Return from the twelfth century

As many of you know, I have not been well lately, and I’ve had to severely cut back on my Facebook and blog time. I hope to be able to resume contact once Land Beyond the Sea is finished and turned over to my publishers’ tender mercies. Thanks for your patience and for not turning my Facebook pages into cyberspace ghost towns while I’m off-stage.
I hope that those of you caught, as I was, in the frigid blast of Grayson have thawed out by now. I don’t object to the new trend of naming winter storms, but couldn’t they have done better than Grayson? That sounds like a butler on Downton Abby, not a blizzard that paralyzed almost half of the US. Let’s pray for an early spring or, Down Under, for an early autumn since Sydney has been suffering under the sort of soaring temperatures normally found in Death Valley. And I am sure my readers share my sympathy for the miseries that have been inflicted upon California recently; first the worst wildfires in the state’s history and now those horrific mud-slides. So many of us had hoped the new year would be an improvement over 2017, which too often felt like penance for our sins. Speaking just for myself, I’m not overly impressed with 2018 so far.
Before I fade away into the shadows again, I wanted to offer a progress report on Land Beyond the Sea. I finally finished fighting the battle of Hattin. Battle chapters are never easy to write even though I’ve spilled enough fictional blood to turn the Dead Sea crimson. But Hattin was particularly challenging, for the contemporary sources were often contradictory or muddled and I had to spend a lot of time pouring over maps and photos since the topography of the area played a major role in the outcome. While I’ve always tried to visit the battlefields I’ve written about, assuming they still survived, it was usually not an absolute necessity, more like a reason to take a tax-deductible trip to England or France. With Hattin, being able to see the battlefield for myself was a huge help, for I did not need to rely upon imagination to conjure up images of the desolate, barren hills and stark rock-strewn slopes. I could draw upon memories and my own photographs, thanks to my Israeli friend, Valerie Ben David, who so generously offered to be our guide. I did have to make active use of my imagination in one aspect of the battle, though. It was fought on a brutally hot day in early July, with men and horses suffering greatly from thirst and the unrelenting heat. Whereas if I looked out the window, all I saw was a blinding swirl of snow and it was so cold that I half-expected to find polar bears in my back yard. But the battle is over at long last, I have begun to wash all that blood off my hands, and now there are just two more chapters to go!
Thanks again for all the understanding and support. I shall return!