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!

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.