Today the Midwinter Blog Tour is headed for Let Them Read Books for The Perils of Offering Your Agent a Book Different From Your Other.

The journey from an author’s mind, through her manuscript, and into the mind of the reader can be fraught with unexpected detours and delays. Circle of Witches proved to be more of a proof rather than an exception to the rule. If you’d like a guided tour, click on thru.

– Margaret

Earlier this year I celebrated my Double Twentieth Anniversary: Twenty years since my first novel was published; twenty years as an ongoing survivor of cancer. Recently I’ve been struggling through a resurgence of the cancer. My friend Patricia Stoltey has been going through some hardships of health in her life as well.

So we’re kicking off the blog tour with Cancer vs. the Author, which delves into the struggle of dealing with the final lap for Circle of Witches and the horrors of chemotherapy at the same time…

– Margaret

A friend once phoned me after reading – I won’t say which of my later books – to exclaim at me with apparent indignation, “You used your own disease in the story!”  What could I say but “Well, yes.  There’s no point in letting it go to waste.

It’s a quality authors have: everything that happens is grist for a story or a character.  More than once, I’ve been in the middle of some very real emotional crisis and become aware that in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Remember how this feels.  You can use it in a story sometime.”  Shuffling between two nurses down a hospital hallway, still groggy from surgery and anesthetic, with tubes and drainage bottles hanging from me, what did I find myself thinking?  “Remember how this feels.  You can use it in a story sometime.”  And I did, giving someone a wound high in one shoulder because I had some idea of how much movement he might have afterward.  Pain to the point of screaming in the bone from cancer?  I used that experience in a story as a character’s motivation for a final desperate act.  Feeling the life go out of a well-loved cat as I held her…  Let’s just say grief doesn’t get in the way of using even the saddest things.

So have my experiences added depth to my books?  Oddly, I can’t honestly say one way or another.  Mostly I’ve seen the cancer as a great annoyance and distraction, getting in the way of my work.  But I suppose having the likelihood of one’s own death – not simply the fact that one is going to die but the knowledge of what shape that death is probably going to have – looking back at you day in and day out for fourteen years must certainly affect one’s relationship to the world and work.

What I’ve mostly found, though, is that I’ve been increasingly compassionate.  The more I hurt, the more I want other people not to hurt.  The more miserable I happen to be, the more I want other people to be as happy as they possibly can.  I suppose as this desire has grown in me over the years, it has informed my writing, because I find myself often highly indignant at the murderers in my books.  How dare they do something so vile, so selfish and dreadful?

Of course the fact that they are my murderers gives me occasional pause when I find myself angry at them.  After all, whose fault are they if not mine?  And even more so mine because in order to write them believably, I have to find something in myself that understands them, something in me out of which I can make them real.  I’ve had people say to me, “You’re really Frevisse, aren’t you?”  But the truth is that I’m all my characters.  (I add with a wicked grin:  Consider that the next time you encounter Alys.)

Now, thinking about it here, I have to consider that very possibly it is this need to look at the dark parts of me joined with my own bodily miseries that has roused and nourished in me this profound and aching desire for other people’s well-being.  Knowing what it is to hurt, I want other people not to hurt.  So when someone tells me that my books have given them comfort in a hard and hurtful time of their life, that gives me very great pleasure.

– Margaret

Far from being done with me, in the fourteen years since it first returned, the idiot cancer has come back and back and back. Ten times? Twelve? I’ve lost count. I’ve had a year off here, a year and a half there, once even two years whole years. But always it comes again. A tumor here. A tumor there. A dissolving bone. A distended gut. A battered brain.

For twenty years I’ve seen announcement after announcement of a “breakthrough discovery” for a new treatment, but so far as I’ve seen they are all last heard of as “being developed” and then disappear from view without a trace. For several years I had some luck with aromatase inhibitor drugs, but one and all they have given me life-trashing collateral damage. (I scorn the euphemism “side effects” with bitterness and distain. They aren’t like “side dishes” on a menu, a matter of choice. They’re part and parcel of the drug.)  Worst of this damage has been further, accumulating brain damage (seemingly deemed irrelevant by many oncologists, whose primary concern appears to be defeating the cancer, even if it means the treatment kills you before the cancer can) so that creative writing has become harder and harder.

And I’m afraid that apologies are due to all my readers and to many of you who’ve written to me through the years.  I know I’ve too often been behindhand in answering letters and emails, and far too often have never answered at all. Much has depended on where I was in the cycling of cancer through my life, and how much energy I had to spare from working on a story while dealing with the idiot disease, so that often everything but the story has gone to the wall, neglected. I offer this not as an excuse for failing you but as the reason, and I humbly apologize for all disappointments.

But one may well ask:  How does someone go on writing while dealing with a life-threatening, crippling disease?

The answer:  Very slowly, if that’s all that’s possible. And very stubbornly, certainly.

Little did my long-suffering family know that the infuriating stubbornness of my youth (all right – of my infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, and declining years) would turn out to be a Good Thing, because there have been many days when it’s been only bloody-minded stubbornness that’s dragged me to the computer to work.

Yet the cancer goes on, forcing me to accept it as a chronic disease – a thing I will now be fighting day in and day out for the rest of my life, never leaving me alone for long. That’s why I chose to make a kind of closure with Frevisse in The Apostate’s Tale. Someone once earned their master’s degree in English with a thesis paper on how Frevisse’s series makes a single, over-arching story told in multiple volumes. I love that idea, and willful, stubborn creature that I am, I chose to end Frevisse’s story where I wanted it to end.

Still, I’ve already written a novella for her, set after Apostate’s, and hope to write more. Let them be considered grace notes to the series itself. And even if there are no more stories – well, the ending to Joliffe’s last book – “Let the wagons roll!” – still pleases me with thought of that gallant, joyous going onward. Whether I am able to or not.

You see, the cancer is back, and it’s fighting me harder and longer than it’s ever done before. It’s the reason there’s been so little activity here since the end of 2011, when the last aromastase medication I attempted wiped out my energy and too much of my brain, all to no use. So far, through more than a year, nothing I’ve tried has curbed the nasty stuff and this summer I’ve been brought at last to what I’ve avoided for twelve years for fear of losing more of my brain – another bout with chemotherapy.

But maybe my stubbornness will see me through again. After all, Cancer happens. And Death. But so does Life.

– Margaret

Less than two years after radiation therapy had killed the cancer in my sternum, the idiot stuff was back, now in my right ribs and lung. Neither of those is fun, especially when a hole is put in your back to drain the cancerous fluid out of your lung, and when you see the x-ray showing how almost an entire rib has been dissolved away by the cancer. Since something hard hitting and quick was obviously needed, I accepted the need for chemotherapy.

Let me say here there are great differences between clinics. Because of moving and insurance changes, I’ve been to five clinics and a number of different oncologists over these twenty years, and I no longer have any hesitation over changing doctors and/or clinic if they treat me (1) as too ignorant to know when something is going wrong with my body and their treatment, and (2) as a dead woman walking. You can recognize the former when you feel your concerns dismissed or treated lightly. The second is more subtle but too often there. The best oncologists truly care how you’re doing. The lesser kind merely go through a pre-set checklist of treatments, and when that’s finished and you’re not in remission… well, there’s more where you came from.

People with cancer are told to stay calm and keep a positive attitude, but I have found that occasional, well-justified anger is a great help in focusing my mind on what I need to do.

These days you stand a good chance of finding official cancer-literature that admits to the “cognitive impairment” (heaven forfend it be outright called “brain damage”) caused by chemotherapy in the majority of recipients. But twelve years ago, when I tried to make my then-oncologist understand that something was wrong with my mind – that it desperately wasn’t working right – the most I could get out of him was a vague, dismissive, “We hear that a lot,” and the shrugging suggestion that it was depression.

Now, I know depression. I’ve rung enough changes on depression to know it when it happens to me. What I was experiencing was something else altogether, and I was left to suffer through it on my own. A brief article about “chemo-fuzzies” in a magazine for cancer sufferers was the only, chance-found help I had. It was not until a few years later that report came out from a British study confirming that, yes, chemotherapy can destroy the myelin sheath on the nerves in the brain.  In fact, it seems four out of five people on chemotherapy complain of mind-fuzzies to greater or lesser degree.  “We hear that a lot” indeed!

Too bad most of the oncologists I have encountered don’t seem to care.  Too bad, too, that it was still more years before those cancer booklets that proliferate in doctors’ offices began to tentatively admit to the problem.  And, yes, I’m bitter, both for myself and for everyone else who was left to suffer without understanding why — to think that they were going mad while their doctors dismissed them.

My own chemo-fuzzies were definitely at greater end of the scale, making thinking a constant uphill battle for coherence, but I had to struggle on without help, unable to make clear to family or friends what was happening to me, barely able to cope with day-to-day matters, and all too often reduced to desperate tears by the overwhelming effort to do such familiar things as write checks to pay monthly bills or fix food to feed myself.

There were also the several days shortly after each treatment when I could do nothing but lie on my bed while chemo-agony coursed along my bones. I remember how, during one of these times, I would wait until the pain paused, freeing me to slip off the bed to sit on the floor and work at correcting the galley proofs for The Squire’s Tale for a few minutes until the next wave of pain hit, sending me crawling back onto the bed to see it through.

The one thing to the good in this time came from a friend who treated me with reiki and made me an “old wive’s” tea of ginger, marsh mallow, peppermint, and horehound that ended my nausea without any prescription drug, and introduced me to colored light therapy. I had had such good luck with alternative medicines before then that I was willing to try other things, and certainly since then I’ve had some dramatic effects from the light therapy and at least the ease of lying quietly under it when ease was often hard to come by.

Yet all through that dreadful time, morning by morning I got up, made a pot of tea, set the computer going, and wrote for as long as I could while the brain was at its best, until it would close down like a door shutting in my face and I was left to grope onward through the day.

The disconcerting thing is that, reading the books I wrote while my brain groped toward healing, there’s no sign of the struggle going on.  I’ve found that likewise true when I’ve worked on a story while suffering from flu or a dire cold or family grief – the writing goes on and no one can tell how ill I was while I wrote it.  I’ve heard the same from other authors but have, as yet, been able to draw no profound conclusions, except perhaps that we all are quite mad.

In a creative rather than pathological way of course.

Still, eventually I finished with the chemotherapy and was in remission. My hair regrew into a curly mop that I hadn’t had before (but which, alas, went away with my next haircut), and bit by bit over the next few years thinking became less of a desperate struggle for coherence. I began work on The Bastard’s Tale.

Round Three was over. I yet lived.

But the cancer was not done with me yet.

– Margaret

With the cancer in my sternum, I received radiation therapy that, day by day, drained me of more and more energy. Because mornings are my best time to write, I scheduled my radiation treatments for early afternoons, which would have given me time to rest before writing again except that, besides writing and taking myself to the hospital for radiation and trying to rest while keeping house, I was also helping one of my sons get his driver’s license, buy a car, and find an apartment before he started going to college that fall. I wanted him as ready as possible to live without me if it came to that.

With all of that going on, the writing went very, very slowly.  One page a day was good, two pages in a day was a triumph.  But I didn’t tell my agent or editor what I was going through, thinking that when I missed my deadline on the present book, I would have a terrific excuse for it and they’d forgive me.  Imagine my “disappointment” when I finished the book two weeks ahead of the deadline, my great excuse gone to waste.

At the end of everything I was weak but still functioning, with the tumor in the sternum dead and the hope of more books ahead of me.

(Take note, however, that when, with radiation, they say “There’ll be some reddening of the skin at the site”, what they mean is you are getting a radiation burn.  I had good luck with simple aloe vera gel to soothe mine, rather than some prescription thing.  And when they say there’ll be “some tanning”, they don’t mean as from a pleasant time at the beach but closer to tanning an animal hide. Bloody, misleading euphemisms.)

Onward, stubbornly, I went. The Reeve’s Tale became the first book to be published as a hardcover, and my next book after that was The Squire’s Tale, where I fulfilled a long-held wish to write Robert’s story.  He had shown up in The Novice’s Tale as, first, an unnamed servant who opened doors and answered questions, but an unnamed, recurring servant was a bother, so I gave him a name and ended by making him someone integral to the whole story. I also found I would like to spend more time with him.  Thus he made his small appearance in The Bishop’s Tale and eventually got his own whole book.

But despite the radiation specialist’s assurance during the treatment that I would notice no effects to my lungs from the radiation therapy, when the treatment was done I was promptly assured by my then-oncologist that I would soon suffer “asthma-like effects”.  He at least was telling the truth.  Pills of bee pollen and Siberian ginseng moderated the breathing problems to some degree, but the polluted city air too often caused my damaged lungs to seize up, just as with asthma, and I promise you that it’s a terrifying feeling, not being able to draw in enough oxygen.

Happily, as a writer I don’t have to live in a city, so less than a year after finishing the radiation I ended up moving to the country so I could indulge more easily in the simple pleasure of breathing.

Besides, I like living in the country far more than I do living in town.

Alas, a year later, as I had The Clerk’s Tale under way, the cancer returned in my ribs and right lung, doing such rapid damage that I submitted to the dire necessity of chemotherapy.

– Margaret

With my opening encounter with cancer in 1992, I had a bi-lateral mastectomy. In the six clear years that followed, I wrote six books.

For the first part of this time, I was working with a co-author. Mary and I had a prosperous relationship through the first six books of the series (from The Novice’s Tale through The Murderer’s Tale), but by the end of them she had grown tired of medieval England and our vision for the stories had drifted somewhat apart. She wanted to write warmer murder mysteries – cozies; but I simply do not feel cozy about murder and prefer to explore the deep effects of it on everyone around a wrongful death. Mary so loathed Giles in The Murderer’s Tale, however, that before we were done she could not work on chapters from his point of view. (We will not consider what this says about me, that I was willing to be in Giles’ head.) After that, we parted friends – leaving me in medieval England while she began a new career as Monica Ferris, writing mysteries centered around a modern needlework shop.

I was lucky with The Prioress’ Tale, my first solo effort in the series: Both my agent and my editor told me I waited far too long to kill anyone in it. They said I could get away with it once, but that I should never do that again.

Then it was nominated for an Edgar Award, and after that I was allowed to kill people whenever I wanted to.

From there it was The Maiden’s Tale – story I had been wanting to tell for a very long time – and then on to The Reeve’s Tale. It was while I was working on The Reeve’s Tale in 1998 that the cancer made its first return. The damnable stuff was in my sternum this time, eating a large, tumor-filled chunk out of the bone, and as you can see from the sudden heaping of dedications at the front of Reeve’s, I wasn’t sure I would live to write another book.

This was also when I began my long career of not trusting what oncologists said to me. You see, I had been told that if I made it five years without the cancer coming back, I was cured, in the clear, a success. But at one of the scans to determine what the cancer was doing in the bone, a technician asked me if this was my first time with breast cancer, and when I answered, no, I’d had it six years ago, the technician said casually. “Oh, yes. Six years is when it usually comes back if it’s going to.”

I was left speechless.  I had been annoyed at insurance companies because I’d been told none of them would give me health insurance for seven years after the breast cancer had been treated.  That had seemed eminently unfair, given the oncologists’ claim – made boldly and often – that if a woman goes clear of cancer for five years, she’s cured.  But now I had to consider that the insurance companies had a very good reason for their seven-year limit – and that if the insurance companies knew about the six-year cycle of recurrence, then the cancer community’s claim that “five years and you’re cured” was someone’s cruel, self-serving statistical game to make a good-looking “success rate”.

What makes me a tad bit more bitter is that if I had not accepted the “five years and you’re cured”, I would have figured out far sooner that the excruciating pain in my chest was likely cancer instead of the strained muscle I supposed it was and kept trying to ease, and I would have gone to the oncologist far sooner.

Since then, with fourteen more years experience, I have become wary of the almost-truths and avoidances too many doctors practice to keep control over us (for our own good, of course).  Rather than blindly trusting what oncologists or any other physician tells me (no matter how desperately I wish they would just save me), I listen, I judge, I research, I make my choices – often against the advice of my various oncologists over the years – knowing full well that a choice I make could be the wrong choice and kill me.  But doctors make those choices for us all the time, all too often “by the book” and without due regard for our personal responses to medications, and their choices also kill.  Frankly, if I had been a “good patient” and done as I was told at every turn through these past years, I’d have been dead long since.  As it is, I grope onward, hoping for the best.

– Margaret

This year is my Double Twentieth Anniversary!

Twenty years ago this summer my first novel – The Novice’s Tale – was published (and is still in print as I write this).

But (must there always be a but?) twenty years ago this year I was also given my first diagnosis of breast cancer.

I’m afraid that the latter considerably took the edge off the former. Instead of gearing up for the excitement of my first novel’s debut, I was recovering from major surgery. A summer that should have been bright with success was shadowed instead with pain and fear. Besides that, I was already dealing with the break-up of my marriage, and by the end of the year I had helped my mother close down her own home in another state and gone house-hunting here in Minneapolis for a place we could live together – her to watch over me as I recovered, me to watch over her in her increasing old age – and hopefully make a home for my young sons.

All in all, emotionally and physically, 1992 was not a great year.

Happily, The Servant’s Tale was finished before the cancer-crisis started, but working on The Outlaw’s Tale was a struggle.  Still, young sons, aged mother, and the need to make a living are great inspiration to get out of bed and to work in the mornings.  And since then – to the good – book has followed book.  Unfortunately – and to the bad – I’ve fought through multiple rounds of cancer, one after another. Of that, on the supposition that my experiences in the cancer dance may be of use to someone, over the next few days I’m going to talk about my experiences.

But more of that another time. Because this is also a time of celebration, and to that end, over the next few days, I’m going to be previewing The Novice’s Tale here on my website one chapter at a time. If you’ve never spent time with our dear Dame Frevisse, I hope you’ll seize the opportunity to make her acquaintance.

Of course, if you and Dame Frevisse are already old friends, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to join me in going back to the beginning. It’s been a long journey. And it’s not over yet.

– Margaret

An all-too-common motif in novels purportedly set in medieval England is the ubiquitous presence of violence. According to these novels, medieval England was full of scoff-law lords raiding and raping as they would with nary a law officer to thwart them, and with the only decent people willing to stand out against them The Hero and possibly his favored companions. All other people are merely hapless victims who must endure the lawless times, with one or (preferably) more of them getting killed outright in the first chapter, just to show the reader he’s really in medieval England. This is “medieval on the cheap” – an author using “medieval” as synonymous with “nasty and vicious” because he or she doesn’t want the bother of being accurate about the time, only a setting in which to set scenes of brutality to titillate readers.

In writing The Prioress’ Tale, I played very consciously against this cliché.  When Domina Alys hears her cousin has killed a man, she wastes no time on handwringing over the wrong he has done or the morality of the matter. Instead, her first thought and her immediate protest are how the man’s murder will bring the sheriff down on them. She knows the law well enough to know no one simply gets away with murder and theft just because he has the power to commit them and an armed force to back him. In the reality of the time, she knows there will be legal consequences and they will likely come quickly. Reynold may not have sense enough to realize it, but other people in the story not only know it – they depend on it.

Admittedly, at certain times and places, law and the structure of society did break down spectacularly. King Stephen’s reign in the 1100s was a disaster of violence and lawlessness. Any book set then cannot avoid dealing with a time so horrible that a chronicler wrote, “Christ and his saints slept” (the title of an excellent, harrowing novel by Sharon Kay Penman, set in that bleakened century). Nor do the Scottish borders seem to have been a good place to find a peaceful life at any time. There were also occasional outbreaks of violent opposition to a king, and feuds, with sometimes a pair of powerful men having an armed go at each other. But these were exceptions, not the day-to-day way of things, because through the centuries people had worked at creating a strong legal structure in English society and making it work. From village level onward to the royal courts themselves, there was a complex of officers great and small charged with keeping the peace and a complicated bureaucracy to support them. Through the medieval centuries in England there was a steady increase in curbing societal violence at all levels, and despite such aberrations as an outbreak of criminal gangs in the northern Midlands around 1300 and occasional lords or powerful commoners who threw their weight around and caused trouble in their area, these affected only limited places and only for limited times.

That is something for anyone looking in detail at medieval English criminal activity and the legal system set up to deal with it to keep in mind, especially while reading scholarly studies, because the same examples of medieval violence tend to be cited over and over. The Folvilles and Coterels gangs, for example, are perennially popular, not least because extensive scholarly study has been done on the legal documents concerning them.  (For a fine example: John Bellamy, “The Coterel Gang: an Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth-century Criminals,” English Historical Review, vol. LXXIX, pp. 698-717, 1964.) But take note that individual examples like this are limited in scope and scattered over a wide number of years. They reveal that there were criminals in medieval England and that they did criminal things, but to extrapolate from these cases that uncurbed violence was a constant in medieval life everywhere and all the time is the equivalent of using the violence in Prohibition-era Chicago to characterize the whole of American society’s behavior through all the centuries. (And, come to it, the violence in Chicago went on far longer than the Coterels  and Folvilles ever managed.)

It is perfectly possible – by choosing the right time and place – to write an accurate novel set in medieval England replete to overflowing with violence if that is what the author chooses to dwell on. For Dame Frevisse, however, I deliberately chose a time and place where violence was not a way of life in England – and, not incidentally, the great plague was in abeyance for a while. Depriving myself of these two ever-popular means of instant drama, I’ve been left free to explore other aspects of medieval life and people: Their ordinary days before violence comes out of seeming nowhere making the shock of it the more wrenching – both for them and hopefully for the reader – because it is set against the usual tenor of their world, with afterward their effort set not only to finding out and dealing with the criminal but starting the hard striving toward restoring to their lives their lost balance, to putting together a new peace in place of the one so unreasonably and unexpectedly stolen from them. I find it a very satisfying quest to write of.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 21

This being their first time on the pageant wagon itself, with stairs to consider and the need to pattern people’s going out of and into the stage house – the place being small enough to make such considerations very necessary – the practice went unevenly, with more thought on how and when and where to move than on what was being said…

Because with these essays I’ve reached a point in A Play of Heresy where the investigation has become everything, leaving little mention of anything else on which to comment, I’m reverting to an issue that has come up at several points during the story – the matter of Anne Deyster’s property.

Very basically, under the law – keeping in mind that what I write here is in very general terms, with allowances to be made for local variations – a woman was considered to be the responsibility of her father, then of her husband.  How stringent the “I am responsible for you, daughter” was held to would depend on the individuals, however.  Since we know unmarried women left home to work as servants or to go into training for trades or even to pursue their own businesses, fathers couldn’t have been in charge of all the unmarried women all the time.  The same was undoubtedly true in marriages, and certainly among merchants it was possible for a woman to become legally a femme sole – a business woman for whose debts her husband could not be held responsible.  Then, in the fullness of time, a widow was considered to be responsible for herself, expected to make her own decisions and run her own life.  To me, this – and common sense – suggests that women were expected to be doing that to a significant degree before widowhood, rather than being powerless pawns in the male lives around them, then abruptly thrust into responsibility.  Social theory is one thing; reality on the ground is usually something else.

The thing is that all but the very poorest of widows would indeed have property to make decisions about, because under the law at all levels of society a woman was held to have a right to one-third of her husband’s property at the time of his death.  The idea was that a husband’s death should not automatically leave a widow impoverished.  Besides this, there could/should have been agreement made at the time of the marriage regarding dowry and dower.  Dowry was what the wife brought to the marriage – money or property or both.  Dower was the money or property or both that the husband promised would go to his wife should she be widowed.  Often the dower would include what she brought to the marriage as dowry, especially if land was involved.

Besides those provisions for her widowhood, a husband could will to his widow however much more of his property/money he wanted (supposing he was high enough in the social order that some or all of his property was not entailed to go to a specific blood-relation).  To some degree how much a man could will away was limited not only by a possible entail but by the automatic legal provision that a man’s children should have one third of their father’s property at his death.  Since, generally speaking, orphans were given into their widowed mother’s care until they came of age, this inheritance came under her control along with her own.

All of this could make for some very wealthy widows among merchants, gentry, and nobility, but even at the more modest level of the village, a widow could be very desirable remarriage material, and many widows did remarry.  But others did not, and although the little given here barely scratches at the complexities there could be in individual situations, I trust it’s clear that Anna Deyster’s widowhood does give her economic options, with choices to consider and the freedom to make them.

For interesting reading and ample bibliographies regarding medieval wives:

Hanawalt, Barbara.  The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London.  Oxford University Press, 2007

Swabey, ffiona.  Medieval Gentlewoman: Life in a Widow’s Household in the Later Middle Ages. Sutton Publishing, 1999.

– Margaret

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