Seven Noble Knights in Modern Life

My recent trip to Spain had many life-changing moments. Most relevant to my writing, I got to see the legend upon which I based my novel Seven Noble Knights "out in the world." The events, if they ever really took place, happened more than 1000 years ago. That's a lot of time for historians, minstrels, and everyone else to make the story their own.

Most amusing to me was the way entrepreneurs could use the characters' names and count on their buying public to know what they're referring to. For example:

Mudarra Café and Grill in Salas de los Infantes

This restaurant is named for the hero of the second part of the saga, who redeems the González family after fifteen years.

Los Infantes Bakery in Salas de los Infantes

An enterprising pastry chef knew "Los Infantes" (the seven noble knights of my title) would lend his wares credibility.

Doña Lambra Hotel and Restaurant

More surprisingly, this hotel and restaurant flaunts the name of the legend's supervillain, Doña Lambra. Granted, it's located in Barbadillo del Mercado, her territory.

Barbadillo also boasts a Lambra Street!

And a twentieth-century sculptor was moved to honor Barbadillo's most notorious ruler with a rather nice statue. The inscription reads, "Doña Lambra. Between history and legend, she ruled this village in the high Middle Ages, immersed in the events that would end with the betrayal of the seven noble knights and Mudarra's revenge (10th century)." Behind Lambra, on the left, is an impression of her husband, Ruy Blásquez, the seven noble knights' uncle. On the other side, Mudarra, the great hero. The statue tells a lot of the legend with no need for reference elsewhere. My husband and I weren't sure where the statue was, so we walked what we thought was the whole town with no luck, and then asked a couple of different residents before we found it. I was thrilled to be able to speak the name of the antagonist of my novel and see recognition on people's faces. They needed no explanation!

Stories are powerful, and apparently they last through time. I'm proud to continue the legend of the seven noble knights.

My book of stories, Unpredictable Worlds, releases for Kindle on May 15 with a softcover edition available the same day. Unpredictable Worlds is already available for preorder for only 99 cents. Once it’s out there in the world, the price will go up, so save at least 66% now and have this strangely amazing book delivered to your device on release day. 

(Originally posted at jessicaknauss.com)

Okay, I Finally Get It

I don't usually learn the hard way. But the tenacity needed by a writer these days seems to have dulled my previously incisive perception. Or it's simply true that even an editor needs an editor...

As partially chronicled here, although I hit a sweet spot after a year of writing, I had a terrible time figuring out how to start Seven Noble Knights in a way that would draw readers in and do justice to the rest of the story. The version I debuted at the Muse conference session was already the fourth or fifth complete rewrite, so along with the shock, I felt disappointed I wasn't a little closer to right after all that thinking and rethinking and redoing.

Here are the latest facts: I sent the best query letter I could come up with to 144 literary agents. I never dreamed I'd find that many in the first place, much less tap all of them! A few have yet to get back to me, but my record for agents requesting to see the full manuscript stands at a fraction of a percent. I felt a tad like the man with the raised arms in the picture above: those are the heads of his sons being presented to him. (It's an illustration from a nineteenth-century Spanish pulp version of the Seven Noble Knights story: more on that later.)

The most gut-wrenching experience involved my sending a chapter from Part II as a sample. The agent enthusiastically requested to see the entire manuscript. A disturbing silence followed, to be capped off by a severe disappointment when she declined to move forward.

I thought I might have better luck with publishers who accept submissions directly from authors, and while tweaking the query letter for suitability to this new audience, I had something of an epiphany: my synopsis starts at the wedding, my trailer starts at the wedding, the medieval sources I drew from start at the wedding. The only thing that does not start at the wedding is, in fact, Seven Noble Knights, the novel itself.

The problems with the beginning of what is, after all, my first novel, run much deeper than I could have imagined.

How had I gone so far wrong? Why did it take me so long to see it? Shouldn't I have realized something was awry when the agent loved the chapter from Part II and rejected Part I, even knowing that Part II was coming?

Simultaneously with this reeling, I began to forge a new plan. I consulted with Kim Rendfeld, author of two excellent historical novels, refined the plan, and am now following it.

I'm deleting Chapters 2 and 3 and rewriting the important material from young Gonzalo's point of view. This should pick the pace up significantly and reduce confusion as to who the reader is supposed to root for. It will also provide opportunities to develop male egos and make for a convincing Chapter 4, the bloody wedding.

Chapter 4 will become Chapter 3 and will be quite a bit jazzier after the new Chapter 2, but also in its own right with planned additional emotional resonance.

Chapter 5, currently from the point of view of Doña Lambra, will be cut down and redrawn from the point of view of Justa, the long-suffering servant. Chapter 6 will be rewritten. It may be from Gonzalo's point of view to increase reader sympathy, or I may decide to integrate it into Chapter 5 (now Chapter 4) and keep it from Justa's perspective.

Extreme changes will take place in one third of all the chapters in Part I.

Since I'm juggling two other writing projects, taking a class for six weeks, working ongoing editing/publishing projects, and working a full time job, these changes may take a while. Submissions are on hold so I can present the first part of the novel knowing it's the best thing since the printing press. Please bear with me.

In the meantime, that Spanish pulp novel is sure to make another appearance!

Unusual Historicals: The Cantigas de Santa Maria

Today at Unusual Historicals I get to share with you the medieval phenomenon that occupied my every waking moment for three years, all told: the Cantigas de Santa Maria. This unique collection of songs and artwork is the single most influential reason I became a medievalist. I hope you can glimpse why there's so much to love about these thirteenth-century songs. Enjoy!

A Glimpse into the Life of My Hero

Imagine for a moment that you are Mudarra González. You’ve just come of age, having been raised in tenth-century Medina Azahara among splendor the world hasn’t seen for a thousand years. You’ve met Christian travelers before, but they all seemed kind of dumb to you because they walk your palace city with mouths agape. Now you’re traveling in Christian lands, having to interact intimately with Christians for the first time, and a woman who claims to be your new mother takes you across an icy bridge to a small stone chapel, the likes of which you never imagined you’d see inside.

It’s as dark as night, with only a few candles before the altars and tiny windows letting the smallest bit of winter light in. A priest comes from some dark corner to greet your “mother” briefly before drawing back a curtain.

In the gloom, you can make out the shapes of a painting very much like this one:

I went to the local art museum this weekend. The place is impressive in the context of this area, and only makes sense when you consider that it was established during the city’s industrial heyday. It holds remarkable treasures from every corner of the globe. Of course, I’m partial to the medieval galleries. They even transported a chapter house and reassembled it just off the main atrium, complete with medieval stained glass windows. (My fondest hope is to make a presentation of Seven Noble Knights in that setting once it’s published.)

The painting above resides in the darkest gallery in the building. When I came upon it, I felt as if I had been transported into my own novel!

It’s a Catalan altar frontal from the late eleventh century (about 100 years in the future of Seven Noble Knights). It shows the ascension of Jesus, while in Seven Noble Knights I had imagined a dynamic portrait of a "Moor-slaying" saint. But the colors, the cartoonish outlines, and the presence of crosses and gesturing hands are exactly what I had in mind. Mudarra finds the red and yellow garish, but I recognize these shades as the favorites in northern Spain for hundreds of years. The serious expressions and outstretched hands are the dramatic expressions of a visual story, meant to instruct anyone, whether or not they could read, whether or not they’d had previous instruction.

I wanted to take this piece of art with me because it accomplishes in an instant what I’m attempting to do with more than 100,000 words: it brings anyone who sees it close enough to my characters to imagine themselves in their shoes.

Snip, Snip

I was seriously considering entering Seven Noble Knights in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. When I first heard about the award, I regretted not having a novel to submit. Last year, Seven Noble Knights was too freshly finished. No way was it ready for submission of any kind, much less a brutal contest.

The thing was, the Amazon contest caps the allowable word count at 125,000. What kind of random number is that? Seven Noble Knights, after the significant cuts I made over the last several months, sat at 129,000.

Maybe 4000 words isn't so much in an epic novel, I thought, and started by looking for the silly things writers do. First plan for excision: most adverbs. If you modify a verb, it's often just the wrong verb to begin with! So I dove in.

It took four days of gruesome, shrieking effort.

But now at least half the adverbs I had are gone. It had to have strengthened the writing. It also got rid of one thousand words.

Three thousand words short.

So I looked at the official rules again, just to make sure, and yes, they're firm on 125,000.

What other silly rules were there? The dealbreaker for me was that if you win the prize, you can't negotiate the contract. You just have to sign over whatever rights they want for themselves. Pretty suspicious. If, on the other hand, you don't win, they may offer you a contract and you can negotiate. It just felt weird to enter a contest in which I would hope I didn't win. So after all this time thinking of the Amazon award as a possible goal or learning experience, I won't be doing it.

I'm glad those thousand words have been removed. It gave me a chance to finesse some sentences and to revisit the entire novel, seeing more clearly what its strengths are.

The picture celebrates that cutting as well as my first civilized haircut. When I first got to North Carolina, I got a haircut, and was unhappy with my hair ever after. So I was determined to have a New England haircut that solved some of the problems or at least got rid of some layers, as soon as possible. It looks similar to my profile photo again, so I think I've found the haircut I belong to as well as the place. Now I just need to find the right home for Seven Noble Knights!

A Medieval Coin

A little coin appears in Seven Noble Knights, once Mudarra has been in Castile for a while. He wants to give money where it wouldn't be seemly, so he mitigates his crime by casting a few obolos into the street. Described as parchment-thin and barely worth enough to buy a loaf of bread, Mudarra's coins are based on something I have in my possession.

I got this little coin on Ebay (what can't you get there?) for little money ten years ago. The vendor told me it was from the reign of Alfonso X el Sabio, pretty much my only reason for being alive at the time, so I couldn't resist. I was later able to verify in a museum in Burgos that this is just like other obolos out there, so I feel pretty confident that it's the real deal.

The front shows a castle, the emblem of Castile, and the Latin letters CASTELLE.

The back shows the lion of León and bears the inscription LEGIONIS.

Of course, Mudarra couldn't have thrown a coin that bore the emblems of both kingdoms because he lived during a time when Castile was an independent county officially still part of León. It's still likely obolos were struck at the time because of the eternal need for very small values of coins. Aside from the thinness and small circumference, one mark of a coin of small worth is that it hasn't been cut to make even smaller values. Most important to me as the author, this coin was minted during the reign of my favorite king in the history of the world and the same king whose team compiled the books where we find the first traces of Mudarra's story.

This coin weighs almost nothing, but I can feel the seven hundred years in the patina. It brings me that much closer to the realities of the lives of my characters.

Happy holidays! See you again from my new home in the new year.

Entertaining, Fast and Fun Trailer Debut

I've been working on this for about six months now. It's more of a pitch than a trailer, simply because the book isn't published yet. I hope it's entertaining and makes you interested in the story. Please let me know!



I couldn't have accomplished this by myself.

The talented graphic novelist or "story artist" Ayal Pinkus did the drawing and painting that makes this trailer so special. I can never thank him enough for lending his talent to bringing the Seven Noble Knights to life. It's incredible to see the characters and events that have so far only been words on pages or screens this much closer to flesh and blood. Our collaboration was amazingly fruitful.

The professional voiceover was done by James Scott.

The background music was chosen after much agonizing. It's "Non me mordas, ya habibi" (Don't Bite Me, oh Lover), a jarcha from medieval Andalusia. The text is written in a proto-Spanish that has a strong relationship to what the characters in Seven Noble Knights would have been speaking, and when he goes to Córdoba, Don Gonzalo hears a similar jarcha. This version is performed by the Eduardo Paniagua Ensemble Música Antigua and is available on the album El crisol del tiempo.

Thanks so much for watching. If you feel inclined to do me a favor, watch it many more times — as many as you can — and share it with any of your friends interested in historical fiction. Thank you!

Touching the Past

I was going through some photos I took when I was in Burgos in October 2005 and was thrilled to find this gem:

It's a document granting Covarrubias to a noble monastery. It's signed by Count García Fernández, supreme leader of Castile and a character in SNKL. His wife Ava also signs. She isn't a character in SNKL, but a strong possibility for a sequel. The document dates from 972, ever so close to the year SNKL opens.

This wonderful piece of faded, wrinkled, and water damaged vellum was on display in the cathedral, under glass, and you can see the reflection from the window in the picture. At the time, I was impressed with the undulated Visigothic majuscule writing and the sheer age of the document. Could I have known that seven years later, having finished the dissertation I was researching, I would complete the biggest, most complex piece of writing of my entire life about the very time period when this document was made and one of the very people who signed it?

Now that I've written SNKL, I find myself wishing I could tell my 2005 self to take even more pictures and look even more closely at these extraordinary objects I haven't had the chance to get so close to since then. In that way, 2005 seems farther away from me than even the year 972.

In other news, the artist completed scanning all the pictures for the SNKL trailer, so keep an eye out for that. It's going to be great!

Catchphrases and the Title

Because I haven't yet encountered the enthusiastic support from New York every writer dreams of, I've been thinking about what I can do to give The Seven Noble Knights of Lara that X factor.

In the first draft of my query, I had a major attention-getter in the opening line: "The Seven Noble Knights of Lara is a medieval epic with strong women, valiant knights, and a bloody cucumber." It even made it into a radio clip when I presented it at the Book Doctors' Pitchapalooza in Naperville! It garnered laughter at the time, and there are a couple of problems with that: I wasn't sure whether it was funny laughter or uncomfortable laughter, and the book itself isn't intended to be a laugh fest. I kept it for a while, thinking that any attention I can grab is good attention, but eventually I felt too strongly that I was setting up false expectations, and changed it.

The first way I made it less comical was to remove the rule of three: "The Seven Noble Knights of Lara has strong women and valiant knights. It is probably the only novel you'll ever read with a bloody cucumber." (This version is up on the "About the Novel" page and will come down soon.) I got at lot of approval for this arrangement, but eventually, also some puzzlement. Why do I think anyone would necessarily be attracted to a novel with a bloody cucumber?

I'm trying! I really am. So I took that version out, too. My query letter now has no real "logline." It launches right into the "When Gonzalo does one thing, Lambra does another" plotting. I felt the loss of the logline and decided to try to remedy it. I came up with the logline in the picture above.

Not making giant leaps of progress away from humor, am I? I'd like to invite my readers to help me write a logline that conveys more of the feel of the book, which tends toward the dramatic. Not the melodramatic! Please comment or contact me on Facebook or Twitter if you have good ideas.

In the meantime, I like the picture above and may use it and its logline.

So, no logline. How about the title? Is it too long? Too boring? I'm willing to admit I haven't been creative with the title. I just translated the title academics have assigned to the epic poem. If it helps the book, I'll change it. But to what? Would THE FAULTS OF OTHERS work? If not, I'm afraid I'll lapse into the unintentionally comical, such as BLOOD IN BURGOS or CRESCENT OVER CÓRDOBA.

The trick is to be concise and impactful without dipping into the flippancy that seems to surface in me whenever I try to write in such a short form.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Medieval Spanish Names I

A dismayed young Gonzalo is comforted by his mother, Sancha, in the upcoming trailer.

I recently had the first 50 pages of SNKL critiqued by someone who'd never seen it before and has no history with me. It didn't occur to me that I might get comments similar to ones I got very early on and on which I've been working and fixing and obsessing over ever since. It didn't happen much (which indicates I have indeed fixed previous problems, thank God!), but an amusing observation came through that touched on one of my earliest fears: "The father and son are named the same thing? Are we going to be able to tell them apart? You really should give them different names."

Two of the most important protagonists of SNKL are Gonzalo Gustioz and his son, Gonzalo González. Those are the names they either had in history or were chosen for them by the wise and gentle medieval jongleurs and historians. Faced with this identity crisis, I agonized over what to do. I was afraid the text would get confusing and off-putting.

In the end, I left the names as I found them and used convenient cues to make certain the reader knew which Gonzalo I was writing about: the father gets the title "Don," even though the son is also a knight, and the son often gets the descriptor "young" before his name. I also kept the nickname Gonzalico strictly for the son. It turned out that the father and son don't spend much time in the same scenes, so once I'd established point of view (because they're so strong, they pretty much call the shots in their respective chapters), I could drop the shorthand clues. For example, in Chapter VII, everyone knows I'm talking about Gonzalo the son, because the father is off on a journey he started in the last chapter.

I could always tell the difference between them, which seems to mean readers can, too. I never got a single complaint about the issue before this one.

It points out a challenge in writing historical fiction about medieval Spain: the lack of distinctive names. I think one reason the old texts always refer to the villain by the full name, Ruy Blásquez, is not only to establish psychic distance, but also because the listeners in the first audience would have appreciated knowing which Ruy the singer meant among all the Ruys in all the histories and among their acquaintances. Spanish parents in the tenth century displayed a lack of creativity in naming their children, giving rise to the use of patronymics, place names, and, one presumes, nicknames that haven't survived very often in the historical record. And more than one pulled-out hair among historical fiction authors. And possibly more than one opportunity for the same authors to take their own creative license.

To be continued with women's names...

Picture It!

Gonzalo and Álvar have a difference of opinion.

It's every author's problem: how to get attention and potential readers for the book you've labored over so lovingly for so long?

I came up with a lot of ideas under the philosophy of "Dream Big." None of them were practical, at least not with my current resources. (My life changes drastically in that regard every six months or so.) However, an idea's impracticality doesn't mean I forget about it, so I held onto the idea of an unusual book trailer for a month or two. Then, through the vicissitudes of life, I virtually met graphic novelist Ayal Pinkus, and made creative use of this new talent in my life by asking if he'd like to illustrate the first third of The Seven Noble Knights of Lara.

He said he would!

We've been having a great time ever since, bouncing ideas off each other and off the walls, trading historical pictures back and forth, and generally being creative. The process has helped me think about the novel in new ways, which I hope will benefit both my search for representation and my readers. So hang in there! It's coming, and it's going to be great!

For the color scheme, we settled on primary shades, but using tints they might have had available for clothing dye in the year 974. The result, I think, shows the expensive colors everyone wanted to display with just a slight historical patina. And it really intensifies the drama.

Setting the scene: Burgos, 974. A wooden castle has just been destroyed by competing knights during the festivities at the wedding of Ruy Blásquez and Doña Lambra.

So, even if no one ever watches this trailer (but you will, won't you?), at least I can say I made my best effort.

Characters: Blanca Flor

There are several characters in SNKL who began as a throwaway phrase in the source material. Yusuf came about because Mudarra needed a guide through Christian Spain, and Justa blossomed out of Doña Lambra having "a single maid" at one point in the story. They both took on their own amazing (in my opinion, because they seemed to develop independent of my original intent) story arcs.

Blanca Flor, however, is all mine. I took her name from other medieval epics and her personality from the question: What would Doña Lambra and Ruy Blásquez's daughter have been like? The epic states that they had no issue, but what if the case was more that after the terrible things their parents did, no one wanted to be associated with them, especially by blood ties? If I do write a sequel to SNKL, it will be based largely on that tension.

Personally, when I think of a female between 14 and 25 years old, I don't see a fully grown woman, but in the tenth century, people did in general. We're coming full circle with the way teenagers dress and make themselves up these days, but that's another story. So I took inspiration for Blanca Flor's look from her mother, seen in this post, and in this gorgeous artist's fantasy:

Then I made a sketch with words to evoke when I described her for the first time. Hard to see pencil in the scan, but here it is:

I was going for the beauty of the mother, but full of kindness.

Here's how the description ended up, from the point of view of Mudarra:

He ducked behind the tree trunk, from where he observed a being who radiated so much brightness he hardly dared to keep watching her, and yet he couldn’t look away. As he stared, he distinguished two long braids the color of gold thread that pulled the hood from her head and whipped from side to side and front to back as the girl-woman changed her gait to suit her mood. Her mantle flew away from her body with each step like the wings of a giant bird taking flight. At her neck, an underdress of a fine, almost transparent fabric protected her fair skin from the blue wool of her tunic. The skirt, covered in embroidered whorls, danced stiffly atop soft leather boots. Mudarra thought he would visit a cobbler and have similar boots made for himself in a strangely practical thought that ran somewhere below the rapturous feelings the female caused in him. She distractedly passed the empty bucket from one soft-looking mitten to the other as she made her meandering way toward the riverbank. He had never laid eyes on anything like her.

Characters: Mudarra

Mudarra is the somewhat unlikely hero of the second half of The Seven Noble Knights of Lara. The reader spends a lot of time in his point of view, so my first priority was to make sure we could see the world through his eyes, sympathize with him, and generally root for him. Then I had to present him from the outside, when another point of view character meets him for the first time. He should have dark hair and light eyes and a scruffy beard, much like the picture above, although probably even a bit younger.

This guy should credibly play his father in the movie version. (Oh, yes, the role of Don Gonzalo is coming for you, Mr. Clooney!)

I could have looked online for inspiring pictures like these, but at the time, I thought it would be more creative to draw a picture myself. I've never been a particularly visual writer, so I thought that might jump-start those muscles. Sometimes the creativity only really gets flowing in one area when you take a break and try to create in another medium. I never took drawing lessons, but here's my description guide for Mudarra.

Would this make an impression on you?

Here's how the description ended up:

... how could it be anyone else, with the same cowlick in the front of his dark, almost black hair that pointed in every direction before curling almost tamely under his ears? His eyes were shaded under the same wild brows, and his long, straight nose, exactly like his father’s. His square chin supported the same half-grown stubble of a child on the verge of becoming a man. His mouth was pursed in seriousness, but Sancha recognized instantly its shape, always ready to burst into a smile or laughter. ...

Where had he been all this time? He’d been doing well. As he knelt before them, his long cloak opened to reveal that it was lined entirely in a fur as fine as silk and much warmer than the hole-ridden lynx pelt. The tunic he wore underneath, made of a soft-looking, fuzzy fabric, seemed to create its own heat with its bright red color and golden embroidery. The hand he held out to her and her husband had golden rings embedded with shimmering carbuncles on each finger. Even his boots were studded with beads that sparkled as much as rubies. The only detail that seemed out of place for a well-landed lord somewhere in Andalusia or in the borderlands was the length of rough string that secured a small pouch around his neck.

Characters: Doña Lambra and Doña Sancha

​I used these illustrations of ninth-century noble ladies as the inspiration for what Doña Lambra and Doña Sancha, the two main female characters, are wearing the first time they meet each other in Burgos before the wedding. 

​

I colored the edges of Lambra's chain mail girdle and sleeves to appear as if they were pieces of jade in a brass setting. Her dress should probably be a richer color, as it's her best dress, inherited from her mother. I think the most inspiring element of this sketch is the haughty look in the tilt of her head and pursing of her lips.​

​

I imagined Sancha's underdress or chainse to be made of a delicate, expensive fabric, and the tunic or bliaud to be richly colored, but with a more Hispanic type of embroidery. The mantle seems mainly practical to me, but perhaps it was once dyed a very dark color that has faded to grey with washing. I imagine her shorter than Lambra, even though she's much older, and the pleasant expression in the sketch is appropriate to the character I describe in the novel.​



These come from Tom Tierney's Medieval Fashions Coloring Book. Sometimes, writing gets to be too much and you just have to color.

Cultural note: The title doña is the female equivalent of don, which is used in the same manner as English "sir." It may be used with the first name or the complete name, but not with the last name only. Derived from Latin dominus and domina, they translate more or less to "Lord" and "Lady."



Traitors and Turncoats: The Vile and Incomprehensible Ruy Blásquez

Supposedly an illustration of an incident from the cycle
of El Cid, which also comes from historical/epic tradition.

As you know if you follow my author blog, I have a guest post today on the wonderful site Unusual Historicals. It's all about a pair of traitors in medieval Castilian epic, and in passing I discuss the strange symbiosis between Castilian epic and medieval Castilian historical sources. 

I wanted to discuss the baddies of The Seven Noble Knights of Lara here. There are spoilers in the following comments.

The story on which I base  The Seven Noble Knights of Lara contains historical figures, but the existence of Ruy Blásquez and Doña Lambra has not been verified, perhaps because no one, even today, would welcome the possibility of being associated with such vile traitors.

Ruy Blásquez – a. k. a. Ruy Velásquez – doesn’t kill a king or even a count. But when he wipes out seven warrior brothers in an epic battle and sends their father to be beheaded, he eliminates an entire generation of soldiers of Castile, leaving himself with all the power for more than ten years at the turn of the eleventh century.

The crime is all the worse because the warriors are his nephews, the sons of his sister. There are few stronger blood ties at this time in history. An uncle is expected to take on an almost nurturing role, ensuring that his nephews realize their potential, especially on the battlefield, and for this surrogate father to cut the knights down in their prime frankly smacks of taboo. Further compounding the betrayal, Ruy Blásquez uses an army of Moorish soldiers to take down his nephews and sends their father to Córdoba, the capital of the Islamic caliphate. His close association with powerful Muslims taints him in the eyes of his Christian neighbors. His actions betray not only his blood relatives, but also the Christian faith.

Although I tell the story from many different points of view in my novel, Ruy Blásquez’s actions are so hard to understand that I dared not take a seat behind his eyes. The source material writers seem to have felt the same taboo. They make an effort to distance the audience from Ruy Blásquez, referring to him as I do here, always with his first and last names, and usually appending “that traitor” or calling him simply “the traitor.” I took a more subtle route: I made him a slippery character, hard to get a handle on in general, so that his incomprehensibility in the betrayal is somewhat believable. The reader is left to conjecture that his wife, Doña Lambra, made him do it.

Doña Lambra, on the other hand, was too much fun not to try to understand. She’s frustrated because she has to marry Ruy Blásquez and covets the nephews’ superior power. She also feels an inconvenient level of sexual tension around her handsome new nephews-in-law, and when they get into an argument and kill her cousin, she snaps. She has to be a little insane to take such a disproportionate revenge, but she also has to be manipulative or influential in order to get Ruy Blásquez to agree, even if he is wishy-washy. It was delightful creating this dangerous beauty the reader loves to hate.

Check back soon for more about how I developed these fascinating characters.