Rouen is a miracle. Every street corner revealed another medieval set piece, yet alive with shops and people. If Canterbury is a tourist mecca that dies after sunset, Rouen only becomes more itself. Walking the crooked streets lined either side by crooked buildings during golden hour, I imagined Chaucer stumbling to one inn from another, …
Left City of London on the tube (Northern Line) to catch the Southeastern, then a smooth ride to Canterbury. Taxi through a medieval gate/moat, down a cobbled street with buildings without a single 90 degree angle, to the gates of Canterbury Cathedral. What an entrance! Crowds of students and tourists thronged the entrance – was …
Checked out of the hotel in Westminster and took the St. James Park tube to Monument, a short jaunt. Walked 10 minutes to the next hotel on Threadneedles Street (love the names). Greeted with the best customer service I’ve ever experienced. Then out to the City, what is now the financial district, and what was …
Returning to my hotel after a day exploring medieval Rouen, I was excited to get the news: The Storyteller’s Reputation has been long-listed for the 2019 Chaucer Book Award for pre-1750’s Historical Fiction. See more here, and here’s an except from the Chanticleer Book reviews website: It’s wonderful to be included in this group of talented historical …
Read more “September 3, 2019: The Storyteller’s Reputation long-listed for historical fiction award”
At the back of Westminster Abbey sits a squat medieval building built by King Edward III in 1365 to house various treasures and important documents. To build it, Edward basically co-opted the land it sits on from the Abbey, engendering ill will from the monks. Called the Jewel Tower, it survived the fire of 1834 …
I left Vancouver on August 29, 2019 in the afternoon and arrived in London on August 31 in the morning…
After a much needed shower (it had been 26 hours since the last one in the Seattle hotel), I’m off to Westminster Abbey, only a few minutes walk away. I had forgotten how glorious the facade is. Known to millions as the site of various Royal weddings, it is an iconic building, central to British …
Every now and then I stumble on a book that blows my kind. In preparing for my research trip I was lucky enough to come across Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life (just published earlier this spring) that was the perfect resource as I finalize novel one and move into the latter half of novel …
Here’s where I’m going to research The Storyteller’s Desire…plus a side trip to Juno Beach in Normandy to see where my father landed, fought and was wounded over 75 years ago.
As I work on my second book in The Storyteller series, I think back to visiting Milan three years ago, standing in the mercado – the market square – that Geoffrey Chaucer would have stood in, the hair standing up on the back of my neck as I sensed his presence still, over 650 years …