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Fantasy Romance

Knights

Cover Reveal!

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Yes, it took much longer than I had planned, but here is the cover for Knight of Valor!

And the link to pre-order it!

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What would it take for you to make the devil’s own bargain?

The vampires hunting Brelynn are the least of her worries. Not even the demons stalking her are enough to convince her to make the bargain. But to prevent her master from capturing her again, she’ll do anything, including make a pact with the King of Tamryn and the Knight of Valor he sends to fetch her. A Knight of Valor that eradicates all that is unholy in his path, including her, if she’s not careful. But he’s the only man that can destroy her master. The only man that can truly free her. And the only man that can win her heart.

Sir Marcus Valerian is the Knight of Valor who slew a lich, freed a nation, and came home a broken man. The Dragon Church wants him to retire. The Tamryn people want him to be their legend. He just wants a purpose again and accepts a mission from the king. The mission wasn’t supposed to involve destroying vampires, demons, and necromancers. But those aren’t the hard part. Reminding himself a man like him can never fall in love is.

As another lich rises, Sir Marcus and Brelynn must decide how much they’ll risk, how much they’ll give, to save the land and for their own chance at love.

Things I Learned Writing Knight of Valor

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Pending no major calamities, Knight of Valor will be released at the end of this month. I started writing this book in January of 2015, so it’s taken over four years to write, edit, revise, rewrite, edit again… You get the picture.

During that time, I learned a lot about writing, both the craft aspect of it, but also what works for me. Here are a few things I learned.

You Get Better the More You Write

I was just getting back into writing in 2015 after a long sabbatical, and it was a challenge to write even the first draft. While writing may have a degree of talent, see George RR Martin or Nora Roberts, it also has a huge degree of practice. The more I write, the better I get at it. I have to believe this is also a part of why George RR Martin and Nora Roberts are so amazing. Certainly, I need to read, too. Studying craft books helps as well. But none of that replaces the work of sitting down and crafting a story.

Revising is Crucial

I need to revise. My first draft is far from perfect. So very far. It is mostly a sandbox I have shoveled sand into that becomes the rough lump of a story. Revising turns that lump into a sandcastle. Some stories take more drafts than others. Knight of Valor took more than twenty drafts. A big part of the revision process was making up for how rough the first draft really was. I was out of practice when I wrote it. More recent works have required seven or eight revisions. I almost felt bad about it.  Then I came across this.

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Yeah, even he had to rewrite.

Take Only the Advice That Works for You – Ignore the Rest

Part of the reason this book had so many revisions was I took a lot of advice I shouldn’t have. More benign advice was to write in any order than piece those scenes together. Yeaaaah, no. Doesn’t work for me, and it created a lot more work in the revision process.

For example, I was also reading a lot of craft books on romance as I wrote this, and they were all touting the alpha male as really the only hero most romance readers wanted to read about. So I revised and changed the hero and made him a lot more alpha. But then I didn’t like him anymore, and that meant I didn’t like the story Knight of Valor became. So I revised it again, removing most of the edits I had added, then focusing on really showing who he was instead of what a craft book told me he should be.

 

EatMushroomsAdvice
What works for one author doesn’t always work for another.

 

Write Your Story

Which leads me into my last point: learning to trust myself to write my story. The one I want to tell. The one that reflects my characters. That can be a lot harder than it sounds, as I learned writing Knight of Valor. Doubt is a powerful force, especially when you are working on a story for years at a time. When there are so many things going on around you personally, professionally, and in the world. Sometimes it can seem foolish to question those who “know” what they’re doing. In writing Knight of Valor, I’m glad I did. Even though it took me all those revisions to do it.

Micro Fiction: Family

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BrelynnKnightBaby

Brelynn was like a sister to her, and the only family Mara had. The only family worth having.

How could Brelynn fall in love with a holier-than-thou Knight of Valor?

As the tiny fist of Brelynn’s daughter closed around Mara’s finger, a faint smile curved the warrior’s lips.

Maybe the Knight wasn’t all bad.

The Truth about Medieval Swords

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Okay, A.S. Akkalon and Thomas Weaver busted me. I have been researching many things in the Middle Ages and the Roman era. I’ve studied a lot about politics and daily life. One thing I did not think to question was my belief in large, heavy swords being the norm for knights.

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She’s got nothing on any paladin I’ve ever played. And I’ve played a lot of them.

I am going to blame it on years and years of D&D, video games, and some bad information from the History Channel. I stupidly thought these were researched. I know. Stop laughing.

Here is the truth.

The weapons of the Middle Ages were light, strong, and well-designed. They were agile weapons designed to kill, and they did a fine job of it. They were not clumsy or heavy. They were not “clubs with edges”.

According to the Wallace Collection Museum in London that has dozens of actual swords from the Middle Ages, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any that weight more than four pounds. Most weigh less than three.

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Perhaps a bit more accurate. Picture from Pixabay.

Yeah. Three pounds.

Even the large “hand-and-a-half” swords rarely weighed more than 4.5 pounds.

All of these swords would be easily handled by a man who’d been training with them since the age of seven.

Perhaps popular media (and my RPGs) were thinking of special “parade” swords when they came up their weights. However, they only weighed up to eight or nine pounds, not the forty you regularly see in popular culture (or on the History Channel). Even so, you’d really have to be stretching to make this mistake. These swords were show pieces, not fighting weapons. Their blunt edges should bring home that point.

This idea is perhaps older than Hollywood. Hey, misinformation isn’t just for TV and movies.

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Land of more misinformation than even the Mythbusters can bust.

In a fencing booklet from 1746, the author already talked about how heavy and unwieldy earlier swords were, stating they were designed basically for brute force. Perhaps the author felt that way as he was used to using a foil instead of a sword, but I’m going to guess a foil isn’t nearly as deadly on a battlefield or more soldiers would’ve used them.

In the 1870s, a historian describes earlier weapons as ponderous and requiring both hands. Getting back to the Victorian hubris Thomas Weaver spoke of where the Victorians assumed all things that came before them must be inferior.

There are other example, but the one thing we have to remember is that much of this was documented by people who were not swordsmen or otherwise trained in battle. Perhaps a man who has survived a half-dozen battles will find a certain sword light, well-balanced and agile when the scholar who has never left his library will find it heavy and unwieldy compared to his quill.

When I step back and look at this logically, of course it makes sense that knights and soldiers of the Middle Ages had finely-crafted blades that were light, sturdy and agile. War tends to bring about inventiveness as nothing drives innovation like survival.

I admit my ignorance on this, but I’ve learned and will go back and rewrite accordingly. Reminds me again to question everything.

How about you? Ever believe something you later learned was Hollywood magic? Any other common misconceptions held by the general public that could make me go back and rewrite?