I did - that was the msg from kindle page on the UK store :) It's only showing hardback, paperback & audio in the UK on Amazon - so was wondering if the ebook was available elsewhere on this side of the pond (before I do the account switching, DRM ripping dance with my US Amazon account to read it over here).
]]>So if you want to buy the ebook, you'll need to do the account switching tap-dance this time.
]]>Which is not to say I had to write more books to justify my new enthusiasm for the topic. As I was finding the details I wanted for that one scene, I had the visionary moment that usually begins a book for me: A character, in a place, with a problem. In this case, it was a man whom I knew to be a surgeon of some kind, standing in a sunlit doorway, blood dripping from his hands, saying, "My God, I've killed them all."
Who had he killed? And why, and what would happen next? I had to write the book(s) to find out.
]]>(On the other hand, listening to them on head phones really doesn't work. You need your viscera to be quivering to get the real experience.)
]]>But now I have a different question- if your world has magic, how come surgery doesn't go better with magic to help deal with some of the problems? Or does it? That's always a difficult thing, how to balance danger and problems with what the magic can do.
]]>So, Nojay, you have a spare bed we could borrow?
(More seriously, there is actually a whole bunch of performers whose shows we would like to catch. One year, maybe when we have the time. This year that month is the one we go to Helsinki and a few other countries during.)
]]>The answer seems to be: it does, to a certain extent; recovery rates shoot up. But if you know you have such abilities you are strongly motivated to avoid doing anything that might clue people on, in case they set fire to you. And actually performing surgery by magic is beyond most people's abilities in any case; it seems to require a combination of unusually great ability and unusually strong motivation.
What does puzzle me is where has all the dysentery gone. Medieval warfare, especially siege warfare, involved a lot of hanging around doing nothing while two thirds of your troops died of dysentery from sitting in their own shit for months. But I don't recall seeing a single case. Granted our protagonist is on the surgical side, but I'd still expect to have seen at least some mention of something that polished off a lot more troops than the actual fighting did.
I am also puzzled by the nature of the divergence of the alternate history. It seems to have run pretty much as usual for long enough for Longshanks to turn up on schedule, but by the time we get to the overt point of divergence with Eddie 2 dying young, Longshanks thinks it is both desirable and practical to disinherit his two surviving sons, legitimise Hugh Despenser as his bastard, and install him in their place; and it actually sticks, too. So there must have been some pretty major disruption at some point after Longshanks married Margaret to create a situation in which that could happen, and I'm not clear what.
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