Excerpt from Good Knights: The Swithen Book Eight… Balin encounters the invisible knight
Greetings, those out there. I hope you are well and getting through all this.
First, here’s an excerpt from the forthcoming Good Knights: The Swithen Book Eight.
This book concludes the story of Balin le Savage that began in Book Seven, the two together telling the tale contained in Book Two of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
At the beginning of The Adventure God Will Choose: The Swithen Book Seven, Balin was able to draw a sword that could only be pulled by a knight free of treachery and villainy. When he refused to give the sword back, he was told that if he keeps it, he will kill the one he loves most in the world. Yet still, Balin would not give the sword back, saying, “I will take the adventure God will choose for me.”
Immediately after, Balin killed the Lady of the Lake and was banished from Arthur’s court. He made a plan to capture Arthur’s greatest enemy, King Rion, and against all odds—he did! But still, something kept him from returning to Arthur.
Where this scene picks up, Balin has just come back to King Arthur, and received a promise to be welcomed back into his court. Thing is, a weeping knight just went by where King Arthur was, and Arthur wants Balin to do a quick favor; just go bring the knight back so Arthur can know why he is sad. As you will see, this sets Balin on a new adventure…
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The ebook of Good Knights will be only $0.99 until it is released, when the price will go up to $4.99.
Preorder Good Knights now.
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We must now face how Monty Python and the Holy Grail relates to the Arthurian legend.
Greetings, select few! I hope everything is fabulous with you. I’m just back from a holiday in Chile, refreshed and facing my day job for the first time this morning.
But there is a positive tinge on the horizon, which is that my long-gestating video / article about how much or little the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail relates to the medieval Arthurian legend is finally online, and you are cordially invited to view it at your leisure. You will find it here.
In other news regarding my book series, I was thrilled that Gifts With Hard Swords, The Swithen Book Six won Bookshelfie’s award for Best Fantasy book of 2025!
I’m 150 pages into Book 8 and taking a dive back into Le Morte d’Arthur and the Vulgate / Post-Vulgate and other medieval sources of the legend to really hammer out the plan for the rest of the series. I do have a general plan, but I’ve been focusing on the first half. Now that we have our main set of characters for the rest of the saga, it’s time to really plot out the rest of the series in excruciating detail.
And I have my day job! Which I must get to now… be well, thanks for following my series and keep on being you.
Scott
Book 7 is now available
Greetings, delightful readers!
Did you know that the seventh book in The Swithen series is now available?
This one tells the first half of the Balin / Balan story, which will be familiar to anyone who has read Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Balin commits a shocking murder at the beginning and is banished from Arthur’s court. He settles on a plan to win his way back into Arthur’s court, but it will take unbelievable prowess and courage. Meanwhile, Guinevere and Arthur’s romance continues to grow. The book ends with Arthur’s fight with the giant of St. Michael’s Mount, which has always been one of my favorite moments in the legend.
I like it because it adapts a different source than the ones we’ve been in up until now, and this source has a lot more darkness and evil. This book features the emergence of a lot of villains, and starts to move Arthur himself into the background, shifting the focus to the knights of his court. Balin and Balan’s story will be completed in the next book, which should gain great resonance from the history we’ve built up here.
Check out The Adventure God Will Choose: The Swithen Book Seven in ebook or paperback.
“Telek writes short chapters that alternate between multiple plots, but the result is a continual interest on the reader’s part because no one plot becomes boring or tedious. The pattern changes at the end of the novel when Arthur fights a giant devasting part of his kingdom. This section was the longest because it was also the novel’s climax, and Telek did a magnificent job in depicting it. Arthur is not some invincible hero here but a fully realized, multi-faceted man deeply concerned about his people, self-conscious about his own faults, and prone to frailty and doubt because of his past. Telek also brings the giant to life, allowing him to speak his truth so that Arthur understands why he ravages the land. The encounter between King Arthur and the giant is a masterly piece of prose.”
—Tyler Tichelaar, author of the Children of Arthur series
“The author has delivered probably the most terrifyingly convincing fight against a giant any of us could imagine… These two giant scenes are the most shocking and powerful in all seven of the books.”
—Poor Boy Sixtyish, Amazon UK review
Book 7 Preview / Le Morte d’Arthur guided reading
Greetings interested parties–
Two major items of note.
Book 7 preview
It is quite possible to get a view of what to expect in Book 7 of The Swithen series with this exciting new piece, Book 7 Preview. I like this book but it is different… it adapts a different souce, one with a lot of spookiness and magic, and a lot of horror and the emergence of several villains. It also shifts into a different phase of the saga, in which we start following an interconnected cast of characters as their paths cross and connect with oine another. I’ll be interested to know what you think.
It is also well within the realm of possibility to pre-order an ebook of Book 7 right this very second, saving a whopping $4 off the price it will have once it is released.
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Our Guided Reading of Le Morte d’Arthur officially gets started
With all the introductory material out of the way, we now begin our guided reading of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur with Book 1, Chapter 1.
if you’ve ever wanted to read this but been intimidated, I will literally read it to you and we will go chapter by chapter discussing what is happening, what it all means and the larger context of the story and how it all came together. I think it will offer many people a new way to approac h the work, especially hearing it read with the intonations making more sense of it and getting the wider context.
Check out the guided reading now > > >
Alrighty, that’s it! Hope you are well and surviving, you know, like everything with aplomb!
Part 1 of the guided reading of Le Morte d’Arthur is up
Greetings, delightful ones…
Remember how I said I was going to start a video/article series taking you through Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur chapter by chapter?
Well you know, it’s all a bit of “before you can do this, you have to do that, and before you can do that…” most of which involved getting the companion book of the entire series up and available before the series started. Where can you find it, you ask? Why, right here:
Anyway, the first article and video sets up what Le Morte d’Arthur IS, like what were the circumstances under which it was written and how did it all come to be. It’s not just fluff, it’s very crucial to understanding all the articles that follow, so if you plan to follow along with the series, check it out!
So without futher ado, here is Part 1 of the Guided Reading of Le Morte d’Arthur: What is Le Morte d’Arthur?
The Swithen 