SCOTLAND, AT LAST!

Loch Lochy, the Highlands, Scotland

After an exciting experience it is not easy to go back to your everyday life. After a journey, you download, order and archive the pictures you’ve taken and look at your travel notes: all those beautiful moments flew at the speed of light and left you astonished,  with beautiful memories but also the awkward impression that you dreamt and have just woken up. Maybe writing can help you fix them somewhere in a safer place and make them somehow more real.

Scotland, at last!

Eilean Donan Castle 

Scotland is the 3-M land: the land of magic, mist and myth. How could one resist its charms? I simply couldn’t.  Last year, after a very brief visit,  I had to promise myself I would soon go back to see more of it. I did it in July and here I am,  back from an incredible tour,  which has been as magical, misty and mythical as Scotland in my dreams.  In our 10-days’ schedule an unforgettable series of fantastic sites, a variety of wonderful places, which I had the opportunity to visit  in the company of four of my anglophile friends.

One of the themes of our  tour was Outlander, the best-selling saga set in Scotland written by Diana Gabaldon,  as well as its TV adaptation.   We managed to visit a few of the main locations they used in seasons one and two or important sites mentioned in the books.

BOOK REVIEW - A RIP IN THE VEIL BY ANNA BELFRAGE (THE GRAHAM SAGA, BOOK 1)

Hooked from page one. There’s so much I love in this book that once I got started, I couldn’t stop and read it in a few days:  Scotland in the 17^th century, at the time of the Civil War, romance and time travel, fantasy and magic, adventure and irony.  A Rip in the Veil is book one in Anna Belfrage’s “The Graham Saga” and is a thrilling ride between two different time lines, through the adventurous lives of Alexandra Lind, a 21st century computer engineer still coping with a trauma from her past, and Matthew Graham,  a runaway 17th century convict on his way home to Scotland.

The heroine & the hero: Alex & Matthew

Here are heroine and hero as presented by the author herself in the section bonus material at her website:

Alexandra Lind

Date of Birth: August 24, 1976

Astrological sign: Virgo (“Virgo? How boring is that,” she says with a laugh)

Education: Degrees in Computer Engineering and Programming. Most useful in her new environment she says sarcastically. A karate practitioner since childhood, she holds a black belt 4th dan and has also dabbled in jujitsu. Never got beyond “Smoke on the water” on guitar, but knows the lyrics to all her favourite rock songs – although she’s not quite sure this qualifies as education. Is a proficient user of the staple gun – has used it for everything from upholstery to fixing Halloween disguises. Sadly, staple guns do not exist in the seventeenth century. Good at drawing, crap at sewing and knitting. Used to consider herself a good chess player – until she met Matthew.

AT THE CINEMA - ALL HAIL, MACBETH !

 "... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  

At the cinema with my students

It came out on the 5th this month and,  at last, I came to see it this morning. It's the latest film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. I saw it at the cinema with one of my classes. 

It is a great movie: dark, gloomy, violent, impressive. It was not my first Macbeth, of course, but it was certainly an outstanding one. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are giant actors and I expected them to be remarkable  as the two protagonists.  But they were beyond perfection. As Macbeth was doomed to be king and Lady Macbeth his Queen, Fassbender and Cotillard were born to embody these two icon figures.  They were not simply remarkable but incredibly intense, impeccable in their renditions. 

"The film is a grimly visceral version of the classic play and offers a fresh take on the tortured rise and fall of the Bard's darkest anti-hero". (Mail Online)

AUTHOR GUEST POST - LIZZIE LAMB, TRAVELLING AROUND AND WRITING ABOUT SCOTLAND

Do you recognize this shop? A clue: Claire in ep. 1 of Outlander 

Readers, I have discovered, are drawn to the mystical, dreamy highlands of Scotland as the backdrop for contemporary romance. As a writer, I heartily agree with that sentiment. Tall, Dark and Kilted, features a sexy laird Ruairi (Roo-ary) Urquhart who has to fight to safeguard his land and inheritance. In Scotch on the Rocks, kilt-wearing American, Brodie arrives on Eilean na Sgairbh on the back of a storm wind and turns my heroine's life upside down.  Both novels have gone down a storm in countries where there are ex-pat Scots – USA, Australia, New Zealand or Canada; it appears that second and third generation Scots are eager to learn about the old traditions and their former homeland. And if they learn through my novels, then so much the better. My novels are meticulously researched and, as a true born Scotswoman, I write with complete authenticity about the land and its people.

Falkland, in the Kingdom of Fife where the first scenes in Outlander were shot

Romance readers simply love a novel which features a man in a kilt. The element of ‘costume’ (ie the kilt), especially in a contemporary setting, removes the hero and the reader from the here and now and transports them into the realm of fantasy. And, in the case of a kilted hero, there is also the tease of whether he’s followed tradition and gone ‘commando’.

The kilted hero in my novels is, generally, aristocratic – a laird, at the very least. And, while he does not have to work to earn his daily crust, he carries the weight of his inheritance and the welfare of his tenants and family on his shoulders. He often has emotional scars which only the heroine can heal. All of my novels have a happy ending and readers can close the book with a satisfied sigh knowing that all the obstacles which have prevented the hero and hero from leading a happy life, have resolved.

CROESO CYMRU! SORAIDH, ALBA! TRAVELLING THROUGH WALES, THE LAKE DISTRICT, SOUTHERN SCOTLAND

I never miss a chance to travel to Britain, I've been there a few times only this year - Yorkshire in March, Bristol in April and then a summer tour in July. I've seen much, but so much is still there to be discovered. I never have enough, in fact, and I consider Britain my second home country or, better,  the one where I feel - oddly enough - at home. It is the place of my favourite writers, my favourite books, my favourite drama series, my favourite heroes, my favourite language, my favourite actors ... do I have to go on?

Here are 10 of the best places I visited on my latest tour through Wales, the Lake District, the Borders and Southern Scotland. Only 10. Yes, there were more!

SCOTLAND WANTS TO REWRITE HISTORY: GUN DEID LEAT!

Glasgow - 17th September 2014

Come what may, British history will be rewritten with 18th September 2014  referendum. The Scottish want their complete independence from the UK, not the palliative autonomy they have been offered so far.

I'm not Scottish, I love Britain as it is, with all its different nations and peculiarities, so I decided I'll be watching this extraordinary event without taking sides, with great respect for the passionate political campaign of the YES! front,  as well as for the matter-of-fact worries of the NO! party. 

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland

I'll be giving a lesson to my oldest students tomorrow titled: "Fighting for a flag of blue and white". We will read articles and listen to interviews about the Scottish referendum and will revise the historical events involving Scotland we studied last year: Mary Stuart and her rivalry with Queen Elizabeth I, which ended up with the beheading of the Scottish Queen; the ascent to the English throne of Mary's son, James VI of Scotland after Elizabeth's death,  which meant the unification of the two reigns under one crown in 1605; the 1688 Bloodless Revolution, which led to the dethronization of  the Catholic  line of the Stuart dynasty.

In the second part of the lesson we will move to literature and start discussing Walter Scott's Waverley and its historical context - the Jacobite uprising of 1744-46. In that novel, Charles Edward Stuart,  Bonnie Prince Charlie, is one of the historical figures interacting with the fictional ones created by the great Scottish writer, father of the historical novel.

WRITING AND DREAMING SCOTLAND - INTERVIEW WITH GLEN CRANEY, AUTHOR OF "THE SPIDER AND THE STONE"

If you follow FLY HIGH!  on blogspot or on facebook, you must certainly have noticed I'm (kind of ) hooked with Scotland and  Scottish heroes at the moment. This is why I was glad to hear from Glen Craney, author of "The Spider and The Stone", when he proposed me to review his historical novel set in 14th century Scotland. 

I've started reading his novel and I've invited Glen to tell us more about it,  his love for Scotland and for historical fiction.

He has generously granted the readers of this blog 10 ebook copies of the book! You are all invited to take your chances to win one of them. Check the book giveaway contest below the interview. Good luck!

Welcome Glen! I’m really glad you accepted my invitation to talk about Scotland and "The Spider and The Stone"  with me.

Thanks to you for the invitation, Maria Grazia.

Scotland is the setting of your historical novel. I’m quite hooked by that amazing land and its stunning wilderness and its castles, what about you? Have you been there ? Why did you choose it as your setting?

I’ve traveled to Scotland three times, and have some ancestral roots there. I often get inspiration for my books in dreams. About ten years ago, I awoke from a particularly vivid one in which I was a mounted knight fighting a duel near a stream with a black-robed hag who wielded a sickle. In the midst of this death struggle, the dream shifted to a photograph of me standing with six other knights around a seated king in a pose of celebration. Below the photograph, a caption read: "Americans aid the King at Bannockburn."