Tag Archives: Chivalry

For a Life Forgotten – Stonehearted Volume 3 Published!

I am pleased to announce that For a Life Forgotten has now been published and is available in eBook and Print Book formats!

The concluding volume 4 is nearing completion and should be out in the summer.

For a Life Forgotten by Mark Lord

When the cut from the blade runs deep – You need a heart of Stone

The English army commanded by Robert Knolles has reached Paris – the capital and the honour of the French kingdom is under threat. But against the backdrop of war another drama plays out – will Eolande find her father, who was captured by the French? Will Richard seek the redemption he seeks after the terrible killing of his brother, and what will be the fate of the amoral Minsterworth, a captain in the English army, but only interested in his own gain?

Meanwhile secrets about the fate of Eolande’s father will be revealed.

For a Life Forgotten is the third part of the Stonehearted series, a fast-paced medieval adventure story set during the epic Hundred Year War between England and France.

Available from:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | Smashwords | Kobo

New Short Stories Coming Soon

This aircraft is currently displayed at the Na...
This aircraft is currently displayed at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just to let you know what is coming up soon from me. I’ve been working on a lot of things recently, including researching and planning novels. Currently I am focused on writing short stories for publication in paying short fiction markets – so the likes of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, Asimov’s etc. We’ll see how that goes – it’s a hard market to break, but I have a feeling that I’m getting closer – I had some good personal feedback on one of my stories recently from a leading editor, so I am hoping that with some persistence I can write something that’s good enough for one of these publications.

So that means I’m not writing a lot currently that will be self-published. But I do have two stories that don’t really fit for these markets, so these will be coming out soon.

One is a Biggles-like story set in WW1 – but with a slightly more serious central character. So a setting that is quite a departure for me.

The second is a short story featuring my medieval supernatural detectives, Roger Sotil and Jake Savage. They are the main characters in my novel Hell has its Demons, and Jake also features in Chivalry and Bring on the Night.

More news on these will be available to newsletter subscribers soon, and then I’ll let blog readers know when they are published.

Chivalry – the first Jake Savage Adventure – eBook Now Free

Chivalry Cover - NewYou can now grab a copy of the short story Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure for free from most major eBook stores.

Chivalry is the first story I wrote featuring the character Jake Savage. Jake goes onto feature as one of the main characters in my novel Hell has its Demons and also in two other short stories: Bring on the Night and The King of Britain’s Head. I have another short story featuring him in the works and more to come.

Get Chivalry for free from:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | iBooks | Nook | Smashwords

Review of Chivalry at SFcrowsnest

Chivalry Cover - NewI’m pleased to report another review from a well-known review site – this time of my short story Chivalry, which was reviewed by Kelly Jensen over at SFcrowsnest.

Here’s a quote from the review:

Chivalry’ is the first story of his I have read and liked it a lot. Aside from his choice to play with the definition of chivalry, I also liked the setting, that of the aftermath of battle. I don’t think it is covered enough, which is a shame as the ashes of war give rise to some of the most history and alternate history tales I have read.

You can read the whole review at http://sfcrowsnest.org.uk/chivalry-a-jake-savage-adventure-by-mark-lord-short-fiction-review/

Enhanced by Zemanta

Bring on the Night published – a New Short Story and Sequel to Chivalry

Bring on the Night Front Cover copyIf you have read and enjoyed my short story Chivalry, then hopefully you’ll be pleased to hear that there is now a sequel available: Bring on the Night.

Bring on the Night tells the story of what happened after the events of Chivalry – what happened to Jake and to the boy, all set against the backdrop of the Hundred Years War and with a dash of horror and paranormal fantasy thrown in.

You can get the story in eBook format here:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords | Kobo | Nook | iBooks

You can also read a brief extract and the blurb for the story at the page for it on in this site. Go here to check that out now!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Free to Play – and why not read a story about Chivalry too?

Chivalry Cover - NewThere’s a recently released medieval combat action game called Chivalry: Medieval Warfare – the publishers of it are making it free to play for the whole weekend: Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Free to Play this Weekend | VGRevolution.

I might well take a look!

While they game is installing and loading, why not also take a read of the start of my short story Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure – featuring some medieval warfare of its own! The first fifth or so will be free to read if you click through and download a sample from your favourite ebook retailer.

Guest Post on Chivalry at Tanzanite’s Castle Full of Books

Daphne who runs Tanzanite’s Castle Full of Books has kindly allowed me to write a guest post for her blog about Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure.

In the post I ramble on about how I came to write Chivalry, the background for the story and some of the important themes: Arthurian romance, the terrible generalship of John of Gaunt etc.

You can even sign up to win a free copy of the eBook!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Writing Plans: Jake Savage Adventures and Hell has its Demons

I have been mulling over what to write next. Currently I have a novel that’s a Work In Progress, with the first draft nearly completed – Hell has its Demons. I broke off this to put the finishing touches to Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure and also to work on some ideas about how a series might develop involving the two principal characters of Hell has its Demons – Jake Savage and Roger Sotil.

I now have a good idea on paper for a follow-up tale to Chivalry, involving Jake Savage. It will be a dark fantasy tale again based in war torn Medieval France. My plan is to write the first draft of this story and another story with the same setting and Jake as a central character during the month of November. These will then get sent out for critiquing and I’ll turn once again to finishing off Hell has its Demons.

Hell has its Demons is my first novel and the task of creating characters that will work across such a large piece of work is one that I have been grappling with – indeed the characters have changed during the course of the book more than I expected. So once the first draft is nailed down, I’ll need to go back and re-evaluate the characters and determine what is going on, what stays and what goes, and what needs to be added in. I can see that taking the first part of 2012.

However, its also likely that there will be two new Jake Savage Adventures out early next year!

And hopefully with any luck I’ll find a publisher for Hell has its Demons sometime later in 2012 – that’s the plan anyway!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Bow Down to the Awesomeness of this New Cover for Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure

Do you like it?

I had been having my doubts about the original cover for Chivalry – the Lady of Shallot Pre-Raphaelite picture – I thought it perhaps conveyed the mystery of the female antagonist in the story, but it didn’t convey the tone of the story, which is all about the gritty awfulness of medieval combat and its consequences.

This image from Mark Tarrisse does though, and in spades. Please go and check out his website at www.marktarrisse.com. There’s some great stuff there.

Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure is a short story published as a stand-alone eBook. It’s available for Kindle, Nook, iPhone, iPad – anything that bleeps!

Enhanced by Zemanta

New Medieval History Book: Chivalry in Medieval England by Nigel Saul

Chivalry in Medieval England by Nigel Saul

  • Hardcover: 440 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press (15 Oct 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0674063686
  • ISBN-13: 978-0674063686

I think this is a new title! It’s not always easy to tell after all – for instance there seems to be another title by Nigel Saul The Age of Chivalry, but this is only 144 pages, so I am guessing is something quite different? But then again there is also For Honour and Fame by the same author – see the related articles at the end of this post.

There is a wealth of information on Amazon.com about the book, including lots of glowing reviews. I have read Nigel’s book on Richard II and remember very much enjoying, so I am sure that this and anything else he might have published on Chivalry will be good too!

Amazon.com:

Review

Nigel Saul takes a relatively benign view of medieval noblemen. He rejects the once-fashionable notion that war was all about money and land, and that chivalry was just tinsel. And, although he sees a steep decline in standards in the last medieval century, he thinks that chivalric values did have a real influence in civilizing the conduct of war. Whether one agrees with this or not, his is a view that commands respect. He is a historian with a rare gift for seeing the human lives behind the rather formulaic and impersonal sources of medieval history, and he has written widely about aristocratic culture…Saul can make the most unpromising material speak to us with a directness that can surprise even those who are already familiar with it. This is a rich book that does ample justice to its complex theme.
–Jonathan Sumption (Sunday Times 20110626)

The author of this sparkling book that “puts chivalry centre-stage” explains its substantial contribution to the development of Western civilization through links to the practice of treating prisoners of war with compassion, to the growth of individualism and even to the modern cult of celebrity.
–Christopher Silvester (Daily Express 20110711)

Splendid…Saul has drawn heavily on what he calls this “rich repertory of contemporary witness” to illuminate the relationship between chivalry and the political, military, social and artistic currents of the time. The result is a wide-ranging examination of how the ethos of chivalry defined and shaped knightly culture…As this book so ably demonstrates, [chivalry] influenced every aspect of knightly life: without it, the Middle Ages would have been not only duller and darker, but even more brutal.
–Juliet Barker (Mail on Sunday 20110722)

An entirely original project, and in [Saul’s] hands it proves illuminating…[A] brilliant book. The skill and scholarship with which he has done so fully justify his claim at its opening that chivalry was a major factor throughout the narrative history of medieval England from before the time of Richard I to the aftermath of that of Edward III. Chivalry has often been neglected by historians in that story; Nigel Saul’s vivid and exciting study should make sure that it can never again be left out of the account.
–Maurice Keen (Literary Review )

The era of chivalry was the idealized fantasy that grew out of the military superiority of the armed horseman, and which lasted roughly between the invention of the stirrup and the invention of gunpowder. Nigel Saul is just the right person to tell the story as experienced in England…One of the strengths of his new book is its attention to the visual and the material. The knights of England had property and wealth, and they flaunted them. Chivalry was not only a code of behavior but a style honed both on the battlefield and in impressive residences…Interest in chivalry was revived in the Victorian cult of things medieval, aesthetic as well as moral in scope. It inspired such initiatives as the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules and the codification of laws of war, which Saul links to the later formulation of the Geneva convention. Yet lampoons of chivalry are equally powerful, as epitomized by John Tenniel’s drawings of ungainly knights on horseback that illustrated Through the Looking Glass. That unyielding parody has given us the chivalry of Monty Python and Spamelot, and recently a new Camelot too. Nigel Saul’s clear-sighted history makes these survivals all the more apparent, and all the more puzzling.
–Miri Rubin (The Guardian )

Product Description
Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses.

Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

Enhanced by Zemanta