'The Marrying Season' is the final book in the 'Legend of St. Dwynwen' series, and in each of the three books, a small village church in the Cotswolds plays a significant role.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart.
Fantasy novels, I don't really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.
Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.
I visited England immediately after I finished writing 'The Marrying Season,' before any editing or revisions.
As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.
A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'
There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.
I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.
If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.