Thrilled to announce the re-release of SEASONS IN THE MIST, a time-travel story that took the coveted Grace Award in speculative fiction in 2010. Thanks to some brilliant editing by Desert Breeze Publishing, and a marvelous new cover, it's prepared to time-travel once more.
It's available both in print and as an e-book, on all the usual platforms.
I'm also working hard on the final manuscript, pre-edit of its sequel, SEASONS OF RECKONING. This book will be a new release, not seen previously, that all eighteen of my fans have been clamoring for over the past several years. So stay tuned...it's in the pipeline.
7 comments:
I saw that the book had been republished and did wonder if that meant the sequel would eventually come! When do you think it will be ready?
Late this year or early next. I'm working hard on a gut-and-rewrite because I didn't end up liking the story. But I'm making progress! It'll be called SEASONS OF RECKONING and it tells the tale of a character only slightly figuring in SEASONS IN THE MIST -- Marcus Richards, Bethany's faculty advisor, who gets curious about Beth's disappearance from the 21st century.
Obviously his visit to the UK to find out doesn't go quite as planned...
Thanks for getting in touch, Medieval Girl.
Faculty Advisor? Same as a Professor/Lecturer? I sometimes think my old Professor would be perfectly at home in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. His knowledge of the time is just Amazing, without meaning to show off.
Marcus is Bethany's faculty advisor whilst she's doing (did? She's done with all that 21st century nonsense!) her dissertation. Now, I don't have a PhD but during my time in grad school, we did internships for our Masters' degrees under a full prof who acted as faculty advisor, not as instructor. So I used that practice for Bethany and Marc.
My faculty advisor was brilliant, and I couldn't have gotten that sheepskin without him.
Oh, it must be done differently with history degrees in the UK. I had a different Suervivor for my Dissertations but the Prof in question was also Head of Department as well.
Most of his students and former students are sort of in awe of him, and he's really helped me out.
On a slightly different subject, I did not entirely agree with something in 'Seasons in the Mist' (I read the old Kindle Edition a few years ago), which was Bethany thinking she would be accused of witcraft for having surgical scars. Medieval Surgery was not that awful!
There is actually an account written by a surgeon on how be performed a succesful operation to remove an arrowhead from the face of Prince Henry of Monmouth, the young man who would grow up to become King Henry V of England. We know he survived because he won the Battle of Agincourt 12 years later.
https://mattlewisauthor.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/the-scar-of-henry-v/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Nef1siUus
That operation would have left him with a prominent scar on his face- but it was not the first or only such operation. Its macabre, but archeologists have found evidence of very serious injuries that had healed on Medieval skeletons- so there must have been a fair few people with surgical scars.
I think Professional surgeons- the ones who could and did treat wounds successfully, have a bad reputation because people confuse them with untrained barber surgeons.
Yes, that's true. But the Prince would've had the best available at the time. It's true that medieval medicine was more skilled in many areas than many in modern times give it credit for. But intra-abdominal surgery was dicey then, the treatment of battle wounds perhaps less so (lots of experience!).
It's amazing to me as a writer what small "details" you can research till you're blue in the face and still get wrong. On MIST's original edit in 2009, I had a relatively long-term dispute with my publisher over what language the upper classes in the 1350s England would speak. She challenged me to prove my conclusion; when I went to research to support it, I found about 50% of the scholarship asserted the aristos spoke French, and about 50% insisting they'd converted fully to speaking English by that time. So I wrote an author's note explaining my stance and my pub was fine with it.
No matter how deep you dig, there are omissions and inconsistencies everywhere. I chose to have Bethany fearful about her scar because I figured she might not know that it would've been fine, had the contemps actually seen it.
So true. To be honest, Medieval England is hard because we did some things differently, and because there are more surviving records then there are for a lot of other European states. Also, people seem to be examining the records or certain aspect of history more and discovering new insights about a time that was just previously dismissed as dark and ignorant. I know that the medical profession is starting to take some old herbal remedies more seriously.
As to the langauge, I was of the view that many Medieval English arisocrats would have been at least bilingual and comfortable with English and French, and probably knew some Latin as well.
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