Cornwell timing light will not advance3/12/2024 ![]() ![]() Sleep is always in short supply on book tours and by the time I got home, I was ready to hibernate till the summer. My heart does not even start beating before nine AM on most days, so you can imagine how much I enjoyed having to get up in the middle of the night to catch a dawn flight. This past spring, I did a book tour for A King’s Ransom, and while it was great fun, it was also exhausting. ![]() The trip seemed snake-bit from the first, though, for the timing was not good. But I still felt cheated at being denied the opportunity to see these cliffs, cities, and castles for myself, and vowed that I would find a way to do on-site research for my novel about the Kingdom of Jerusalem. For example, while looking for information about Arsuf, I was delighted to discover that paragliding is a favorite sport in the area, and there were quite a few videos that offered excellent views of the cliffs of Arsuf. ![]() I managed to visualize the places I was writing about, thanks to videos and YouTube. Lionheart was the first book in which this pattern was broken. It helped, of course, that these trips were tax-deductible for me! While it might not have been absolutely necessary, especially in the age of the Internet, I think I benefited by walking the peaceful pastures that had once been bloody battlefields, by exploring the haunting ruins of once- powerful medieval castles, and by following in the footsteps of Welsh princes, Yorkist kings, and a remarkable Duchess of Aquitaine. I’d always been fortunate enough to visit the places I write about. But in the twelfth century, it was known throughout Christendom as the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and Outremer, a Norman-French term that translates as “The land beyond the sea.” Since 1948, it has been the State of Israel. It has been called Canaan, the Levant, the Promised Land. As a Roman province, it was Syria Palaestina. The Babylonians knew it as the Kingdom of Judah. It was called the Land of Israel in the biblical era. Its history goes back almost to the dawn of time and it has been known by different names down through the ages. ![]()
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