Name: Wendy J. Dunn

Book Title: Shades of Yellow

Series: n/a

Publication Date: September 7^th, 2025

Publisher: Other Terrain Press

Pages: 350

Genre: Women’s Fiction / Literary Fiction / Dual-Timeline

Any Triggers: Adult themes and with a few well-deserved F words included.   

Hashtags: #ShadesOfYellow #Forgiveness #AmyRobsard #WomensFiction #DualTimeline #Romance #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Twitter Handle: @cathiedunn @marylschmidt

Instagram Handles: @wendyjdunnauthor @thecoffeepotbookclub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog-tour-shades-of-yellow-by-wendy-j-dunn.html

Book Title and Author Name:

Shades of Yellow

By Wendy J. Dunn

Blurb:

During her battle with illness, Lucy Ellis found solace in writing a novel about the mysterious death of Amy Robsart, the first wife of Robert Dudley, the man who came close to marrying Elizabeth I. As Lucy delves into Amy’s story, she also navigates the aftermath of her own experience that brought her close to death and the collapse of her marriage. 

After taking leave from her teaching job to complete her novel, Lucy falls ill again. Fearing she will die before she finishes her book, she flees to England to solve the mystery of Amy Robsart’s death. 

Can she find the strength to confront her past, forgive the man who broke her heart, and take control of her own destiny?

Who better to write about a betrayed woman than a woman betrayed?

Shades of Yellow

Excerpt 1:

‘So, you’re Stephen’s Australian granddaughter. I’ve heard a lot about you over the years.’
A flush warming her face, Lucy shook his hand and smiled back. ‘I hope Pop told you only good stuff.’

Tom laughed. ‘Yes. Only good stuff.’ He waved towards the door he had just come out of. ‘Shall we get started? We get to the Bell Tower from inside the Queen’s House.’

Lucy blinked to adjust her eyes to dimmer light when she reached the narrow spiral stairwell of Bell Tower. Knowing her good fortune to have a private tour of the tower and the ramparts, she steeled herself to surmount a demanding climb. To her relief, not long into their ascent, Tom halted and pointed out a cell with a toilet.  The heavy porcelain toilet bowl and its honey-coloured wooden seat seemed to come from around the 1930’s. Lucy gulped back a giggle. Despite its obvious age, the toilet looked incongruous in its ancient setting.

‘They say this is where they planned to place Hitler in World War Two.’

Jo peered into the cell. ‘Dad told me about the plot to capture Hitler. Sounds rather mad to me.’

‘Desperate times result in desperate measures,’ Tom responded. ‘The Second World War was a desperate time for Britian.’

Lucy pretended interest in the story as she caught her breath, only to become fascinated when Jo and Tom talked about the efforts of an English witch coven to win the war.

Tom laughed. ‘Like I said, desperate times, desperate measures.’

They returned to climbing to the ramparts. By the time the three of them emerged from the stairwell to daylight, Lucy’s heart thudded hard against her chest. Wobbly and a trifle ill, she gathered the remnants of her strength and headed straight to the waist-high wall of the rampart to look out at the view of modern London, seeing again the newly rising Shard from a fresh vantage point. She prayed Jo’s attention was all on the view and not on her. Her aunt may discern she was lingering at the ramparts for other reasons than the gorgeous outlook of London.

Tom came to stand next to her. ‘I’ve served here close to twenty years and never tire of coming here.’

Jo joined them to take photos.

Relieved to no longer hearing her heart drumming loudly in her ears and feeling better, Lucy waved her hand from right to left. ‘It would have been so different in the sixteenth century.’

Tom leaned on the wall. ‘Time always changes things. Even the Tower. We can all be thankful that Victoria and Albert both appreciated England’s history so much that they rebuilt it.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Hooray for old Queen Victoria.’

‘Well, yes.’ Tom grinned. ‘But she wasn’t old Queen Victoria then, and it didn’t mean they rebuilt everything. John Taylor, the second man in charge of the rebuilding program, caused an awful stink by pulling down far too much.’

Lucy peered over the top of the wall. ‘I, for one, am happy they left some things to our imagination, like the moat. For centuries, they called it a cesspool. It was a source of illness to those who lived close by.’

‘You’re right.’ Tom returned to his soldier’s stance. ‘It destroyed the health of many of the men who drained it, too.’

‘Thank you for bringing us here, Tom,’ said Jo, recapping her camera. ‘You said you need to go back before twelve? Time for us to walk the leads before we head to our next stop, don’t you think, Lucy?’

‘Walk the leads.’ She paced along the narrow walkway and looked over her shoulder at her aunt. ‘The people of the past had such a lovely way of describing their surroundings. I adore how it describes walking the ramparts. Weird to think of Elizabeth walking here and causing time to rewrite it as Queen Elizabeth’s Walk.’

The sky was now the same shade as the stones of the Tower. The wind picked up, blowing colder. She stilled near the wall. The world around her disappeared. Her Amy in 1554 possessed her mind’s eye.

On the ramparts, Amy shifted a little away from Robert, gathering her cloak tighter around her chilled body. Below, the moat glittered as clouds broke away from the sun. Smoke from chimney stacks of nearby houses eddied in the air and tickled her lungs. The spire of St Paul’s pierced the sky. Robert rarely brought her here. But, after John confided this was the place her husband most often met with Elizabeth, Amy had entreated Rob to take her to the ramparts. Now she pretended to study the view, all the while imagining Rob holding Bess in his arms, like he had just done with her. Rob kissing Elizabeth. Telling her he loved her. The thought cut Amy’s heart into pieces.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/mqPGgd

This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Author Bio:

WENDY J. DUNN is a multi-award-winning Australian writer fascinated by Tudor history – so much so she was not surprised to discover a family connection to the Tudors, not long after the publication of Dear Heart, How Like You This, her first Anne Boleyn novel, which narrated the Anne Boleyn story through the eyes of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder.

Her family tree reveals the intriguing fact that one of her ancestral families – possibly over three generations – had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.

Wendy gained her PhD in 2014 and tutors in writing at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. She loves walking in the footsteps of the historical people she gives voice to in her books.

Author Links:

Website: http://www.wendyjdunn.com/

Newsletter: https://wendyjdunn.substack.com/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/authorwendyjdunn

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Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Wendy-J.-Dunn/author/B004FRTZFA

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/197156.Wendy_J_Dunn

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-wendy-dunn-6358181a

Name: Mike Weedall

Book Title: Escape To The Maroons

Series: n/a

Publication Date: August 19th, 2025

Publisher: Historium Press

Pages: 275

Genre: Historical Fiction

Any Triggers: I don’t think so; no readers to date have cited concerns.

Twitter Handle: @cathiedunn @marylschmidt

Instagram Handle: @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #HistoricalFiction #AmericanHistoricalFiction #AfricanAmericanHistory #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog-tour-escape-to-the-maroons-by-mike-weedall.html

Book Title and Author Name:

Escape To The Maroons

By MikeWeedall

Blurb:

In 1792, an escaped slave, raised and living as white, is discovered and forced to flee into the Great Dismal Swamp.

Barely escaping a bounty hunter, a Maroons community of fugitive slaves rescues him. Over time, Nathanial comes to accept his true identity while fighting to overcome the suspicions of his new community. Because of his pale skin, he becomes a conductor on the underground railroad, slipping runners onto ships going north. On one of his missions, fate intervenes and places Nathanial’s community at risk.

This little-known chapter in American history tells how escaped enslaved people gave their all to live free while creating a community and economy in one of the world’s most unforgiving environments.

Excerpt #1

The Great Dismal Swamp and Man

“Capricious, contradictory, and alluring” is how author Hubert Davis described this place. How does one navigate through this hell hole of nature? Assaulted by clouds of biting insects, where to step? When one’s foot does not sink into boot-sucking mud, the so called land is a sponge.

Bushes and trees sporting oversized thorns tear at skin. Dense stands of bamboo show no way forward. Occasionally, an obscure deer trail might reveal itself. Why would Mother Nature take her worst and throw it together in a 2,000 square-mile blight?

… Storms build quickly, turning a capricious environment more fearsome. It is marshland gone wild, all matted and impenetrable. Never intended for man, nature rules this place. In 1791, can desperate people be anything other than secondary players if they choose to enter?

Buy Links:

Universal Buy Links:

Ebook: https://geni.us/eRthZgH

Paperback:  https://geni.us/RM5o

Hardcover:  https://geni.us/AVs7

Author Bio:

As the author of three books, Mike’s passion is finding the little-known stories of history and bringing them to life. History in school is too often events and dates. Mike seeks to discover the people who lived those events and reveal why those individuals made the decisions they did. Ultimately, there are stories to be mined, and who doesn’t love a good story?

In his historical novel “Escape To The Maroons,” Mike tells the little-known story of 1791 self-liberated slaves who chose to struggle for survival in The Great Dismal Swamp in their determination to live free. The term Maroons delineates areas where escaped slaves fled and could not be recaptured. It’s estimated that over 2,000 survived deep in the swamp around the turn of that century.

His first book “Iva: The True Story of Tokyo Rose” describes the tragic life of Iva Toguri. Trapped in Japan during World War II, this Japanese American woman was forced to work for Radio Tokyo. Although she never participated in propaganda, the racial animus of post-war America led to her being falsely labelled as Tokyo Rose and prosecuted for treason. Through her incarceration and the ongoing discrimination heaped upon her, Iva never lost her courage and determination.

“War Angel: Korea 1950” was his second book that followed a reservist nurse thrust into the carnage of The Korean War. Serving as an operating room nurse in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the real MASH and strength of a woman is revealed. 

Mike resides with his family in the Pacific Northwest where they enjoy experiencing the outdoors.

Author Links:

Website: https://www.MikeWeedallAuthor.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094196717126

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/mike-weedall

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mike.weedall8

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mike-Weedall/author/B082J6MMN2 Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5681426.Mike_Weedall

I woke up and found this! Shadow won the GOLD medal!!!!!! First ever Gold Medal. I’m walking the stage for this one! Mark Wayne Adams Books & Illustrations this is huge for me! HUGE! Will you be there to put that medal around my neck? Snow won Gold! Dawn Andrews Finnegan WOWSER!!! Shadow is found here: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Mary-L…/dp/B0DW2LHNW7/ and Snow:Cursed is found here: https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Cursed-Willa-R…/dp/B0DS2SVPZS/ Miami are you ready for us?

Book Link

From Amazon:

A Fishing Captain set Adrift with a deckhand in a Toxic Sea is haunted by a Beautiful Siren who pledges their safety. She visits Captain Taylor’s dreams, and he and the worried Deckhand try to survive 70 miles from Stump Pass in the middle of a Red Tide Bloom. With Shark attacks, a Blistering Sun, and scant Food and Water, they must find their way home in this Romantic Fantasy full of Poetry and Mystical Dreams. A story of Treachery, Love ,and Perseverance.

My Review:

Darrell thought life was good, great university job, a wife, beautiful home, but they no interest in what events or hobbies eack liked. One of them cheats and that brings this saga into full force. Darrell left everything behind for a new life on the sea and catching fish. Not all hired deck hands are honet, and then to have a gorgeous siren come to life in your dreams, or right in front of you, Kyna helps Darrell become his future destiny.

Name: Catherine Kullmann

Book Title: Lord Frederick’s Return

Series: n/a

Publication Date: 22^nd July 2025

Publisher: Willow Books

Pages: 269

Genre: Regency Romance

Any Triggers: No

Twitter Handles: @CKullmannAuthor @cathiedunn @marylschmidt

Instagram Handle: @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #Regency #HistoricalFiction #HistoricalRomance #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog-tour-lord-fredericks-return-by-catherine-kullmann.html

Book Title and Author Name):

Lord Frederick’s Return

Catherine Kullmann

Blurb:

An older hero, an enigmatic heroine and a delightfully outspoken four-year-old. Throw scandal into the mix for a gripping and tender Regency love story.

August 1816. Lord Frederick Danlow returns to England after spending 18 years in India. He plans to make a home for himself and his motherless, four-year-old daughter, Ruperta. Unsure where to start, he accepts an invitation to stay at Ponsonby Place, home of Colonel Jack Ponsonby who made his fortune in India, and his daughter Susannah, the mistress of the household.

Soon Frederick finds himself in need of a governess—and a wife? The more time he spends with Susannah, the more his admiration of her deepens. Is she the woman with whom he will share his life?

He is resolved to court her, but then his younger brother Henry engulfs his family in an appalling scandal that could prevent any lady from agreeing to a connection with it. Now Frederick must support his family during this ordeal.

But what of Susannah? What will she say when she hears of the scandal? Should he, dare he offer her his heart and his hand?

Guest Post: When Angels Fly

Why Write or Read Historical Fiction?

What do we write and read historical fiction? First, I suppose, because it takes us out of ourselves—transports us to an unfamiliar society recreated partly from familiar facts and partly from a myriad of tiny, new details so that it seems as real to us as our world of today. The setting rings true and the characters’ actions are determined by the laws, morals and customs of their time, not ours.  Sometimes this horrifies us; at other times we find it liberating and long for more romantic, more adventurous, perhaps simpler bygone days.

Contemporary fiction instinctively reflects/portrays the world as it is at the time of writing. Historical fiction considers the past through the prism of the present, the author drawing on research rather than personal experience to create an authentic setting and story. But, while we cannot forget what we already know—that Germany lost both world wars, that the Allies under Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo or that the US won the War of Independence,—reading the right author, we are willing to suspend our belief, to become so caught up in the story, that we experience those events as if they were happening today. And within these grand story arcs there are so many smaller arcs concerning fictional characters with uncertain outcomes or gaps in the known narrative that informed imagination can fill so that no matter how well we think we know a period or an episode, there is always something new to discover.

With history becoming more and more of a niche subject at schools and universities, it is historical fiction that offers millions of readers a connection to the past, a past which casts long shadows. We need only look back two hundred years to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland of 1800, the Anglo-American war of 1812 and the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 are all events that still shape today’s world. At the same time, the ruling aristocracies were being challenged by those who saw the need for social and political reform, while the industrial revolution which led to the transfer of wealth to the manufacturing and merchant classes was underway. Powerful voices demanded the abolition of the slave trade and women, who had few or no rights in a patriarchal society, had begun to raise their voices, demanding equality and emancipation. It is the beginning of our modern society.

Following the collapse of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803, the United Kingdom was at war with Napoleonic France until 1815. Like Hitler in 1939, Napoleon swept eastwards conquering all before him until he stood at the gates of Moscow. Unlike other combatants in this long war, Britain was spared the havoc wrought by an invading army and did not suffer under an army of occupation. War was something that happened elsewhere, far away. For twelve long years, ships carrying fathers, husbands, sons and brothers sailed over the horizon and disappeared. Over three hundred thousand men did not return, dying of wounds, accidents and illness.

What did this mean for those left behind without any news apart from that provided in the official dispatches published in the Gazette and what little was contained in intermittent private letters? The question would not leave me and it is against this background of an off-stage war that I have set my novels. How long did it take, I wondered, for word of those three hundred thousand deaths to reach the bereaved families? How did the widows and orphans survive? What might happen to a girl whose father and brother were ‘somewhere at sea’ if her mother died suddenly and she was left homeless?

It is against this backdrop of an off-stage war in a patriarchal world where women are both second-class citizens and held to impossibly high standards that I set my first novels. My characters and their stories are fictional but the world in which they live is very real and there are no twenty-first century solutions to their dilemmas. The main story arc is romantic; I am particularly interested in what happens after the first happy end—how life goes on around the protagonists and sometimes catches up with them. In The Murmur of Masks, Olivia agrees to a marriage of convenience, unaware that her husband’s secrets will prevent love ever growing between them. How can she build a satisfying life for herself? Perception & Illusion charts the voyage of newly-wed Lallie and Hugo through a sea of confusion and misunderstanding. Will they come to a safe harbour or continue to drift apart? And, in A Suggestion of Scandal, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time puts Rosa’s whole future at risk. Could it happen today?

In later stories, such as The Potential for Love and A Comfortable Alliance, I consider the situation of those who fought or lost love ones during the long war. The war may be over, but life goes on. Lady Loring’s Dilemma and The Husband Criteria highlight the situation of married women whose legal existence is denied under the legal fiction of coverture. And finally, in Lord Frederick’s Return, the situation of children born out of wedlock to an Indian mother and English father and the implications of this for their fathers is considered.

Good historical fiction therefore informs us about the past. It provides insights into yesterday and helps us understand today. It encourages us to persevere or warns us to change direction. It can reveal past, hidden wrongs, teach us to value the struggles of those who went before us and inspire us to preserve and build upon their achievements.

© Catherine Kullmann 2025

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://mybook.to/Frederick

Author Bio:

Catherine Kullmann was born and educated in Dublin. Following a three-year courtship conducted mostly by letter, she moved to Germany where she lived for twenty-five years before returning to Ireland. She has worked in the Irish and New Zealand public services and in the private sector. Widowed, she has three adult sons and two grandchildren.

She has always been interested in the extended Regency period, a time when the foundations of our modern world were laid. She loves writing and is particularly interested in what happens after the first happy end—how life goes on for the protagonists and sometimes catches up with them. Her books are set against a background of the offstage, Napoleonic wars and consider in particular the situation of women trapped in a patriarchal society.

She is the author of The Murmur of Masks, Perception & Illusion, A Suggestion of Scandal, The Duke’s Regret, The Potential for Love , A Comfortable Alliance , Lady Loring’s Dilemma and The Husband Criteria.

She also blogs about historical facts and trivia related to this era. You can find out more about Catherine’s books and read the blog (My Scrap Album) at her website where you can also subscribe to her newsletter.

Author Links:

Website: http://www.catherinekullmann.com/

Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/CKullmannAuthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/catherinekullmannauthor

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/catherine-kullmann

Amazon Author Page: viewauthor.at/ckullmannamazonpage

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15549457.Catherine_Kullmann

Book Link

From Amazon:

“As someone who has been actively engaged in sales in diverse
forms my entire life, I can pick out valuable lessons in this book.
“Infl uence: The Secret of Selling” is a practical guide into building
customer engagement and rapport, both critical tools for ensuring
a successful sale and life in selling.”
—Dr. Chris Kirubi, Director, Centum Investment,
Billionaire businessman, entrepreneur & industrialist.
“A must read for anyone who cares about driving business and
positively impacting on customers’ lives”
—Amb. John Mwangemi, Kenya’s High Commissioner to
the Republic of Rwanda.
“Certainly, this is a walk-the-talk groundbreaking manual for the
21st Century for all to read.”
—Dr. Julius Gathogo (Ph.D), Senior Lecturer Kenyatta
University and Distinguished Prof. St. Alcuin,
Minnesota, U.S.A.

My Review:

This book is a must read for any business owner or anyone preparing to start a business. Why not start off full of confidence and having the ability to to successfully market your product and make the important sales? Yet this book is about more than simply sales. The writing style comes from a truly heartfelt perspective and helps you to not overdo things all at once. Self care is vital to growing a business.

Book Title: The Wanderer and the Way

Series: Cuthbert’s People

Author Name: G. M. Baker

Publication Date: March 10^th, 2025

Publisher: Stories All the Way Down

Pages: 249

Genre: Historical Fiction

Any Triggers: Rape is mentioned by not portrayed.

Twitter Handle: @mbakeranalecta @cathiedunn @marylschmidt

Instagram Handle: @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #HistoricalFiction #MedievalFiction #SantiagoDeCompostela #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/07/blog-tour-the-wanderer-and-the-way-by-g-m-baker.html

Book Title and Author Name:

The Wanderer and the Way (Cuthbert’s People, Book 4)
by G. M. Baker

Blurb:

The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, now the most famous pilgrimage route in the world,

was founded in the early ninth century, largely due to the efforts of Bishop Theodemir of Iria

Flavia. As with most people of this period, nothing seems to be known of his early years.

What follows, therefore, is pure invention.

Theodemir returns footsore and disillusioned to his uncle’s villa in Iria Flavia, where he meets Agnes, his uncle’s gatekeeper, a woman of extraordinary beauty. He falls immediately in love. But Agnes has a fierce, though absent, husband; a secret past; another name, Elswyth; and a broken heart.

Witteric, Theodemir’s cruel and lascivious uncle, has his own plans for Agnes. When the king of Asturias asks Theodemir to undertake an embassy on his behalf to Charles, King of the Franks, the future Charlemagne, Theodemir plans to take Agnes with him to keep her out of Witteric’s clutches.

But though Agnes understands her danger as well as anyone, she refuses to go. And Theodemir dares not leave without her.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/thewandererandtheway

Guest Post for When Angels Fly

I’ve long been fascinated by journeying. I don’t mean travel in the modern sense, which is not about the journey but the destination. For the modern traveller, the airport serves as a kind of transporter device. You enter a box at your start, time passes, and you exit the box at your destination. You have travelled, but you have not journeyed.

Journeying is not entirely dead, of course. YouTube is full of videos of hikes and road trips and long-distance train rides. In all of these, the journey is part of the experience. In some cases it is secondary to the sites visited along the way. In some cases it is the main attraction. But journeying of this kind is very much a choice today, a form of recreation. Often people will use planes to teleport themselves to the starting point of their road trip, rail journey, or cruise.

I am a road-tripper myself, and I recently published a book of reflections and recollections of what my wife and I called our Grand Tour, beginning with Route 66, then north along the Pacific Coast Highway, then returning East via Yellowstone and the Badlands of South Dakota. The book is called Ordinary Eccentricity, and it is very much a book about journeying, the motivation for it, and the way it changes how you see the world and feel about life.

In the past, journeying was a necessary part of human life. It was arduous, expensive, and above all dangerous. And yet even when it was so difficult, people still took journeys voluntarily as well as out of necessity. Sometimes they took them as a means of doing penance for their sins. Thus we find in many cultures the practice of pilgrimage, the journey to a sacred place undertaken for the sake of the soul. Some pilgrimage routes are now world-famous and attract hikers and tourists as well as pilgrims. One such is the Camino de Santiago, the most famous pilgrimage route in the world, running from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in southern France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. My novel, The Wanderer and the Way, is an imaginary account of the youth of the man, Theodemir of Iria Flavia, who in later life was responsible for the founding of the Camino.

So many of my favorite books are about journeys. The Odyssey is the story of a journey. So are The Lord of the Rings, The Grapes of Wrath, Lonesome Dove, and Huckleberry Finn. There is nothing so sure as an arduous journey to expose the heart, the character, the longing, and the dread of every character. Even the prospect of such a journey can become a moment of crisis for a character, forcing them to make hard choices between competing values. The classic model of story is the Hero’s Journey, first described by Joseph Campbell and popularized by Christopher Vogler and Star Wars, includes a vital step (though one that is curiously missing from some popular versions), the refusal of the call to adventure. The call to adventure is the event that gives the hero a reason to go on the journey. But the drama in the call to adventure lies in the hero’s reasons not to go. The tension between the reasons to go and the reasons not to go shapes everything that will happen to the hero, all the decisions they will make, all the emotions they will have, throughout the whole journey. The hero lives and moves in the tension between the call to go forward and the call to hurry back. Without that tension, the story of the journey is a mere travelogue.

As the journey goes on, the hero will also be tempted to stop and stay at several points along the journey. These temptations renew and build upon the tension that drives the hero ever forward and calls him ever back. But this is not to ignore that sometimes what calls the hero onward is the road itself. The road can become the normal world of the hero, the world they understand and are accepted in. The call to settle down then becomes a call to a different kind of adventure. In Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey model, there is a second refusal, though Vogler did not include it in his model. This is the refusal of return. The hero has become so attuned to life on the road that he has become too wild to settle, and must contend with the same stay or go dilemma again, but in reverse.

One of the great attractions of the past as a setting for stories is that one does not have to do any work to make a journey arduous. Finding a way to present a modern character with the choice to go on an arduous journey or not is difficult because few journeys today are arduous, and one therefore needs to invent extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary motivations to plausibly present your character with that choice. But in the past, all journeys were arduous, to one degree or another, leaving the author free to concentrate on the essential dilemma of whether to go or to stay.

It is that dilemma that hangs over both my main characters in The Wanderer and the Way. For Agnes, the kidnapped wife of a Viking warrior, escaping from her husband, and from the lascivious local lord who employs him, means abandoning the women she was kidnapped with. For Theodemir, nephew of that same local lord, staying means becoming a monster in the mold of his uncle, and going means leaving Agnes to her fate. But go they do, as go they must, along the lonely, sun-scorched roads of the abandoned territory of the Douro and through the treacherous ways of the Pyrenees, menaced by Moorish raids and by the wild, fierce tribes of the Pyrenees, treading the arduous way that so many pilgrims in centuries to come will follow after them.

Author Bio:

Born in England to a teamster’s son and a coal miner’s daughter, G. M. (Mark) Baker now lives in Nova Scotia with his wife, no dogs, no horses, and no chickens. He prefers driving to flying, desert vistas to pointy trees, and quiet towns to bustling cities.

As a reader and as a writer, he does not believe in confining himself to one genre. He writes about kind abbesses and melancholy kings, about elf maidens and ship wreckers and shy falconers, about great beauties and their plain sisters, about sinners and saints and ordinary eccentrics. In his newsletter Stories All the Way Down, he discusses history, literature, the nature of story, and how not to market a novel.

Author Links:

Website: https://gmbaker.net

Substack: https://gmbaker.substack.com/

Twitter / X: https://x.com/mbakeranalecta

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gmbaker

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/g-m-baker

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/G.-M.-Baker/author/B09WZK7MD4

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4259382.G_M_Baker