Celebrating the occasion required a bit of creativity this year. My own mother died some years ago, my wife, Jeanette’s mother died last year, and Jeanette’s daughter now lives about 2,500 miles away, back in Houston. But Jeanette came up with a clever way to overcome that distance, and share a Mother’s Day brunch together with her daughter.

They both got dressed up. Jeanette decorated the table (or in this case, actually her desk) with a vase of various flowers cut on our property, including a flowering branch from an apple tree. Then they each had a special Sunday morning breakfast, which they ate while leisurely visiting together by video-call via Skype.

Here’s what Jeanette had for breakfast:

Coffee, a Mimosa made with orange juice and champagne, and I cooked her buckwheat pancakes, made from locally grown and ground buckwheat, topped with butter from a local creamery, sorghum syrup and local blackberry flower honey, an egg laid by our next-door neighbors’ chickens, and a piece of English-style uncured back bacon. It was delicious (I had the same).

Jeanette's Mother's Day breakfast

May you all have a wonderful day.

Our plan was to live in a rental house in Eugene for a number of months, while we became familiar with the area and began our search for a permanent home. We’d already looked at a number of properties on a quick trip in January, as well as regularly checking listings online that our realtor sent us, and did not think the process of finding a “final” home in a price range we could afford would be a quick one.

Good thing our lease was month to month. Within less than a week, we found our dream home, on five acres located on the McKenzie River to the east of Eugene. It’s modest in size–something we wanted–but a beautiful house that brings the outdoors inside, and is surrounded by breathtaking views. We moved in two weeks ago today.

The first night in our new home, a rainbow appeared over the mountains across the river.

We are still in a state of mixed astonishment and bliss. The closeness to nature and the beauty here are breathtaking. The weather can be fascinatingly mercurial: today, we’ve had steady, gentle showers (typical eastern Oregon weather for this time of year), periods of unusually hard, driving rain, intermittent spells of bright, warm sunshine, and one hard hail storm that left the ground briefly covered in white. The air here smells and feels fresh and crisp, and the background noise we hear is no longer the constant sounds of traffic, and frequent police helicopters circling overhead, but instead the murmur of the fast-flowing river, visible from the window of my new office where I’m typing this, the honking of wild geese that are nesting on a nearby island and often fly low over our land, and the occasional crowing of a neighbor’s roosters.

Evening fog rises over the river, and hides the tops of the mountains on the far side.

But we are constantly mindful that our own good fortune and happiness comes at the cost of someone else’s misfortune and sorrow. Another couple built this home as their dream home after moving to Oregon, but they lived in it only a few months, then lost it in the recession. For us, it was a manifestation of our “trust fate” belief: when we first saw the property, it had been on the market for less than two weeks, was a bank-owned foreclosure (and the bank was eager to get rid of it), and was priced at less than half of its original tax listing valuation the year it was built, just before the recession (and the recession hit Oregon very hard, the economy here is still in rough shape, and property values have plummeted). For its original owners, it must have been a crushing disappointment. I hope they find a new dream.

The land itself was once part of a large farm, and is almost all open pasture. We see it as a blank canvas on which to paint our new life. One one side, where a single, large old apple tree stands, will be a small orchard. We’ve scrambled during the past two weeks and planted seventeen more small saplings, a mix of fruit and nut trees, so they can get a start during the once-a-year spring planting season. It will take two to three years for them to begin to produce, and we didn’t want to lose this whole year. I’ve tilled and we’ve planted the first bed in what will eventually become a sizable garden plot, we’ve planted blueberry bushes and raspberry canes (blackberries grow wild all across the property) and a small asparagus bed–additional efforts that will not produce for a year or two, so needed to be begun. Today we cut up one of the large wardrobe boxes from our move and turned it into a makeshift brooder. Some of the feed and hardware stores here stock baby chicks during April–another of those brief spring windows that have to be seized or it will be missed until next year–and we’ll be bringing some home tomorrow.

The initial ground-breaking for the new garden.

Soon the spring windows of opportunity will all be passed, either seized or missed until next year. Soon all of the boxes will be unpacked, and life here will begin to find its new routine. Soon I once again will return to Halfdan’s newest adventure. When I left him, he, too, was preparing to leave on a new voyage, sailing east from Denmark….

The rest of the drive from Texas to Oregon went smoothly (with the exception of about 24 hours of food poisoning after eating at a Denny’s restaurant, on a late night when nothing else was around). What was most striking about the drive was that for almost three full days, we were crossing desert. I had not appreciated, until then, how much of the United States is composed of such harsh, inhospitable terrain. And the varying types of desert were also fascinating. For example, all of day two of the drive was consumed by crossing the vast expanse of west Texas—a flat, arid, monotonous land, with few signs of human habitation. The legal speed limit on Interstate Highway 10, crossing these lands, is 85 miles per hour, the highest on any highway in the nation.

The west Texas landscape

We left El Paso on the morning of day three of the drive, and later that morning crossed into New Mexico. By the afternoon we’d crossed another border and entered Arizona—still crossing arid desert landscapes, although strikingly different from the west Texas desert.

The rocky southern Arizona landscape

After an overnight stop in Phoenix, we pushed on across the western half of Arizona, including some of the most bleak, arid landscape we’d seen on the trip.

The sandy western Arizona desert landscape.

Too much heat and too little water create lands incapable of supporting much life. Will more of the earth become similarly uninhabitable?

We entered California in the afternoon of day four. Much of southern California was still very arid, although not quite as harsh as west Texas or Arizona. Circling around Los Angeles showed different kinds of blight, though: horrible traffic, backed up for mile after mile (fortunately going in the opposite direction on the freeway than we were traveling), and heavy, poisonous-looking smog blanketing the city.

Los Angeles smog.

California may not be extremely wide, but from north to south it is a very long state. We drove north through it all of day five–slowed somewhat by the food poisoning I’d contracted the night before. We stopped for the night in Sacramento, then on the morning of day six pushed north again, and finally crossed into Oregon.

This one speaks for itself.

Southern Oregon was VERY different from the deserts we’d spent so many days crossing: very mountainous, and very cold.

The mountains of southeastern Oregon.

But we reached Eugene later that day. It’s very beautiful here–and the trees grow very big!

We're not in Texas any more!

Life was supposed to enter a period of calm, with lots of spare time, after we arrived here. It hasn’t–but that’s a story for another post.

We met, married, and have lived the past ten years in Houston, Texas. We’ve had good things happen there–the greatest of which were that meeting and marrying I mentioned–but there have been hard times, too. As an example, the death count alone has been daunting: I lost both of my parents, Jeanette lost her sole surviving parent, we each lost a child, and all three of the pets we started out with now are gone.

But we believe, like Halfdan (see the end of book 3), in trusting fate. It has long been a dream of ours to relocate to the Pacific Northwest. And finally, a rather incredible sequence of events has fallen into place over the past year, making that dream finally possible. Our journey began today–we have begun our own, private Oregon trail.

The Trust Fate Express, end of day 1 in Fredricksburg, Texas

And what is so sweet about this is that it is the Strongbow Saga itself, and readers like all of you, who have made this wish come true.

Jeanette at the wishing well.

Thank you. When we reach our destination in Oregon, I plan to abandon myself to writing for the next few months, and complete the first draft of book 4, so my editors can begin reviewing it. More news to follow…

I’m offering Viking Warrior free for two reasons: first, there may be readers out there who have not tried the series because they think a novel about the Vikings wouldn’t interest them, but if it’s free, they might at least give it a look. Amazon has created a new, special promotional program for authors, that lets them offer their books free for a brief time, for just this purpose. So even if you think a novel about the Vikings might not be your cup of tea, please try it. I’m hoping you’ll find yourselves pleasantly surprised—not only with the book itself, but also to learn about the true nature of the Viking peoples and their culture. The second reason is to give existing fans of the series a chance to pick up a free copy of the e-book version of book 1. It’s a small way of saying thank you for your support.

For those who have not yet experimented with e-books, you might not realize that it’s not necessary to buy an actual Kindle e-book reader (although I certainly love mine). Amazon offers a wide range of free Kindle apps, including for PCs, for iPhones or Android smartphones, and for the iPad and other tablet-style computers. All you have to do is download the appropriate free app to your device, and you’ll be able to use it as a Kindle e-book reader, ready to download Viking Warrior or any other e-book available through Amazon. For your convenience, I’ve included some links to where the various free Kindle apps can be downloaded:

Kindle for Windows PC

Kindle for Mac PC

Kindle for iPhone

Kindle for Android

Kindle for iPad

The new Kindle edition of The Road to Vengeance is now available on Amazon. I chose to use the first of the two cover alternatives I previously posted drafts of, but did incorporate many of the suggestions for that cover that some of you made–thanks very much for the input. Here is the finished cover:

A number of readers who responded did express disappointment that the old covers were being discontinued, and/or that the new ones I’ve been using do not feature Halfdan on the cover. Let me briefly address those issues. The original publisher of the first three books, HarperCollins, created the originals of the first three covers, so they own the rights to those covers, not me. And the “Halfdan” on those three covers is an unknown model hired by HarperCollins for a photo-shoot, so there’s really no way for me to recreate, on new covers, that image of Halfdan. Additionally, it was my desire and intention with the new covers to (1) create images that more clearly suggested that these novels are historical fiction set during the Viking period than the original covers did, and (2) at least suggest some scene or event in the books. This most recent cover, for instance, is intended to evoke the Danish army’s sneak attack on Paris.

That said, I will keep in mind the desire expressed by some that Halfdan appear on the covers, and see if there may be a means to achieve that with the cover of book 4, in some way that works around the problem that the model used for the first three original covers is not available.

I hope the new paperback edition of The Road to Vengeance will become available in January–it takes longer to set up a print edition than an e-book–and that an e-book edition for the Barnes & Noble Nook will be available by then, too. In the meantime, book 1 of the series, Viking Warrior, is currently being featured in a new Amazon program which allows customers who have signed up for Amazon Prime membership to “borrow”–actually buy, at no charge–one featured Kindle book per month. And during January, I intend to run a special offering during which the Kindle edition of Viking Warrior will be available to anyone at no charge, through Amazon, for a brief period. I’ll announce more about that as the time approaches.

Meanwhile, it is time for me to return to writing book 4.

I should give some backstory. As he aged out of his 50s, my father often remarked, with some wonder, that he was the first male in his family he knew of who had lived beyond the 50s. He ultimately lived to age 88. He was, for most of his life, a very active man–he loved sports, and the outdoors. He loved fishing and hunting. But the last few years of his life, he was bedridden and in considerable misery. During those years, he more than once remarked, “What have I done to deserve to live so long?” That once had been his goal.

If my father’s knowledge of family history is accurate, I’ll be the second male in our line to live beyond our 50s. I hope I have many years yet to live. That said, I hope for a quicker and cleaner death than he had. Before the “miracles” of modern medicine we’ve been graced with in recent decades, people used to die when it was time, without so much lengthy, agonizing drama. I think the Vikings had a very intuitive appreciation of this: their ideal was not to die sick and old in bed, but with a sword in their hand, while they were still vibrant and alive. There’s a lot to be said for that, although the whole “sword in hand” thing is no longer practical.

Forgive the somewhat morose nature of this post–it comes with crossing a significant threshold.

The goal with this new cover is to evoke the Vikings attack on Paris–which, in 845 A.D., was still a fairly compact town, located on Mount St. Genevieve above the Seine River. The key word is “evoke”–with a book cover, due to its limited size and the need for clarity rather than being too cluttered and busy, the visual elements are best kept relatively simple.

These are just very rough first drafts, not finished covers. But I’d welcome comments, critiques, and votes for which version you like best.