The Ill-Born Prince

 I've got a new fantasy novel!  It's called "The Ill-Born Prince" (that's ILL-BORN, not three-times born or anything like that).  It's about a prince who has discovered he's actually not the son of the king but rather of the queen and the Royal Wizard, and he ends up off studying at the wizards' school.  (I was originally thinking of calling it The Bastard Prince but decided that would be too shocking.)

 

For those keeping score at home, it's number 4 in the "Starlight Raven" series.  That series is also known as the "Yurt, the Next Generation" series.  Here's the cover, and here's the link on Amazon.  It's available both as an ebook on all major ebook platforms and as a paperback (it can be ordered from any bookstore as well as bought directly from Amazon).

Like all the books in the Starlight Raven series, it's narrated by Antonia, daughter of the Master of the wizards' school, and the first young woman ever accepted to study there.  The male wizards are still not totally convinced that a woman magic-worker might not be some kind of dangerous witch, so Antonia has plenty of issues to deal with, not least her relationship to Walther, the ill-born prince.

I've tried to write it so people could enjoy the book without having read any of the others in the series, but you may pick up a few continuing sub-plots from earlier if you have.

Here's the beginning to whet your appetite.

PART ONE - Magical Problems

“Every spell in this book has an error in it,” the teacher told us.  “Something is left out, or steps are transposed, or the words in the Hidden Language are wrong.”
Our class of wizardry students looked at each other, startled, then again at the books on our desks.  This was not some ancient grimoire of half-understood magic scribbled down by an imperfectly trained magician whose wits were already going.  These were freshly printed, clean volumes, each copy identical, that we had just been told would be the fundamental text for our final two years at the wizards’ school.
There was a confused murmur while students tried leafing through the book, looking unsuccessfully for any clues.  Then Walther raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, sir, but why were the errors allowed to remain?  Or,” he hesitated a second, pushing a shock of black hair away from his forehead, “were they deliberate?”
The teacher smiled.  He was one of the older teachers; in the last few years a number of new, younger wizards had joined the school faculty, but he was still teaching.  Like all the older wizards, he always seemed to have a soft spot for Walther.
“Excellent question,” he said.  “And yes, it was deliberate.”  He scanned the room.  “Can any of you think why that should be the case?”
After a moment of uneasy silence, Chlodomer put up his hand.  “It’s an exercise for us.  If we can’t find the errors, it shows we aren’t as good at wizardry as we think we are.”
The teacher nodded, lips pursed.  No one on the faculty had ever had a soft spot for Chlodomer.  Even though he was no longer the awkward, easily startled young man he had been when first entering the school six years ago, even though he had become one of the best students in the technical wizardry division, he had never gotten the respect from the teachers he probably deserved.
For that matter, many of the older teachers were still reluctant to respect me either: the first girl the school had ever taken.
“It’s more than an exercise for you, though of course it could be that as well,” the teacher answered Chlodomer.
“This isn’t the way magic is supposed to work,” one of the students objected.  “This isn’t the way anything works.”
“Indeed,” said the teacher crisply.  “Since you have such a good idea of how everything works, this book will present no challenge for you,” which caused the student to slump back in his chair.
I was distracted, looking out the classroom window toward the school courtyard.  There, among the fountains and the rainbows, lay a crimson flying carpet, twitching as though eager to be off.  Two men were busily loading parcels onto it: a swarthy, enormously fat eastern mage, and with him the white-bearded Master of the wizards’ school.
I wished they were not going.
The teacher interrupted my thoughts.  “Miss Antonia, you usually are full of theories.  What do you think?”
I dragged my attention back to the room and tried not to appear irritated at his patronizing tone. “You’re keeping the most powerful spells from us.  Or if not from us, from the senior students, then from the more junior students.  You don’t want anyone using this magic unless and until you decide we’re worthy to have the missing parts of the spell revealed.”
Now the teacher looked surprised, even, I thought, a little guilty.  “Well, there may be something in that.  After all, it could be dangerous for some of the younger students to read and try to master a spell for which they were not ready.”
Another one of the students spoke up.  “What happens if we try the spell just as it’s written?  What is the danger, exactly?”  He and another young man bumped elbows and grinned at each other.  “Does something, well, inappropriate happen?  Does a winged gorgos appear?  Does the whole school collapse?”
“Not at all,” the teacher said reprovingly.  “If you tried one of these spells as written, it would have no effect.  Other than,” he added darkly, “perhaps blowing up in your face.  As would happen if a junior student tried to alter the spells unwisely.  These are errors that need to be considered carefully.”

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Indie book publishing

These days, the good news is that anyone can publish a book, as an ebook on Amazon, B&N/Nook, iTunes, or Kobo.

The bad news is that anyone can publish a book.

Independent author/publishers, of which I am now one, have to be their own publicists, cover designers, editors, accountants, and everything else.  But the biggest challenge is getting one's books noticed among all the other ones.

Far more indie ebooks are published each year than traditional print books, yet about 80% of all book sales are regular, physical books.  As they say, do the math.  And if that wasn't a big enough challenge, a lot of the ebooks available are, how shall I say this delicately, really bad.  This makes it harder for readers even to want to plow through the haystack in search of golden needles.

One of the ways to get attention is to do "promotions," put the book on sale and make sure as many people as possible know about it.  A whole minor industry has grown up of companies that will send out emails to people who like your ebook's genre, telling them it's on sale.  They charge quite a bit, and authors line up to pay.  The reason it works is that these companies are very picky about which books they will promote, so buyers will know the book's worth reading.

I'm been experimenting with the whole indie publishing thing with "The Starlight Raven," my most recent full-length book.  I've made it available both as an ebook and in paperback.  This is intended to be the first in a new series about Daimbert's daughter (for those of you who have read the Yurt series).  It's available on all major ebook platforms.  Here's the link to Amazon.

For my own amusement, I've written the opening to what could pass as a typical ebook on Amazon, written by someone who always wanted to write, but….  It is not particularly over the top.  Of the over 4 million ebooks on Amazon, about half never sell at all, other than perhaps that one sale to Mom.  There may be a reason for this.

The Storie of Sue & Tom

Sue was very pretty.  She luved to go to the movie's. She had a boy friend.  His name wsa Tom.  Who was tall and strung.

One day it was very sunny Tom called up "Hello." He sad.  "Hello. Said Sue."  "Is this Tom." She asked?

"Yes do you want to go to the movie's?" Said Tom "Yes."  Said Sue.

That eventing they went to the movie's.  When they walking down the street a horrible Monster jumped out.

"Eek." Said Sue!  She wsa truly scarred.


© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Fantasy book covers

These days, all books need a cover image.  Fantasy books especially are expected to have a fantastic looking cover (in the full sense of the word).  I've gotten a new, professional cover for my ebook, "The Starlight Raven" (you can see the original cover here; I made it myself with some clipart).

Below is the new cover, made by Dane of "EbookLaunch."  If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, it's available as an ebook on Amazon and other e-tailers for $4.99.  It's also available as a paperback (see more detail here).  Tell your friends!

A lot of readers (myself included) get irritated when the cover seems only tangentially related to the book, for example if the heroine is a shy teenager yet shown on the cover in a flamboyant pose, wearing a stainless steel bikini.  But, strictly speaking, the cover is not an illustration of the book but rather an ad for it.  That is, the purpose of the cover is to make people want to pick up a physical book and look at the first few pages or click the "look inside" feature of an ebook.

Then the purpose of the first few pages is to make the reader decide to read the whole thing and proceed to checkout.  If this happens, the cover has done its job by getting the process started.

Covers also convey a subtle message about what kind of book it is.  If you read a lot in a particular genre, you'll notice that many covers look a lot alike.  A romance will have a couple looking passionate.  Science fiction will have space ships and/or celestial objects like the rings of Saturn.  Fantasy will have medieval-like settings, often with swords or castles.  A western will have a cowboy.  Even the type-face has to match--vaguely medieval for fantasy, jagged and modern for science fiction, and so on.

A tendency which I don't quite understand in modern literary fiction (also called main-stream fiction, stories about people living here and now) is to have no actual human face on the cover.  Instead, you will see a person from the back, or somebody's torso doing something (say, knitting).  People who read mainstream fiction may not even realize this, but it sends a subtle message that this is not fantasy or science fiction or romance or westerns.

Sometimes (as in the cover above) a graphic artist paints a picture that becomes the cover.  These days, a lot of graphic artists start with a photograph or photographs and then use Photoshop to blend them together or to alter them to fit the book's theme.  There are many sites where photographers can put what are called "stock photos," photos of generic scenes (a tulip garden, a family having a picnic, a placid cow, etc.) which graphic artists then license for use in magazine ads, book illustrations, or covers.

One advantage of publishing ebooks as an "indie" (as I'm doing) is that one has much more control over the covers.  A traditional publisher seems to assume that the author is the last person on the planet with helpful insights into what the cover should look like.  My "Starlight Raven" cover, my only professionally-made cover (it's an experiment), is at least based on my ideas.  For most of my books I use my own photographs of castles and the like, rather than stock photos.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Anniversary

Happy anniversary to my "Life in the Middle Ages" blog!  It's one year ago today since I started it.

So far I've covered a wide range of topics, some on everyday life, such as what people did and didn't eat in medieval times; some on religious history, such as why medievalists avoid calling people "superstitious" just because we in the twenty-first century don't agree with them; and some on political history, such as the Holy Roman Empire.  Posts on medieval women have proven especially popular.

I've also talked some about my books, fantasy set in an alternate version of the Middle Ages, where there was working magic, and where the Middle Ages had persisted without the invention of gunpowder, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution.

("The Starlight Raven" and other books are available as ebooks on Amazon and other e-tailers.)

Recently I seem to have been discovered by gamers, who want some ideas for role-playing games set in their own version of the Middle Ages, and by students googling for answers to take-home exams.  (I'm fine with the first, not so sure about the second--if you just copy and paste my text, kiddos, the teacher will recognize that you weren't the ones who wrote it.)  I'm probably a big disappointment to re-enactors, because I don't describe exactly how to sew a medieval-style tunic or give recipes for garlic stew (which was actually a big favorite--better than a plate full of under-salted lentils).

As a professor, I get a lot of people signing up for medieval history courses because they've enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" or "Game of Thrones."  I'm not alone--medievalists across the country experience the same thing.  Real medieval history is usually a shock if one comes in expecting lots of sword fights, but fortunately it's extremely interesting in its own right.  And that's what fantasy is for, a half-way house between hard-core medieval history and imagined adventures with knights and castles.

If there are specific topics you'd like to see covered in this blog, let me know!

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

The Starlight Raven

I've just published a new book!  It's an ebook, available on Amazon, BN/Nook, Kobo, and iTunes; a paperback version has also been published (on which see more here).

The story can be considered "Yurt, the Next Generation" (by those who have read the original Yurt series), or it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone.  It's a "YA" book (aimed at a young-adult audience), because Antonia, the heroine, is fourteen when it begins.

A sneak preview is below.  Enjoy!

THE STARLIGHT RAVEN

Of course I knew my mother was a witch.

She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.

But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.

That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.

But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

It started two weeks earlier.  A gentle hand on my shoulder interrupted my dreams.  “Antonia, wake up.”

“It’s too early to get up for school,” I mumbled into the pillow.

The hand remained on my shoulder.  “It’s not a school day.”

Then I remembered.  “We’re going to the City!”

I was out of bed with a bound, and then, with another bound, right back under the covers.  The air from my casement window was cold.  ”It’s not even morning yet!”

Mother flicked a flame into life on my candlestick.  She was already dressed, her brown braids neatly wrapped around her head.  I loved her hair, smooth where mine was always tangled, darker than mine but showing golden highlights in the glow of the candle.

“I want to go there and be home again before it gets late,” she said firmly.  “After all, tomorrow is a school day.  In fact I hear,” she added with a smile, tugging the quilt off me, “that at the wizards’ school they give the new students only one warning.  Then, if they aren’t on time for the first early-morning class, they set the dragons on them.”

I swung my legs out of bed and kept them out.  “Sometimes I think everyone’s seen dragons except for me.  Father even killed one once when he was young, even though he won’t talk about it.  And there was the time we arrived in the City just too late to see a whole flock of them.”

“I’ve never seen a dragon either,” said Mother.  She had the brush and was working the snarls out of my hair.  “I think it would be more terrifying than exciting.  And I’m not at all sure they come in ‘flocks.’”

I let her work on my braids, thinking that once I was a wizard I would go visit dragons myself, rather than waiting for them to come to me.  A herd of dragons?  A pack?  A clutch?  I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a gaggle.

“Besides,” I said after a minute, “I know they don’t punish students for sleeping late.  Father told me that when he was a student at the wizards’ school, he hardly ever made any of his morning classes.”

There was a chuckle behind me.  “Antonia, your father is an admirable man in many ways, and he’s made himself an excellent wizard over the years, but I would not recommend using him as your model when you become a wizardry student.”

I shrugged and laughed myself.  Having my hair braided was very pleasant.  I glanced toward my window, still nearly dark, and was hit by a sudden memory.  “I had the strangest dream,” I said slowly.  “It was about a bat.  He tapped at my window and squeaked this really high squeak, but when I sat up he flew off.  And for some reason I wasn’t frightened at all.”

“Of course not,” Mother muttered through hairpins.  “Bats won’t hurt you.  I’m glad you knew that, even in a dream.”

“And the strangest thing of all,” I went on, “was that he had a little cylinder tied to his leg—you know, like the carrier pigeons wear.”

“Who would send messages by a bat?” said Mother abruptly.  The last pin went sharply into my hair.  “Really, Antonia, you’re old enough to know that nobody finds someone else’s dreams very interesting.  Get dressed and come downstairs.”

She slammed my door behind her, leaving me wondering why she could possibly be so irritated by a dream.

No time to worry about it.  I splashed cold water on my face from the washbasin, pulled on a school dress, and laced up my boots.  In front of the mirror I smoothed out the hairs disarranged in getting dressed.  I grinned at my reflection and blew out the candle.  I was the daughter of a witch and a wizard, almost fourteen years old, and I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do.

When I clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, Mother was frying bacon and smiling again.

But then I saw it, lying on the table amid dressmaking scraps:  a tiny piece of parchment, half unrolled.  It looked like the kind of message usually brought by a carrier pigeon.

We took the air cart.  It was barely light as we hurried down the streets to the livery stable, where we rented space for it.  The building was still locked this early in the morning, and after Mother had concentrated for a moment she said that there was no stable boy inside who might have answered our knock.

But that didn’t slow us down.  The wind tugged at our cloaks as I used a tiny lifting spell to turn the tumblers in the lock and drive the bolt back.  The spell worked perfectly the first time—a good sign, I thought, for my future as a wizardry student.  Mother led the cart out into the street, talking soothingly to the horses in the stalls, and I relocked the big doors.

The air cart was the skin of a purple flying beast, a gift to us from Father a few years ago.  It had been born in flight, and even though long dead it would still start flying if not carefully tethered.  This was wizardry, not witchcraft, and I had learned the spells even before Mother had.  We climbed in, and I confidently gave the commands in the Hidden Language.  The cart took off, wings flapping steadily, to circle above the narrow streets and dark tile roofs of Caelrhon.

I glanced sideways at Mother, saw that she seemed deep in her own thoughts, and quietly muttered the spells that made the air cart pick up speed.  I loved to go fast.

The sun rose behind us as we headed toward the City.  It was springtime, and the trees and meadows below us were fresh and green in the light of breaking dawn.  Finally I got up my nerve to ask.  “What was that letter I saw on the table?”

Mother shrugged, unconcerned.  “Just a message about a dress I’m supposed to be making.”  I would have believed her and thought no more about bats—except that no one in Caelrhon would have sent her a pigeon-message.  They would have used the magic telephones or walked over to talk to her in person.

Most of the time it was fine having a mother who kept her concerns to herself.  She had calmly bandaged me the time I’d come home all bloody from beating up a boy who’d invented an insulting song about witches.  She’d just shaken her head when the teacher sent her a frosty note saying she hoped I would never cover another student with green spots again—I didn’t even have to explain that I had virtuously resisted turning him into a frog.

And this last year, when I’d gone to a few school dances with the same boy who’d come closer to being a frog than he realized, she just asked me when I got home if I’d had a good time.  She didn’t quiz me about what we had and hadn’t done—as I’m sure my father would have in her place, as if I didn’t have excellent good sense!

But if someone had trained a bat to carry messages, which I’d never before heard of anyone doing, then the content of that message must itself be interesting.  If I’d been waked in the middle of the night by a bat, I thought, and the bat was carrying a message, I’d certainly tell my daughter about it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015