We're just weeks from the release of the Playing With Fire boxed set (so excited). To get you in the mood (you HAVE pre-ordered it, haven't you?), here's the prologue to "the Poisoned Cup," my modern-day retelling of the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot:
In
the end, people blamed me for the fall of Camelot and the end of the British
monarchy. As if one woman could do in a thousand days what a thousand years of
war, murder. Family feuds, and anti-royalist sentiment could not. Those who
blamed me conveniently forgot that when Arthur took the throne, he inherited a
kingdom already in disarray. The Brexit mess had weakened the economy,
fractured the United Kingdom, and left his subjects demoralized and unhappy. They
needed a scapegoat, and they chose me for the role.
It wasn’t even personal.
Royals have traditionally been a focus for
“civilian” discontent, and in many cases, understandably so. Royals were rich,
after all, and therefore had no idea what it was like to live paycheck to
paycheck or work more than one job just to be able to afford the basic necessities.
It grated on the public when a royal—usually
some dotty dowager duchess—was praised for being “hard-working” when the work
involved was mostly smiling pleasantly while listening to a boring speech about
some issue of little practical concern to anyone outside the room. After all,
no one wants to hear the extinction of the skylark when their own jobs are in
danger of disappearing even sooner.
And it didn’t help that the royals were always so
ubiquitously on display, with the press and the bloggers feverishly covering
their every move, recording their every utterance, and memorializing their
every fashion faux pas. And even then, in the face of nearly universal mockery,
it took forever for the “fascinator” fad to die. I never could understand how a
grown woman could wear something that looked like a toddler had made it out of
pipe cleaners and keep a straight face. Or those silly flat hats that are tilted
at such an acute angle that they looked like tiny alien spaceships had just
landed on the royal coif.
