It's not surprising that the daughter of a witch and a wizard has some innate magical aptitude, and Daimbert is more than willing to nurture her talent. But he's finding he also has to play dad to the rest of the younger genertion of Yurt. The duchess' stubborn twin daughters want to be respectively a knight and a priest, careers closed to women, and young King Paul is balking at marrying a perfectly respectable woman and wants to run away with the cook's daughter.
I'm both a fantasy writer and a professor of medieval history, having loved fantasy since I discovered Tolkien in ninth grade. That and a long trip to Europe with my family in high school--including lots of climbing around castles--got me interested in real medieval history. The two different facets work together surprisingly well--including that both are tough ways to make a living! For one thing, real medieval history can come up with much better plots than anything I could create.
Real medieval people were rather grim by our standards: ruthless, violent, always thinking about death, and with no religious tolerance--and those were the good guys! My own fantasy tends to be lighter, though it always ends up being about sacrifice, mortality, redemption, and similarly knee-slapping topics.
The characters and situations for my first published novel, "A Bad Spell in Yurt," came to me literally in a dream. I'd been trying intermittently for over 20 years to get a novel published, but this one worked! And it became a national "top 10" best-seller in the fantasy/science fiction genre. (Ought to have more dreams like that...)
The "Yurt" series is six books long; they can be enjoyed in any order, but there is still an overall story arc. The books in the series are (in order) "A Bad Spell in Yurt," "The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint," "Mage Quest," "The Witch and the Cathedral," "Daughter of Magic," and "Is this Apocalypse Necessary?" This overall story is now wrapped up, though I'm contemplating "Yurt, the Next Generation."
Of my other two novels, "Count Scar" is the closest I've gotten to real medieval history. It's set in a thinly-disguised version of southern France in the thirteenth century. My husband, Robert Bouchard, and I co-wrote it. "Voima" was my chance to revel in the Nordic myths I've always loved, while making up new myths of my own (no Odin or Siegfried here). For some reason "Yurt" fans have never taken to it, but it may be my favorite book.
More information about my novels is available on my website, www.Daimbert.com. Recently I've made my out-of-print books available for Kindle. I like a physical book in my hands myself, but for everyone who enjoys the convenience of reading onscreen, enjoy!
