DARK MIST RISING: AVALON UNVEILED

Helmet from the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo Burial Well, Folks, looks like I'm down to the wire!   The Tyrant and the Twins , Book I of The Annals of Anavere , comes out on Kindle tomorrow!  See below, for a quick look! Pictish or Briton Birdlip Mirror The Tyrant and the Twins is not a medieval romance.  Nor is it one of the many contemporary updates of Arthurian legend, peppered with modern jokes and slang.  It is, rather, the reworking of an ancient tale, embedded in an archaic time and presented as its fifth-century characters would have portrayed themselves. Herein, no white knight in shining armor rides the lists, a lady’s silken kerchief floating from his lance.  No wizard wearing a pointed hat waves a birchen wand to summon the wind.  No impossibly indefatigable hero rescues a damsel in distress.  No one disappears into a mysterious – and fictional – otherworld.  No quixotic fairy story, this. Instead, brutish warriors, contrastingly armed with swords of light and clubs l

Well, Big Internet World Out There: My first historical fiction novel, "The Tyrant and the Twins", is set to be published on Kindle in TWO DAYS: on Saturday, March 31, 2012!  I'm really excited!  (And not a little stressed out and tired!  Wink)! I've been really busy putting the finishing touches on it: setting up the forward pages, like the title page, table of contents, and acknowledgements; writing and editing the final chapters and epilogue; editing the appendices, and more! Conversely, the item that has taken the most time is the art!  I've done all my own art, including the cover art and five separate pieces for the scene breaks!  Since I haven't put pen to paper (except to write) in over a decade, that was a brave, new world!  (Or a risky, old one)!  I'm proud -- and relieved -- to report that the girl's still got it!  The drawings have turned out great, and some are even better than I could ever have expected!  I'm thrilled! So, che

...comes out on Kindle in 9 DAYS!  Can't w8!

Amazons Killing Greeks, Woodcut, 16th or 17th c. Did you ever just feel like killing someone?  Maybe your kids are driving you nuts.  Or maybe it’s your husband.  Maybe the traffic is bad, or you had a bad day at the office.  Maybe your monthly friend arrived early, and the chocolate ran out already.  Or maybe it’s Friday the Thirteenth or a full moon or Mercury in Retrograde, and everyone seems like they’ve lost their collective celestial mind.  (I feel like most of these things on a daily basis – and the chocolate doesn’t even need to run out for that to happen – but I always assume that it’s the combination of my Wild Irish with my White Russian and let it go). If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you understand how it is to want to off someone.  Well, the Amazons actually did it.  Regularly. Some people, like the male-oriented and xenophobic Greeks, thought that’s what their name meant: Oiro-pata , Man-Killers.  (I don’t.  I think that such independent women

Toreador Fresco, Knossos, Crete; c. 1550-1450 BC This episode: NO CHINA SHOPS ON CRETE! The Toreador, or Bull-Leaping, Fresco in the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world.  And no wonder!  It is a color-saturated, exuberant – almost cartoonish – fresco that conveys both fluidity and movement. And it boasts a subject matter that no one has ever been able to agree upon.  What are these people doing?  Are they ancient matadors?  Bull-baiters?  Suicidal primitives? Was this a sport?  Maybe an archaic ancestor of the original Olympic Games?  Or something more arcane?  Like a religious ceremony? What is immediately apparent – if this was an actual exercise or ritual and not some hypothetical representation (like "Initiates Dance with the Great Bull God": Film at 11) – is that the two women (and one man) in the fresco were tremendous athletes and that the bull held a place of enormous importance in Minoan society. The Minoans we

Reconstructed Crannog, Loch Tay, Scotland Scotland.  It is only fitting that this is the land of Sir James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan and his pixie, Tinkerbell, and, well, the people for whom the pixies were named: the Picts.  It is a land of glass-eyed lochs, floating wraith-like mists, torrential rainstorms, craggy mountains, purple thistle growing wild on the hillsides, herds of thick-fleeced sheep grazing placidly, and a warm-hearted, welcoming people. I love Scotland.  (I visited the place for several weeks in 2000 and am, proudly, one-sixteenth Scottish myself).  On close examination, Scotland really holds up well to comparison with Braveheart and Rob Roy .  All those picturesque lochs and tatters of floating mist and rain.  Tons of rain.  Oodles of rain.  Barrels and buckets and big bronze cauldrons of rain.  It’s the perfect place for hiding numerous tribes of a quasi-historical people.  Or Picts.  Or pixies. (“Quasi” because no one seems to know just who the Picts were.  We

Sarmatian Kurgan , Filipovka, South Urals, 4th c. BC OK.  So, let’s get the terminology out of the way first. Kurgan .  A burial mound.  Usually visible against the skyline from miles away.  And there are a lot of them.  All over Russia and even down into China and Mongolia. Steppes .  Grasslands.  Derived from a Russian word meaning “plains”.  A grassy area that, according to Dr. Davis-Kimball, stretches from Manchuria to Hungary, and from Tibet in the south to Siberia in the north.  In other words, it’s big.  Real big. As previously mentioned, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Ph.D., of the University of California at Berkeley and author of Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines , is one of the leading experts on the Scythian kurgans of Russia’s steppe-lands.  It was in July of 1994 that, while excavating a kurgan mound, she noticed a teenaged girl buried with a collection of arrowheads, a quiver, and an iron dagger. This discovery was the beginning of

Traditional, Rural, Pontic House So, onward to Amazonia!  The mythological Amazons – “mythological” simply means that their existence has never been proven – are said to have lived in several, far-flung places.  Herodotus, the celebrity geographer of ancient times, said that they hailed from the steppes of what is now the Ukraine (which, oddly enough, is where my beautiful, feisty, Russian grandmother’s family comes from: a parallel that I am thoroughly enjoying). Some chroniclers place them in Libya.  The Minoans did have contact with Egypt, and even a settlement in the Nile Delta, as evidenced by a Minoan bull-leaping fresco found there.  It is certainly possible that some of them resettled there after the eruption of Santorini, perhaps, as their contemporaries, the Semitic Hyksos, initially did, as traders or mercenaries. Others locate these warrior-women in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Africa proper (as with the Dahomey), or even South America.  But, it is the Amazons of the Po

Bronze Age fresco from Akrotiri, Thera/Santorini, c. 17th c. BC The island formerly known as Thera (not the same as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”) is now called Santorini .  But it had another name once: Kalliste , Most Beautiful (Place).  They say that its name only changed to Thera – “Place of Fear” – when the volcano exploded.  It’s a wonderful story, but who knows for certain whether it’s true? (On second thought, I do.  Take a look at the gorgeous, green-blue caldera in my earlier blog.  Thera’s still one of the most beautiful places in the world). To judge by their art, the Minoans – the Bronze Age people who populated Thera, as well as Crete and the other Aegean islands – were a highly developed, extraordinarily photo-op-friendly culture.  Their frescoes explode with color and life.  In them, the people are tall, athletic, and good-looking, with long, rippling, black locks and large, expressive eyes.  To judge by their Toreador Fresco , they didn’t get those muscle

Partial Panoramic View of the Santorini Caldera In c. 1628 BC, a volcano at what is now Santorini erupted, spewing molten rock and ash into the air and ejecting an entire people from their homes on Thera, Crete, and the other Aegean islands and mainland.  True, the Minoan civilization did not vanish overnight, nor did they all leave at once, but this natural disaster is considered by scholars to be the catalyst for the decline of their civilization: the beginning of the end. There is a theory that the Minoans left the Aegean and journeyed to the steppes of Scythia, where they became the people who are now known as the Amazons.  There has long been a theory that the Amazons either became or married into the Scythian tribes.  A third theory suggests that the Scythians – or some of them – later traveled to Scotland, where they became the people known as Picts. As all of these theories, in particular the one concerning the Picts, have an enormous effect on my book, The Tyrant and the

So, I've been away for awhile.  Busy, as most of us are.  Well...I'm baaaaaaack! Tomorrow, I'm launching the blog from a new tangent: "The Minoan-Amazon-Scythian-Pictish Connection," or "MASPC"!  In case you're thinking, "You do, and you clean it up," this is what it means.  (Warning: One of us is gonna' feel really stupid in about thirty seconds...although, I think that one might be me). I'm exploring the connection between the supposedly disparate cultures of the Aegean-based Minoans, the mythical steppe-based Amazons, the historical steppe-based Scythians, and the British Isles-based Picts. If you're wondering, "How does this relate to The Annals of Anavere ?" here's the answer.  The Picts and their supposedly Scythian origin appear time and again in The Annals of Anavere , my ten-book series, the first of which comes out on Kindle on March 31. The Minoans, Amazons, and Scythians will also appear repeate