If you RUSH on over to
Lulu, you'll find a nice shiny new edition of The Silurian book one - book one is now a free download all over the Net; well, sort of. I'm working on it. You can also find me, somewhere, on
Smashwords.com. For some reason, The Silurian is on the last page under 'historical'. Why must it be on the last page? But the Lulu version is the most up to date; it's damn hard work, travelling all over the Net to update my ebook.
I'm also working on trying this epub idea, and I also have The Silurian 1 as a mobipocket file, and tying to work out how readers can download it from this site. But I'm not tech-headed computer geek.
I'm also excitedly awaiting a box set of DVDs from the UK called
Arthur of the Britons. It's an old 1970s TV show starring
Oliver Tobias as Arthur. Now back in those days, I used to have the hots of Oliver Tobias, but I didn't know he played Arthur on TV till only a few years ago. This wonderful little show tried to do it right; to set Arthur in his true period, set him in reality where he belongs and not in silly fantasies of dragons, Merlin waving magic wands, silly women who all think they're the ones who ran the show, magic crystals and floating watery tarts who lobbed swords at men while lying around in ponds, (yes, acknowledgments here to Monty Python and The Holy Grail).
People will never get it through their heads that Arthur was a real person as long as their ideas of him are clouded by ridiculous fairy stories. Reality is far better than that; reality is truer, grittier, more honest, more tragic because it is real people it is happening to, and reality is where you find real love and real lives.
This is why I admire this old TV show; it attempted, long before anyone else, to place Arthur within the true historical context of Dark Age Britain. And on its probably limited budget, it tried hard to interpret how life might have been in those days, given too that since the early 70s, a lot more research has been done on this era, with the upshot being that it probably wasn't as decayed as a lot of historians portray. I don't believe it was. This idea of 'decay' only comes from the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, circa 410AD. And of course, no one can really look after themselves without the Romans, now can they? Especially if you're a Celt; you can only decay when you ain't got no big people looking out for you. But it was the Celts of post-Roman Britain who could read and write in Latin. They were the ones who preserved the language and then passed it to the Saxons and Angles, who did not speak or write in Latin.
So when historians lord it up for the Angles, the English, for preserving Latin, it was in fact, the British Celts who had originally preserved it, teaching it to the Saxons by way of clerics.
But there you go. History is written by the conquers, and they like to forget who it was that came before them.
Arthur rules!
