Chapter One: Building a Medieval Castle From Scratch

Dear reader, have you ever built an entire medieval castle entirely from scratch? No? Well neither have we, but today, we totally did. Kind of.

When we began this venture back in August, our project was little more than a rambling, speculative conversation that Kat and I had while waiting for a train. Now, as we come to actually develop it into something real, we realised that it's going to be a lot more hard work than we had thought.

The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, to reveal our project to the world. Two best friends are coming together to create a series of historical novels based around the trials and tribulations of the Medieval jousting circuit.

The idea of these novels, centering around a rebellious English socialite and her fall from grace, was born during our annual trip to the Grand Medieval Joust at one of our local English Heritage sites. For years, we have sat in the lists, watching from behind our hands as these brave men, quite literally, ride at each other with very pointy implements on a dramatic background of Cornish coastline and (often tempestuous) seas. This year, after watching the Skill At Arms, very loudly cheering our chosen knight, we sat down on the grass with our picnic and experienced a rare, simultaneous epiphany. In the years that we have known each other, we've worked on countless projects together (some ended up being more successful than others.) Why not one more? I'm a writer by heart and trade, and Kat's a historian. With our combined love for the Joust and our very compatible trades, we could create a thing of beauty: a novel.


And thus, reader, you learn the secret of this blog. Here at the Words of Walker and Edwards, we will be chronicling our process as we create the world of our lady, Felicia.

Today, we had our first official session, building our characters' homes and lands around them and their families. This is where we hit our first big decision. Did we use existing titles and castles, or create our own? Off to google we went, armed with little more than a year (1154, which later became 1138,) and a vague idea of what we were looking for. In the end, we came up in a compromise which involved both pilching some real-life names of earldoms and building our own castles from scratch. When I say building from scratch I do not, of course, mean in the literal sense of brick by brick. Really, all we did was find some empty fields and dump a castle in it in a distinctly Sims-esque fashion and then think of a cool name. But boy, did we do it well.


Also today, we managed to create the first five chapters of the plot in a nice, neat plan form that we can now work from to begin the story for real. The idea is, that if we plan the story in five chapter increments, we can keep our research efficient and organised, two things I rarely am.

Next, we plan to begin the writing for real and throw ourselves straight into the first chapter.

For now, I am off to bury myself in Elizabeth Chadwick novels ( it's research, I promise.) Good morning/day/night!
Kate x