Fil Reid's Blog

Here I am, sitting at my computer with the cat nearly resident on TOP of the keyboard and purring loudly in my ear. She’s probably better at technical stuff than I am. She certainly thinks she is, as she constantly tries to edit my work with her neat little pussycat paws. Her form of touchtyping is to be avoided at all costs, though. I’ve had beta readers say to me, ‘why is there ‘xk;aig’ in the middle of this paragraph? Did you mean to do that?’ And I have to say, ‘it was the cat’. Maybe she’d like to be mentioned in the credits at the end of the next book? Or have it dedicated to her? She could be hinting.

Unlike her, I can type proper words and sentences, and I do know how to do things like cut and paste, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes, which at times can be very frustrating. If anything goes wrong (or appears to have gone wrong as I can never tell if it’s a genuine problem or me just being stupid) I am stumped.

Just recently my computer decided that it didn’t want me to be able to open any of my Word documents – which was basically everything I’d ever written. Could I work out why? No, I could not! And neither could the cat. I did try, I promise you. I googled, which is my ‘go to’ whenever there’s a problem. Not that I’m usually any the wiser as even though the answer Google offers is written in English, to me it might as well be in Double Dutch. Quite often I have to google again to find out where the keys it wants me to use are on my keyboard. Not that I’ll be able to remember next time it goes wrong.

Luckily for me, I have that great and useful asset – sons. It’s lovely having children, but in particular it’s lovely to have sons who know about computers. Daughters are great too, but mine know next to nothing about technology – must be in their genes. However, my sons do, and that’s a great relief to me. One of them is a computer coder and he’s the one that’s best at sorting my problems.

Unfortunately, though, he lives in Devon and I’m in Berkshire, so we have to do the fixing at a distance. And he’s dealing with a mother who’s next best thing to an idiot where computers are concerned. She can type, and that’s about it, remember. Poor boy (well, not quite a boy as he’s thirty-four) – he must get very frustrated with me. On the phone, he tells me what to do and half the time I’ve no idea what he’s talking about. He’s very patient, but as I said, idiot on the line.

This time he remotely took control of my computer for me so he could fix it. Hooray! Now he’s done that once, he can do it again (apparently) and hopefully any other problem I have he can sort just like that.

So… hooray for sons. Well, ones that know about computers.

At the moment I’m up to my ears in redecorating our boat. The inside had become decidedly tired looking, and once we started, it didn’t feel as though we could stop. The problem with decorating on a boat though, even though ours is a widebeam, is all your stuff. To get at walls, furniture has to be moved, and with windows taken out we have had to make sure our cat couldn’t escape.

Nancy’s already had one ‘Big Adventure’ this year, although from the way she’s still trying to get out of the boat, she appears to have forgotten how much she didn’t enjoy being a wild and free cat. She escaped one night when Bella (our dog) went out for her last thing at night pee with my husband, and we didn’t find her again for ten long days. Ten days in which we had high winds and storms – this was back in February. She was a very relieved cat indeed when we finally found her hiding in a bush not far from our boat. But now her adventure has faded in her memory, and she thinks a sortie outside is just what she needs. We’re being vigilant, as she’s fifteen and already a bit wobbly on her pins at times. Not a good thing near water.

In between painting various exposed sections of wall in turn and wielding the grouting pen in the bathroom, where I have come to curse the person who put two-inch tiles over ALL the walls, I’ve also been polishing book six of my Guinevere series, The Road to Avalon. I finished writing it a while back and have been slowly giving it a final polish. Slowly because I don’t want to leave it. I’ve been living with the characters of Gwen and Arthur so long now, I don’t want to have to put them away. I was keen to get book six written as I’d been looking forward to it for such a long time, and yet as I drew nearer the end, I knew I was going to be heartbroken to end it all.

I knew from the moment I started writing book one exactly where, and how, book six was going to end, but what I didn’t know was how my characters were going to get there. Banging about inside my head I had all the different legends I knew about the various characters, not all of which I used. It was such fun picking my way around their storylines and in particular popping in various twists and turns to surprise my readers. And killing off a few of my darlings. You’ll have to wait to find out which ones don’t make it to the final curtain call.

I love all the different legends and the endless possibilities they provide for the storyteller. However, if you’ve read my first three books you’ll know by now that there’s one character who will never darken the pages of my books – Lancelot, that French interloper. And nor is there going to be. It does seem, however, that the one story most people know happens to be the one about Lancelot! Ugh! I can’t get the vision of Richard Gere in plate armour out of my head – a total anachronism. Not that I’ve ever seen more than the cover of the video. Not a film I’d want to watch!

In my books, I’ve tried to stick with the characters who have been associated with Arthur from the furthest back in history – such as Cei, Melwas, Medraut, Gwalchmei and Bedwyr. Apart from Merlin, that is. I do know (sadly) that in all likelihood he’s not contemporary with Arthur and was only associated with him at a later date. But kings had advisers, so why not have one called Merlin? This is a work of fiction, after all, and if I want Merlin in it, I can have him. Plus I’ve had a very big soft spot for him since I read Mary Stewart’s Merlin books as a teenager.

Anyway, I thought I’d write a little bit about my Merlin. There have been many renditions of him portraying him as anything from a white-bearded old man (Disney’s The Sword in the Stone etc) to a youth (The Boy who would be King and BBC’s Merlin series). He’s been associated with Arthurian legend for so long, readers/viewers expect to find him in a tale about King Arthur, so who was I to deprive them?

My Merlin is slightly different. He’s young, like Arthur and his warriors at the start of the series, or at least he looks as if he’s young. However, he may well not be. As Gwen remarks to herself – if you had magic why wouldn’t you use it to keep yourself looking young? He’s a warrior in Arthur’s warband, and as far as Gwen knows (at first) his magic consists of him being psychic and able to sometimes see the future, although very annoyingly, not all of the time and especially not when it would be of most use to Arthur and Gwen.

As the books progress, you’ll get to find out more and more about Merlin’s background and he’ll reveal more of the power he possesses. He’s a major character almost on a level with Arthur throughout all six books, and at first, he’s the only one who knows where Gwen has come from. He’s her friend, but in a way he’s also her gaoler, because it was he who kidnapped her back in time for Arthur. Ever wondered what he would have done had Gwen not fallen in love with Arthur? Think he’d have let her go back to her old world? Probably not. He’s an arch manipulator.

If you’re interested to find out more about Merlin’s rather shady involvement in Arthur’s life, and in particular how Arthur came to be born, then go to amazon and order the anthology book ‘Tales of Timeless Romance’. It’s only 99 cents on kindle. The other five stories are by the runners up in the contest I won back in 2021, and I know that at least one of them is about Robin Hood – a story I’m dying to read as it’s by one of my Facebook Friends, Cara Hogarth/Carol Hoggart.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tales-Timele...

Inspiration

I’d like to share a little of what inspires me so I’m going to see if I can upload some photos. When I’m doing my research, I like to save useful photos in a file – pictures of things like places, clothing, weaponry and that sort of thing, as well as maps. I love maps and as a child would spend hours creating my own.

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Here we have a typical Roman saddle, of the sort Gwen and Arthur would use. The four horns work to sandwich the rider and hold him firmly on and also serve to hang things from – your shield, saddlebags, helmet etc. I saw one of these in the Roman Army Museum at Hadrian’s Wall and would love to try riding like this one day. There were no stirrups, although I have Gwen introducing them.

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And this is a typical Dark Age house such as you might find anywhere across Britain at the end of the fifth century and start of the sixth, when my book is set. Probably only one room inside, or with a partition wall to divide off a sleeping area. And no chimneys back then – the smoke filtered out through the thatch. Interior below.


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This is an artistic recreation of what the walls and main gates of South Cadbury Castle (my Din Cadan) could have looked like in the Arthurian period. There was a substantial earth rampart faced with stonework that’s tied in with wood (see the cross-section) to make it sturdier. And on top of that they’ve built a wall-walk and wooden wall with crenellations. Although Din Cadan had a very long run of walls and would have been hard to defend, it did stand on top of a steep hill with three other banks and ditches below this top one. I’ve been up there many times and it would have taken a determined enemy to climb the hill and attack such a well-fortified position.

It was attacked in the early Roman period, but is thought not to have been one of the forts Vespasian sacked in the few years post-conquest. It’s believed the evidence of it being ransacked relates to some time after the Boudiccan rebellion, possibly as much as twenty years after.

I remember being taken there as a child and being fascinated that they’d found the remains of skeletons during their excavations – no doubt from this ransacking. It’s the sort of thing any child asks on a dig – did you find any skeletons? And I was no exception.

I think I might continue to blog like this and post some of my most inspirational pictures that relate to all things Arthurian. I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Fil