A Discreet Gentleman...

Today I have a guest post by the lovely Kris Tualla about her new book, "A Discreet Gentleman of Discovery." Take it away, Tualla!

My "Discreet Gentleman" is deaf. Intrigued?

by

Kris Tualla

http://www.KrisTualla.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kris-Tualla/e/B003O596S0/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1354660522&sr=1-2-ent

I first decided to write a deaf hero after reading an article that said women are attracted to men who stare at them like they are the only thing in the room.

I thought, who would stare at a woman like that? A deaf man.

I have friends who work in the deaf community, plus I have some limited experience with American Sign Language, so I had a foundation to work with.

Next, I needed to figure out how he would communicate, and how to convey that to the reader. This is what I came up with:

"Spoken dialog is in quotes."

Written words are in italics.

And when I gesture there are no quotes, Brander motioned. He added: If they follow the tag there is a colon and capital letter.

(I had to explain all of this to my editor so she didn't try to "fix" what was intentional!)

I write historical novels and ASL doesn't exist in Europe now, much less in the 1700s. When I began to describe Brander's gestures, I had to forget everything I knew and create motions that would make sense to a seven-year-old.

I also needed to give him a realistic trade, one that a deaf man would not only be able to do, but do well. As a private investigator, Brander can use his deafness and lip-reading as some of his tools. After all, he says, when people find out I'm deaf, they forget I'm in the room.

I have a scene in the second book, "A Discreet Gentleman of Matrimony," when a doctor asks to look into Brander's ears. My discreet gentleman experiences a moment of shock and wonders if he could regain his hearing.

He cannot. And when he thinks about it, Brander realizes that he is a better man because he is deaf. To regain his hearing at this stage of his life would be a detriment to his career.

That is a very realistic response. Not heroic. Not bitter. No pounding anyone with a politically correct agenda. Just real.

Others agree, according to this very complimentary reviewer of books & movies with characters with PD: http://paradevo.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-discreet-gentleman-of-discovery.html *smiling*

Of course, the hearing people he encounters are as insensitive and ignorant as humans can be. To write the story otherwise would be a mistake as well.

As I was typing along, I occasionally made those mistakes. When I did, I tried to work them into the narrative. Like this line:

"Regin lowered her voice…" Oops. Well, go on with the thought: "…before she remembered she didn't have to." The hearing spouse is making an adjustment, too.

I even had a line of dialog where Regin points her finger at her deaf and mute husband and shouts, "Don't you ever say that to me again, do you hear me?" Who wouldn’t use words they were accustomed to in the heat of an argument?

Brander looks at her like she's crazy and asks: Do you realize what you just said?

"You know what I mean!" she retorts.

Realistic. Real. And a little humorous, to be honest.

And did I mention sexy? That intense stare, quick intelligence, and the ability to see things others cannot make for a uniquely strong character. I confess: I'm thoroughly smitten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzBMPPVdZq8&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjj986aaTR8

Useful review site

Below is a link to a useful-looking review site that offers free promotion for books - we like free promo, don't we? Of course we do!

Linky

A White Hawk! A Bolton, a Bolton!

 The White Hawk - cover art by Martin Bolton

Hard on the heels of The Half-Hanged Man, comes Book One of my family saga set during the bloody conflict remembered as The Wars of the Roses. This period, with its murderous dynastic feuding between the rival Houses of York and Lancaster, is perhaps the most fascinating of the entire medieval period in England. Having lost the Hundred Years War, the English nobility turned on each other in a bitter struggle for the crown, resulting in a spate of beheadings, battles, murders and Gangland-style politics that lasted some thirty years.

Apart from the savage doings of aristocrats, the wars affected people on the lower rungs of society. One minor gentry family in particular, the Pastons of Norfolk, suffered greatly in their attempts to survive and thrive in the feral environment of the late 15th century. They left an invaluable chronicle in their archive of family correspondence, the famous Paston Letters.

The letters provide us with a snapshot of the trials endured by middle-ranking families like the Pastons, and of the measures they took to defend their property from greedy neighbours. One such extract is a frantic plea from the matriarch of the clan, Margaret Paston, begging her son John to return from London:

"I greet you well, letting you know that your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister... Daubney and Berney are dead and others badly hurt, and gunpowder and arrows are lacking. The place is badly broken down by the guns of the other party, so that unless they have hasty help, they are likely to lose both their lives and the place, which will be the greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman. For every man in this country marvels greatly that you suffer them to be for so long in great jeopardy without help or other remedy..."

The Paston Letters, together with my general fascination for the era, were the inspiration for The White Hawk. Planned as a series of three novels, TWH will follow the fortunes of a fictional Staffordshire family, the Boltons, from the beginning to the very end of The Wars of the Roses. Unquenchably loyal to the House of Lancaster, their loyalty will have dire consequences as law and order breaks down and the kingdom slides into civil war.

If that whets your appetite, then please check out the paperback and Kindle versions of Book One below...

The White Hawk - paperback version

Kindle version

New New New...

  The Battle of Auray, 1364

My Hundred Years War tale, The Half-Hanged Man, is now available from Amazon on Kindle and paperback.

I've wanted to write a novel set during the latter half of the 14th century for a long time. Even by medieval standards, this was a brutal and bloody era, with much of Europe plunged into dynastic wars. England under her warrior-king, Edward III, was at war with France and Scotland, and Spain and Italy were riven by internal conflicts. The constant fighting and general chaos offered rich pickings to savvy mercenary captains such as Sir John Hawkwood, Bertrand du Guesclin, Hugh Calveley and Robert Knolles, all of whom succeeded in making a fat profit while Christendom burned.

"The Half-Hanged Man" is the story of one such captain, though a fictional one. His name is Thomas Page and like many of his peers he is a commoner, destined to rise to brief greatness by virtue of wielding a nifty sword. The book also follows the story of his lover, the Spanish courtesan known as the Raven of Toledo, and the narrative of Hugh Calveley, a particularly ruthless soldier and black-armoured giant with flaming red hair and incisors he had specially sharpened to terrify the French!

Throw into the mix are any number of battles and sieges, including the Battle of Auray (see pic above) in 1364, where the Franco-Bretons and Anglo-Breton armies hammered the life out of each other for possession of the Duchy of Brittany.

Excerpt:
“I led my portion of the rearguard across the open ground to the right of the prince’s battalion, and surged into the first company of Castilian reinforcements as they tried to arrange into a defensive line. They were well-equipped foot with steel helms and leather jacks, glaives and axes, but demoralised and unwilling to stand against a charge of heavy horse. I skewered a serjeant in the front rank with my lance and rode over him as the men behind him scattered, yelling in fear and hurling their banners away as they ran.
          If all the Castilians had behaved in such a manner, we would have had an easy time of it, but now Enrique flung his household knights into the fray. It had started to rain heavily, sheets of water blown by strong winds across the battlefield, and a phalanx of Castilian lancers on destriers came plunging out of the murk, smashing into the front rank of my division. A lance shattered against my cuisse, almost knocking me from the saddle, but I kept my seat and slashed at the knight with my broadsword as he hurtled past, chopping an iron leaf from the chaplet encircling his basinet, but doing no other damage.
          My men held together under the Castilian charge, and soon there was a fine swirling mêlée in progress. I was surrounded by visored helms and glittering blades, men yelling and horses screaming, and glimpsed my standard bearer ahead of me, shouting and fending off two Castilians with the butt of his lance. Another Englishman rode in to help him, throwing his arms around one of the Castilians and heaving him out of the saddle with sheer brute strength, and then a fresh wave of steel and horseflesh, thrown up by the violent, shifting eddies of battle, closed over them and shut off my view. 
          I couldn’t bear to lose my banner again, and charged into the mass of fighting men, clearing a path with the sword’s edge. A mace or similar hammered against my back-plate, sending bolts of agony shooting up my spine, and my foot slipped out of the stirrup as I leaned drunkenly in the saddle, black spots reeling before my eyes.”

Intrigued? See the links to the Kindle and paperback below:

Paperback version 

Kindle 

Saint Crispian's dinner time

Ken and Em's divorce was a heated affair

Today is the feast of Crispian, i.e. the 25th of October, the day that all good men are supposed to teach their sons about the Battle of Agincourt. Lacking any handy sons, I've decided to preach about it on here instead. 

Agincourt was fought on the 25th of October 1415, and was one of the highlights of the epic slugging match of the Hundred Years War, fought to determine whether a Frenchman or a man of French descent should sit on the French throne. A couple of centuries later Shakespeare turned it into the main event of his play, Henry V, a glorious hymn to English patriotism. The speeches he puts into the mouth of the heroic King Hal at Harfleur and on the eve of Agincourt are pretty much familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of English literature. When expressed by a great actor, they still have the power to electrify, as dear old Kenneth Branagh demonstrated in his 1989 film version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAvmLDkAgAM

Modern-day scholarship, that most joyful of enterprises, has asserted over and over again that the historical battle was anything but a glorious event, and in fact consisted of loads of men bludgeoning each other into gory oblivion on a freezing winter's day in the middle of a muddy field. So much mud, in fact, that thousands of the heavily-armed French knights and men-at-arms drowned in the stuff, while the lighter-armed British archers - English, Welsh and Irish - danced rings around them. 

Doubt has been cast over the traditional view of the battle, in which the French cavalry charged forward to be mown down by a storm of arrows. The longbow, some critics point out, lacked the power to send an arrow through heavy plate armour. Most of the French dismounted before the battle and trudged forward on foot, wishing to avoid a repeat of earlier disasters like Crécy and Poitiers, where they did indeed charge on horseback and came thoroughly unstuck. Mud and rain, it seems, won the day for King Harry and Saint George, who can count themselves lucky the weather was on their side.

The other fondly-held view of the battle, that Henry's 'poor and starved band' was hideously outnumbered by up to sixty thousand chortling, garlic-spewing Froggies, has also come under the microscope. In her 2005 book 'Agincourt: A New History' Anne Curry argues that the French army numbered about 12,000, and the British about 9,000, which vastly evens up the odds. However, in the same year Juliet Barker flatly contradicted Curry's claim and stated that the British were outnumbered by four, possibly even six to one. Contemporary accounts, given as they were to ridiculous hyperbole, are of little help, and the surviving records are too patchy to build up a clear figure. 

A more interesting question might be - is Agincourt still a valid reason for celebration? It made for brilliant propaganda in World War Two, when Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V was used as a brassy, tub-thumpingly patriotic morale-booster for a British public exhausted by years of war. These days, however, it is possible to view Henry V's invasion of France as a largely futile exercise. 

Henry's bid to win the French throne was scuppered by his own early death and the rebound of French nationalism, spearheaded by Joan of Arc, that followed a few years later. The English position in France was steadily eroded until the last English field armies were blasted to pieces by new-fangled artillery at Castillon and Formigny, and the English nobility slumped into the murderous round of infighting remembered as The Wars of the Roses. 

Thus the Hundred Years War ended in defeat and civil war for England, and the eventual result was the Tudor dynasty. Which in turn led to those dreadful Cate Blanchett movies, and the even worse CBC/Showtime TV series with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers embarrassing himself as Henry VIII.

If only Henry V had taken up gardening instead. 

Belaying Pins and Pirate Kings...

...S.G. Rogers Sets Sail! Suzanne has the platform for this post, centred on things nautical and her spiffy-sounding new fantasy novel, Tournament of Chance - clew up the futtock shrouds, Ms Rogers, and Roger the Cabin Boy!

'Research poses many challenges, whether an author writes historical fiction or fantasy literature.  In the former, a writer must do his or her due diligence as part of the craft.  Although some readers might assume fantasy worlds are just completely made up, that’s not necessarily true.  For me, fantasy worlds work best when I can picture them clearly. As a writer, I try to have clear and concrete details available before I pen a scene. Since the setting for my latest release, Tournament of Chance, is Earth-like, the medieval-ish setting required a surprising amount of research. 

One particular area of inquiry involved maritime transportation.  The plot required the main characters to make two voyages in a two different ships.  My challenge was to describe the ships in such a way to paint a picture in the mind of the reader, but avoid immediate association with any particular nation.  Fortunately, as a fantasy writer, I’m able to fudge eras!

Cutter

I was looking for a vessel that was small, maneuverable, and could be sailed by a very small crew.  I chose the cutter, which is a single-masted sailboat. Although the ship in the illustration above (Louis Le Breton (1818–1866)) is a French cutter from the 19^th century, it had the look I wanted and the generic name I needed. 

For the second voyage, I needed an armed ship manned by a larger crew, so I selected a corvette.

Corvette

The vessel above is a type of corvette, which is a small warship about 40 to 60 feet in length.  The term dates back to the 1700s. I found this illustration (used with permission) on Rob Ossian’s Pirate’s Cove website, dedicated to pirate and nautical information: http://www.thepirateking.com/index.htm

The Pirate King has a wealth of information for authors and enthusiasts, from biographies of historical figures to rum reviews.

Although neither illustration appears in Tournament of Chance, I referred to them when I was writing the nautical scenes. I began my research on Wikipedia, by the way, and moved on from there. For attention to detail, I discovered beautiful ship models at The Art of Age of Sail: http://www.ageofsail.net

Writing a fantasy novel with historical detail takes a lot longer, but the results can be well worth the effort. My research in no way made me an expert in historical sailing vessels, but I have a much greater appreciation for them than I did before.  For example, I discovered a belaying pin makes a mighty fine weapon in a pinch.  Who knew?

~ S.G. Rogers

Excerpt:

Heather peered at Ariel. Despite his tough façade, the boy radiated loneliness and deprivation. “If you make it back to Ormaria, call on Lady Parker at the castle. Tell her Heather sent you. She’ll help.”

Ariel gave Heather a mistrustful glance. “Why should she help me? I’m nothing to her.”

“She’s very kind,” Heather said. “And you’re not nothing; you’re a person.”

Bast’s uninjured hand descended on Ariel’s shoulder and knocked him to the deck. “You’ve been told not to talk to Heather. I’ll whip you for this.”

“You will not,” Heather exclaimed.

Ariel scrambled backward as she stepped between him and Bast.

“Get out of my way, girl,” Bast roared.

“No.”

Bast shoved Heather aside and advanced on Ariel, who cowered in a quivering lump of fear. Heather plucked the nearest belaying pin from the pin rail alongside the bulwark and brought it squarely down onto Bast’s injured hand. He screamed in pain.

“Run, Ariel!” she yelled. “Hide in the cargo hold.”

Bast turned his murderous temper on Heather. The crystal around his neck flared, and she found herself tumbling through the air with the belaying pin still clutched in her hand. When she landed at the base of one of the four cannons, everything went black.

In Tournament of Chance, a hunter’s daughter becomes the spark that ignites a revolution—in time.

 When a beautiful commoner enters the Tournament of Chance archery competition, her thwarted victory sparks a revolution in the oppressive kingdom of Destiny. Although Heather never believed the legends about the restoration of Ormaria, after three shape-shifting Ormarian wizards awaken from a long magical slumber, she joins their perilous quest to regain the throne. Heather battles vicious predators and angry trolls to free the wizards’ magic, but at a horrendous cost. She is unexpectedly torn from the arms of the man she loves and hurled back in time to fulfill a prophecy not yet written. The ensuing maelstrom tests Heather’s survival skills, wits, and endurance. Will she become an unwritten footnote in history, or can she trust the magic to lead her back to her one true love?

Now available in all e-formats from Musa Publishing HERE. Also available for the Kindle at Amazon. Coming soon to BN.com and wherever fine e-books are sold. To learn more about author S.G. Rogers, visit her blog at www.childofyden.wordpress.com

Sir John clatters to a halt...

 You just lie there for a bit, mate

...and finally gets to climb off his knackered horse, peel off his rusted armour (or 'harness', to use the historically correct term) and hang up his dinted broadsword over the fireplace. Yes, Sir John Swale's opus is coming to an end with 'The Wolf of Fairburn', Part Thirteen of The John Swale Chronicles, released at the end of this month by Musa Publishing. All loose ends will be tied up (hopefully), all wrongs will be righted (maybe) and all of the long-suffering Sir John's enemies and problems will be banished forever (almost certainly not).

Still, at least the poor man gets to take a break. He's had a hard time of it, what with fearsome outlaws, Scottish rebels, slaughtered kinsmen, ambitious kings and the general nastiness of 14th century life to contend with. My heartfelt thanks go to Musa  for giving me the platform to tell Sir John's story, otherwise it might have remained lost forever inside some musty old leather-bound chronicle.

Will he return? Maybe, though it might be best to let his ghost rest awhile. He does, however, have a daughter...