Special Guest Interview with Nancy Northcott, Author of The King's Champion (The Boar King's Honor Book 3)

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

American reporter Kate Shaw and English Major Sebastian Mainwaring clash from the moment they meet on the beach at Dover. Kate has just escaped the hellscape of Dunkirk with a troop of English soldiers when Sebastian turns up, seizes her camera, and refuses to give it back. Kate needs the photos inside to prove to her boss back home that England’s fight against Hitler is a story worth covering and that she, woman or not, is the reporter to write it. Sebastian sympathizes, but controlling information about the war is his job.

I'm pleased to welcome author Nancy Northcott to The Writing Desk:

Tell us about your latest book 

My latest book, The King’s Champion, is the concluding volume of my Boar King’s Honor historical fantasy trilogy.  It’s set during the summer of 1940, one of my favorite periods. The book opens with the Dunkirk evacuation and ends during the early days of the Blitz. The heroine, Kate Shaw, is an American photojournalist posted to London and sent to France to cover the British Expeditionary Force. When the Germans rolled into France, she was caught up in the fighting and then the evacuation. What she doesn’t know at first is that she’s also a wizard and a seer.

The hero, Sebastian Mainwaring, Lord Hawkstowe, is a British army officer and a wizard who also possesses the seer Gift. As Britain stands alone with Nazi military might threatening from across the Channel, he’s desperate to convince Kate to use her abilities to help the British cause. First, though, he must persuade her to believe in those abilities.

Sebastian is part of the Merlin Club, a covert organization of wizards sworn to defend Britain. The club’s headquarters masquerades as an exclusive gentlemen’s club near St. James’s Square in London. As Kate’s visions and Sebastian’s reveal an invasion fleet massing on the French coast, he enlists his magical comrades, including a group of Scottish wizards, to stop it.

The King’s Champion also wraps up a subplot that has run through the trilogy, the efforts of the Mainwaring family to lift a curse laid on them by an ancestor. This ancestor unwittingly abetted the murders of the King Richard III’s nephews, Edward IV’s sons, who’re known as the Princes in the Tower by the Duke of Buckingham’s agents. 

Because of the political situation, King Richard III ordered him not to speak out until the king gave him leave, but King Richard was killed at Bosworth Field before doing so. The Tudors who succeeded him blamed him for the boys’ death and generally painted him as villainous. Speaking out would’ve cost the wizard his life. Torn by guilt, he cursed his entire line so that none of their heirs would rest in life or death until the king’s name was cleared.

I’ve always found the mystery surrounding the fates of Edward IV’s sons intriguing. I chose the scenario I did for the story because it was fairly simple and straightforward. Over the years, my thinking has shifted, and I’m now convinced the two boys probably survived Richard III, but no one knows for certain. The mystery allows plenty of room for authors to play. 

Tower of London – photo by Nancy Northcott

What is your preferred writing routine? 

I don’t have a particular daily routine. I just try to squeeze in two or three hours at least every couple of days but will sometimes write for most of a day if everything is flowing.

I prefer quiet. If I can’t have it because of noise in the neighborhood, I use classical music or movie soundtracks to drown it out. Music that has lyrics doesn’t work for that—at least not for me—because I can’t string words together when other words are coming into my head.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers? 

Treat every book as a learning experience. Read a lot, and notice how authors you like handle foreshadowing, conflict, and character in particular. For goodness’ sake, pay attention to paragraph and dialogue form, punctuation, and spelling.

Get feedback from people you can trust to tell you unpleasant truths. If something in the book isn’t holding readers’ attention or is making them dislike a character you want them to root for, it’s better to hear that privately from someone you trust than to read it in a review after your book is out in the world.

What have you found to be the best way to raise awareness of your books? 

So far, review services—where the author pays the service, not the individual reviewers—and newsletter list builder promotions help. Blog tours seem to work best when the tour company works with bloggers whose readership is a good fit for a particular book.

Tell us something unexpected you discovered during your research 

The English Channel was unnaturally flat and calm during the evacuation. The prologue to Sinclair McKay’s Dunkirk – From Disaster to Deliverance, Testimonies of the Last Survivors (2014; pp. xii-xiii) quotes a veteran who was there as saying the sea had not been like that again in the 75 or so years since then.

English Channel from Dover Cliffs photo – Photo by Nancy Northcott

What was the hardest scene you remember writing? 

It’s difficult to pick just one. The scenes on the beach at Dunkirk come quickly to mind. I don’t like writing carnage, maybe because I prefer not to think about it. But the soldiers on the beach were vulnerable and trapped, and many of them died. I couldn’t have Kate on the beach and pretend none of that happened. So I had to choose how much to show of the horrors she would’ve experienced.

What are you planning to write next?

I’m working on the last book in a four-book contract with Falstaff Books for a series of historical fantasy novellas, The Merlin Club. They’re set in the world of the Boar King’s Honor trilogy, but they’re all in different historical eras. 

This has been fun! Thanks again for having me, Tony.

Nancy Northcott

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About the Author

Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realised it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy, history, and romance. Nancy earned her undergraduate degree in history and particularly enjoyed a summer spent tudying Tudor and Stuart England at the University of Oxford. She has given presentations on the Wars of the Roses and Richard III to university classes studying Shakespeare’s play about that king. In addition, she has taught college courses on science fiction, fantasy, and society. The Boar King’s Honor historical fantasy trilogy combines Nancy’s love of history and magic with her interest in Richard III. She also writes traditional romantic suspense, romantic spy adventures, and two other speculative fiction series, the Light Mage Wars paranormal romances and, with Jeanne Adams, the Outcast Station space mystery series.  Find out more from Nancy's website https://www.nancynorthcott.com/ and find her on Facebook and Twitter @NancyNorthcott