King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court

Book Details

TITLE – King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court
SERIES – N/A
AUTHOR – Kim Iverson Headlee
GENRE – Science Fiction/Fantasy Time-Travel Romance
PUBLICATION DATE
– 1 November 2014 (ebook, illustrated)
– February 2015 (audiobook, performed by Caprisha Page)
– November 2015 (hardcover, featuring more than 100 illustrations)
LENGTH (Pages/# Words) – 350 pages/70K words
PUBLISHER – Lucky Bat Books
COVER DESIGNER – Jennifer Doneske
ILLUSTRATORS – Jennifer “The Royal Portraitist” Doneske and Tom “The Creature King” Doneske

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Book Blurb

Morgan le Fay, 6th-century Queen of Gore and the only major character not killed off by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, vows revenge upon the Yankee Hank Morgan. She casts a spell to take her to 1879 Connecticut so she may waylay Sir Boss before he can travel back in time to destroy her world. But the spell misses by 300 miles and 200 years, landing her in the Washington, D.C., of 2079, replete with flying limousines, hovering office buildings, virtual-reality television, and sundry other technological marvels.

Whatever is a time-displaced queen of magic and minions to do? Why, rebuild her kingdom, of course—two kingdoms, in fact: as Campaign Boss for the reelection of American President Malory Beckham Hinton, and as owner of the London Knights world-champion baseball franchise.

Written as though by the old master himself, King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court by Mark Twain as channeled by Kim Iverson Headlee offers laughs, love, and a candid look at American society, popular culture, politics, baseball… and the human heart.

Excerpt

Chapter XI: The Queen in Search of a Baseball Club

CLARICE HELPED ME pack my clothing and accessories for the relocation to London: just what I would need for the first brace of weeks, which amounted to eight large traveling cases, one of which was devoted to my hair accoutrements and cosmetics. Not long after arriving in this century, Clarice had introduced me to these wonderful products, which allowed me to create the same visual effect as I had done for decades with the aid of magic; now you sit privy to the secret of how I could cast ever so many enchantments for President Malory and remain looking as glorious as ever.

While I was yet sorting through my garments deciding which to bring and which to leave, my thoughts turned toward a leaving of another sort. I must have appeared sorrowful, for of a sudden Clarice asked if aught ailed me.

“I shall miss you, Clarice, when I get to London.” Since that answer represented only half the truth, I hurried on with: “And yet I know that you shall perform your duties in continuing to oversee my office here in Washington to the utmost of your considerable abilities.”

That made her smile, and she thanked me for the compliment, but her look turned shrewd. “I imagine you’ll miss President Hinton, too.”

“Of course I shall. She has become as a sister to me.”

Queen Morgan Character Interview

Name of character: Queen Morgan of Gore

Thanks for sitting down with me today. Tell us a little about yourself.

I hight Morgan.

That is to say, my name is Morgan, so chosen by my mother, Duchess Igraine, to honor the Great Queen of the Old Religion, Mór Rigan, goddess of war. I am the daughter of Duke Gorlois, the sister of Queen Margawse and Queen Elaine, the wife of King Uriens of Gore, and the mother of Sir Uwaine of the Table Round. Blessed good fortune made me all of these things.

By the capricious hand of ill fortune, King Arthur became my younger half brother, spawned upon my most virtuous and blameless mother by that demon in man’s raiment, Uther Pendragon.

All call me Queen. Most call me ‘The Wise.’ No man dares call me ‘le Fay,’ lest he die.

Right, then! I understand you have some kind of special power, Your Majesty. Can you tell us about it?

I am, quite simply, the mistress of magic. My citizens of Gore know well the extent of my powers, and my will to unleash them as the situation warrants. No spell or charm or enchantment has eluded me…save one.

Did you have special education or training to hone your power?

Indeed I did. While I was yet a maiden, Uther ensconced me in a nunnery, never realizing that I would there become introduced to the magical arts. Prayer is, in fact, a most potent form of magic, as much misused, as it is misunderstood. It was the first form of magic I ever learned, and I expect it shall be the last to desert me, should my fortunes ever fall that low.

Do you consider your power a gift or a curse? Why?

In spite of what anyone may think of me, I remain ever a dutiful daughter of the Church. As such, I believe that my magical ability is a gift from Almighty God, and I must be a good and faithful steward of His gift. It is when I forget the Source of this gift, and turn my mind toward its use for selfish purposes such as revenge, that the gift becomes a curse for me.

It is very likely that I never would have found myself sojourning in your century if I had cast my time-travel spell with the intent of peacefully persuading The Boss Hank Morgan to remain in his era. Instead, I had harbored malice and murder in my heart, and thus set the stage for my own temporal dilemma.

How does having this power complicate your life?

The one enchantment ever to elude my control—traveling to the place and time of my choosing—cast me into Washington, D.C. in the latter portion of your century, even though I had intended to travel to The Boss’s demesnes and day, a misfiring of 300 miles and 200 years. Since I know not the precise reason why this calamity of the arts has befallen me and therefore cannot correct my error, I dare not assay the spell again.

Mayhap ’tis my doom to remain trapped in this era, fifteen centuries removed from my rightful time, as punishment for my presumption.

What does your lover think of your abilities?

Queen Morgan’s lips bend into a slow, sultry smile.

Though I have known many men—Round Table knights, for the most part, and many of my London Knights baseball players—in what you would call the biblical sense, there have been but two in my sixteen hundred years of existence upon whom I would confer the title lover.

Sir Accolon, my chosen champion of sixth-century Gore, knew the shape and extent of my powers, but as my loyal supporter he never gainsaid my use of them.

Alexander “Sandy” Leroy Carter is the one man, of any era, for whom I ever chose to eschew the use of magic. He only disapproved its use whenever I felt tempted to exercise my powers in inappropriate ways, and for that gentle guidance I shall always be grateful. Sandy and I were—are—will be well matched indeed.

Book Review

By M.C. Simon

I am writing this review from the position of the person who did not read Mark Twain’s story and who is not a fan of King Arthur’s epoch. However, I have to admit that time travel is one of my passions.

I had a pleasant surprise finding that the main character had to travel forward in time. Her reason for doing it was also a hook for me.

It was appealing to read about a 6th-century Queen’s time travel in the future. It was amusing to read about her thoughts and feelings in the end of the 21th century, a completely new Era filled with so many technological marvels. I found here an interesting approach of interactions between people living in such different epochs.

I needed some time for the language used to reel me in, but once this happened, it was a nice journey to take. If this somehow happens to you also, be patient. After several pages, you will find yourself immersed in this book and when the end arrives, you will not want to put it down from your hands. You will find many aspects to follow here … romance, politics, business, magic, sports… and much more.

I recommend reading this book especially if you are an Arthurian reader and a sport or politics fanatic. In addition, if you are passionate about time travel, I would recommend this story line concept to you. Seeing the comparison between the lives of the same character in two different worlds, while reading it, a question shadowed me. Will Morgan choose to go back in her original time period, where her brother King Arthur was dying or will she remain in the new time, where so much is happening?

I will not tell you her final choice. You will have to find this out for yourself. Therefore, read it and tell me what you think.

Author Bio

Kim Headlee lives on a farm in southwestern Virginia with her family, cats, goats, and assorted wildlife. People & creatures come and go, but the cave and the 250-year-old house ruins — the latter having been occupied as recently as the mid-20th century — seem to be sticking around for a while yet.

Kim is a Seattle native (when she used to live in the Metro DC area, she loved telling people she was from “the other Washington”) and a direct descendent of 20th-century Russian nobility. Her grandmother was a childhood friend of the doomed Grand Duchess Anastasia, and the romantic yet tragic story of how Lydia escaped Communist Russia with the aid of her American husband will most certainly one day fuel one of Kim’s novels. Another novel in the queue will involve her husband’s ancestor, the 7th-century proto-Viking king of the Swedish colony in Russia.

For the time being, however, Kim has plenty of work to do in creating her projected 8-book Arthurian series, The Dragon’s Dove Chronicles, and other novels under her new imprint, Pendragon Cove Press. She also writes romantic historical fiction under the pseudonym “Kimberly Iverson.”

Video Interview

Direct Link – http://youtu.be/DV5iKrEIROk

Kim Headlee, author of the award-winning, critically acclaimed Arthurian novel DAWNFLIGHT and its forthcoming sequel, MORNING’S JOURNEY, chats with Jessica Gibson, host of the Release Day Diva blog, about her novels, her writing origins, the incident that nearly ended it all, and her lifelong fascination with spiders.

10 MAGICAL POWERS KIM WOULD LIKE TO POSSESS

To clarify, these are listed not in order of preference but as they came to me!

1. Invisibility… because I cannot count the number of times when I’ve thought to myself, “I would love to be a fly on the wall to observe this!”

2. Talk to animals… and of course by this I mean Dr. Doolittle style, not the pseudo-conversations that I conduct often with my cats, dogs, and goats, which leaves me thinking, “What did I really say to them?”

3. Teleportation… because I love traveling to destinations worldwide, but the “getting there” part of the process isn’t always the most fun.

4. Time travel… because being a history buff gives me loads of time periods that I would love to investigate in person as it happened!

5. Make myself look glamorous… just because. 🙂

6. Become a mermaid… because my 13 years as a competitive swimmer, including as a Division I collegiate recruit, have gifted me with the ability to feel much more comfortable in the water than out of it. Just call me “Ariel in reverse.” While I’m at it, of course I’ll be a glamorous mermaid. 😉

7. Clone myself… because even with as much practice I’ve had with regard to multitasking, as a computer systems engineer as well as a mother, I still experience times when there just isn’t enough hours in the day—especially in regard to preparing two books for release at the same time!

8. Heal with a touch… because what mother wouldn’t want the ability to “kiss it and make it better” for real??

9. Flying… because I always have loved the “magic carpet ride” scene in Disney’s Aladdin.

10. Lead to gold… because I can’t think of a single reason why that wouldn’t be handy!

Guest post – Happily ever after…

Please write about your many travels and how they’ve influenced your books.

I became a world traveler at the tender age of 4 when my parents took me to Tokyo, via Taiwan, on a cruise ship to attend the 1964 Olympic Games. I celebrated my 5th birthday in Japan, and once the Olympics were over, we visited something like 30 countries. Being so young, I retain only a few memories of that trip — visiting the amusement parks atop the sky scrapers in Tokyo, the great Buddha in Kyoto, the junks of Hong Kong, the mass of humanity lining the corridors throughout the New Delhi airport, all the stacks and stacks of mummies in the Museum of Cairo, watching my mother ride off into the desert on an Arabian stallion, attending a live performance of The Sound of Music in London.

I was hooked. And I am certain this exposure to so many cultures instilled within me the desire to learn and write about people of different cultural backgrounds. Overcoming cultural differences, whether on the battlefield or in the bedchamber or somewhere in between, has indeed become a hallmark of my fiction.

Now I travel as much as time and budget constraints permit. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I was priviliged to visit sites featured in my Arthurian series collectively titled The Dragon’s Dove Chronicles. I have climbed atop the site of my villain’s home fortress in Dunadd, on the Kintyre Peninsula of Scotland, and have driven past the site (now on private land) of Ardoca Roman Camp in Perthshire, Scotland, home of my heroine in this series. I have seen through my train’s window the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall on my way to Edinburgh, Scotland. I have hiked Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic plug overlooking Edinburgh. I have tasted the sulfuric waters of Bath in southern England.

I have walked where my characters have walked.

The sites themselves form only a portion of my inspiration, for I draw from all my experiences. Just the other day, while returning home from a trip to Australia and Hawaii, I chanced to sit next to a young U.S. airman-linguist en route to his next training assignment. We geeked out over linguistics during the entire flight; he taught me how to say and write goodbye in Farsi, and I showed him my work in Scottish Gaelic and other languages that I have adapted into my novels. He gave me the greatest gift ever: confirmation, as a trained linguist, that my amateur assumptions are in fact right on target. And he gave me an idea, based upon his Persian studies that I plan to adapt for use by my Celtic characters. He and I shared our love for delving into the deeper meaning behind the words we use.

I leave you with one such lesson from my days in Hawaii. I’m sure you know that in today’s parlance, aloha means goodbye as well as hello. Literally it means embrace life, which is exactly what I try to do as I travel and write.

Aloha!

One Question Interview

INSPIRE TO READ

Did you always have a fascination with the future and how did it happen that you brought two worlds, so diverse, together in one book?

My dad was involved with NASA when I was a kid. We lived in Cocoa Beach, FL, on the beach, near Cape Canaveral. I was always watching launches from the roof of our apartment building, or on the TV monitors at school. To me, space exploration has always represented the future, the ultimate question of, “Where can we go from here?” So, yes, in that sense I have always been fascinated with the future and what technological advances can do for us.

At about the same time, my parents took me to see the movie Camelot when it first premiered. This, combined with having visited such magical places as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Cairo, and Copenhagen before the age of 6, ignited in me a lifelong love of all legends and fairy tales and mythologies—and the Arthurian Legends most especially.

In that sense, the future and the past have always coexisted in my life.

During high school, lo these many moons ago, I was introduced to two novels that would shape my fiction to this day: The Hollow Hills (book 2 in Mary Stewart’s “Merlin Trilogy”), and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

The first novel set me on the path to researching the historical roots of the Arthurian Legends. The second, ironically enough, I didn’t care for upon first reading, and I wouldn’t appreciate it until decades later, in 2007, when my (now ex-) literary agent returned from that year’s BookExpo America and sent a blanket email to his client list stating that he had met a publisher who was actively seeking sequels to 19th-century authors’ works. I got the green light to develop a sequel to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing I updated the story for the 21st century, and the journey to its eventual completion commenced.

The specifics of that journey I have elected to include, in lieu of a more standard bio, at the end of King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court. It was not the fashion to include authors’ bios with novels in Twain’s day, but somehow I don’t think the old boy will be vexed at me for this break in the tradition with which he was most familiar.

Author Follow Links

AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE – www.amazon.com/Kim-Headlee/e/B001KE2LK2

WEBSITE / BLOG – www.kimiversonheadlee.blogspot.com/

FACEBOOK – www.facebook.com/KimIversonHeadlee

TWITTER – www.twitter.com/KimHeadlee

PINTEREST – www.pinterest.com/kimheadlee/

GOODREADS – www.goodreads.com/author/show/845537.Kim_Headlee

LINKEDIN – www.linkedin.com/in/kimheadlee/

YOUTUBE CHANNEL – www.youtube.com/user/gyanhumara

King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court - WritersPayItForward

Written as though by the old master himself, King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court by Mark Twain as channeled by Kim Iverson Headlee offers laughs, love, and a candid look at American society, popular culture, politics, baseball… and the human heart.

Editor's Rating:
5