The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint

The second book in a series never gets the love or attention of the first book.  So today I want to talk a little about The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint, the second of my Yurt fantasy series.  (Available both as an ebook and as part of the print omnibus, My First Kingdom.  Here's the link on Amazon.)

Here our young wizard hero, who realized in the first book that if he was going to be a competent wizard it might have helped to pay attention in the wizards' school, has been a Royal Wizard for two years and has actually become sort of good at magic.  But then he has to deal with two extremes of renegade magic--the old retired wizard, who learned his magic back before the wizards' school even existed, and a newly-graduated young wizard who is just as feckless as our hero was a few years ago.

Plus cranky religion!  I'm a medievalist, so I've put into my medieval-themed fantasy genuine medieval stories about relics, saints who appear in visions, saints who blast their enemies with lightning, and other exciting tidbits.

For any book, catching the reader's eye is important, and the cover is a big part of that.  The book was originally published over 25 years ago, with the cover below.  I guess it's eye-catching, but the wood nymph of the title here looks sort of like Disney's Snow White, which she certainly shouldn't, and my young wizard hero looks like an old geezer, which he also shouldn't.

So when I made this into an ebook, I did my own cover, as seen below.  It is meant to suggest an old hermit in the woods.  (Did I mention there are hermits in the woods?)

The book is also now an audiobook.  This requires a separate, square cover.  I used an image of a mossy stream, because a lot of the book's action takes place in the woods (the hermits' woods) where there's a mossy stream that comes out of a cave in the side of a cliff.  (The actual stream is in Burgundy, if anyone is interested.)

Now I like this cover just fine, but my narrator finds it unexciting.  So I've created a new cover that now appears on Audible.  This is a reliquary from the Middle Ages and evokes the reliquary of the Holy Toe in the book.  (I told you there were relics in it.)

So if you're interested in listening to audiobooks, you'll get the above cover.  My narrator does a great job, so I highly recommend the audiobooks.  Audible, where they are to be found, is so eager to get new listeners that they're usually running a free trial, so give it a whirl!

Here's the link to the first audiobook in the series, A Bad Spell in Yurt, where you might as well start, for US and for UK listeners.  Enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2019