I’d like to welcome Hannah Meredith, author of Song of the Nightpiper, to my blog
today.
RW: What’s your most embarrassing experience?
HM: I’ve worn glasses since I was a child. Without correction,
I see only different colored blurs. But when I entered high school, I decided
“being seen” was more important than “seeing.” I wanted to look as alluring as
a chunky fifteen-year-old could, so wore my glasses only for classwork. This
led to much awkwardness. Every morning I greeted a little boy waiting for his
bus, only to discover, weeks later, it was a child-shaped sign holding a School
Zone placard. I sat on a girl who was wearing a flowered dress and sitting in a
floral upholstered chair. Of course, if she’d been more animated, she would
have been safe. But it was when I couldn’t find my date at a school dance—every
boy there seemed to have on the same blue-shirt, khaki-pants combination—that I
gave up on vanity and put my glasses back on.
RW: If you were stranded on a tropical island, who would it be
with? You can choose any living, deceased or mythical figure.
HM: My husband! Yeah, this sounds like a cop-out, but the man I
married fifty years ago would be my choice. He’s the kindest, most interesting,
most understanding man I have ever met. He “gets” me. He makes me laugh. And I
suspect together we could figure out how to get off that island.
RW: What do you do to relax and recharge your batteries?
HM: Travel! I’m infected with wanderlust and simply must know what is on the far side of the
hill. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit all fifty states and to travel to six
of the seven continents. Sorry, Antarctica is not on my list—too cold. But all
the different people and places get my imagination working. And my creativity
is exercised figuring out how to do all this on the cheap. 😊
RW: Tell us about your latest book. Where do your story ideas
usually come from?
HM: My latest solo novel is Song
of the Nightpiper, a fantasy romance with a quasi-medieval setting.
Although this is a departure from my usual, straight historical romance novels,
the characters of Faulk and Anlin arrived in my head fully formed and I
couldn’t resist writing their tale.
Most of my story ideas just pop into my mind in
this manner, most often when I’m doing some necessary but mindless task like
vacuuming or folding laundry. I clearly envision characters involved in a
specific situation—in the case of Nightpiper,
this was in the middle of the tournament that starts the book—and then I expand
from there by asking a series of “what if” questions. I suspect I have primed
the pump by a lifetime of reading and imagining,
RW: What kind of research do you do for a book?
HM: Probably way too much. 😊 I have an inquisitive mind that wants to know everything
my characters know, even if most of this will never appear in a book. The
internet has made all this information easily retrievable, although I still
like to use period books. For instance, I used my antique copy of Paterson’s Roads (a Regency era travel
guide) to carefully trace the journeys of both main characters to “the house by
the sea” in Home for Christmas which
appears in Christmas Revels IV. I
know what they saw, where they could have stopped, etc. But none of this
minutia appears to bore the reader silly.
RW: Those
are all the questions I have for you. Thank you for speaking to me.
HM: You’re
very welcome. It was a pleasure.
SONG OF THE NIGHTPIPER
The
Plot
In a world where only
Magical Talent is prized, Lady Anlin and Sir Faulk lack any ability—yet their
unlikely alliance will reshape nations and challenge long-held beliefs.
Although she’s finally
free, years of enslavement in Rennic forged Anlin’s iron will. She is
determined to rescue the half-Rennish son who was taken from her. But to do so,
she needs one thing—a champion.
Faulk is a landless
knight whose life has stripped him of all illusions. But
he still harbors two impossible dreams—to have a fief of his own and to find
someone to love who will love him in return.
His fighting skills
have given him the first of these dreams. The journey into a hostile land with
Anlin may give him the second.
An
Excerpt:
The two men met with a tremendous clash of metal. The surrounding crowd
quieted. It breathed in and out like a great beast in time with the laboring
combatants.
Sir Charl logically kept pressing the advantage of his greater reach,
making the smaller man move back. Then the green-clothed knight appeared to
stumble, and Sir Charl lunged. Anlin, like most of the spectators, gasped. This
must be the end.
But the smaller man deftly sidestepped the blow and returned with his
own stoke, low and across the legs. Even with the swords padded, the stroke
must have been punishing. Sir Charl’s knees buckled and he crumpled to the
ground. The green knight moved to a dominant position over his opponent and the
referee called an end to the match.
The spectators broke into a frenzy of cheering. Anlin remained frozen
in place. This, then, was the man who would have command of her body until the
day she died. Cold uncertainty leached into her bones. Then she reminded
herself this could only happen if this warrior agreed to bend to her will. She
felt her shoulders relax as the man approached. She yet had control of the pieces
in play.
HANNAH
MEREDITH
Bio
Hannah Meredith has a BA and MA in English from Southern
Methodist University. For over a dozen years, she taught at the high school and
university level. Then she discovered more people wanted houses than grammar
and switched to a career in real estate. She remained a successful real estate
broker for the next thirty years.
After retiring, she returned to her love of words and began
writing. Under another name, she initially wrote award-winning short fiction
for many of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines. Now as Hannah
Meredith, she writes primarily historical romance. She has five individual
books available, as well as a novella in each of the four Christmas Revels anthologies.
As an historical romance author, Hannah has found her
niche. She loves the history. She loves the HEA. She’s always been a
storyteller, and these are the stories she was meant to tell.
Book
Links:
Contact
Hannah At:
Website: http://www.hannahmeredith.com
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Hannah-Meredith/e/B00E5FZLG4
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