Can You Help Seven Noble Knights Take a Trip to a Movie Studio?

2020 is shaping up to be the year of Seven Noble Knights, with tons of great news.

First and foremost, the search for a new home that started in mid-2018 is over. Medieval masterpiece Seven Noble Knights will be re-released in December 2020. You can delve into the rich tapestry of romance, revenge, war, and adventure at the end of this year! The wonderful team at Encircle Publications is getting a new cover and spruced-up edition ready as we speak.

As if that weren't wonderful enough, Seven Noble Knights is also set to appear in December 2020 in Italian! The translation is already under way. Expect to hear more about this unexpected literary gift soon.

And most exciting news right now: Have you ever wanted to see your favorite actor get hit with a bloody cucumber while wearing medieval underpants? Now that long-awaited possibility is within your grasp!

Seven Noble Knights has been selected to compete in the TaleFlick Discovery contest. With your help, this epic of medieval Spain can win a chance at being optioned for a movie or series!

Voting takes place now through February 14 at 4 p.m. Pacific/ 7 p.m. Eastern/ 1 a.m. on February 15 Central European Time. Be sure to get your vote in before time's up!

To vote, go to TaleFlick.com and click off any pop-ups. You don't have to subscribe to anything in order to vote. Near the top of the page, you will see something like this:

If Seven Noble Knights is not on the first page, it needs your help even more! You can search for it by typing "Seven Noble Knights" into the bar circled above and clicking the magnifying glass.

Seven Noble Knights appears with its original cover.

When you have Seven Noble Knights in your sights, you can expand the description using the white arrows at the center bottom, share the contest, or comment using the square speech balloon under the book cover, which is linked up to Facebook comments.

Or, just vote, clicking the upward arrow button on the right, which I have circled in the picture above. As I mentioned, you don't have to sign in or sign up for anything to vote, so you can help Seven Noble Knights with no commitment! The whole process takes all of five seconds with a good internet connection.

The page accepts one vote per IP address. So two people using the same wifi only get one vote, but say you have a tablet at home, a dinosaur desktop you use at work, and a phone you can hook up in a cafe--each of those could be a vote!

So please click away as you are able and tell everyone you know who loves medieval epics, Spain, or great movies based on exciting legends to vote for Seven Noble Knights at TaleFlick.com!

You will have a say in what actors get which roles when casting starts!

Thanks for reading. I'm so grateful for your help in making Seven Noble Knights a movie or series!

The Sleep Surface Saga

I've written about my husband's and my difficulties finding furniture that fits our budget, which in these past months has ranged from $0 to loose change. We were gratifyingly able to get a $50 refund on our futon when a sale went into effect at the store. We were feeling pretty settled, and even venturing into thinking about using the refund to get a cheap table to eat at and maybe use the computer when we weren't eating. Of course, that's when our air mattress got a leak in it. We slept on the futon while arranging to find some rubber cement to plug the hole, and even had an amusing time using the method my husband learned while briefly working at a gas station: we wiped soapy water over the plastic surface with a sponge (like he used to rub over tires) and the hole revealed itself with a little volcano of bubbling air.

Of course it was never the same once it was patched. We like to keep it pretty firm, and it insisted on sinking underneath us more than we wanted. We figured it was par for the course: we'd been using the thing every day for months, both for sleep and for extracurriculars, which we figured was beyond the scope of its design, anyway. It agreed with the thought by going completely flat within days and becoming unresuscitable.

So it was back to the futon. Why be dissatisfied with the futon? It's pretty lumpy and narrow for sleeping, and it's in the living room, where my husband can wake me up far earlier than before by grinding coffee and generally having the lights on. If we decided to sleep permanently in the living room, the bedroom would become useless and our pocketbook would ask loudly why we didn't just get a studio apartment.

It was time to get a mattress. We have a completely useable mattress... in storage in Pennsylvania. Knowing that, we really didn't want to spend the money on a mattress that would, in the best of situations, be a duplicate of something we already had, and in the worst, be something we would have to throw away if we left for greener pastures. We considered my dad's suggestions of getting thick foam pads of the kind people by for camping, but we couldn't find any such materials for sale near us. We looked for free and cheap things on Craigslist, and that's where we found our mattress provider.

We had to call ahead and make an appointment. The warehouse was in a nondescript building on a deserted-looking street. In the picture on our GPS app, it looked much cheerier than it was in person. For some reason, it made us feel less secure about our purchase when we saw Better Business Bureau insignias posted everywhere. We were shown a mattress with a garish balloon pattern that my husband wouldn't even touch, much less consider.

We were shown the next price point up from there and it seemed about as thin as a camping bedroll. The next price level was a "pillowtop," but the pillow aspect of it is still in question. It feels more like adobe bricks. I was surprised when my husband said okay, we'd buy it. The next level up was much more cushy, but we said to each other, as if convincing ourselves, that we wouldn't be using it long before we'd go back and get our deluxe memory foam dream machine in Pennsylvania. It wasn't worth it to pay that much more.

The delivery was same-day. They were going to charge $35 for the service, but we'd just had professional delivery of the futon for only $20, so, faster than the blink of an eye, the salesman lowered the price on our mattress by $35. We used a debit card for the purchase and it felt ever so risky. We wondered if every traffic cop was going to stop us for trafficking in stolen goods.

But only for a little while. Miraculously, a friendly man delivered the mattress a matter of hours after the purchase. In spite of its brick-like surface, my husband and I have been sleeping like the dead on it. It's much easier to get out of it in the morning since it doesn't slide around like the air mattress. The disconcerting squeaking is gone, too. Only two things nag at me: we still don't have a proper table to eat or work at, and when we happened into Big Lots the following day, they had a fresh shipment of Sertas for $50 less than we'd paid for our no-name.

Some day we'll win, and we'll be well-rested when we do!

A Second Glimpse at My Exciting New Project

The cathedral at Burgos, constructed 300 years after our story takes place. 

Although my novel's pitch didn't win first prize or the reader's choice award for the Pitchapalooza thing, I was glad just be reviewed. Thank you very much to everyone who voted for me! Here is a revised version of my pitch for The Seven Noble Knights of Lara. Let me know if it makes you want to read the whole thing.

No one can safely ignore doña Lambra. Her need for revenge leaves the plains of tenth-century Spain stained red with the blood of her seven warrior nephews. That same blood rises up from the rich soil of Andalusia in the form of Mudarra. This knight of noble lineage can bring meaning to his life only by exacting revenge on doña Lambra and her pawn husband.

In an age of superheroes and superpowers, this book returns to a simple hero, a mere mortal born with a special purpose. The setting is exotic, but the complicated web of rivalry and admiration between the cultures means that it fits seamlessly into our multi-ethnic, multi-denominational, and multi-problematic world.

I hold a PhD in Medieval Spanish literature. This historical tale brings together the violent family culture of Mario Puzo and the rugged realities of medieval Spain of María Rosa Menocal. Gleaming silks spill out of treasure chests. Heavy, rough coins are traded for taken lives. Diners turn the goblet to avoid drinking from the same spot as their neighbor. Our young hero holds his hands out to catch falling almond blossoms as if they were snowflakes, then takes his glittering sword to the throats of his betrayers. Can Mudarra bring balance to the feuding families? Will he be satisfied with a simple revenge?

Inside the Great Mosque at Córdoba, finished around the time of our story. 

This novel is based on a medieval Spanish epic, thought to have been sung by minstrels, and which now only survives prosified in history books, primarily Alfonso X el Sabio's Estoria de Espanna. It has never completely faded from the popular imagination through the ages. Most recently and notably it took the form of films and comic books in Tagalog in the Philippines. Bringing together my knowledge of the era and of the craft of writing, I make it a compelling story for todays' readers.


This year, I had several smaller writing projects to complete, and with the help of critique partners and set deadlines, they are done. Because I mentioned in my New Year's resolutions that I would make good progress (okay, I said I'd finish a first draft!) on a big project, there's now nothing for it but to get to work. The daunting part is strictly the assembling together more than 50,000 words.

It's time to get my specialty, medieval Spain, back into my writing. Who doesn't love a little exotic adventure with castles and palaces, knights and battles, desire and hate? I hope you will be as excited about the new project as I am. Tune in to this blog for periodic updates and teasers.