Cathie Dunn writes...

The countdown is on!  Only four more days to go until A Highland Captive is let loose! I’m very excited, but also terrified. My first completely new release in nearly seven years. Gulp! A Highland Captive is the second tale in my Highland Chronicles series set in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, a region I miss very much. Books in the series are standalone, but that doesn’t mean that characters within them may not feature in another story in future. Watch this space! It’s already available on pre-order at Amazon , so if you fancy, feel free to grab it whilst it’s only 99p / 99c. On Sunday, the story will then magically appear on your Kindle, and you can dive straight in... I hope you'll enjoy it. My beta-readers have helped me immensely in the final stages of preparation, and it now reads much better. My thanks goes to them. You know who you are! But for now, enjoy the blurb, and an exclusive excerpt of the beginning of A Highland Captive . The small island...

This is our third winter in this beautiful part of France, and our first full winter living in Carcassonne, after two years in the Minervois on the plain. And yes, it’s been cold here too! 😉 In recent weeks, the peaks of the Pyrenees and the Montagne Noire were covered in beautiful snow, but yesterday was a rebel day: the temperatures rose to 16C here in Carcassonne, and up to 25C in the plain of the Languedoc. ' Tout le monde ' (everyone) was outside walking, sitting in cafés and just soaking in the the sun. View towards the medieval Pont Vieux and citadel River Aude We enjoyed a beautiful afternoon walk up to la cité with our dog, to enjoy a small bottle of rosé on the large food square, Place Marcou. And it was heaving there. As the sun set over the buildings, the crowd moved with it. At first, one particular restaurant was full of people, but later, new arrivals picked their seats in the sunshine, and so another place got all the business. Fun to watch... T...

Today, I'm returning to one of my favourite places, courtesy of historical fiction author, Samantha Wilcoxson: the Tower of London! I can't see it often enough, and I try to visit whenever I'm in London. Yet, I also find it interesting to read other writers’ experiences of their visits.  So, over to Samantha without much further ado... ~~~ My Place: The Tower of London By Samantha Wilcoxson for Cathie Dunn I was blessed with the opportunity to visit the Tower of London in November 2015. So much history has been witnessed by these stone walls that I wish I could hear them whisper their story. The Tower is a significant setting, for both good times and bad, in my Plantagenet Embers series due to its varied history as royal palace, fortress, and prison. If you have not visited the Tower or other castles, you may not realize that the setting is much more like an enclosed village than a single structure. Our romanticized vision of a castle more closely rese...