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.

Beowulf

Beowulf the current tv show was a surprise to me.
I looked forward to watching it not least because it has been shot in the north of England. Eastgate in Weardale - also known as Heorot - is no more than thirty miles from where I live. The landscapes shown on screen are fairly typical of my area.

Unhappily I wasn't very taken with the production. The sets are fabulous, if a trifle overdone. The mead hall would have taken a team of carpenters years and the amount of gold decoration is way over the top. I was puzzled by the number of coloured actors, puzzled by a thane being a woman, puzzled that the blacksmith was a frail looking woman, by the amount of fantasy creatures hanging about and so it went on. Slowly it began to dawn on me that this Beowulf is not a retelling of the Beowulf poem. It would have been better to have named it something else and removed all references to the original.

As a fantasy it probably works well, but I have to say I'm not enamoured of the actors or the story line. All told it isn't for me. But then I'm one of the few people who got bored a third of the way through Game of Thrones Vol 1 and midway in the Tolkien saga. That sort of Fantasy is not my thing though I'm happy to read Time Slip novels, which may be considered another kind of fantasy.