Embittered Release Date

I finally feel comfortable selecting a release date for Embittered, so I chose Thursday, February 6, as the official launch date. Embittered will be offered for free for one day, Friday, February 7. If something happens and I’m unable to release Embittered on those days I will be sure to let you know, Champions.

Also I will be releasing Enthroned, Enchanted, and Embittered with some extra content (2 short stories and some background information) as a three pack for $2.99. I’m not certain what day I’ll be able to release the three pack on, but I will try to release it as close to Embittered‘s release date as possible.

I’m really anxious to see how you all will like Lancelot. I spent quite a bit of time crafting his interactions with Britt. It was challenging because this book was going to lack the witty banter between Morgause and Merlin, so I needed to provide humor without letting Britt go totally wild and punching Lancelot in the face–which is something she would dearly love to do.

I didn’t get to bring one of my favorite characters into this story–Nymue, the Lady of the Lake–but she’ll be popping up a lot more starting in the next book so I can forgive myself.

So yes. Two weeks, Champions. Let the countdown begin!

King Arthur Sword Use

I am so close to finishing Embittered, I’m just a few pages short! I’ll certainly finish it up this weekend, though. After that it is editing, which practically takes as long as writing a King Arthur and Her Knight book, but it looks like the first week of February release is within my grasp. I’m reaaaaaaaally hoping I don’t get killed for the ending of this one. It’s not a cliff hanger, but it might leave people…overly intrigued in certain characters. But who knows, I might change the ending a bit after my test reader goes through it.

As we dwell upon King Arthur and Her Knights that brings me to the fun Arthur fact of this post. The sword fighting style Britt uses is historically accurate. (Or at least as fictionalized and accurate as I can make it.) I know we typically picture duels with parries and dancing back and forth, but it wasn’t like that at all. I did a lot of research and looked at some medieval manuscripts that a bunch of very nice professors/sword enthusiasts posted online. These manuals have illustrated pictures that show various techniques. Believe it or not but it wasn’t exactly unusual for someone to toss their sword aside and tackle their opponent before beating on them with their fists.

Swordplay wasn’t honorable–or at least not the honorable we think of. In Embittered Britt is involved in a sword fight (surprise!). One of the moves she uses is basically wedging a sword between the armor pieces of the leg and the foot. I got this idea because one of the sword manuals shows a guy literately STABBING his opponent’s foot, pinning him to the ground so he could slug him. (No, I’m not making this stuff up.) Grappling was also a common technique, and typically instead of parrying a blow it was encouraged to dodge it and then leap at your opponent since they just made themselves wide open.

In spite of the Arthur legends that talk about sword fights lasting for a whole day, these sword fights were really difficult and very fast. Typically they were finished in about three to five minutes. Fighters adopted the mindset Britt has–attack first and keep attacking to keep the advantage–which is why the fights were still incredibly taxing. (It was also why they were short.)

Now yes I did some research about this topic, but don’t take my word for it. There are a lot of varying records about fighting in the middle ages, but I decided to trust the ones that had papers and documents from the middle ages to back them up. The bottom line is we don’t know for sure what fighting was like–which is why King Arthur and Her Knights is still a fictionalized take on battles and fighting.

I’m not the only perfectionist

Greetings, Champions. Enchanted (book 2 of King Arthur and her Knights) has a splendid new cover! Myrrhlynn spruced it up a little bit and most notably added the dark, forbidding clouds. (I think it matches the mood of the castle when the Knights of Camelot realize Morgause is visiting.)

Embittered is halfway finished. (Well over, actually.) By the end of today I should have roughly a third of it left to write. But today I wanted to talk a little bit about Enchanted. For those Champions who haven’t read it, King Arthur and Her Knights is about Britt, a college grad who gets pulled back into King Arthur’s time after she touches a rusty sword while vacationing in Britain. When she arrives Merlin explains to her that the real Arthur has run off with a shepherdess, and that the Sword in the Stone has chosen Britt to rule in Arthur’s place-while in disguise as the real Arthur. Enthroned (book 1) is all about Britt winning her throne and defeating those who will not acknowledge her. In Enchanted Britt is forced to defend her throne against Morgause, the wife of King Lot–the King who led the forces against Britt in Enthroned–who has come to stay at Camelot with her four sons.

The idea for Enchanted was birthed from a single page of Sir James Knowles “King Arthur and His Knights” as well as the traditional stories Knowles based that page off of. In this single page (It’s really more of a long paragraph) Knowles states that Lot’s wife came to Camelot to spy on Arthur. However, while there she basically is charmed by Arthur and tells him what her husband charged her with doing before she goes home–leaving her four kids with Arthur so Arthur can use them as hostages.

The traditional stories have something similar–again it is barely touched upon–and in a great deal of tales it’s generally agreed that Gawain, Lot’s oldest son, comes to Arthur’s court because his mother leaves him behind to serve as a hostage. This didn’t sit very well with me, first of all because King Lot is Arthur’s biggest threat for the first few months/years of Arthur’s rule. He’s a smart dude, so I find it hard to believe that he would send his wife when it’s fairly obvious she doesn’t have the stomach for cloak and dagger missions. In the stories that don’t have Lot’s wife fall for Arthur, Lot’s wife is Morgause–a witch who is even more twisted than her husband. Morgause is the kind of person you would want to send on a spying mission, so I decided to combine the stories and send Morgause to Camelot.

I wanted to go into detail on a part of Arthur’s life that storytellers mostly brush over because I feel often we take it for granted that when Arthur was crowned everyone loved him and BAM his Kingdom was huge and perfect from the start. I also wanted a chance to give a more satisfying explanation as for why Lot’s wife would come with the mission to spy and then give her husband’s greatest enemy the tools to defeat him. (Aka: his kids.) I have a lot of fun writing King Arthur and Her Knights books because it’s so much fun to try and explain things that are typically glossed over. In this case I got to write out Morgause’s character, and greatly enjoyed it!

Thanks for reading, Champions. I will see you on Wednesday.