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.
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