who wants to know the history behind the book to be published soon as VIKING SUMMER.

Sigtrygg II Silkbeard Olafsson actually existed. He glories in having several spellings of his name depending which source you read; he can be Sihtric, Sitric and Sitrick in Irish texts; or Sigtryg and Sigtryggr in Scandinavian texts. There were two Sitrics before him in the family tree and one of his sons was also named Sitric, so reading histories of the time can be confusing. As the Hiberno-Norse king of Dublin of the Uí Ímair dynasty, his dates are complicated too. He ruled - and these dates are the best I can glean from the different reports - AD 989–994, then again AD 995–1000; and restored once more in AD 1000 and abdicated 1036. Adding all that time together, he ruled for 46 years, which was no mean feat at the time.

He conducted a long series of raids into territories such as Meath, Wicklow, Ulster, and perhaps even the coast of Wales. He also came into conflict with rival Norse kings, especially in Cork and Waterford. 

He went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1028 and is associated with the foundation of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin and would have called himself a Christian, but that didn't stop him executing and blinding his enemies. 

His father was Olaf Cuaran, King of York and his mother the infamous Gormflaith ingen Murchada of Munster. They married in AD 972, and Sigtrygg was born around AD 974. He married Emer, daughter of Brian Boru, when he was 24 and forced her to watch the Battle of Clontarf with him from his fortress. It was the battle in which her father Boru died. They had 5 sons, who all died before Sigtrygg. He seems to have been related to almost every famous family of the time - his sister Gyda married Olaf Tryggvasson, who died in 1000. Their son was killed by Canute's son, Sveinn in 1033 in Norway. Sigtrygg's son Olaf married Slaine, daughter of Boru - though some reports have Slaine as Sigtrygg's wife. 

With English blood from his paternal grandmother, Eadgth, Alfred's grandaughter;  Irish blood from Murchadh, King of Leinster, his maternal grandfather, the mix was complete with his Norse bloodline reaching back to his great great grandfather Ivarr the Boneless. He abdicated in 1036, and died in 1042 

Marriages were repudiated seemingly at will, and Gormflaith, in spite of her famed beauty, was repudiated twice. Not only did Sigtrygg marry Boru's daughter, but Brian's third wife was none other than Gormflaith.  It is rumoured that Brian had four wives and thirty concubines and though Gormflaith gave him a son, it is doubtful that she was ever truly married to him.

Interesting scraps of information I found was that in the year 1000 AD, the temperature was 2-4 degrees higher than now. Population was so much less than now: in 1066 England had a population of 2-3 million, Ireland just under 1 million and Scotland and Wales a little over half a million. 

Viking Scotland II

Early History

The tribes to the north of Hadrian’s Wall were largely undisturbed by the Roman occupation of Britain. A Roman document of the 3rd century mentioned the Picti, a new tribal group that had established a dominant position in the country. Scholars suggest this was a Romanised version of a tribal name, or that they tattooed their bodies (picti is Latin for 'painted people'). They are thought to have been an indigenous people with a non-Indo-European language. They were later subdued by Celts - not from within Scotland, but from overseas. In the 5th century a Celtic tribe from Northern Ireland settled on the west coast of Scotland.

The Scots

The invaders were called Scots. (Yes, the original Scots were a tribe from Northern Ireland). The Scots established the kingdom of Dalriada in both what is now Northern Ireland and the south west of Scotland. By the 9th century the Irish Dalriada succumbed to Viking raids, but in Scotland the Dalriadan kings established themselves and withstood constant Viking pressure from all sides.

The Vikings

Monasteries of the time owned sufficient wealth to attract Viking marauders. Lindisfarne on the east coast of Northumberland was raided in 793 and Iona, on the west coast of Alba, three times in a decade (in 795, 802 and 805). Even monasteries which seemed secure on inland rivers fell victim to longships rowing upstream. During the 9th century, the raiders settled in the Scottish islands and the Isle of Man and seized territory on the mainland of both Britain and Ireland. In 838 Norwegians captured Dublin and established a Norse kingdom in Ireland. From 865 the Danes settled in eastern England.

The MacAlpin line

A recognizable Scottish kingdom had appeared by the mid-9th century. Some suggest the year 843 to be the important date, but it was Kenneth MacAlpin, king of the Scots since 840, who won acceptance as king of both Picts and Scots. The MacAlpin kings took Strathclyde and Lothian into Scotland and Kenneth's male descendants provided kings for the next two centuries. The separate Pictish kingdom disappeared. All that remains are the beautiful carvings of weird beasts.

Publishing glitches

Busy right now. I suppose you could call it a Spring Clean, or simply getting rid of redundant paperwork. Like many authors, I have lots of it! I've also changed the cover on Magician's Bride yet again - does this book have a chequered history? This time it is to indicate that I have made changes to the formatting and re-published the book. Apologies to those readers who found my formatting so odd!

I don't know why now, but I must have thought that leaving two spaces  to indicate a scene break or a passing of time was enough. Evidently not. It looks all right on my ipad, but then I know what I did! So I've done the proper space-***-space formatting all the way through. There should be no formatting problems now.

I received a review for Magician's Bride from the Historical Novel Society and though it did not earn an Editor's Choice Award like The Craigsmuir Affair, it was still pleasing - "Ms Black does a good job of depicting life among the Norsemen who colonised Ireland and the western Isles of Scotland. Casual details are inserted with a light hand, bringing to life everything from the interior of longhouses to food and clothing...a fun and interesting read."

Bebbenburg

Judging by the Twitter feed #The Last Kingdom, the show is a hit.

So this is what the audience of today likes to watch - people stabbed through the back of the neck, nailed to a tree, a young lad blinded. I spent a good deal of the show flinching and closing my eyes, not because I didn't know what was coming  but because there's a huge difference in reading about violence and watching it. At least, I think there is.

The ingredients of the stories can all be found in the sagas out of Scandinavia and Iceland. Reading them, I'm safe in the knowledge that it all happened a thousand years ago. The same applies to the Cornwell books which I read because Bamburgh is local for me. (Though I think I never got round to the last in the series.) Maybe it applies to a bit of psychology I heard on television the other night - that we all love to be scared (via films) to prove that we're alive and safe. Maybe like everything else it is a stage we go through, for I can remember paying to go to cinemas in my youth and watching all manner of frightening films from Dracula to Omen and the Exorcist - and loving it. Now I find I don't feel the same. I doubt audiences today would find those films particularly frightening. Which in a way is  sad. Does it mean their perceptions of the world are less secure than mine were, or are they just more hardened to violemce than I was?

Black Hole Country

A short walk already completed and a cup of coffee by my hand and I'm ready to go at 9.30 on a Saturday morning. Amazing.
I intended to do this yesterday, but got sidetracked by attending a Writers' group meeting at Ashington, where we had a lovely lunch, a good discussion and put some good plans in place for a Writers' Retreat Day  in May 2014. The lunch was remarkable for its variety and quality - there was one unforgettable lunch where fourteen people all decided to bring a quiche!

The only trouble is that the region east of Newcastle, between Newcastle and the coast, is rather like a Black Hole/Bermuda Triangle for me in the sense that I inevitably get lost either going, or returning and sometimes both. The same thing happened when I was lucky enough to share a ride in Hazel's car. We arrived happily in very good time and full of confidence decided we didn't need the sat nav for the way home. Mistake! We got snarled up in heavy traffic coming through Gosforth, a suburb of Newcastle, and I didn't get home until almost four o'clock. There was only just time to take the dog for a swift walk, before I typed up the notes of the meeting before I forgot the detail and then the clock and  dh's stomach suggested it was time to begin preparing a meal.

Which is why I'm really pleased to have a good chunk of working space in front of me now. I left my hero/heroine wet and bedraggled in a Viking longship about to sail up the Liffey to Dublin, (called Dyflin in that period) and I want to get back to them before they catch cold.

Days gone by

I never seem to have enough time these days. My blog used to be as regular as clockwork but it is a trifle hit and miss now, though I still try to keep to three posts a week. Today I'm in the unusual situation of having time to do it and groping for subject matter. Most frustrating.

We had the first frost of autumn last night. There might have been a tentative frost earlier in October, but it was so tentative it didn't last til midday. When I took Tim down to the river bank today, the ground was frozen. It's been soft and squishy up until yesterday and while Tim romped about and got muddy, I had to keep my eyes on where I put my feet. I still slipped a few times, but didn't go down. Tim, on the other hand, hit a puddle at full speed this morning and skidded off to one side. He came back to sniff the ice, so no doubt he knows what to expect next time.

This sort of weather makes me very glad to be living in the 21st century. I tell myself a Viking hallhouse could be very cosy with the central hearth blazing and everyone wrapped up in furs to keep warm while the harper told a tale or two. But someone had to go out and find the wood or peat, drag it back and keep the fire burning night and day. Someone had to go hunting so there was something to cook and eat. Trudging through snow in leather boots without the thick, textured soles that we're so used to today would be no picnic. Maybe they packed straw and wool inside to add insulation, but there must have been many frozen toes, chilblains and even frost bite.

People complained of chilblains in the fifties, (a painful, itchy swelling on the hands and feet due to poor circulation and exposure to cold) and scorch marks on the skin over the shins from sitting too close to the fire. These things were not unusual even in the early sixties. No doubt they were common in Viking days as well. Nowadays, does anyone under forty know of chilblains? Do they remember running to the kitchen to make a hot drink before hurrying back to the one warm room in the house? A trip outside to the coalhouse to get more coal - no one wanted to do it, and it usually fell to the man of the house. Going to an icy bed was unthinkable without a hot water bottle, and three people in a bed doesn't seem such a bad idea in context of  ye olden days. Body heat times three was not to be sniffed at. Pity those who had outside loos....all these discomforts are mostly forgotten now. But it is life as it was lived in historical novels.

Vikings

My interest is shifting and just to give you a clue, here's the opening passage from a book whose title I will not reveal until the end of the post. 
"As Rome fought great battles along the Rhine and lost whole legions in the darkling Teutoberg forest, a people-group made their way into a sparsely settled land. Cold, inhospitable and with a short growing season, it seemed an unlikely place to generate sufficient spare resources to enable a few generations of men to develop an ocean-going ship from a curious assembly of planks and rope in which you or I would not cross a boating lake. Yet that is what happened: as continental influences and migrations from the east caused the cultural changes that led from the Vendal culture to the people we have come to call the Vikings and the inter-reaction of cultures seems to have accelerated developments in boat technology....From this unlikely beginning developed a particular line of sailing vessels which could attempt ocean voyages across the Atlantic and - at the other extreme - light craft which could deal with shallow, fast flowing rivers and were capable of being moved across land to another river or lake."
So says J Kim Siddorn in his book Vikings, Weapons and Warfare.

I agree with him that there is much to admire in the Viking culture and from 793 onwards right up to and including the Norman invasion, Viking genes were planted across the lands that currently make up the UK. Few areas escaped attention. Given the small population then, and the widespread infiltration by Vikings, it isn't surprising that so many of us carry traces of them. No doubt it also explains our fascination with them. Race memory opens one eye when it hears the name...

First review and Scotland

Lindsay Townsend gave me 5 Stars!
here's her review of FAIR BORDER BRIDE

"A beautiful bride in a turbulent country....
From its fast-paced, compelling opening, 'Fair Border Bride' is an exciting historical romance set in the border lands of northern England in 1543. The romance of Alina and Harry is full of incident and tenderness and is a well-told story, with moments of humor, sensitivity and passion. They are sympathetic, rounded people and believable in their dilemmas and conflicts. The other characters in the novel are also very well-drawn, and the whole is filled with fascinating historical detail about a part of England that is rarely explored in Tudor historical fiction. If you want to lose yourself in vivid adventure and romance, I have no hesitation in recommending this novel by Jen Black."

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We arrived in Ullapool around 4pm. The journey took 7 hours, door to door. Not bad. I'm aware it probably  doesn't sound much to those who live in larger countries, but France, Canada and the US have so much open space to build wide roads, whereas we're just a tiny bit cramped.
 Ullapool looked as gorgeous as ever as we drove down Loch Broom and saw the buildings, shining white in the sun, sticking out into the middle of the water and with the hills rising behind. We’d booked at Waterside House on West Shore Street and stared straight down from our first floor window into Loch Broom.
They say Saint Maelrubha came here from Ireland around 722. Certainly the Vikings were at Ullapool. Their galleys rode at anchor in the fine anchorage of Tanera Mor, and by 1775 there were approximately twenty buildings and a road where West Argyle Street and West Terrace now stand. In 1698 a fishing station was set up at Ullapool with the intention of developing the export of salt herring from Wester Ross to Stockholm, London and France. Herring were so abundant in Lochbroom that the people were using them for manure but it was not until the growth of Glasgow as a port, and as a exporter of salt and dried fish across the Atlantic for the slave trade, that the commercial fishing of the remote north west coast became feasible. If you want more history click

We walked about, enjoying the crisp, bright sunshine. There are two good bookshops in Ullapool, and at least two shops selling expensive knitted fashion garments, three fish and chip places cafes, and numerous pubs offering meals. We settled on the Ceilidh Place, which always seems to have young staff from other parts of the world working there. We chose venison stew in red wine, and found it delicious. click

Edits

This is a duck house, photographed at Jarrow acouple of years ago. Typical of Viking and early medieval dwellings to keep the birds safe overnight. The sort of duck house my heroine Emer would have known in the story FAR FROM GOLD.

Well, the edits for FAG are done and returned. It wasn't bad at all - only two points where a sentence needed to be removed and I didn't disagree with my editors decision. Apart from that, it was mainly removing commas and semi colons. That shows how long ago I wrote the story, for I rapidly grew out of using semi colons and hardly ever use them now. The incorrect commas, I fear, are partly a legacy of my critique goup and the computer grammar rules. At one point it seemed that where I put them in, critiquers took them out. Where I omitted them, critiquers put them in, and I became so confused they were spattered anywhere! The computer butted in whenever I used "and"... and as we all know, computers are totally inflexible.

Now I'm looking forward to a pre-release version of the book for reviewers in November.

This morning I must return some books to the library, buy some cottage cheese which I forgot yesterday during the grocery shop, and then settle down to some work on Heiress's Dilemma. Critiques to check, amendments to make before it goes off as a complete ms. Meanwhile dh goes on working in the kitchen. Tomorrow the new oven and fridge arrive and then, dear friends, it will be complete except for a total clean down and re-arrangement of storage. I'll have so many cupboards I won't know what to do with them all! I expect I'll walk to the wrong cupboard for weeks until I get then hang of where I've stored everything.

Things I noticed

That isn't a mountain, it's a cloud formation sweeping in from the west towards Voss.

Just one last recollection of my Norwegian holiday - at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam we walked to the gate for the Bergen flight and sat down. We were early. Other passengers gathered, slowly. I began to get a sense that I was surrounded by rather large, tall chaps. I asked dh, and he concurred. Vikings, he said, grinning.

Don't be silly, I told myself. Just because you write about them doesn't mean you have to collect them. But I kept up with the sneaky glances. There are tall men in the UK, certainly, and some of them, especially if they have outdoor, active lives, are good and broad across the shoulders. Go to a pub like the Pheasant at Stannersburn and many a husky Northumbrian lad will tower over you at the bar.

But the collection at Schiphol loomed around me. Not only broad shoulders, but heavy thighs, thick wrists - and so many in one place! I began to fear the plane might not balance up correctly.

There was only one problem - not one of these guys was blond. Every shade of brown, but not a hint of fair hair. Not Vikings, then.

In Bergen, the big men vanished. I don't know where they went, but they didn't go skiing, and they didn't go to Voss. Except for our driver. He was definitely one of them, and his name was Einar. His knees almost touched the dashboard, he was so cramped into the seat. First thing we saw at our hotel next morning? Three or four female staff all with silvery-fair hair. The typical iconic Norwegian colouring, and they were all big girls, too.

I kept looking all week, but I never saw a man - young, old, tall or small, with that same silvery-fair hair.